skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Matt wasn't judging the risk as "worth it". He said that a startup founded under those circumstances is less likely to succeed, which is entirely true. He also clearly believes that it's a bad idea. As do I.

That said, I think it's totally appropriate to judge someone who makes such a foolish decision (i.e. pursuing a startup when you have no savings and little time) when children are involved.
I feel like I need to take a shower after reading that.
Why "bite"? You're not disagreeing with anything I said, you're giving reasons, and I think you're right on. Within this theory, do you have any thoughts on how to get more women hacking?
What would happen if one school actually decided that they would go the other way, and fail anyone who "sucked"? Wouldn't that school then get a good reputation for graduating only "great programmers," pushing any aspiring programmer to apply there--a virtuous cycle? The top schools in any field graduate the best simply because the best apply there, and the best apply there simply because "the best" are known to graduate from there.
But seeing examples of non-trivial algorithms makes what you once considered non-trivial, trivial. A lot of algorithm design seems to be a kind of poetry to me - where one draws on similarities to algorithms she's seen before, as a poet would draw on metaphors or imagery they've experienced elsewhere.
I didn't vote it up, this is an old social news site standby.

It's about art. And drugs. I think it's interesting.
OK, this makes sense. How long should the secret key be?
Maybe college is the new high school?
FriendFeed, Twitter, and the best places to "hang out" online
40 Reasons Why Software Projects Die
We do 400K+ users an day on our Rails app, 10MM pageviews, and 200 requests a second.

YellowPages.com, which is probably the largest Rails site (yes larger than Twitter) does a lot more than that.

I used to buy in to the whole 'scale later' philosophy from 37signals, but after getting burnt by a fast growing application and being down for half a month - capacity planning is definitely worth it over being caught with your pants down right when you're growing.
What kind of DOS patterns are you trying to prevent? People requesting the same image repeatedly, or people requesting random images? Generally, DOS attacks are prevented by making the client do some non-trivial amount of work, like answering a computational challenge, or filling out a catchpa.
Though I do use VS a lot, I actually do use vim -- and awk, grep, sed, etc -- when VS/Resharper can't do the tricks I want.

PuttyCyg/Cygwin provides a nice shell + unix tools on Windows.
I guess your school sucked. Red-black trees ARE binary search trees. Also: the worst case behavior of a hash table is in fact worse than that of a balanced (red-black tree, b-tree, avl-tree) search tree.
Garlic Programmers for Silver Code? How your code base affects productivity
Depends how paranoid you are, but 256 bits is ideal.
Here are some numbers from our application, let me know if this helps:

We have 400K daily active users, doing 200 requests a second and around 10MM page views per day. All requests are dynamic and hit the full Rails stack. We're probably easily in the top 5 Rails sites on the net based on load.

We run all of this on 5x 4core 8GB application servers and 2x 4core 32GB db servers in master-master replication. We run 16 mongrels on each app server for a total of 80. Our average response time per request is around 100-200ms.

We host on Softlayer and pay around $6000 a month.

Also, the number of mongrels you will need is directly dependent on how fast your requests are, and how you are loading balancing across these mongrels. We use the nginx proxy with the fair load balancing patch.
http://brainspl.at/articles/2007/11/09/a-fair-proxy-balancer...
Play Poker, Win VC Funding
I'm a bit unclear on how you're preventing DOS attacks. Does the client have to request a "signed" URL from another part of the application first?

If the user has to login to your application, couldn't you just limit it based on that? Or by IP address? (of course that won't help against DDOS, but that's another problem all together...)

