skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's true that much (most?) progress in programming has come through higher-level representations of programs. But this has made programming easier for programmers, not for non-programmers. Why? Because much of the complexity in programming is intrinsic to the problems themselves. The ability to distill and organize abstractions to address that complexity, and to formulate them precisely enough to be suitable for mechanical execution, is essential to programming. This ability is not going to magically appear once programs are represented as "something akin to a PowerPoint presentation, [or] a flow chart, [or] a sketch of what they want the actual user screen to look like" rather than in code. Actually, just the reverse is true. We program in code not because we're "coders", but because code happens to be by far the best medium for precisely expressing abstractions. If these other representations were so much better that they enabled non-programmers to specify working systems (i.e., to program), then they'd be better for programmers too. We'd all use them.

I'm not saying that Simonyi won't come out with anything of value. Maybe it will help to facilitate dialogue between programmers and domain experts about how a system should work. But the hype that it will turn non-programmers into programmers is pure PR.
Say, "I have a similar offer from another company and ask them if they can sweeten the deal." Most places will up the offer around 5-10% with a minor nudge. If they don't change things you can still go with them and say I think it's a better option or whatever.
You're right. All I wanted to say is that generally I am leaning towards making product rather than looking for financing, but I still decided to go for the competition first with this specific idea. Also it's not a "back-of-a-napkin" but it's 6-9mo thinking/research on brains, learning, market etc.I also have real chances since it's down from 41 teams to about 7 now and I have won other competitions, so I have a feeling of what judges are looking for, which is different than what investors are. So yeah, badly described there.
Just start working on your startup when you're not at work. The extended work hours and work load will get you ready for when you make the full transition.
Err yeah sure that will work. My advice: read the four hour work week. Not for the four hours but for putting you in a position to work for yourself and work as an employee.

Focus obsessively on your productivity on your current job and take on no new tasks. Hopefully get your tasks done in 10 hours per week (very easy if you get rid of all possible meetings and phone calls). Use the extra time to work on your own startup.
Your blog post seems to focus on a dwelling feeling of hopelessness, uncertainty, financial insecurity, without a clear certainty of what to do next. With only a couple hundred bucks and a burn rate of $400 (or 3 months at the most), you're really playing against the odds. I mean, I'm sure there are a lot of people interested in getting $60,000 besides your group. On the bright side, you have a bunch of ideas, and seem to have a willingness to push your limits. These qualities don't go away quickly.

Here's some sage advice I got from one of my mentors: "A good opportunity != a good opportunity for you." Also, it's ok to not start a start up right away. Without knowing all the facts of your circumstance, I would suggest focusing on making your long-term situation better by getting your finances in order, and getting indispensable skills/experience by working at some job (depending on what skills you want to get) and hoarding your money. Spend your nights and weekends figuring out how to spot good opportunities for you, getting a team together, mentors, etc. Six months to a year from now, you should have $10k-15k and be ready to rock. Then you can quit and pursue a good opportunity, reduce unnecessary stress, and increase chances of success.
Is it organic, though? :)
Azul Means (Big) Blue: There's a new kind of mainframe coming and it isn't from IBM
For my purposes server-side is more useful. My site is for casual photographers, people whose photos are mainly for sharing their doings. For them it makes much more sense to get the photos out there in a timely manner, then go through and crop, etc., when time allows.

For even a moderately-sized digital photo (2MB these days), downloading and especially uploading is slow. It's much faster for snipshot.com to talk to ourdoings.com.

We just got a digital photo frame yesterday, and it's pulling family shots from ourdoings.com. Those frames draw attention to the need for good cropping much better than a web page does.

The way snipshot constrains proportions by default when cropping is helpful. If picnik users forget to choose the appropriate option, they'll end up with a line of thumbnails that are all different.

That said, I still think redeye is a big issue. Also, as broadband gets better the difference between client and server-side image editing will become less important.
class Proc
def curry *args
self.class.new {|*a| self.call(*(args+a))}
end
end
Feds Seize $78M of Bogus Chinese Cisco Gear
Sony leery of the Eee PC?
Wow, talk about two years behind the bandwagon. How is this "News"?
If the extra time belongs to your employer, then so does the copyright on any work you do during that extra time. Don't write any programs, documentation or marketing literature on employer time. Do focus on productivity, though. You need to be in the habit of being productive.
New erasable holographic material paves way toward 3D movies
Well, that made me laugh.
The reason why your dumb programmers uses Java is because that was their first language. Dumb programmers don't like to learn new stuff. If they were interesting in learning, they would become smart programmers :-)

Don't blame it on the language. Blame it on the students who only wants to learn the basics so that they can get a degree and a comfortable job.
I generally think stepping back for a little bit is ok. After all, this is why I am not a banker like most of my friends around.

