skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"And I also noted that some of the best web companies of our time; Google, YouTube, Skype, and Facebook all launched without a business model and too their sweet time getting to one."

Wait, aren't 3 of those still unprofitable, with no sign of change? I mean, technically they have business models, but Twitter can just sell ads and then they'll have as good a one as any but Google on that list.
Tesla Motors - A Letter to Customers
Stealth Bloodbath
After trying to build and serialize an XML document in Java, I'm even less surprised. Check out this snippet:

DocumentBuilderFactory factory = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();
DocumentBuilder builder = factory.newDocumentBuilder();
DOMImplementation impl = builder.getDOMImplementation();
I'll be darned. Guess I missed that one. Thanks zach!
Consuming the YouTube API in your Ruby/Rails project using ActiveResource
"Hacker Safe" badge = huge target on your back.
Sounds like an interesting story, but I think your link is wrong.
An astute individual during the dot-com bubble could have forseen the effect of the market crashing would lead to cheap money and hence a mortgage bubble. What does this latest bubble pop portend for the prescient investor?
Flickr: Photos from The Library of Congress
Anyone have an example of what you can do with someone's location?
Jamiroquai
What strikes me is the number of people who predicted this whole mess in the first place. Even during the bubble, there were people describing, almost to the minute, exactly what would happen. The market always has its share of chicken littles, but the detail with which some people predicted the crash makes me think they're a little more than that.

Rationally, it seems like it will scare institutional investors out of the market and into PE and VC funds, so it might be a better time than ever to run a startup.
@mhartl: I did the same thing until I went and read up on vi long ago...

Also when I finally learned that you could copy and paste into the terminal with ctrl+shift+v/c, I cried tears of joy. Back then, as a nub on linux and copying all those long commands from forum boards without copy/paste...yes. it really was the dark ages.
Yeah I agree, though my point wasn't so much about the bubble than about the crash. The crash was precipitated by a critical mass of foreclosures, which was attributed mainly to sub-prime borrowers. A softer landing could have been achieved if there were stricter lending regulations, and the bubble wouldn't have been as high either.

I wanted to respond to the assertion by the poster that this was all a result of government interference. Yes, the government (via budget deficits) and the Fed (via monetary expansion) were meddling with the market, but the nature of the free market itself was a contributor. The market isn't perfect and neither are regulations, but it's not an all or nothing proposition... there needs to be balance.
Is there a better song for working on a startup than "Everybody Wants To Rule The World"?
Not a bad idea at all. I'd need a pretty eclectic library to please everyone here, though.
I really like Hans Zimmer's soundtracks: "The Thin Red Line" and "Gladiator" are both particularly good.
I sent an email since the link to submit was broken for me this afternoon. I'd love to try building something.

smspencer.kernel (AT) gmail (DOT) com

Hope I can try it out!
I would draw the "pyramid" differently (with reading exemplary code higher up for example, and "writing about code" on the bottom), but it is an interesting idea.

But I am curious, do you spend significant time reading "master level" code? I have gained much by analyzing code from Peter Norvig and PG, but I have a feeling I don't do this enough.
I hear you on the vocals; your brain might work like mine...I never forget a conversation and I can't tune them out no matter how trivial.
I know. I remember back in '06 listening to a business week podcast where they said "Wall Street has found a way to slice up bad debt and create grade A debt" and thinking,"how the hell is that mathematically possible?" Turns out it wasn't.
bring the pain bitch.

Good luck. I'm sure you'll find what you seek.
Did anyone here buy one? Please come here and brag and tell us your thoughts on your non-existent transmission.
Lol. I had only a 700 credit rating at the time, had been self-employed for over 3 years, and was approved for a no-doc loan on a $300k condo with only 10% down. I actually could have afforded it, but there was no way for them to know that and no reason to assume it either.

