skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I rarely need to calculate Fibonacci numbers, but I use lists of varied types of objects constantly.
Ten Indian Start-ups to watch for in 2008
Yeah! Even 3D!

http://tlrobinson.net/misc/3d.html
Old discussion on Viaweb, Lisp, and maintainability
Like Apple, Intel Wants to Put the 'Internet in Your Pocket'
Will Opera Mobile perform for free?
Rumor: Apple planning late February event?
I spend a lot of time in the San Francisco main library and in cafes. It's nice to be around people and to be somewhere other than my room.
Are Lisp programs inherently hard to maintain? If macros allow a Lisp program to become its own programming language, does coming on as a new maintainer have a much steeper learning curve than for programs written without macros? What about after that learning curve is surmounted, does it become easy to maintain after that?
Any time. I'm concentrating on finishing school right now. So, maybe we'll talk in 6 months or so. Keep up the good work.
(in the meantime, it's cool to try to strike up conversations with people reading bulletin boards, do street improv, or bring a Frisbee to a park and see what happens.)

Ha... I thought I was the only who did that.
Slashdot has had its ups and downs, I think its quite reasonable now. You often get really informative and in depth commentary there.
Ssshhhh... don't attract their attention.
You're somewhere in the middle.

If that's not apparent to you, then perhaps you need to find some better peers. :)
Wow! I wish someone did the same for Pylons.
OpenID Has Big New Friends
I think it will... and I think it will blind-side the general populace when we get there.

I actually think our hardware is already sufficient for this (obviously not one computer, but a large network of them). I think it's mostly a software problem at this point. I think a new generation of database products in the works (with more flexible, dynamic objects) and the recent (last decade) appreciation for statistical pattern recognition will take us a long way. I think we are not much more than inefficient, redundant, statistical processing systems.
"On the other hand it is a straw man because you would not use continuation for navigation in real-world production web sites. You would have to store a continuation for every hit on the site forever, which is clearly not scalable."

I think if you are not using first-class continuation and are rolling your own CPS-style libraries, you can make the continuations serializable. Then you can save them on a LRU cache like memcached, to disk, or pass them to the client, depending on your performance requirements.
Hey, thanks! I was hoping I wasn't the only one with this idea. http://www.berkeleycoworking.com/ is just 15 minutes from my apartment, and in a cool area. :-)
湖北话
I'm no ruby developer so I decided to push your example a little further just to see how trivial it really is.

Unfortunately the next instruction you offer didn't work either:

powerbook.local 105> sudo gem install rails
Password:
Bulk updating Gem source index for: http://gems.rubyforge.org
ERROR: While executing gem ... (Gem::GemNotFoundException)
Could not find rails (> 0) in any repository

A little googling reveals that at least on OSX, you need to do this:

powerbook.local 106> sudo gem update --system
Password:
Updating RubyGems...

and after that, then you can

powerbook.local 107> sudo gem install rails
[...]
powerbook.local 108> rails myproject
powerbook.local 109> cd myproject
[...]

But then the next command you wrote blows up again:

powerbook.local 110> ./script/server
Cannot find gem for Rails =1.2.6.0:
Install the missing gem with 'gem install -v=1.2.6 rails', or
change environment.rb to define RAILS_GEM_VERSION with your desired version.
Yeah, it felt like I was reading a SCIgen paper (http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/).
You should go to Caboose Conf:
http://rubyjudo.com/2008/2/1/cabooseconf
It is a bad thing if the obvious choice isn't the best choice. Leaves me wondering what other ways to do things in perl seem obvious, but are horrible ideas.
interestingly this could be part of the reason for the android challenge.. get a lot of developers first and hence get a lot of applications out there, which would reduce one headache for handset manufacturers - applications to bundle to the users!
Now this is a decent science article. Maybe I should start reading Der Spiegel.

