skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Programming isn't math, but mathematical expressions are often found in programs, more or less so depending on the domain. My preference is to have readable mathematical expressions in programs that resemble the forms in which I see or use them elsewhere.

In the general case of complex logical and bitwise expressions, order of operations can cause a tremendous number of bugs. I like to use parentheses to make these cases absolutely unambiguous anyway. But I can't remember introducing a serious bug because I messed up order of operations between +- and X. Anyway, if it's such a problem, there's nothing to say you can't put parentheses around every operation in infix notation, at least in any language that I know of!

Maybe my preference relates to having a fairly visual memory for formulas and such. If I want to find a root of a quadratic equation, I do (-b + sqrt(b * b - 4 * a * c))/(2 * a), and that is easy, and anyone with high school math sees that in someone's code they know what it is. (I probably have to check for a zero denominator and also look at the discriminant unless I'm directly using complex numbers, and there's also the conjugate root, but that doesn't change much.)

If I have to write (/ (+ (- b) (sqrt (- (* b b) (* 4 a c)))) (* 2 a)) then I can do it, but it takes a lot of thought and it doesn't go along with the way I think about the quadratic formula. Granted, this is because I learned it the way I did, but I also know I'm not the only one.

A footnote to that is that to my mathematical sensibilities, in list notation, using the same symbol for negation and subtraction is hideous!
I keep copies of all of my files online using a distributed storage grid that we've created.

(bias alert: I'm deeply involved in the project I'm about to mention)

A few years ago I realized that I'd either lost data due to hard-drive crashes or mistakes and wanted some sort of safe place to put my data. We then started a project (http://allmydata.org) which provides for a decentralized, secure storage fabric. You can create your own grid if you'd like, create one with friends, or use our managed grid (for a service fee).

I think that Amazon S3, Nirvanix, and others are starting to provide nice basic services in this area as well, but I do think there is a lot of room for retaining and saving information that is gently locked into web services (Flickr, blogs, LinkedIn, etc.).
We have select users now and plan to open up the private beta in about 3 weeks - our deadline as we have a presentation that day. We've been coding for a year now, and we're excited to be on the verge of finally raising the curtain. :) http://streamfocus.com
I don't see how this could be bad news if your strategy is sustainable. As in, you won't die a swift death if you don't get acquired YESTERDAY.

I also don't see why you'd choose an unsustainable strategy. Though it seems lots of companies choose the "lottery" option (all-or-nothing make-a-quick-buck-fast).
Media Overload: 10 Tips to Reclaim Your Sanity
1. its going ok but its just me at the moment and its self funded, I am working 50/50 client work and startup work at the moment.

2. first product very soon, just need to do the final tweak and get some beta testing done to make sure its easy to use and hard to break :p

3. small simple web apps, I plan to release more than 1 app under my companies brand.

4. I just did a redesign of the first app and am happy with the look now. I am also working on tech demos for other products in my portfolio.

Next week I should release my first app.
I suppose if you use the term A-list more than like, hardly ever, and especially if you worry about not being "on the A-list", you have much bigger problems than how many hits a day your app/site/blog/whatever gets.
YC vs. Techstars, Launchbox, and DreamIT
There's obviously YC.

But there's also Techstars, Launchbox, and DreamitVentures, in the United States at least.

Three Questions:

1. Can they not all co-exist (does it have to be us vs. them? or can't we celebrate entrepreneurship in varied forms)

2. Why are people so irate when a good idea is cloned -- doesn't that re-inforce the strength of the idea?

3. Who will be the first (or does it exist) to do a YC in the under-developed world?

Certainly, Ashoka (http://ashoka.org/) already exists, but what about a focus on entrepreneurs/ mentoring and connections, regardless of whether its social or not.
as a person who manages all that for a small business, that would certainly be a life saver.

but what about the salesforce users? you must be thinking exportability is key (entering in thousands of contacts again would not be enjoyable)

I vote on making a salesforce or google apps application that leverages your information already stored there into a super all-in-one
"... the Bantu languages of Africa, the Indo-European group from Eurasia and the Austronesians of the Pacific ..."