That's when I realized something was wrong.
I'm going straight to hell.
The $1.4 Trillion Question (What will China do with their massive US dollar holdings?)
I feel the same way about emacs. A few nights back I was editing my wife's website - making quite a lot of use of keyboard macros, regex search-and-replace, and that kind of thing. She's only ever used MS-Word so she was continuously asking me "how do you do that?"
MapReduce: A major step backwards
He is. But also qualifies that this is especially true for Twitter. You have to read the footnote:

Note: if you're not a player like Ev, and you don't have unlimited access to capital do not take this advice and focus on building revenue streams.
Yes and no. The eyeballs model has been maligned too much, I think. If you have 10-20M attentive people, it is easy to make money. Just ask NBC or USA Today. Then ask them about their plans now that their audiences are declining.

The great thing about the massive-eyeballs model is that it's very easy to measure, very easy to pick and choose between advertisers, etc.

The bad thing is that it reminds me of that saying "if X is so easy, why isn't everyone doing it?" Well, everyone is. So they need lock-in mechanisms like subscriptions.

In short, it's fragile & cut-throat but it has a great potential for buckets of easy cash.
Relational Database Experts Jump The MapReduce Shark
The Netscape Deathmarch Story
GCC + SpiderMonkey = GCC Dehydra
doesn't MC Hawking rep Cambridge? (the one in England)
8 Ways to Find IT Talent for an Undesirable Location
If you had been self-employed for three years, then you had properly found a way to make money by yourself (or you would have starved to death before) so what risk is there to lend you the money?
The Risks and Benefits of Teaching Purely Functional Programming in First Year [PS]
It's a combination of motives: I want there to be a site that's like Reddit used to be; I want a real application to drive the design of Arc; and it's good advertising for YC.

All three are best satisfied by a medium-size site with good quality links and comments, so I am definitely not hoping News.YC becomes the next Digg.
Sure, this strategy will work for him, but will it work for everyone? What if you're not an absolute idiot?
The Benefits of Type Inference
Generate mp3 files from Wikipedia
This is a good refutation of the linked article. The authors of the original article definitely seem to misunderstand both the purpose and the usefulness of MapReduce.

The claim that MapReduce is a poor implementation, for example, is particularly silly. Most large scale relational databases rely on very powerful centralized machines, and replicas of those machines. MapReduce, by contrast, relies on a large number of commodity systems. The decentralized nature makes hardware failure much less likely to cause problems. The system knows how to dynamically reallocate tasks, and new nodes can also be added while the system is running.
article mainly focuses on the networking aspect of being a poker player

also beneficial is the fact that a good poker player could make enough to cover cost of living in a few hours a day, then focus on his or her startup the rest of the day.

But of course poker is a zero sum game, so this advice can't be good for everyone.
Images that show what internet threats look like graphically based on the actual code
A few of the privations of the Chinese were listed: Heating, housing, vegetable oil, and a clean environment. I'm not sure if these things are related to trade imbalances so much as overpopulation.

So China is holding a lot of bad paper. I don't know why in god's name you would buy debt from the US when it's basically low-yield junk, and has been for a while. The old saying is: When you owe your banker a 1000 dollars, you're in trouble. When you owe him a million dollars, he's in trouble. So China's in trouble.

Their odd dollar-centric twist on mercantilism isn't likely to help them in the long term: Once the export markets (and jobs) dry up, the people will have all the iPods they want, but the heating/oil/living space/environment problems aren't likely to be solved.
My Personal Trade Deficit
"In effect, every person in the (rich) United States has over the past 10 years or so borrowed about $4,000 from someone in the (poor) People's Republic of China."

Uh, no. I get the feeling that the author doesn't really understand how trade surpluses and deficits work.
Cool service. Horrible name.
Well, you can scrape by on a lot less than the income required to pay that mortgage when you live in Ohio. And with no documentation and a less than stellar credit rating, plus little down, they were nuts to grant it to me.