Of course, technically all of us are related to Brad Pitt. And I'm not convinced that, though I have blue eyes, I'm really that much more closely related to Brad than any other Indo-European is.
all 3 downmods appeared between quick refreshes.
This is from a minimal install of FreeBSD 6.2-RELEASE:

> ruby
ruby: Command not found.
> python
Python 2.4.3 (#2, Aug 11 2007, 18:44:16)
[GCC 3.4.6 [FreeBSD] 20060305] on freebsd6
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>>
I'd say somewhere around Boston would be ideal - Brookline, Cambridge, Framingham, etc..
heh. that is another reason it's important to be an expert on the subject: the mainstream view is very confused.

the whole knowledge is justified, true belief thing is such a mess. they've known induction doesn't work for ages, but haven't replaced it. good answers to these things, on the other hand, are largely ignored. (hint: Popper)
I find this very amusing. Something about it implying the bold statement that no hacker is lesser than Paul Graham, and then audaciously posting it on Paul Graham's site.
BS Material Science - Rice
Took no comp sci in school, but I've been coding since I was 8 (Drawing Mr. T in VB)
Currently work as a coder, never used the degree
but..
co-workers who do my same job without a degree pull 20k less a year and are career limited (in that they can't advance anymore until they get a degree of some kind)
Workling - Use Starling (Twitter's Queueing Engine) or Amazon SQS from Rails
Anyone know of an email service where you pay to send email to famous people?
Email from the highest bidders would be read by a famous person. Although there aren't that many famous people who would benefit from this, there are probably millions who would be interested in sending such email to famous people.
You may want to consider Almeria, Spain. Large contingent of Brits and other expats, excellent weather, excellent services, and at least one University in-town, others nearby. A quick 45 minute flight to Madrid. Old Roman bath nearby , Mediterranean Sea, then beach, then 30 minutes away are foothills/rocky terrain.

If staying in the USA, the area outside Philadelphia (Main Line) or going a little farther, Lancaster, PA, will have excellent access to just about anywhere on the East Coast, while being as small to mid-size as you want, as you can choose between mostly-rural to mostly-urban as you travel west on Rt. 30 out of Philly.
I've found python much easier to deploy.

Rails is just a pain.

Python has a longer history on the web. Give cherrypy a try, which, although not as powerful as Rails, is lightning fast.
I thought we were talking about YC funding. oops.
Albuquerque is nice.
Not Flat
Decent city with interesting things to do.
Fair community of hackers, coders and makers.
Lots of movie money, lab money and spin offs.
It's really booming around here lately
Still possible to live walking distance to good food, bars, music, parks, and grocery stores for minimal green (especially compared to Bay Area).

Santa Fe is expensive and full of retirees who are snobs.
It's close enough to drive up or train up (coming soon) if you'd like to visit, but no one should live there.

The only caution is NM is the land of entrapment. Stay for more than 2 years and you will never move away. (the spanish have been here for 500 years).
Thanks for the heads up. Do you know of some good companies around there?
How to tie world's fastest shoelace knot
he has 864 karma. wonder why he's trolling.
Indeed. Aristotle in fact ... translates roughly as "... Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work ..."
I'm concerned that I've only seen 14 of these 20 films. I have to disagree with the remake of The Italian Job. The original is generally considered to be better than the sequel. The plot element of hacking a traffic control system is taken from the original, which is quite astounding because it was released in 1969.
Engineering degree in civil engineering. self taught programming while in college and switched to full time programming career after a year stint has a civil engineer on the field.
Are any startups here using OpenID for authentication? What is your experience with it?
When I think about what technology was like 100 years ago

Touche... on the other hand, although I don't have artistic training, I'm sure there are techniques which have stayed around, even though photography has mostly "replaced" painting in most uses (or at least in some way...). By analogy, if some technology replaces explicit programming, people will still program.
18 inspirations for educators and social entrepreneurs
B.S. Economics and Computer Science, 2006 - Duke University!

GTHC! GTHC! ;-)
The Top 10 Mistakes People Make When Starting A Business
How do I make the infinity? Actually where do I get all those symbols?
It takes me ~10 min to deploy a Rails app (production ready) on a freshly installed Ubuntu server. To do that, I have to issue a SINGLE command that includes the IP, ssh port, and a password of the machine. The process includes setting up the server, downloading all of the necessary files, security updates, compiling and setting up the server (nginx), setting up rails, setting up database, loading database dump from the remote server, grabbing the app from svn, etc etc anything I want really. I issue the command and just forget about it and work on something else for ~10min. When I come back, the app is up and running and production ready! Wanna setup 10 servers? Just open up 10 terminals and you'll have 10 servers in 10min.