While it was a good read it had absolutely nothing to do with RP. RP cuts through the Commonwealth nations marking those who speak it, as "English educated". It doesn't matter if you are from Calcutta, or Canberra, Kingston or Kowloon. If you have received RP training you can still be understood.

RP or "Received pronunciation" is a technique that provides accentless enunciation of "Standard English". Taught to foreigners (mostly Commonwealth) as an effective means of communication across language barriers. It is most often (mistakenly) associated only with the English upper class , classically trained Shakespearian actors and BBC World service announcers.

"... To do so he looked at three well-studied parts of the linguistic family tree: the Bantu languages of Africa, the Indo-European group from Eurasia and the Austronesians of the Pacific. ..."

Who are "Austronesians"?

Without looking at Dr. Pagels original work [0] I don't know if he used this term but in terms of language, the term "Austronesians" is a nonsense word. In Australia there are over 800 non english langauges. Probably about the same in New Guinea. [1] This is not even including the Indonesia Archipelago which spreads 5000km across 1700 Islands. So to use such a term in a study of languages is a bit far fetched.

"... Evolutionary biologist Mark Pagel and his colleagues at the University of Reading, UK, used a comparative database of Indo-European languages to trace the words used to express 200 different meanings in 87 different languages ..."

In New Scientist I found a better summary of what the study was about. [2]

[0] http://www.ams.rdg.ac.uk/Staff/academic/Professor%20Mark%20P...

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Guinea

[2] http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn12772-language-mutatio...
one month away from launch. improved messaging system
You are dead right. I was wrong. I meant "ISO 8601". Late night post and I should have checked ~ http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3339.txt
Currently all word-of-mouth. For our commercial product we will be doing some standard key-word advertising and an interview round about the company and project.

One thing I meant to mention earlier, we are self-funded so far.
Evolved code vs Enterprise code
We just launched seekler.com on January 7th. Seekler is a collection of community-built lists that make it really fast and easy to find new stuff like movies, music, etc.

We had some good early traffic (from a few great links to one of our lists), but unfortunately things have slowed down a lot in the past few weeks. We think the basic concept is great, but we're wondering if the UI is keeping people from really digging into our content. We're going to probably release a slightly tweaked interface on Monday. And, as always, we're always looking for feedback on how we could make Seekler better.
It's in my head. Waiting for school to be done.
This isn't the place to discuss the business itself, but our product isn't software. We simply conduct business over the internet.

So, for example, instead of writing/installing/debugging a shopping cart, we just posted Google Checkout buttons. Instead of creating a database backend for orders, we have the form submit to email. Instead of creating the most beautiful website with the best copy, we made something that looked OK and populated it with some basic content.
Agreed, in fact if everyone used tables for tabular data only, we could have nice browser-supplied column-reordering and row resorting, I think.

Right now that kind of thing is intractable because there's no easy way to distinguish a table-for-data from a table-for-layout. I think it could be cool to have some way of putting something in your page HEAD that means: "In this page, tables are used exclusively for tabular data: you can activate your reordering features".
I'm sure many of us have thought of this before but don't see a point in attempting any new idea until one can find other programmers and getting investment behind it. Otherwise, no matter how good you are, you're just one guy wherever you are trying to compete with a few other groups of people who are funded in Silicon Valley. Anybody else thinking like this? There are tons of good ideas like this out there, but ideas aren't as important as getting a team together from the beginning.
we'll write importers as needed.

Make sure you sign up for the launch list, so I can let you know when we're ready.
Dot-com pioneers -- where are they now?
Would a Yahoo acquisition finally mean the end of the last Viaweb accounts?
Yahoo! is still running the Viaweb lisp based systems for users who never "upgraded" to the rebuilt Yahoo! Store version. Unless it has change recently, I believe paulgraham.com is still running on that system. How long do you think it would take after a Microsoft acquisition before the last Viaweb accounts would finally be shut down?

