skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Zen is not a philosophy; it's a technique. Not unlike masturbation.
For me, these invite sarcasm:

"Make yourself a blend of fruits that excite you. I love a carrot-apple-ginger juice and drink it in the morning"

I like a blend of various fermented grapes, but am not yet to the point where i drink it in the morning.
Shouldn't there be two of each animal on the cover?
http://del.icio.us/amx
we have a privacy policy and we are transparent with what we do.
unfortunately we don't have a ui/designer guru on our team =(

right now given our tight resources, our priority is building more features into muchcloser...
Shape-shifting robot forms from magnetic swarm
"You want Unicode support? Write it in."

Sorry but that's like selling someone a car and saying "Oh you want the chassis to be made of metal instead of wood? Well you can change that can't you."

I disagree. If you're building something from the start, you decide on a good character set, and use it. Namely Unicode. It's a lot easier to do that than to try and fix things afterwards.

Look at php. Dealing with Unicode in php is a major hassle because it wasn't designed from the ground up to support Unicode. It was added in later as a library. So now you have special functions for dealing with unicode, and all the hassle and verbosity that entails in your code.

In Javascript or Java however, Unicode just works universally.

I'd say choosing a character set is one of the first things you should do as a language designer - that's why I was surprised with the lack of support for anything but ascii which just doesn't cut it any more for real world applications.

Saying that adding Unicode is a couple of days work for anyone interested sounds like a recipe for absolute disaster - see how php turned out.
Entrepreneurial Success According to Paul Graham and Madeline Albright
IBM taunts Sun, HP and VMware with $40 PowerVM hypervisor
I'm not doing it.
For photograph based captchas,the diversity will be too low and will be uneconomical to implement on a large scale.

How about animated gifs instead of static images as captchas?
When the goal is entertainment though, I don't see that strategy getting you far.
Good story. I didn't realize it was fiction until some post-read googling.
What's with all this negativity... it's not like you paid for the code and he owes you something. It's like someone builds a new type of car and gives it to you, and you say it totally sucks because there isn't any paint on it.
Yep... this is pretty much the greatest story ever.
If everyone just bookmarked this specific page on delicious it might work well.
How can you know whether you have unconscious thoughts in your mind?
Sorry, but that is exactly what the article is arguing against. Some great state you love and call "Nirvana" is just another escape from reality.
You can't.
Quite dated now. Better solutions exist.
It's surprising to hear Joel say something negative about MSFT.
Yahoo to Cut 1,000 Jobs
More realistic would've been better. Had good parts though.
What exactly is the point?
In a way I understand trying to apply the algorithm manually for each client is wasteful, negotiation with each client is tiring especially when its with a 7B company.

I'm thinking about using the idea I got of building a web-service around it, and letting people find their own uses for it.

Considering applying to YC with the idea.
Slashdot really doesn't get it and as a result, it's becoming a ghost town. I used to visit Slashdot constantly. Now I look once or twice a week.

Digg, Reddit, and even YNews to some extent, can be filled with junk but they let me decide what's important, rather than what someone named Commander Taco finds important. It's the same as Wikipedia: give me all the information and leave the onus on me to separate the wheat from the chaff.
How to Homebrew Wii Games: 73 Tips, Tutorials and Resources
If you've spent all your money on a bidding war to get the Wii and you're out of cash for games, follow this guide to some of the best Wii homebrew resources out there.
I figured that bird's neck was the closest thing I was going to get to an "arc".
As the author of the above article, I'd like to point out that the adjacency matrix is extremely sparse. If you use a sparse representation of the link matrix (as I have done -- your claim is incorrect), its space usage will scale as O(N), and not as O(N^2) as you suggest.

By that of course I don't mean to say you can use this script to build your own google.... but the problems lie elsewhere.
You can't guess all the possible alternative names for your site, and for your enemy site. Drop it.
Slashdot is happy to criticise Digg's approach, but for a long time /. was swamped by reposts and commenters still regularly criticise poor moderation decisions (grammatical mistakes, misrepresentation of articles, trollbait, blogspam) that /.'s moderation should be able to fix. Whatsmore, over time even /. has conceeded and accepted social contributions via Firehose.