As far as hashing algorithms go, if you're just trying to keep an attacker from pounding your server in a DOS attack, any of the SHA1, SHA2, or MD5 should be fine, since even though there may be weaknesses, in reality it takes a long time to find collisions.
People requesting random images. A captcha won't work because the images are in <img> tags in every page in the application... I don't want to make users type in a captcha before each pageview.
loooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooonooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooonooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooong
Cool, that's pretty good. Is that for your page builder or your facebook app?
OK. Thanks for your help!
andrew chen's response to max levchin
Jaxer could be great if someone just made a decent MVC framework and used jaxer for html templates. It's worth to have a look at TrimJunction, a JavaScript port of Rails implemented in rhino http://code.google.com/p/trimpath/wiki/TrimJunction

In my opinion, ruby code is way more readable than javascript. Here's a direct comparison of a rails and a junction app
http://code.google.com/p/trimpath/wiki/RubyRailsVsJavaScript...
Maybe "I'll rise to the challenge." I thought "I think grown up men are statistically better hackers than women and children" was a question that begged to be answered and I thought I'd try my best. Any thoughts, hmm.

I don't know if stuff like this (http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/news/2007/12/YE_sexy_...) is helpful or not. On the one hand, it shows that you don't have to be ugly or frumpy in order to like computers, but it also doesn't do much to lessen the expectation that women should always be beautiful.

I don't have any practical ideas, just stuff like 1) give every little girl a hacker/geeky dad, 2) give every elementary school kid teachers that love and can clearly teach math, and 3) convince high school kids everywhere that computers are cool. Gonna happen soon, right?
For performance reasons, we wanted to serve everything directly from the filesystem instead of dynamically using a script. If an image requested is not found, the 404 handler generates it, saves it to disk, and sends it back.

The legitimate URLs are for 'static' images (static in the sense that once they have been generated, they will never need to be generated again) that are stored on disk using the filesystem. For example, an image url might look like:

http://example.com/1e/2f/c/(image generation parameters).png

The idea is that 1e2fc (the hash) serves as both the path on disk (so that files are roughly evenly distributed among the 2^20 directories) and as a checksum to prevent DOS.
How 'bout letting news.yc folks in on the beta testing?:-)
Create a Mini Business Plan Online
Starting Up: Four Tips on Effective Networking
Is anyone else shocked that Flickr has less than a terabyte of images?
One terabyte of text that makes up the database... they've got a whole lot more than a TB of images. the photos themselves are on static.flickr.com.
please, keep ideas like that to urself ;)
Makes sense to me. Know what you're getting into, discuss it and get the approval of your partner, but if it's what you're set on doing, you can probably find a way. Tim O'Reilly started his company after the birth of his first child, if I'm not mistaken. I don't suppose it qualifies as a "startup" in the sense of Google but he seems quite successful to me.
Great stuff, good to see some action in the UK and that it's to do with Django. I was going to suggest posting on djangogigs.com but I think you've beaten me too it :D
really not so sure about this test. If I don't get 80% of the answers then I don't know enough about entrepreneurship and should by the book? No thanks.

Especially now i "know all the answers"
"The only thing more pathetic than still playing Rock, Paper, Scissors in real life is playing it online with one-dimensional Web hands."

Sorry, but this is just not fair. Rock, paper, scissors used properly in real life can be an effective decision making tool. Also, got to say, why does this guy even care. If they're so worthless they'll die soon enough right?
Things that other languages should take from Lisp
A lot of the questions seem more relevant to the economy and policies, rather than things individuals need to know.
Embracing weightless data
How the "CEO-Janitor" Cleaned Up With Dell
Matt on Automattic's funding
It's just the Facebook app.
How would companies in Europe go about finding new team members from Asia? What would you recommend?
Why phone software sucks and how to fix it
So according to the test I should be a better entrepreneur if i knew what percentage of U.S. households owned a business in 1983 and 2004, respectively?

Erhhm, I don't think so...
Getting Started With WSGI
You need to know someone in Asia (obviously). Ideally you've worked with them before, but if you got a contact in some other fashion, obviously you need to interview /talk to them, look at their code (I strongly suggest this), read their blogs etc, just the same as you would if you were hiring them for your startup in the USA/Europe.