Any chance they could get the Viaweb code to run on Windows? (mostly joke, partly serious)
Good work on the app. The ui is really good, I don't know if that's an issue. Do you have a business model?
1. i think over the years you will see several more companies like ycombinator. you may even see something better. that is just how it goes, but in the long run, seed fund will die. and companies will go straight from doormroom to acquisition. add the fact that acquisition will be in the low millions and high hundred of thousands.
yes I remember you :) lmk when you launch
In a thread, PG has said was asked to switch to the C++ version in late 2007, so I believe the lisp version is no longer supported in production.
Inside a macbook air
Git is the next Unix
Prototypes and Real Applications
FlickrFS - access your Flickr database as a filesystem
can you go into more specifics? just so I get it
Everything you needed to know about human-created life forms but were afraid to ask
I'm building a hosted load testing solution at the moment. There's a little more to it, but that's the idea. I'm close to where I thought I'd be--I need about another month to get it really going and a month or so after to tune and iterate.

http://testomatix.com

My solution will require no hardware, be based on an open source tool people might already be using and be ridiculously easy to use if I hit my mark. I'd like to make it self service too.
>So everyone who still holds any given stock thinks that the market price is too low.

Only true in a limited sense. For instance, a majority holding the stock up until today might have just thought that the market price was way too high for how the company is performing, but that the presence of one or more misguided, irrational, drowing-in-money, potential aquirers out there meant that there was a large chance they might get a large upside off one of the fools--turns out they were right =).
Lifehacker Australia interviews Linus Torvalds
"And, it turns out, Paul Graham's a phony"
101 Design Patterns & Tips for Developers
Yes, basically it'll be supported via advertising and affiliate partnerships once we can get traffic going. The issue we've heard from users (including the news.yc community - thanks everyone for the feedback!) is that the site looks a little "spammy." The redesign will keep most things the same, just show a bit more about each item (including a description and some reviews).
The difference is there is practically no lock-in in advertising systems--Microsoft has demonstrated repeatedly that it will use it's OS monopoly to unfairly leverage things online. If you think they have failed miserably, consider that it was only because of the anti-trust rulings that beige box makers got the right to change the start page.

Also, much of Google's "monopoly" comes from a source that is heavily protected by law: the pagerank patent. Patents are government granted monopolies with limited time; as such, there is little or no legal recourse as any mildly abusive behaviour is expected, tolerated, and what the system was designed to provide.
My startup's going fine so far. Tech side's coming along (slower than I'd like of course), but the business side's going crazy.

We're aiming for a beta in the spring. I wish I could say what it is, but we're all hush-hush now (can't even say what it's called right now). Maybe in a few months :)

On a side-note, I'm looking for a programmer, particularly with for UI and design stuff. Let me know if you or someone you know may be interested.
An open source synthetic biology toolkit (DIY)
That's pretty cool. Can you let me know when you launch? I might use it
When you hear "Microsoft makes a surprise, unsolicited offer to buy Yahoo!", that means there hasn't been any negotiation yet, and that this is the minimum offer (they can accept it right now; the only downside is the risk that they don't pass the reg approval process). Now, you gave two possible outcomes, but as others have mentioned there is a third: a counter offer for more money.

(yet another outcome is that Yahoo twiddles it's thumbs and Microsoft rescinds the offer, but in that case you can look forward to getting in on a nice shareholder class-action lawsuit against the board)
Some Rules and Helpful Hints by John Cage/Corita Kent
John Cage's words visually formatted by Sister Corita Kent. Cage's original title is "Some Rules and Helpful Hints for Students and Teachers."
I took a look at Seekler again, and I'm a little confused on who your audience is.

The home page appears to be a generic destination, as in, "if you want lists of stuff, we've got 'em" But, I don't think people just want lists of "stuff", they want lists of a few things that are relevant to them.