I'm not sure either model is better than the other, frankly.
Why do people think we know what we're doing?
Demo 08 videos are up
For those of us that didn't or couldn't watch the streaming. I am not sure if this all of them or if there is more to come.
Stallman doesn't use a web browser
Gotta love him.
I have fond memories of Slashdot. I remember in the early days reading this really inspiring essay about Lisp by some guy.

That said, I'll glance at it once a day but will rarely dive in. I worry that Reddit will suffer the same fate.

There's definite room for improvement in this area, maybe even a new startup or two...
Searching For Feynman
Thought he left out the standard Queue module, but I guess he does have a link to it. Really should mention ipython in the shell question though.

Also, I would change some of the solutions to the more modern, pythonic styles that have evolved. And add in some newer questions.
He does crank dat while waiting for the wget bar to finish.
Tell YC: Need tabindexes. I keep going to the help page when I try to submit a comment.
And the comments are disabled for my previous submission? wtf?
http://www.craigslist.org/about/best/bos/533096562.html
Grew up with computers (started with a ZX-80) but for some reason lost interest as a teenager. Maths degree at university; mainly pure maths, group theory, number theory, topology etc.

Didn't want to do research so sought a mathsy job and joined an actuarial consultancy, advising pension schemes through calculations and mathematical models. Found out that it was less technical than I'd expected and consulting was quite repetitive. Unofficially carved out an hour or so each day to get better at broader finance theory (derivative pricing, corporate finance etc) and programming, and re-discovered why I liked computers so much as a youngster. Not a well-defined career path, but more a case of doing things I found interesting, earning trust, and pushing myself and the firm in different directions.

Then quit and did an MSc in artificial life for a year - unrelated but challenging and great fun.

Then back to the same company, doing similar things. I'm reminded of an article posted here a few months back saying that it's tough to be the best in a narrow field, but being in the top decile in lots of areas is easier and makes you valuable. I'm not the world's best programmer, mathematician, finance theorist, researcher or communicator; but I'm not too shabby at any of them and the combination seems to work well, particularly when coupled with a good knowledge of a particular domain (pensions in my case).

Some parallels to the startup world, even though I work for a big firm. In particular pg's The Power of the Marginal (http://www.paulgraham.com/marginal.html) resonates and translates to my own experience.
http://del.icio.us/simon.belak
Of course, while 0 would work just as well; my brain was half in C-mode.
And I thought it was crazy that he didn't use a cell phone ("personal tracking device"... as he calls it)...
Why should we care?

I liken Stallman to a fanatical religious person. Although intelligent, they're completely out of touch with reality. Stallman has brainwashed himself with ridiculous beliefs.

Don't drink the (un)Kool-Aid too!
How to hide a rar in a jpeg file
Bill Gates' new project: Farming
No New Windows Release Till 2011, Users Stuck With Vista
HP Launches 'Loss-Proof' Laptop
The Psychology of a Recession
TechFest 2008 To Rock Indian Institute of Technology
Would You Pay for Online Applications?
The 90/10 Principle Of Changing Your Life
An Essay by Einstein -- The World As I See It
The netflix contest was a spectacular failure. I can beat it easily just by using better metrics for the input data.

Really, the contest should have been about finding the data that is most representative of the expected results. But no, they want to throw resources at problems that are unsolvable with the provided data.
Hot Spot Blog: All the Latest News About the Best Products on the Market
http://del.icio.us/danieldl
http://del.icio.us/mortis
http://del.icio.us/michaelwalsh
I think Joel is pretty fair when it comes to MSFT. Sure he's an alum but he's not a fanboy by any means. He uses MSFT technologies because he knows them best and it works best for his business.
Gnul-aid?
I put worrying about this (and paying for lesser domains) in the pointless waste of time and money box. It's more important to test ideas fast and cheap than to protect a non-business from unlikely squatters. Who goes to the .org site first? No one whose business I'm worried about losing. The investment has zero return, and protects you from nothing if you have the .com. I changed names 4 times for my last idea; I'm very glad I never bought the variant domains.