If anyone is looking for good developers (no PHP folks, but say, RoR, Django, Java, C++ etc) in Bangalore, write to me. (No you don't have to pay me. I am a developer not a head hunter ).
Does anybody know if Bill Gates owns Google stock?
i guess he would be crazy not to
If women are interested in programming, they should have a fair shot. But there's a culture that goes with every activity, and that culture can attract people or it can drive them away. We need to look at our culture and decide whether it is fair and practical, not whether or not it appeals to "women". The second question is totally meaningless - it's 50% of the population! So I stay, stick to the basics. Evaluate ideas on their merits, evaluate work on the circumstances and result, and evaluate people on their ideas and on their work. Stick to that. And if you really want more women in the field, get mothers to tell their bright daughters to go be programmers or computer scientists instead of doctors or veterinarians. Honestly, it will have a hell of a lot more of an effect than anything we can do.
Wow, it's like the history of modern art :)
Red-black trees ARE binary search trees.

Agreed. However the original poster said binary tree, a specific structure whose worse case behavior is O(n) just like a hash table.

They didn't say binary search tree (which as you observe may refer to one of several possible structures).
The quotes were there for a reason.
Still broken.

$ date
2008-01-23 12:21:20 +0000 Wed
$ wget -qO- http://news.ycombinator.com/rss |
> tr \> \\012 |
> grep -c comitem
27
$
Research Supports The Effectiveness of Test Driven Development
>But, as far as I know, there are none in the city limits of Chicago and New York.

This isn't because wealthy people don't want to shop there. In both NY and Chicago, unions and their lackeys on the city council didn't allow walmart into the city.

My general impression: in the NY suburbs (where walmart does exist), people will do weekly shopping at whatever store is closest/most convenient. The "shopping for fun" that many wealthier women do is a target only activity, however.
Automattic for the Money ($29.5M to be Exact) |
Hacker news?
Apple iPods: Are we saturated yet?
Business execs snub Facebook
Netsuite responds to customer issues
Software emancipation: An open letter to Linus Torvalds
What percentage of people believe in the validity of a test where most questions start, "What percentage..."?

a. 0 percent

b. 0 percent

c. 0 percent

d. 0 percent
Phone with fold-away screen to launch in mid-2008
frankly, your description is deceptive or you're deceiving youself.
From your own description, you're spending all your time at work and you're obsessed with that problem.

1/ you're not married. You're just the ghost of lovers. being married means something like enjoying spending time with your precious other.

2/ you're not travelling : you're moving from one airport to the other, with a brief pause in office and hotel between them. travelling means learning the country you're in. Don't delude yourself, you're not travelling except on the surface.

3/ you have no friends, as the rest you have no time for them.

I know the pull of a (code) project, especially when you're the boss. It can become an obsession, and eat over your personnal life.
But believe me, beyond 9 hours of real work, you're worthless. Many excellent, brillant coders underlined that for men and in the end, I have to admit they are right.

To be better, you must be open to the world.
First time I see an investment figure which is an 99.99-style. Is that for tricking the investor it's not too much, or what? :)
As soon as I read the word "cannot", I stopped reading. I get that word from everyone else. I don't need it here.
When dealing with pixels, always round or truncate to the nearest integer. OK, you're done.
- Bignums

- Optional type declarations

- Proper (unbounded) tail-recursion

- Methods with multiple-dispatch

- Speed

- Syntactic simplicity (i.e. few ideosyncractic syntactic rules)

What a weird set of choices.

Whenever I switch from lisp to something else, the first thing I miss is how easy it is to express the problem solution as a program and as a data structure at the same time. I immediately miss defmacro but I don't find myself wondering where my multiple-dispatch went.
Or Costco.
How does this affect performance? I don't see any mention of unnecessary round trips.
Europe 2.0: European tech investing "coming of age," as events hard-wire the network
What To Do if You're Laid Off
I think the problem with Reddit (and Digg, and almost every other popular social news site) is algorithmic. The pattern is the same every time one of these sites becomes popular - it starts out with a small group of insightful people that submit and vote on content that they find interesting. The reason it works is that they have similar taste. Kind of like hacker news at the moment. Once the site grows, however, the initial group gets diluted and the site is swarmed with content that is not necessarily core content for the original group. And the new arrivals vote up the material that is submitted by the other new arrivals, thus diluting the site to the lowest common denominator. This is why Reddit is now filled with Ron Paul, conspiracy theories, LOLcats, and all sorts of other crap.