I just feel that I have decent chances this time around and I am willing to take the extra. Once those 2 things I am betting on unwind, I will have time to relax and rethink.

Thanx though, considered.
I thought that understanding program flow was a huge implediment to non-programmers and that if we had graphical flowchart method then at least small tasks could be performed by non-programmers. However, after using ETL software which works exactly this way, I'm much less confident.
Assuming it is a web startup.

Build a content website on something you consider yourself good at. Try to get users, make money through adsense, put up analytics and test it out. You would learn a ton about how(and what) works on the internet - and possibly be making enough by the time you are ready to quit to bootstrap your startup .
A verbal deal isn't.
"Inane" and "Racist" don't seem to be synonyms for "Factually incorrect due to bad data," or "Untrue because the statistical techniques in use are misapplied." Perhaps you want to rephrase so you're discussing the article, rather than whining that it doesn't confirm your prejudices.
Rails fanboys are the new Lisp fanboys.
Yep. I've worked at big companies, and they never had "downs", and our products always launched (on time, even!), and nobody ever got fired.
-1, NOT SOLID STATE ENOUGH
Your first lesson as an entrepreneur:

Your last paragraph is exactly what NOT to do. You will need every single ounce of resources (time, energy, attention) for your start-up. The only reason to ever do anything above the call of duty as someone else's employee is to learn it for yourself.

Start your planning on how you will extract yourself from your current employment, going part time or as a contractor. You will need every spare nanosecond for your startup.

And don't sign anything. (If you already did, get a risk assessment from a lawyer.)
A completed website is a dead website. A completed application is a dead application. A completed open source project is a dead open source project.
Ending software patents: Has the time come?
Social Networks and Software Development
It's an excellent text to be sure, but I wouldn't call it advanced. PCL was the the first real Lisp text I read, and I found it to be a superb introduction to the subject.
Django is much more flexible, stable, and ever changing. It is key to success.
Personally I've never been able to really combine work with startups. You are single-threaded, so to speak, so doing things sequentially (work -> quit -> start company) works better than multi-tasking. Plus, staying on the job gives you too much comfort. Here are four things that I have done or considered doing:

1) Try to sell your startup idea to management. Chances are it won't work, but it's worth a try - the company might invest money or people in it. This one actually never worked for me.

2) Try to steer your work at the job so it overlaps with your startup. E.g., if you think your startup should use Python, but you don't know it, persuade your boss to use Python for your next work project, so you can get the hang of it. Persuade your company to open source some code that could help you for your startup.

3) If you work in a place with good bonuses (50%+ of annual salary), work hard, wait for the bonus and quit. That's what I planned to do, but my hedge fund went bankrupt three months before bonus time. Still, I got a decent settlement, so it worked even better.

4) Decide you are quitting, but don't announce it. Become a bad employee. Note that this is immoral, dangerous and potentially illegal, plus faith has its way to play jokes on you, so after you burn the bridges with your boss you might meet her again in a different scenario (e.g., she becomes a VC). Leave the office earlier, start working from home more often (while actually working on your startup), try to take a 1-2 month vacation/sabbatical, etc. Unless you work at a 7-11, you would usually have 2-3 months before management starts coming down on you. This way you can work on a prototype and if two months in you realize it's not worth it, you can still recover things at the job.
I think fotoflexer.com is a great competitor too.
<disclaimer>I'm still in the process of starting my first business and still working for 'the man.' Take what I say with that in mind.</disclaimer>

I've mulled over this question a lot. After reading all kinds of articles and books about founding a business, it seems to me that the key to becoming an entrepreneur is "just do it." Nothing will teach you more about being one than actually doing it. There is tons of GREAT advice out there but none of it will actually become applicable until you're put in a situation where you need to apply it.

Finish your app, start the business on the side, and see where that takes you. Nothing like market forces to expand your comfort zone for you. If your business starts taking so much effort and time to iterate that you need to decide between your job and your business, take it as a good sign. If it fails, so what? Almost all the big name founders had at least 1 failed businesses before hitting gold-some of them had multiple failed businesses.
During those work hours, you can do stuff like pay bills and make phone calls that would normally occupy your off hours. Optimize your off hours, at expense of your work hours.
A few months ago they didn't have an API. Yes, now they're a competitor too, although targeting more advanced users, I think.
Not really - I've managed to write a basic raytracer within these constraints. But I doubt one could make a baby with your analogy :)
It's weird, I somehow HOPE it's a scam. If it's "legitimate" (as in, they actually think they're making good work) I think I'll have to shoot myself.
I have this book. The site also has an interview with Butler Lampson which was more interesting to me.
fluff!
I think the real problem is the the vast majority of the apps are absolute crap.

Let's take a look at the one referenced:

"The most glaring example of this comes straight out of Toronto, the TD Canada Trust “Split the bill” application, which I have to admit seemed like a decent idea to me when I first heard about it"

Split the bill? Really?