Luckily for me I didn't purchase the condo, as the housing market there took a nosedive, and I'd currently be unable to sell for less than I'd owe the bank.
I think perhaps the original authors were really thinking of BigTable:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bigtable
Evil can be dangerous
Lean and Mean: operating with less moving parts
List of Datasets on the Web
yeah, very lofty for a website that harvard students use to find anonymous sex.
I think of YouTube and Skype as loss leaders.
PHP God with mastery in heavy DOM manipulation. Pretty nice combination :))
What did you use to track this down? Did you do it manually?

And yes, just like with a lot of other things, it's about quality and not quantity of submissions. The interest of users of this site is pretty clear so if you submit links that are meaningful to them, there's a good chance you'll get upmoded. But as I said, I don't really care about karma... I get nothing for it anyway :).

I view submitting stuff here as a thanks to others that do the same. I can't even begin to express the thanks to others that have introduced me to so many different concepts that have cut down our development time by months.
Why do you disagree with that statement? If China has lent $1.4 trillion to the US Government (by buying US Treasury Notes), then if you divide it out on a per capita basis, that works out to roughly $4000 per US citizen.
http://www.boredat.net/

wow... that really is all anyone uses it for. Good luck monetizing this, guys. Though it does seem like a valuable service.
Bicycles
Clearly these guys need to stick to commentary on RDBMSs, which MapReduce most definitely is not.

MapReduce enables Google to do it's thing, so I wouldn't call it a "major step backwards".
What an incredible piece of shit.

SCREWDRIVERS POORLY SUITED FOR DRIVING NAILS! FILM AT 11!

Right tool for the job. The right tool for accessing half a petabyte of data on unreliable Xeon-based servers in bakery racks is NOT a distributed database. MapReduce... is.

Oh, and one last thing -- he should be comparing BigTable with a standard RDBMS if he wanted to have so much as a single shred of credibility. Google uses traditional RDBMSes internally -- but not for the heavy lifting of indexing and caching. Because an RDBMS is a shitty tool for that job. That's one reason why the founders are rich as all get out -- they didn't worry about which tourniquet to use while the patient bled out. Stupid fucking religious wars.
You mean China _LENT_ $1.4 trillion to the US Government (by buying US Treasury Notes).
The most addictive site on the internet 
off course after news.yc
I second that "piece of shit" -- RDBMS are bad tools for some jobs, and there is still a lot of space for specialized kinds of database; especially I believe in a need for a lightweight (and ^^ slow ^^ :) decentralized document-oriented database. And yes, again, this kind of database will not be suitable for every need, but for some domains only.
Sort of a quick book. It's almost like they spent the whole time explaining the dynamics of programing and forgot to go in-depth with Cocoa. I didn't enjoy it.
Oops. Thanks for catching this. Maybe I shouldn't debate late at night...

(I fixed my post above so that it actually says the point I was trying to make, rather than the opposite.)
The privations of the Chinese people are related to trade imbalances because if the Chinese government allowed their huge trade surpluses to go towards buying goods (heating, vegetable oil, etc) for the Chinese people (thereby reducing trade surpluses), then most Chinese people would have higher standards of living.

Instead the Chinese government forces these trade surpluses to go towards buying US Government bonds (i.e., lending money to the US Government in exchange for low returns (negative returns if you factor in the exchange rate and inflation)). This doesn't raise standards of living for the Chinese people. In fact, it loses them money.

Yes, when you owe a banker a million dollars, he's in trouble. But he's only in trouble when you declare bankruptcy. At which point, he may be in trouble, but you're in bigger trouble.

And that may be the only way out of this financial mess... The US Government declaring bankruptcy. That would mean China is in $1.4 trillion worth of trouble, but the US would be in a lot, lot, lot more trouble.
Why don't those guys descend from their ivory tower and build something novel, interesting and useful?