It is possible, and in my opinion not all that hard, to solve this algorithmically.

One way would be to make mod points weighted, so that members that have signed up early, have high karma, have the same taste (based on their upmods and submissions) as the core group have mod points that count for more than new arrivals that have yet to build any credibility.

Another way would be to not let new arrivals submit stories until they reached a certain karma. This would mean that submitted stories would stay more true to the original idea.

Another way would be to only let users have a certain amount of mod points that would be renewed after x days, spurring users to use them more sparingly, and stopping users that up/downmod everything that is not in their particular interest.

Yet another way would be to let the system learn from the users submissions and votes, and show stories based on this calculated using datamining. Maybe as a "my {site}"

There are numerous other ways of doing it, these are just off the top of my head - and yes there are probably pitfalls in some or all of these ideas.

The point I want to make though is that the social news sites are pursuing the wrong goals once they start to gain traction. Instead of working on and constantly tweaking their algorithms they seem to focus more on new features, design, marketing or whatever.

There is an excellent business opportunity in creating back-end software to drive these sites and solve the algorithmic problems that, for some reason that is unclear to me, are so hard for these sites to do properly.
"express the problem solution as a program and as a data structure at the same time."

exactly . "At the same time" is key. Norvig's "Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming" has some good examples of this technique.
According to the article the problem is that the harware vendor and the software vendor is the same, and since these are big companies with no particular incentives for creating great software it ends up being mediocre. That is true.

The solution offered is splitting hardware vendors and software vendors. Unfortunately I think that if you call Nokia and tell them that they won't return your calls.

It is a classical monopoly situation, and while I agree that it would be a great soultion it is totally pie in the sky wishful thinking.
But then you miss the great photo op...
So you have 1 million kids? Impressive ;-)
It just caters to some weaknesses of the brain, causing addiction. That's all.
What about puzzle pirates and stuff like that? I think there are MMORPGs (in the widest sense) that are far simpler than WoW, yet make more money.
VFER: Really Fast Data Transfer in Userland Application
If possible, why not just use a totally random string rather than a hash? That way it's truly unbreakable.
Why Web 2.0 may not be democracy (Who are the Amazon 10 Top Reviewers?)
I wonder if after seeing the drawings he went back and tried lsd on his own...
What a cheap way to do product development!
Google Earth: 1,000 Human Lifetimes Spent Looking At It
Safari Team Comes Out Against IE8 Versioning
OpenGL: Pixel Shaders and Why The Future of Software Depends on it
Probably not explicitly. But with all of the funds he's likely invested in, it's a near certainty that there's some google in there somewhere.
Nanotube Transistors just got closer
Some speculation on the actual numbers is here.

- http://relmstein.blogspot.com/2007/09/what-do-wows-numbers-m...
Nanotube Carpets for Solar Energy?
Do We All Move As Google Moves?
wow, down me for that? i meant because his drawings got better... they were different. not just to get high...
I don't think it's that simple. When my kids started playing I was suprised how many people they met in WoW who were depressingly sick, poor or significantly limited in their freedom (e.g. stuck on a military base) for whom WoW was one of their only options to socialize.
Just like YC :-)

Doh! Time to get back to work!
Ask News.YC: iPhone development
I have the utmost respect for you folks who hang out here at this site. I've been online for 20-plus years, since I bought my first modem in 1985; news.yc has the highest signal-to-noise ratio of any online hangout I've ever encountered. However, I'm not really interested in web-based software development, so that's relegated me to being a distant observer here.

What I AM interested in is MacOSX and the iPhone. especially the iPhone. I bought one shortly after they debuted, and it's the best consumer electronics device I've ever owned, bar none. I've never once been tempted by any other miniature computer-type devices, PDAs, etc, until this one came along, and now I can't imagine life without it.