You're really going to:

- go to a restaurant

- bring along a laptop

- expect a net connection

- fire up facebook

Just to use this app?

Sturgeon's law is alive and well.
I think Rush is a bad way to interact with Unix.

Another comment already mentioned that there is presently no way to provide arguments to a command. That was the first thing I was looking for, myself. It did not even support the syntax Capistrano promotes by using an underscore, such as my_dir.ls_la, and that's a shame.

Of course, we could use #system to invoke a Bourne shell to run any command, but that's too much overhead for heavy use, so that option does not matter.

One of the most important things a shell does is piping. Rush does allow one to get away from needing to pipe through commands like grep, wc, awk, and sed, but you cannot get away from the fact that there are cases where you just have to pipe data between commands that have a complex relationship with that data that you would not want to recreate within Rush. For Rush to have a chance of being considered seriously, it also needs to address pipes and make them easy to invoke.
I'll also add that David is really smart guy and an excellent author.

I buy his stuff sight unseen.
Some thoughts on Azul:

The comparison of Azul to a mainframe is apt, since there is no low-end Azul box. If you don't have $50K to spend, go home. Startups can stop reading now.

The network-attached coprocessor idea doesn't give me a good feeling; it sounds like yet another point of failure.

Because Azul uses hundreds of cores, most apps won't scale out of the box; Azul-specific tuning like lock splitting is needed.

I want to like Azul but in the end it looks like a niche box.
I realized my comment was too damn long, so I wrote a blog post.

http://www.tonywright.com/2008/half-assed-startup-how-to-sta...
Surprise! Big freaking surprise - who would have guesses that the iPhone SDK would encourage centralized control instead of openness?
Just a clarification. I was referring to PG "On Lisp" as advanced. Not PCL. "On Lisp" is mostly about complex uses of macros. Hence the name -- programming "On" lisp instead of programming in lisp
Hampster powered workstations... I'm not sure if it would be a disaster for productivity because they're cute or because their poop stinks, and to power a workstation the problem would be multiplied to the 2nd or 3rd power.

I'm sure someone could implement it, but I'm not sure how wise it would be... maybe a PetSmart could do it first.
You expect me to do simple math in my head? If I am with friends it is usually more of a fight for the bill than a fight to split the bill.

It is exactly the case of people making apps that are worthless, and expecting the large user base to somehow adopt them.

There IS a huge problem with monetizing various apps though.
For more of a Photoshop replacement: www.splashup.com
That's what I always hope to be true.
I see you're the inquisitive and intelligent type. So I'll make this explanation to those that aren't:

http://www.netbanker.com/2007/08/td_canada_trust_launches_sp...

"What first crossed my desk this week was SPLIT IT, an application they created that allows roommates who are on Facebook to manage how they split basic bills."

Hmm... This reminds me of something: https://www.billmonk.com/

http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/01/30/minimerger-obopay-aquir...

Hmm... I wonder who might find this app actually useful?
As one of the most widely used languages, it has its own bell curve. There are some brilliant people using Java to drive enormous business at big companies, a lot of middling, competent people, and some dreck. Although I would guess that Java's bell curve is heavy to the left, because people that don't do computers out interest choose Java for the money, while a portion of the smartest developers self-select into more powerful but less commercially viable languages (Python, Ruby, Lisp, Smalltalk, Erlang, etc).
+1.

I think you need to go back to work, lick your wounds and start again. You can't start a startup on no money. Firstly because you need to be able to support yourself until both a) you've created version 1 or your product/service, and b) you've started to get some users. (No investor will take you seriously until then.) And secondly, because the stress and distraction of your finances will interfere with your ability to succeed.

Go back to work. Work on it on the side - eves and weekends. Save up some money - then leave the job and try again.

Sucks? I know it does. (And yes, I know it's hard to make a lot of progress in your spare time.) I'm going through this exact thing right now. (And I live in expensive NYC too!) But that's the way it's gotta be. You don't have a windfall in the bank from a previous startup - or a rich daddy. Neither do I. And unfortunately for people like us, trying to launch a startup means a race against time to build something before the money runs out. Well, you've lost this heat of the race. (As did I.) That doesn't mean the race is over. Keep the dream alive on the side, and in a year take it full-time again.

Hang in there - and good luck!
that's the funniest thing I've seen on wtf in a looong time. The dummy who made the site apparently even posted on the wtf forum - in all caps, natch.
I love this, but it's an awful lot of complexity to print '9' to stdout. The first time I ran it through a python interpreter, I thought I made a mistake.
Is there any way to use Google to search the actual source of a webpage? I couldn't find an "insource:" or similar function.

I'm wondering how many websites use this pasuser() function and think they're actually "securing" content.
Ask YC: Should we launch our startup at a conference?
Is it worth doing a splashy launch at a conference? We're going into private alpha this week and thought we could launch it to a wider audience. Was thinking about the NextWeb conference in Amsterdam, but paying money to present seems lame.

