Hacker News Reader

portLANon Youtube's adoption of the video overlay will be good for its competitors

My YC idea is going to be YouTube, without ads. Ever. Or revenue.

portLANon Comic Sans designer: "Comic Sans was not designed as a typeface"

It was designed as a floor wax.

portLANon Holding a program in one's head

This is a collection of points PG has made before in other essays and comments. If the ideas are new to you, you may want to check out the others: http://www.paulgraham.com/articles.html

> Perhaps the optimal solution is for big companies not even to try to develop ideas in house, but simply to buy them.

What's good for YC is good for the country!

portLANon Holding a program in one's head

Management has decided the sprinkler system in the dev room will be activated and remain on until further notice.

portLANon What system do you use for bug tracking?

Joel, we know it's you.

portLANon Philip Greenspun: Improving Undergraduate Computer Science Education

The separation of life into school, college, then work is completely artificial in the first place. Trying to fix "undergraduate " education is just putting a band-aid on a broken system. It even assumes the premise that the goal is to receive a degree, by completing X units of assigned work (whether over 4 years or 2.5).

People don't learn in the same ways, at the same rate, at the same age, and waiting until they're adults just wastes years of neuroplasticity. On the other end, stopping after 4 years or some other arbitrary amount is just under-utilization of adult learning capacity.

"If the colleges were better, if they really had it, you would need to get the police at the gates to keep order in the inrushing multitude. See in college how we thwart the natural love of learning by leaving the natural method of teaching what each wishes to learn, and insisting that you shall learn what you have no taste or capacity for. The college, which should be a place of delightful labor, is made odious and unhealthy, and the young men are tempted to frivolous amusements to rally their jaded spirits. I would have the studies elective. Scholarship is to be created not by compulsion, but by awakening a pure interest in knowledge. The wise instructor accomplishes this by opening to his pupils precisely the attractions the study has for himself. The marking is a system for schools, not for the college; for boys, not for men; and it is an ungracious work to put on a professor." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

portLANon No, I'm not giving you my Google password

Facebook has extensive dossiers that its users unwisely volunteered and I predict it is all going to end in tears.

John Connor is not a Facebook user.

portLANon I surrender. Lisp really is better than C++.

    >+++++++++[<+++++++++>-]<+++.>+++++[<++++++>-]<.+++.>++++[<---->-]<.>
    ++++++++[<-------->-]<-----.>++++++++[<++++++++>-]<++++.---.>++++[<++
    ++>-]<+++.>+++++++++[<--------->-]<---.>+++[<++++>-]<+..>+++[<---->-]
    <-.>++++++[<++++++>-]<.>+++[<+++>-]<++.>++[<+++>-]<.>+++[<++++>-]<+.>
    ++++[<----->-]<--.>+++++[<+++++>-]<.>++++++++[<-------->-]<-----.>+++
    ++++++[<+++++++++>-]<+++.>+++++[<------>-]<----.>+++++[<+++++++>-]<.>
    ++++++[<-------->-]<.>++++++[<------>-]<.>++++[<----->-]<---.

portLANon Perils of Credentialism

> To maintain intellectual honesty and consistency, MIT should announce that it would henceforth stop requiring formal credentials in evaluating candidates for this and other similar jobs. In other words, future candidates like her, who feel confident in their ability to perform the job, shouldn't feel the need to invent degrees on their resumes. Come on, you may say, how are they supposed to find out who is a good candidate and who is bad. Well, they hired her based on an invented degree, didn't they? Didn't she work out OK for 28 years? Then why pretend that the degree was actually needed in order for her to perform her job?

Exactly. I do have an answer for that, however: If they didn't require degrees for the job, they would undermine their own degree-selling business.

A majority of college students are in college because a degree is supposed to help them get some unspecified job, sometime later, out of a job pool which purports to pay better on average than the jobs that let you in based on mere ability.

In effect, colleges have taken on some of the characteristics of shady employment and modelling agencies, the ones that tell candidates to pay a fee and they'll help them get placed. We always hear how the legitimate ones don't charge fees in advance.

If college was only about teaching people what they desired to learn, enrollment might drop by an order of magnitude or more. Like any business, it wants to grow, and so they find ways to market themselves ("you need a degree to get a good job!") and arrange guaranteed contracts for themselves (encouraging you to take on debt) to further their own interests, not yours. Hence they tack on mandatory fees for all sorts of things you may not want and they establish mandatory requirements in quantity of "units" (as if 3 "units" of English or Computer Science makes any sense). Required classes are essentially a jobs program for professors of the less-popular subjects, guaranteeing enough sign-ups to keep the money rolling in for people who would otherwise be unemployable in that capacity.