I'm sure the solution to today's exponential data explosion is building one giant relational database inside of Mount Kilimanjaro...
RE: "ivory-tower", "something useful"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Stonebraker
lately I listen to Naruto Soundtrack :)
Whoever wrote PhpBB was not living in the Valley, where all message boards are "poised for rapid growth" and backed by VC money, even primitive weekend projects like Twitter.

Web 2.0 news that I see lately have started to drop me into "uncov mode" more and more often...
Thanks to you and shiro for the replies. It sounds as though the REPL is more useful for inspection than modification - which makes sense. Graceful addition of new functionality is useful, but provided by other frameworks.

/goes off to think about how best to provide an inspection-based REPL to his web app
I Love Bloggers
Hey, I know that dude. I used to work with him. One of the guys behind SparkNotes/TheSpark, OkCupid, and now CrazyBlindDate.com.

Also check out Deliver the Dis [http://www.chriscoyne.com/dis/index.html] if you're into Context-Free Grammars and insulting people.
Wow, this glimpse into his life just made my day. I hope that I never lose the ability to experience this sort of heaven/hell on earth :)

Is there anything more satisfying than making it through something that is nearly impossible?
Hold on, I thought in Delphi you still have to separate constants, typedefs, variables and code into different blocks, no?
I'd love to be the founder of a company that exits as big as those two 'loss leaders' did. And there's nothing saying they won't make it up (and more) in a few years.
True. And what about eBay, Amazon, and the other huge internet sites that actually do make a ton of money and actually did have a business plan relatively soon in the game? Chopped liver?
Bionic eyes: Contact lenses with circuits, lights a possible platform for superhuman vision
they didn't predict the mess, in detail. making negative predictions is easy, but getting the specifics right is hard.

if you got it right with enough accuracy, you could have made a few billion dollars. many tried, few succeeded.

http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB120036645057290423.ht...
If I had a "report" button, I'd use it on this submission.
What makes you think that? I think DeWitt and Stonebraker can distinguish between BigTable and MapReduce (indeed, their blog post mentions BigTable and Hadoop as well).
The fact that Google use MapReduce has no bearing on whether it is a "major step backwards" to the database community. The original authors essentially argue that MapReduce ignores 40 years of database technology, and that it is the worse for it; whether MapReduce is essential at Google isn't the point.
Perhaps you should hire one, put him in a suit, and give him a three letter title?
Alternatively, you could go and live a life, so that you might have something to write about.
Better headline please?
Basically what you are saying is that the people that took the risk should also take the hit, which seen from a moral standpoint is obviously right. The problem with this approach though is that the financial markets are notoriously non-transparent and full of feedback loops. This means that the blow will hit a lot of people that didn't take risks, but just happen to be in a bad spot, for instance a young family of blue collar workers that have just bought their first house. They have not had the potential upside, but they will get the downside.

This is why government intervenes, not to save the risk-takers.
But if you keep the community small and smart, they would only vote up the good articles so submitting shit will no reward anyone with more karma.

So, even people only want to acquire karma points they would have to submit interesting links, otherwise no one will upmod but downmod them.
What the heck? What happens if you lose some karma? If you want to insult somebody (and it's related to the context), do it!
I agree with you in principle, but most languages let you interface with C programs so you can often rewrite speed sensitive parts of an application in C and integrate it with the rest of your application.
Recommend any of those books? and would you mind sharing what your best feeds are?
I am not sure resolution is the only reason. LCDs emit their own light, paper just reflects light and is much gentler for the eyes because of this.
Stronger: http://scrapbook.akkartik.name/post/16834044
I wish the emacs macro system was easily Turing complete, but that must open a can of worms or something. I like the notion of writing a program as I do an action, but the macros don't really have control structures built in.
This is unfortunately the case with automated vulnerability scans. And while it's true that XSS can't be used to hack the SERVER it's still a major concern for two reasons:

1. the user's data is still at risk due to client side attacks
2. lack of attention paid to validating user input could mean that other more serious problems are likely to occur as well (like SQL injection)
Sure the guy is academically merited. But it's not the first time he compares apples to pears.

http://dlweinreb.wordpress.com/2007/12/31/object-oriented-da...