What do people think about 'event' launches... Should we just launch quietly and let the product do the talking?
Nice blog post, but I object to the "half-assed" phrase in the title, which implies a lack of passion for the startup. Sometimes, I think that one must keep a source of income out of necessity (and consulting is not always feasible).
Perhaps he wrote this as a reminder to himself? Perhaps he had a problem like this at Fog Creek and wanted to share the lesson he learned? Perhaps the editors thought the readers of Inc Magazine would appreciate this?

Plus, he tries to limit hours/wk to 40, gives 6 weeks of vacation, free catered lunches, etc. He's hardly asking his employees to work like founders.
If Apple could provide a reasonably priced system for the customer who wants a Mac for his desktop but already has a monitor, I think they might have something.
canned baked beans
What a terrible article. We "hunch over keyboards, pecking out individual lines of code in esoteric programming languages"? What a cliche! Also, some of us use Ruby or Python.

And we don't talk to users? When there's so much research on interaction design, testing, measuring how users behave? Not that you should always listen to users either (a point completely lost on the author) (http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001063.html).

And intentional programming may sound revolutionary, but our solution to that problem are domain specific languages, and those aren't very new either. And if non-programmers can use those DSLs (SQL, Excel) that doesn't make them programmers.

Also, it's naive to assume that users could create programs except for the scary part where you communicate with the computer.

To program is to think, structured. It means considering all the consequences. x% of programming is error handling (citation needed). Non-programmers cannot think logically enough. The thinking part is what makes programming hard - the arcane API stuff is merely the annoying part - the accidental complexity. And we are getting rid of it, slowly but steadily.
Instead of serious discussion you get this: "by doing pure math, I face legal liability."
Already working on #1 and #2. In alignment with some others, trying to sell a project that would be perfect with Ruby on Rails to the powers-that-matter. I think #3 and #4 aren't in my nature.
Strange, I think I will never be jobless.
In the long run, a "bluff" is a real bad idea. What right will you ever have expecting open honest communication from someone else if one of the first things you ever did to them WASN'T?
Half-assed Startup - How to Start your Company and Keep Your Day Job
What is this referring to?

"he devised the programming method that the company’s software developers have used for the last quarter-century."
Thanks to the author for taking the time to write this up.

We recently had to buy a digital certificate ($99), and it felt very much like a digital mugging. In a year it reverts to $499. You can get a nearly identical SSL certificate for less than $10.

The situation is an example of everything that can go wrong when ethics evaporates from business. Not to mention, the approval process is hostile to startups (corporate letterhead? fax machine?).

"Opening an unapproved browser on Windows Vista now results in multiple warning dialogs and a bright red security notice---unless the unsupported browser pays us millions to audit their program."
Also, I think many people already engage in a simple form of programming: it's called Excel.

I think of Excel as a zeroth-order functional programming environment. It is functional because you can establish direct functional relationships between cells, and zeroth-order because you can't build up abstractions (you can't create named functions, nor could such things be compounded -- it's only direct many-many cell references) beyond what's in built-in functions and plugins.
I agree that managers need to stay in touch with workers and the nuts-and-bolts of the business, but I disagreed with some of the examples he used in the article. There is no evidence that the brigadier or the CEO failed because of a quip about sleeping in a limo or picking up the phone at the pool.
Speaking from my own experiences with my own little startup. I have thought about doing something like this, but it relates to even when I am talking about it at networking events.

I would say you should do it if you can afford it and if your site has instant gratification/wow factor. I think peoples attention spans are limited in conference type settings, with many things going on at once it hard to take it all in, if you can wow them quickly I'd say it be worth it. My site is more community-based (user-generated blah blah), so the instant gratification factor is sort of low.

just my thoughts :)
I was pleasantly surprised to note that this author understands that all Supreme Court rulings invalidate patents on software for general-purpose digital computers, and that we only have software patents because of lower-court rulings. Good article just for that.
Subcutaneous "tattoo" display that runs on blood (concept)
One Hour of Free Marketing Advice From Jay Abraham
There's more to Azul than just the fact they have a zillion cores in a box.

They've also done some awesome work on optimistic thread concurrency and concurrent garbage collection.
> Programmers are good at this - business users are not.

It might be more accurate to say that programmers are less bad at this than business users (and other less analytically minded individuals).
Man, I wish I could get down to $400 per month. But you don't even get a room in the town here for that. Even cheap apartments are at $600 and as I'm living in germany it's also rather hard to get around some insurances - so make that another $600. Some other costs like water, electricity and internet will make another 150$ and then add the normal living costs (about 450$). Ok, part of the reason is the currently low rate for $, but I don't think it would even be possible for me to get down to 400 € in any way.