How? Through the magic of capistrano: http://www.capify.org/getting-started/rails

I've never seen anything else even come close to this level of simplicity.

Seriously, that should be the LAST of your criteria as to which language, and more importantly, framework to pick. We went with Rails since it has better plugins/gems than Django. We don't want to waste our time re-implementing basics and Rails currently has the cutting edge libraries for web work... stuff that you will have to do yourself in other frameworks.
10 Most Amazing Google Search Tricks
I stopped reading /. in November. You're right, these problems have been around forever, but until lately I had no alternative. I have always been mostly interested in the stories they ran on software and renewable energy stuff, but have found several blogs and YC News (and now the Arc Forums) to be much more satisfying of my software reading needs. As for renewable energy, most of the /. stories just got so outlandish and pie in the sky that it just wasn't worth reading about.

The problems I have described above were those that made me want to leave /. to begin with, but I couldn't really get out until I found an alternative of some sort. And like I said, I didn't read at a certain threshold, so I got to see the stuff even if it was downmodded (and got to see some good stuff too that was downmodded).
Loafers FTW!
Companies Change, So Do their Logos
Ask YC: what's the most technically impressive startup you remember from recent memory
Web or client. I'm more interested in client software just because we seem to talk about web companies so much. Any takers?
Enjoy: http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/02/04/googles-android-is-alre...
How to be a better developer?
Why PHP as a templating language sucks
but ixnay on the igpay atinlay upportsay
Beat Your Website into Submission with .htaccess
It doesn't count if you have a professor holding your hand every step of the way and giving you a framework suited to exactly the project you're working on and no other.

Nonetheless, which half do you mean? In my OS class we just worked with a toy MINIX derivative and never got down to anything nearly as nitty-gritty as a bootloader, and the people who didn't drop my compilers class were A-list hackers. I never did any of the others as an undergrad, though I could have and didn't take the class where you build a CPU.
Shrinking ad revenue realigns U.S. newspaper industry
See my response to ken.
Antiquicksort
Well this blog post has now been updated as the person who sent that email turned out to be from nyc
I got RailsSpace from Amazon, steps you through making a social network and teaches you heaps along the way. The final product in the book isn't anything special but that's where YOU come in.
I actually did a 4.5 year program for Master's and Undergrad there, so I don't have the typical experience.

I liked the program, I definitely learned a lot from it, although I can't honestly say I've used it much in my career (ended up lower level than UI often times).

My only gripe is that I wish that (at least at CMU) they had taught more graphic design. We had a few classes, but they were quite basic (I took as many as I could, but ultimately the interesting ones were restricted to Design majors).

Before you go get a Master's -- think about which part of HCI are you most interested in? Usability (evaluating, running tests), UI design, the programming?
So do I -- when I'm working in Lisp. Lisp gives you a Swiss army knife and lets you build specialized tools when you want them. Haskell gives you specialized tools and lets you build a Swiss army knife if you want it.
BSc (Computer Science) from Curtin University, Western Australia
[Shrugs] Read it however you please, but "Lesser" is a modifier with a particular usage:

http://www.classicsunveiled.com/mythnet/html/lessgods.html
Mark Zuckerberg finds a way to kill all those stupid apps, sorta
Here's a recipe for deploying django on ubuntu.

http://www.jeffbaier.com/2007/07/26/installing-django-on-an-...

Its really simple and takes negligible time. Django is also easily scaled as all sessions are stored on the database.

I chose python because I had been using it for years and love the language. It also has a ton of libraries and support obviously.