For example, I may be a movie buff who's very excited about the 2008 anticipated movie list, but charities, books, and comic books are of no use to me. It seems that it'd be better to offer the data on your site targeted to the respective niche audiences that they serve in an easily consumable way (FB App, Blog widget, etc), rather than expecting that there are people who just crave information because it's in a list format.

I'm generally a design snob, but I think your UI is fine for the stage you're at (though it sort of reminds me of a domain landing page). My advice is to refine what the value you're actually adding is, and then find ways to appropriately serve those people looking for your utility.
From this RFC I learned that:

Standard time in the Netherlands was exactly 19
minutes and 32.13 seconds ahead of UTC by law
from 1909-05-01 through 1937-06-30.

Those wacky Dutch!
For Security Purposes...
does this mean pg.com will have a microsoft favicon?
Thanks and absolutely. Can you shoot me your email? I'm 'ebeland' on gmail.
Dead.

I need someone who knows his way around Photoshop, CSS, and visual design, and I don't have a couple years to drop everything and go learn that.
>This always happens with buyout offers

Everyone thinks they know so much more than the market. In this thread so far I have seen you claim the stock always goes (slightly) lower than the offer, and another guy express puzzlement as to why YHOO even managed to exceed the offer at times today. I hope neither of you were trading BEA Oracle offered ~6 billion, BEA rejected it, and 3 months later Oracle offered ~8billion and BEA accepted. One other thing to keep in mind (this is more picking on the other guy than on you) is that when these deals are announced they are often largely made up of stock (Microsoft is so buried in cash that might not be the case here). If Yahoo! accepted the offer right now, it still might end up with a different future value. Luckily it is not to hard to factor that out by purchasing various positions or leveraged vehicles in or relating to Microsoft/whoever-the-aquirer-may-be.
I actually just started the registration phase of my company. But I already have a few products near beta stage. Right now the company is 100% funded out of my wallet, making living very hard. I might have to take out a loan to pay for the server expenses.
I don't know, I work pretty damn hard. At 3am I'm writing code. I've been getting less than five hours of sleep a night, and have had no free time. Then again I'm dedicated to my company.
Like the article says, a LOT of startups are creating features and not products so they'll get in trouble first. Sure, if you have a sustainable business model and can execute, you'll be OK. Problem is startups that don't have a lot of funding and don't have enough revenue to get cash flow positive.
Linda Avey and Anne Wojcicki founders of 23andme discuss with Loic about their DNA saliva testing
"... how did you promote your beta to get to 10k users? ..."

Firstly reliable data backup is a real problem. Anything that can help solve this for users is going to attract attention. Writing your own backup script that reliably backs up your data with RSync and remote servers for example is doable but wastes time and effort. Secondly you can download the software, try it out, change it. But most consumers are not developers and are not interested in playing with software and hardware themselves so they look for a company that provides the service.

So the key bits here are

- Solving a users problem

- Show don't tell.

- Provide a service that users can use if they don't do it themselves.

- Have something that will continually attract new users (articles, software, discussion, etc)

The technical bits make for a good read and can be found here ~ http://allmydata.org/source/tahoe/trunk/docs/architecture.tx...
"... From this RFC I learned that: ..."

The bit I use is a bastardisation of "1985-04-12T23:20:50.52Z". A shorter version as a string, say "20070202T1422" stripping out the hyphens, colons and Zulu.
I'm in the same boat (in that I work my butt off), but I found it inspirational nonetheless. The primary message I took away wasn't really to "work harder." For me, it's a great reminder I can look at every now and then to remember that we all make our own destinies plus or minus the particulars of our own circumstances.
The real take-away from this article is the default rails configurations and many of the recommended capistrano recipes just won't cut it in heavy load situations with complex apps.
I was only thinking about whether or not their actions improved Hotmail.

To learn how to make a Windows web service work, they buy a FreeBSD based one and then spend 5 years replacing FreeBSD with Windows.