Edit: On top of the reasons above--if you get to the point where you've trademarked your name and succeeded, I think you can kick people off the squatter domains through legal means.
2,000 subscribers in 90 days?

Big deal.

We launched HeavyInk.com less than 90 days ago, and we're on track to beat that.

...and those are <i>paying</i> customers.

...and we haven't advertised at all.
Here's the book answer: http://www.oreillymaker.com/link/7957/arc/
edit,

I guess you can click around to see stories of their everyday lives, and stuff. There's no other point.
They've got a pretty solid technical blog, which is how I discovered it. For example, here's a primer on using Ragel State Machines with Ruby as the target language:

http://www.devchix.com/2008/01/13/a-hello-world-for-ruby-on-...
Sounds a bit like http://l8tr.org, except l8tr doesn't make you register and will email later when a dead link (e.g. slashdotted) comes back on line.
Mozilla ups unpatched Firefox flaw to 'high severity'
FireFox continues gains against IE
Steve Ballmer may be the worst CEO
See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=106115
Anonymous Hackers Track Saboteur, Find and Punish the Wrong Guy
Fisker's $80K Plug-In Hybrid to Be Made in Detroit?
Replaced del.icio.us with magnolia for its openID support but then ended up using tumblr instead because of it's slick bookmarklet.

http://tumblr.iamdanw.com
MySpace to Launch Developer Platform Next Week
Sorry but that's like selling someone a car and saying "Oh you want the chassis to be made of metal instead of wood? Well you can change that can't you."

Except pg isn't selling anything, he's just letting you see and use what's ostensibly made his life easier.

I'd modify your simile to something more accurate, but modifying similes is a black hole.
A revolution is taking shape
So, is this the right thread to talk about actual language design?

1. I think using cons to represent lists is an ugly hack. I mean, why should a cons only hold 2 elements? Why not generalize them to n elements, and call them lists?

2. Has anyone tried unifying macros and functions? The distinctions between the two is one of the worst part of Lisp IMO, and I don't think there should be anything fundamental about it.

Otherwise, it's nice to see a new Lisp of course.
Most of your questions are answered here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=105144

PG has a response to advisory boards. Don't give them any compensation unless you're setting up a formal board of directors. If you're doing that, Guy Kawasaki in his book describes a board as having these types of people:

1) Customer- someone who understands your target market
2) Geek- Reality check guy for dev, and the tech expert
3) Dad- calming influence on the board, experience and maturity
4) Tight-Ass= The person who pushes for totally legal and ethical practices.
5) Jerry Maguire- Mr. Connections who can help you with whatever problem you have.

As always, as long as your products are taking off, everything else will fall into place.
Indeed. I've also never found journaling "exhilarating."
Ken Henderson Has Passed Away (1967-2008)
Very sad - Ken Henderson, one of the gurus behind Sybase and then Microsoft SQL Server, passed away Sunday. He was truly one of the brightest.
Let's Trash Yahoo During Happy Hour
Kiva.org: So sucessful it has run out of projects to fund
8 Web Design Mistakes That Developers (Non-Designers) Make
How to Optimize the Founder's Mind
If you look at reddit, 11 of the 25 top posts right now are on politics. That's definitely not a balanced view of the news. Digg has 2 right now, but used to have way more.

They've obviously built great sites, but as many have already noted, it's not at all a great way to discover articles on a wide-range of subjects -- with reddit white labeling their structure, maybe some of the children they spawn will be able to even surpass the main site in real news sharing.

Honestly though, I don't know anybody not really computer savvy that uses any "social news" sites. Many people over 30 wouldn't even know what Digg is.

Really just an example of how people online all the time imagine the impact of what they use (aka twitter) to be greater than what it actually is.

people who are always connected are going to be controlling what the news is on those sites, and it definitely shows.
http://del.icio.us/xavic
I was just talking to a friend about the same issue, and was reminded that referral programs can cause a lot of people to do this legwork for you for 'free'.
A failure of leadership, oversight and communication
http://del.icio.us/jeremyraines
I agree with the author, Unicode seems like it should be right in the core of a language, but I'm incredibly sympathetic to not wanting to spend even a day on the issue.