I chose Django after a horrible stint with Zope3. Especially now, django has some great documentation and a super helpful IRC channel.
BA Political Science, UC San Diego. Still learning programming. Stuck in insurance atm.
It is possible to have blue eyes and be more distantly related to Brad Pitt than family members with brown eyes. I'll describe as follows. Brown eyes is a dominant genetic trait. Blue eyes is a recessive trait. Therefore, it is possible for two parents with brown eyes to have kids with blue eyes. This is a child with blue eyes which is more distantly related to Brad Pitt than either of its more closely related brown eyed parents.

You can use the converse to spot illegitimate children, as my old biology teacher done on dull parent evenings. This is because two parents with blue eyes are unlikely to have a child with brown eyes ( http://www.athro.com/evo/gen/inherit1.html ) and certainly not at the 10% ratio observed by my teacher. If you're a fellow with blue eyes and your partner has blue eyes then kids with brown eyes probably aren't yours.
I agree, that should be the last thing to worry about. Rails and I am in love.
Oxford & Imperial College London count as Ivy?
Premature optimization is the root of all evil. -Donald Knuth
From the article "Each day, the list of celebrities launching perfume lines gets longer."

Could someone please solve the meta-problem and launch a company which allows anyone to have their own purfume. This would remove the cachet of having your own perfume and we'd never have to suffer another "celebrity" launching a perfume. Plus, you'd make some money before the concept completely becomes a commodity.
Ask YC News: a good way to learn electronics/microcontrollers?
i'll be very specific: i want to be able to make simple hardware controllers (buttons, faders, leds) that can comunicate with the software i make (software to make music), using usb or ethernet or bluetooth

so what would be a good way to learn to do this?

i'm more into hands on learning, just like the HELLO WORLD program, i like to have something working first, even if i don't understand it, and then mess around

i know only very basic stuff on electronics, assume i'm starting from zero

note #1: later i may want to learn more and more about electronics, but right now i'm focusing on learning "only" this. (i here declare that i have no idea how hard can this be, but thats why i'm asking)

note #2: i know i can buy midi controllers, but there are some reasons to prefer the self-made controls, i'll mention only one here: more nerd-fun ;)
Guitar Hero Game... Using Real Guitars
this should free up at least 30 minutes of my day
The worst sorting algorithm I've seen was O(n^3). Effectively, it was a loop calling a Bubble Sort function.
There is a reported 8% children-not-from-their-daddy in western societies.

On a related note, the very first words from most mothers who just gave birth to their husbands is "it looks just like you". Psychology at play: we see what we want to see!
To be clear, this is what ML's variant types are all about. You can easily create a list that contains e.g. both ints and chars:

let mylist = [`Int 5; `Char '5']

Technically the elements have the same compile-time type, but the question is, what practical difference does that make? In what cases are variants an inadequate solution?
Fancy Zoom: Lightview Like Javascript Photo Gallery that Zooms When Popping Up
Web - YouTube for all its hype made it ridiculously easy to convert video formats into Flash Video. No one I recall had done that before. Ask anyone if they thought they'd see videos embedded in web pages by the normal user..

Client - IntelliJ (yes, it's an IDE that I use but they hired smart, some near-wizard-level Czech/Russian programmers and did the marketing from the states - to impressive success on both ends)

Client - Portal - ok it's a cool game but shows that ground-breaking ideas can come from students [Digipen] (http://ps3.ign.com/articles/721/721542p1.html)
Surprisingly interesting. You look at it and think, oh, of course it was a square knot, how come I didn't think of that? These things are so common and motorized that nobody cares to think of another way to do it.
In the long run, the more important factor is whether you are gaining faster than your peers.

The younger ones often lack perspective and breadth and depth, the older ones often stop learning or dramatically slow down.

If you continually study timeless fundamentals, current technology, as well as industry trends, then over time you will naturally lead tend to lead the pack.
I can't remember the last time I bought a newspaper.
Related - a visual trick but amusing nonethless: http://www.metacafe.com/watch/360289/david_blaines_self_tyin...
"... I just quit Microsoft to work on this product full-time. What's your brutal feedback? ..."

Show through demonstration. Well thought out, flawlessly executed in an area that will no doubt have the potential to make bucket loads of cash.