What an expensive way to do QA.
The Long View (beyond the Microsoft bid for Yahoo )
Two tools we need to improve online information
Social Graph API: A big step Internet operating system?
The Economist's take a it: http://www.economist.com/daily/news/displaystory.cfm?story_i...

"Microsoft is desperate to grab a bigger share of the online-advertising market because many of its software products are being challenged by free, advertising-supported services offered by Google. The company is also worried that Google's dominance in search and advertising allows it to dictate terms to advertisers, and gives it an unfair advantage over its smaller rivals."
Wow, Jeff Bone being critical. THE Jeff Bone!

Shocking.
You jest, but seriously that makes sense.

Heck you could SAY that it "replaces" Microsoft Flickr, and that would be perfectly valid !

I think it is indeed a happy day for startups.
Check out onmylist.com....they seem to be doing the same thing as u guys
This is where a down arrow on stories might come in handy...
May I ask what approximate % of The Vision has been completed?

If version 0 is not even 7.5% (fake accuracy here) of what Arc will be at its mature stage, I'm not too worried.
62% seems very generous, and with the wobbly market, I guess this is calculated on MS part to make sure it happens (no indecision from anyone).
>> 3. Who will be the first (or does it exist) to do a YC in the under-developed world?

Kiva.org and Prosper.com seem to be doing quite well in this space.

A few I'm aware of that exist in India:

TIFAC ( http://tifac.org.in/ )
Seedfund ( http://www.seedfund.in/ )
Erasmic incubation fund ( http://www.erasmic.com )
Aavishkaar ( http://www.aavishkaar.org/ )
TIE ( http://bangalore.tie.org/ )

But I'm not sure how reliable and enterprising these are actually.

Wondering if there are any seed funding orgs like YC in Australia?
Slowly whittling away at an online accounting suite for small businesses. Stubbed out the underpinnings, and just did the first major design iteration. Should show it to the first potential users in a month or two.
That's a silly reason for a startup to die. Design is rather unimportant to the success of a site. Heck, look at Craigslist, or News.yc.
Curi is on to something here. For a period of a couple years I was TA for an intro to programming course using Scheme. One of the questions we always asked students was about the advantage of certain refactoring styles, to which half of the answer was "giving names to things." One of the great powers of Lisp is that the path of least resistance is to write many small expressions where each one must have a name, even just an iteration over a collection. This is great because we always know what operation we're doing. There is the same type of power in imperative languages to a lesser degree, but it manifests in naming data. The path of least resistance in C-like languages, BASIC, and P languages encourages having named accumulators and containers (writing lots of chained expressions creates code that's more concise but less readable). This is great because we always know what we're operating on.

The flexibility of Lisp probably makes it more suited to adapting to encourage naming data, over imperative languages encouraging MSFs. let/let* is a little clunky for simple things -- it reminds me a little of Pascal's variable declaration blocks. It would be better to do a sort of:
(lambda (a b) (A <- foo a) (B <- bar A b) (Z <- baz B) Z)
or optionally (return Z) instead of just Z, which macros to (lambda (a b) (baz (bar (foo a) b))))

It seems like the sort of thing that someone would already have implemented, but I don't recall it being a core feature anywhere.
Sure they did. Microsoft's internal infrastructure and corporate culture is very Windows-centric (obviously). Maintaining a totally alien FreeBSD-based infrastructure for Hotmail would be very expensive in the long run, and make integration with the rest of MSN prohibitively difficult. Which is to say, it would directly interfere with one of the main goals of the acquisition in the first place.

They would have needed to vastly overhaul and rebuild the infrastructure multiple times to scale the site and add new features, anyway. The question is just whether to do those overhauls as part of a transition to Windows or not -- and I think the answer is that moving to Windows obviously makes sense in the long run, even disregarding the non-zero PR benefits.
"... THE Jeff Bone! ..."

Not this one [0], this one [1]. One is a cartoonist. The other a comic tragic.

[0] http://www.boneville.com/

[1] http://www.google.com/search?q=jbone+at+place.org