I also am incredibly grateful for any open source released (I feel like it shifts political power to individual programmers vs. corporations).

All that being said, it sure would be nice for Paul to spend that day or two of effort that would seemingly save thousands of community man hours. But I can't really blame him if he doesn't want to.
Because every word counts: Twitter experiences
Local Cooling: Optimize Your PC's Power Consumption
"The most important thing is not to constrain the evolution of your ideas. So the less you commit yourself in writing to what your data structures represent, the better."

Exactly! I think most developers don't get this statement. Committing yourself to data structures is like mixing cement IMHO. Once you've started this get harder to change quickly.
Too bad they don't fund American startups...
And remember, through all of this emailing-a-server-to-get-the-page-emailed-back ordeal, he doesn't use an on-line email reader either! He downloads new messages in a batch and reads them off-line. He then writes responses that get uploaded and sent off in bulk later.

At least, that was the way it worked last time I read about it.
Mistake #9: "I'll spend lots of time making it marginally prettier instead of building out features"
Why Myspace sucks
Just signed up for Myspace in anticipation of their API opening up soon....

First, their signup process doesn't work in Firefox (on Windows). If you're going to pass on cross-browser testing for any part of your site, don't let it be the part that actually gets you users! No wonder they've stopped growing.

Then I get an email that says

> Here's your account info for logging in:
>
> E-mail: XXXXXXXXXXX
> Password: XXXXXXXXXXX
>
> Keep it secret. Keep it safe.

Is this a joke? The X's were my actual username and password! For a site with a bullseye on it for privacy concerns, you'd think they could do better.
Microsoft Boy announces his school homework
Update: True, Jerry Yang of Yahoo is clueless. But as I mentioned yesterday, Yahoo is going out of business because their infrastructure can't compete with Google.

Huh? I like it when Mr. Nobody calls the founder of a huge company "clueless". Obviously, Yang is a stopgap CEO after Semel. Yahoo still has more pageviews than google (IIRC) so I think it's infrastructure is doing okay.

That said, their advertising system is effed up...
Full time undergrad student. Over breaks I do network support for a non-profit medical group in the NYC / Mid-Hudson area.
On the flip side, I can't stand building out a XHTML/CSS site from a designer that comes from a print background. No considerations from the design side are made for the web world. None of the front-end developers I work with would make the mistakes listed but these guys and gals think of their work like an art. To faithfully render the designers mockups into a document that can be rendered identically across browsers and platforms in the fastest way is their goal.

The points about free fonts and stock photography. Using system standard free fonts is good for several reasons including initial cost. The main reason I favor system standard fonts is being able to render headers and menus in text versus having to load up and image which is wasted bandwidth for most cases. Stock photography purchases are also tough to swallow for a developer but in a proper setting the developer for the site shouldn't worry about the cost of things because he isn't footing the bill! If it is a developers personal project, understand that he is a do-it-yourself kinda person and will want everything for inexpensive or free.

Sorry this article got me worked up a bit. I felt I fell into the developer (non-designer) category but I don't know anyone so full of themselves to make many of those mistakes. Can't we all just get along? ;)
Even YC gives a lot of money compared to Kiva loans. :)
very true :) Not sure what some of the Kiva entrepreneurs would do with the equivalent of $1 million
Not when you normalize for the startups' host country GDP.
I wonder if he's using UUCP?
Yes, this sounds just like me.

And yes, I really oughta do something about it.

One of these days.
Why not set up a kiva-like site for American startups? Oh, hang on - Kiva has virtually no defaulters on its loans, so maybe scrap that idea.
The analog here would be credit cards or student loans. Perhaps surprisingly, even in some more developed countries credit can be terribly hard to get.
"The default rate to date is 0.16 percent."

Stunning.

Compare that to the ho-hum attitude many Americans have toward credit responsibility.