But there are a few problems I can think of. The first is the market for adverts is dominated by a giant. But where there is competition there is potential for success. The other problem is images + javascript can be blocked through code [0] and by humans. [1] Those clever lads at google get around this using text. Text fools code blocking and to some extent humans. So the technique you use will be less effective than googles technology. What other technology is behind the advert engine. How for instance does it target individuals?

Q What do we really need?

Maybe it's a little bit idealistic but for me I just want to make things that users want [3] and try to make their day a little easier and helping them instead of bombarding them. Reducing the amount of useless information and noise. Linda Stone poses the question(s), "what do we really need, and what do we need to pay attention to". And your system is something I think does not really benefit the consumers full stop. Microsoft thinking at it's best.

Q What do we need to pay attention to?

I'm sure advertising will be a hit for creators, synthesisers. But is this the right question?

[0] http://noscript.net/ for example ~ http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/2250089864/ and humans if http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/2250089862/ you see the distinctive shape.

[1] "Is Navigation Useful?", '... users rarely look at logos, mission statements, slogans, or any other elements they consider fluff (in particular, they ignore advertising and anything that looks like an ad) ...' ~ http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20000109.html

[2] "Creators, Synthesizers, and Consumers" , '100% are consumers, 10% active synthesizers & 1% creators'~ http://www.elatable.com/blog/?p=5

[3] "Linda Stone", 'Continuous partial attention' ~ http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail739.html
Poor man's python templating - what should I worry about?
After churning through the various templating package, I now just use triple quoted strings and dictionary substitution. I never have to read docs, and never forget how to use it. Also, I never run into cases that break the system.

myhtml = '''

<html><body>

<p>%(firstname)s</p>

<p>%(lastname)s</p>

</body></html>

''' % {'firstname':'john','lastname':'doe'}

It's not pretty, but I feel less hindered by this approach. I'm curious what people think the main downsides of this are...
BA Philosophy Colgate University, 1 Year Post Bacc CompSci University of Oregon - have been programming for food since 2000
Haha, sorry I'm missing the web/client question, but http://www.memjet.com is technically impressive to a ridiculous level.

Oh yeah, Johnny Chung Lee's future startup is also pretty technically impressive.
I don't þink ðere's any reason we can't have ðem back -- þorn and eð, I mean.
http://www.unicode.org/charts/ (characters)

http://www.unicode.org/charts/symbols.html (geometrical shapes etc)

As I understand only UTF-8 is supported, so forget characters for UTF-16 and UTF-32 (but you rarely need these anyway)
I agree. Some of the most technologically impressive startups are doing stuff with actual hardware (note hardware is a broad term to encompass everything from cells to robots)

"2007 Young Innovators Under 35

Since 1999, the editors of Technology Review have honored the young innovators whose inventions and research we find most exciting; today that collection is the TR35, a list of technologists and scientists, all under the age of 35. Their work--spanning medicine, computing, communications, electronics, nanotechnology, and more--is changing our world."
http://www.technologyreview.com/TR35/index.aspx

P.S. I vote for the Roomba - bringing robotics to consumers in a safe, friendly non-Robocop kind of manner
Seen in the field, or seen anywhere?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogosort
You have to buy a unicode keyboard. They have over 95000 keys and take up about nine square meters. Hope you have a big desk.

(Sorry, I couldn't resist)
M.S. Computer Science, CIMS NYU. Actively programming when not wrangling departmental politics.
The Economist: Microsoft should be allowed to buy Yahoo
I had to read that sentence three times to make sure I wasn't reading a synopsis of Oedipus Rex. :)
A wiser adult once convinced me that the entire theory of capitalism is based on overpaying you when you're young and underpaying you for the next 40 years...

When it comes to programming, I believe some of the most capable programmers outsource the programming to the junior programmers who are still all about the latest technology/acronym and haven't grokked the underlying fundamental patterns/architectures/commonalities/integration. By the time programmers gain enough experience to see that it's all the same, they might be starting to look at starting their true legacy, a family (not code that lives on)
BS CECS, MS EE, USC '07

People don't give 'SC enough credit!
A CMU Robotics masters is totally sexy.
Ok, what the heck is going on in that Arc Challenge? I just can't make any sense of the flow in it.