You can learn most academic subjects out of the book. Having someone read the book at you and write a few phrases from the book on a chalkboard doesn't add information. All it takes is a tiny bit of initiative on your part to learn it on your own without someone else telling you to do it.

If you don't have that initiative, it's probably because you spent K through 12 always waiting to be told what to do by someone else. The usual classroom method is generally inefficient and it purposely stops you from developing self-direction. Why? Because a good employee needs to do what s/he's told and take direction from a "superior". They don't want you to be self-directed -- how's a megacorp going to exist if there're a million little start-ups running around?

portLANon What happened to you after you were rejected?

> If not, YCombinator picks the winners pretty well.

Impossible to say without knowing what the selectees would've done on their own. A lot of the winners might have opted to stay in college, for example, if they hadn't been picked. Simply being selected is automatically going to influence the result -- having all that support behind you makes it more likely that you'll succeed.

There's a certain amount of being made, not born, so to speak; you might think of it as being a bit like the Spice Girls.

    *Cough*

portLANon Steve "spez" Huffman of Reddit on The Total Rewrite Decision

>the old code was essentially two years of hacks and cludges. The new version is much cleaner, and the new back-end is much more malleable. The idea is that once we get caught up with ourselves, the actual new stuff will come pretty quickly.

portLANon I surrender. Lisp really is better than C++.

    >++++++++[<+++++++++>-]<+.>+++++[<------>-]<----.>++++++++[<++++++++>
    -]<++++++.>++++c++++[<--------->-]<-----.>++++++++[<++++++++>-]<+++++
    ++.>++[<++++>-]<.>++[<--->-]<.>++[<++>-]<+.>++[<--->-]<-.>++++++++[<-
    ------->-]<-------.>+++++++++[<+++++++++>-]<+++.>++[<-->-]<-.>+++++++
    +[<--------->-]<-------.>++++++++[<++++++++>-]<+++++.>++[<++++>-]<.>+
    ++[<--->-]<--.+++.-.>++++++++[<-------->-]<----.>+++++[<++++++>-]<+++
    +.>++++++[<++++++++>-]<.>++++[<---->-]<-.>++[<++++>-]<.>++[<++>-]<+.>
    ++[<---->-]<.>+++[<+++++>-]<.>++++[<---->-]<--.>++[<++++>-]<.>+++++++
    +[<--------->-]<---.>++++++++[<+++++++++>-]<+.>++[<++>-]<+.>++++++++[
    <--------->-]<------.>++++++++[<+++++++++>-]<+++++.>+++[<++++>-]<.>++
    +++++++[<--------->-]<--------.>++++++++[<+++++++++>-]<++++++.>+++[<-
    -->-]<.>++++[<++++>-]<+++.----.>+++++++++[<--------->-]<---.>++++++++
    [<++++++++++>-]<.++.---.>++[<---->-]<.>+++[<+++>-]<++.>++++[<---->-]<
    -.>+++[<++++>-]<.>++++++++[<--------->-]<-----.>++++++++[<+++++++++>-
    ]<++.>+++[<+++>-]<++.--.+.>+++++++++[<--------->-]<---.>++++++++[<+++
    +++++>-]<++++++.>+++[<+++>-]<.+++.>+++++++++[<--------->-]<-.>+++++++
    +[<+++++++++>-]<+++.--.>++[<--->-]<.>++[<++++>-]<.>++[<++++>-]<.>++++
    ++++[<-------->-]<-----.>++++++[<------>-]<.

portLANon Holding a program in one's head

Don't forget you can combine the two. This is often done for you already if you use the pool or hot tub at your apartment complex that kids were playing in all day.

portLANon Firms, investors tend to prosper with founders at the helm

>"It would really bother me to think that in a few years, my successor could weaken something I've spent 35 years building, my entire adult life," says Zimmer, 58. "That would be disturbing."

>When pressed, Mason says it's unlikely that his successor will be as successful.

Of course, because no successor has as large a stake in it as the original founder. Maybe they should do it like a kingship, slightly modified -- where the successor inherits HALF of the founder's equity. You would stand a much better chance of attracting the best people if they were going to get the billions when you stepped down -- subject to vesting and performance. Why would the top people want to join an existing company when the big equity has already been taken out of it?