This everything must be a RDBMS viewpoint seem rather rigid.
True, but in classical Pascal they should go in particular order, and that's what K. is complaining about (no wonder), while for Turbo/Object the order is not important. That was a purely syntactic obstacle and nothing serious.
Ruby seems to be more than fast enough, but Rails and ActiveRecord is slow.
Something oddly rails-ish about the site.
Despite having read this many times, I never tire of it. Reminds me of another classic, "The Graphing Calculator Story."

http://www.pacifict.com/Story/
I just don't get it. Has no one ever heard of linux and tc??? NetBSD?? Its a damn 3 line bash script to faily share the bandwidth among users and give the power users any excess at any time. Instead, they wait until you hit the "magic number" of gigabytes and then just cut you off?!

Of all of the problems facing broadband carriers, this ones is the simplest to solve.

Try hooking up the 10s of thousnds of users who are still on dialup after a decade of being on the "waiting list" for broadband. Now that would be worthwhile.
Skype Users Community
So...you read the Wikipedia link and the main thing you got out of it is that the guy is "academically merited"?!

The part about him founding five DBMS companies and being the CTO of one of the largest DBMS companies in the world doesn't suggest that maybe he might have some practical experience? The fact that he made some major contributions to the database field somehow leads you to believe he is now confused and talking complete nonsense? No? Yes? Okay...I guess he is just an ivory tower egghead. My bad.

I've read the Weinreb post...and I agree with Dan's points, but they're really just disagreeing about the definition of success. I've tried to use object databases in industry, and I can assure you that they ARE considered failures by most people. (I'm not saying their bad reputation is entirely deserved, however...) By the way, Stonebraker saying that object databases are a 'failure' is not the same as him saying that RDBMS should be used for everything. Apples and Pears ;-) Actually, Stonebraker is one of the most vocal proponents of using non-RDBMS technologies when appropriate. See the "One Size Fits All" paper and its follow-up.

I'm not saying I agree with everything (or even anything) that Stonebraker writes, but I think it is a mistake to discount his opinion out of hand because you erroneously think he is just some confused egghead who isn't up on the latest technologies and is clinging to the RDBMS technology he is comfortable with. That does you both a disservice. People tend to write blog posts that argue one side or the other...the 'truth' often lies somewhere between the two sides.

P.S.

If my reply is unnecessarily nasty, it is partly due to the fact that I have insomnia and I'm therefore pissed off (it's 4:30am here and I have to leave on a cross-country flight in two hours.)
It has inherent social value - it influences the way people interact. I'd say it's analogous to any other measurement of social status.

So, when I see someone with high karma, I know they epitomize the ideals of the largest*most active group in a society.
(Comment about things you can't say)
I find the debate about languages follows in a long line of others, first going back to analog vs digital, vinyl vs CDs, film Vs DV, MS PC's vs Apple, blar blar.

It would appear to me that most of this is driven by prejudice and stems back to people like what they know, where they feel comfortable, and upstarts that think they know better (the new kids on the block) have less bias, less invested and are evangelists of the new because it's cool and they have a chance of caving out a bit of respect if they can attain expert status in that new field where they would have had no chance with the old fashioned.

I like php, simply because i find it easy to grasp, almost intuitive, but most importantly is the community, who have within the documentation left their own solutions and many tips are gained from this for me, along with a few other resources I can normally find most things in PHP, thousands of classes already written and open source, code examples etc.

I also do a fair bit with AS2 and this is a great platform but the community is no where near as advanced, and the language can act very strange sometimes, plus is also very tight and unforgiving.

I see no speed issues with PHP, no security problems (as often claimed) if you code sensibly and I like it. so there.
http://myplaylist.biz :-)

I made this lol
Wow! Augmented reality as described in Vernor Vinge's "Rainbow's End" may be just around the corner!