I'd ask what's happened to our country, but I'm afraid you guys might actually answer.
Net Payola: Paying For The Digg Front Page
Having a good lawyer or law firm that you trust is fairly essential. They will be able to prepare your essential documents and steer you clear of landmines (especially the ones you know nothing about). If you are truly a cash strapped startup then a quick way to do this is to find the nearest law school (state or private), head to the library, and ask about the relevant area (IP, incorporation, etc.) and find the professor who teaches the subject.

This same principal applies for your financial adviser. Its better to head to your local MBA school and drop in to a professor who can guide you then try to fumble around yourself.

In sum, two essentials: lawyer + CFO

p.s. what is it that you are building?
Custom - Yes

Stock - No
> Compare that to the ho-hum attitude many Americans have toward credit responsibility.

So these third world countries are so successful because their businesses don't take any risks?
I'm sure you could come up with a list of should-have-dones in hindsight for every company out there. Given enough time, I'm sure the same could be said for Google (couldn't they have prevented the facebook fiasco?). Besides, didn't MS just report great numbers.
Music Wars Continue: Warner Bros Records VS SeeqPod
more like they don't know this exists...
Ajaxonomy Hacks Together del.icio.us Spy
Do we really need a lecture on design from a site where every link opens in a new window or tab?
That's why you stole his username? :P
http://del.icio.us/jamesbritt
Oh Crap Hackers
Hollywood vs. Real Life
Just to add a something... you're also talking about a potential life changing opportunity. When was the last time you used your credit card and felt like it would change your life? If it did change your life for the better you would probably want to give back to the system, no?

I think most people would... It has nothing to do with being american, it's the conditions these people are living in that make them appreciate the help.
I too work for yahoo (just an intern)
I think it was a blog post that the link went to, and it had a clever title. Any other ideas?
if you're a jobless bum in the third world chances are you starve - you might not have a job but you'll be doing something to survive
I'm sure you know the story, but for the benefit of the newbies:

It is supposedly: 'Rupert Murdoch Sucks'.
We could have guessed that.
Simple. In Africa it is so difficult/expensive to get credit that there are almost risk free loans that are not getting founding.

Second, they write status reports back to the site, so they know they are not being "used" by some "big company" - they know there are humans on the other side of the computer.
Dear Programmers, Please Learn to Read Before You Speak: In Defense of Arc
I thought of the same thing. I, for one, would be willing to take investment as a loan.
The list:

"I Know What Looks Good (and I Have Photoshop)"

"Just Use Blue and White Again"

"I'll Just Center Everything"

"Use the Free Font...It Looks Fine to Me"

"We Can Fit More Information in That Space"

"I'm Not Paying for a Picture"

"I Don't Need to Ask for Opinions"

"No Need to Get Too Detailed"
To all sarcastic commenters:

Hey, dudes: he built a bunch of cool and famous software, some of which you are using without paying a dime for, and even making money with.

He has no blog. Can't be found on Facebook. Apparently doesn't even like surfing web. But there is a wiki page about him and he gets recognized while walking down the street.

His name is Richard Stallman. What is YOUR name? What have YOU built?
"Ender's Game" video game
Very cool! Are you also a graduate student there?
I think there is a bare-minimum design quality necessary to launch a web product. The limit depends on the audience. If your design is below that limit, users will bounce off the page. Effort to exceed the limit is probably a waste. A site just needs to look good enough to seem 'legit'.
It's hard for me to imagine myself working at a company where CEO looks, talks and walks like Ballmer. I just can't stand the idea of a sleazy car salesman being my boss. In fact I just can't stand the idea of having a boss who's never wrote a line of code.
Microsoft Steals Firefox Logo
Arc O'Reilly Book
Stop Over-Engineering
This doesn't improve the content, but I've always found using the slashdot search url to return more useful results. e.g.

http://slashdot.org/search.pl?start=1

instead of

http://slashdot.org

the search result leaves out the useless icons and article title bars.
You cold have said "API", this is not a press conference, we're all normal here.
Ahh the cult of celebrity. No longer confined to the big screen!
Doesn't it seem rather more likely that people simply haven't heard about it?
I'll add it to the list.
Should've gone with the Fish for the cover image - invokes the (left) parentheses
(((((
(((
(((((
so much more clearly....
Nice try, kid ...