So, when you retire you vest half of the Founder's stock, if you've been there "long enough". Take a company from $10B market cap to $20B and you've doubled the Founder's share, so you get an amount equal to what the whole thing was when you started, and leave an equal amount to lure the next CEO.

It's late so I may well be missing obvious flaws in the scheme, but some kind of equity retention strategy seems to be needed to promote long-term vitality because the current m.o. is the original founders and investors bleed it all out.

portLANon Firms, investors tend to prosper with founders at the helm

> Amazon's 15-year stock gain: 4,381%

Amazingly they have predicted Amazon's exact stock performance for the next 5 years. Someone over there better hide the electric drills.

portLANon Your server is vulnerable brute force password guessing: solution?

[ - Redacted - ]

Alas, News.YC doesn't cope with Unicode.

portLANon Silicon Valley faces Web startup glut

If anything it's even more glutted now.

Which brings this to mind: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38691

"Today, there is $230 billion of private financing around private equity backed companies."

portLANon Ask pg.news.yc: How do acquisition prices get settled?

You might be making soap while you sleep.

portLANon Y Combinator's Hacker News NoFollows Some Links?

Another asterisk?

    (= *follow-threshold* 5)

The markup eats leading newlines and turns code blocks into normal text, and the normal text eats asterisks. Might I suggest backquote code quoting, and backslash escaping of special chars? (Markdown)

portLANon Founders. We matter. repeat as much as we can

And gosh darn it, people like me!

portLANon Ask pg.news.yc: How do acquisition prices get settled?

> The only person you can trust to work in your best interest is yourself.

If only that were true! A great many people have psychological difficulty in following through on what they believe to be in their best interest.

Other people can often be better advocates for you than you are. They may demand more for you than you would be comfortable asking for yourself.

portLANon Deadpool: Five Stupidest Startups of the Summer

That name is just horrible though. I'm not even going to write what it sounds like; but more to the point, it's totally non-descriptive unlike LinkedIn, MySpace, or Facebook, which is counterproductive for a social networking site.

Edit: Of course one of the founders is named Krapivin...

portLANon A Whirlwind Week in Cali

Congratulations are in order for creating a community that understands each other. It almost looks like it was all a ploy to get a bunch of new like-minded friends!

portLANon Startup Founders Don't Sleep (How many all-nighters do you pull a month?)

I can't count the number of times I stayed up late chasing a bug, only to have it be something so simple that I would've caught it in 20 minutes or less if I'd just gotten a normal amount of sleep and looked at it the next morning.

You just get slower and slower as you stay up, until you're sitting there staring at the screen for 5 minutes before you remember what you're doing.

Any lack of sleep at all will also cost you in productivity the next day. By having discipline to let it be, you can spend 20 minutes on it the next day instead of hours on it tonight and messing up your productivity all day tomorrow.

portLANon Lisp web frameworks: which one should I use?

That wasn't a smug weenie thing. It was funny. I was going to suggest web.py just for giggles.

portLANon How to Get a Job on Craigslist

"How to Change the World", apparently by reading about Craigslist job ads, Facebook postcards, "celeb heads", and how to get an autographed copy of his book.

Getting a job on CL is the complete opposite of what start-up founders want to do, and there's no content on that blog for hackers.

portLANon Hacker School

Start-ups should be a temporary economic blip. In our lifetime, we should either see convincing virtual reality, or be sitting on the beach sipping umbrella drinks served by robots which have taken over all "work" positions.

It's beyond the pale that with our present technology and abundance that we still use "being out on the street and starving to death" as a stick to make people work dead-end jobs. At least, if you'd like a future where all human beings are valued and cared for simply because they are human.

For crying out loud, it's the 21st century and the world still has human slavery. Don't judge your country based on it being better than the worst -- that encourages a race to the bottom. Judge it from a future perspective; science fiction has offered plenty of promising visions for humanity.

portLANon 20/20: "Stupid in America"

Declined -- already got a better valuation. Yeah:

    Five to one, baby, 
      one in five 
    No one here gets 
      out alive

portLANon What programming language should I start with?

I'm modding it down to save anyone from being misled into PHP.

portLANon 20/20: "Stupid in America"

Sure it is -- two co-founders, creating something new, and seeing it through from a nascent stage to maturity.