As you are all no doubt aware, Apple is set to release their iPhone SDK next month. I want to develop software for the iPhone. Does anybody here want to collaborate?

I've developed one big MacOSX project in Cocoa, detailed here:

http://www.platinumball.net/pineapple/news/macosx/

and a bunch of smaller projects for my current employer, which I can't show you, because they're proprietary. I am fairly decent at Objective-C and the MacOSX frameworks, but I suck at user interfaces. Mac users are very picky about how their software looks and works, and I'll be the first to admit I can't live up to those expectations. I can write everything else pretty well, though. My particular strengths are multi-threading and TCP/IP networking.

Here's an idea I had. I really loved the networked multi-player Hearts game that was bundled with Windows 95. It allowed up to four human players, each one sitting at his own computer. If you didn't have four people who wanted to play, it had really excellent robot players built-in, that could fill up to three of the seats. It would be cool to recreate that game, where the four players could each be using a Mac OR an iPhone. If it's popular, it could be expanded to other card games, and Windows and Linux clients.

It's just an idea, though. I'd be just as happy to help implement somebody else's idea, if it's a good one.

Who else here is contemplating iPhone development?
Is Reddit supposed to be democratic? I would say its more like a republic (with the representatives elected via Reddit karma points, the powerful getting more powerful) Not that there's anything wrong with that - Seth Godin says the #1 in most categories dominates - Vanilla ice outsells all other ice cream flavors combined. People like leadership, whether its ways to amuse away a little of the day (lolcats, conspiracy theories) or MSM
I was even shyer than I was now in college, and I fondly recall wasting away hours chatting with people I never ever met on IRC. Yes, anti-social but not really - even the most shy people need some social contact. I think that's the true power of the Internet - from WoW to Facebook helping guys meet and date women they wouldn't otherwise.
Ext Scaffold Generator Plugin for Rails
Perhaps making a currency out of karma would work.
That's one of those articles that I agree with 100%. I think one of the best signs to consider when working out if someone writes good code is whether they're even concerned about the quality of their code. If they're constantly worrying whether their code is good enough, they'll (at least eventually) do a lot better than if they're writing throw-away code.

I've worked in an environment where the majority of people wrote throw-away code that never got thrown away. I spent many months there fixing scary bugs that nobody had ever bothered to fix because the code was just so horrendous and nobody knew how any of it worked, apart from the stuff they'd recently written.

By the way, those bugs (including a large number of crash bugs) got shipped in a bunch of commercial console games.

~phil
I'm also very interested in iPhone app development and think casual games such as Hearts have great potential in a mobile environment.

Why not write it as a web app? That way you won't have to port to Win/Linux and you can develop for iPhone already. Using WURFL you could also make the app available to other mobile devices.
ruby-reddit: gem that interacts with reddit.com
If you want to do several searches on the same data - that is initially unsorted - you can get better than O(n) per query. But like you said - not for the first one.
RRW: Microsoft joins Dataportability.org
I was going to write this: http://www.amazon.com/none-CAR190-Labyrinth/dp/B00000ISLL

but I realized I don't have the required skills in:
Cocoa, performance, accelerometers, game code, tuning, usability, Objective-C, iPhone SDK, coding, testing

Will someone write this? I guarantee I will buy it.
It's no compression algorithm in its own right. Just a first step.

An interesting first step.
Google 'threadless' + 'revenue'
Hardly. We're making Outlook "cool again" and they're helping us do our jobs by giving us the support and software we need to do so. It's a complete win-win.
I wrote about this same issue some time ago. You can read it here http://alwaysnewmistakes.wordpress.com/2007/12/13/idea-embed....
given the accelerometer built-in to the iphone, that's an excellent idea. and it would probably be less work than mine, which is going to be a whole lot of coding.
A control experiment would have been interesting. I mean he surely would not have produced the first drawing nine times even when not under any drug.
Microsoft Startup Accelerator Program Expands
HTML5 differences from HTML4
Fundamental Mistakes