skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Great idea, I'm so there.

Douglas Crockford is coming.. didn't he invent JSON?
Good standards make code reviews trivial.

If that were so, then you could standardize the production of good code.
how much can you ebay it for?
Yup: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Crockford

Which YC companies have been doing cool JS stuff? Any of them going?
Good ideas. I think meaningful, fulfilling core responsibilities are more important, though.

If the product sucks, I would be unhappy working on it no matter the pay or perks.
Can anyone who has both used Wine and run Windows under virtualization on Linux comment on the trade-offs between those approaches? It seems like virtualization works more reliably, and with at least reasonable performance.
RAD Lab is Creating a Datacenter Operating System
Heh, I remember playing Day of the Tentacle a long time ago.
Bear Stearns

Oh, wait...
I can't tell... is this a joke?
Weekly Digest of the Social Networking Space: March 19, 2008
I recommend putting events on Upcoming and Facebook Events, too, if you want big attendance.
Ask YC: A way to measure page render time?
How do you measure the affect of different layouts on browsers' progressive rendering of pages?
A lot of people do start companies during 'downtimes'. Off the top of my head: sixapart started when both Ben and Mena got laid off. Flickr was pretty much the same story IIRC.

Also could get one more attention -- maybe -- because the media won't necessarily expect anyone to be doing anything positive. Recessions are one big moan, and the 'yipee!' of a startup will stand in stark contrast. IMHG (in my humble guesstimation).
The RAD Lab is not a joke, but this post is a little thick with hyperbole.
None of those are unique to a recession: you should be frugal, you should look at your ideas again, etc. Top reason to start a company during a recession: your competitors will go bust.
We have coding standards. The developers are good about following them, and some coding standards problems can even by caught automatically by static analysis tools.

But coding standards don't prevent logic errors, or requirements misunderstandings. Even the best developers make those kinds of mistakes and we catch a significant fraction of them during code reviews.

The other major benefit of consistently doing code reviews is learning. The attendees often pick up useful new techniques. And you spread knowledge of the code base around the team, which reduces the organization's dependence on any one developer and also brings out opportunities for code reuse.
Lack of closures is hardly an "invalid" reason to dislike a language, especially if the reason for lacking closures is that they're too confusing for less-skilled programmers.
Every formal code review I ever sat through was a painful experience that went on for longer than planned, covered way less code than planned, resulted in minor improvements at best and had zero long-term impact on the quality of the codebase.

Of the many reasons for this, I'll mention one: by the time a code review takes place, the key design decisions surrounding that part of the system have typically already been made. To do a retroactive redesign during a meeting is out of the question; that would be more work than writing the original code in the first place. So all people end up doing is scrutinizing tiny things like null checks. I'm not saying those don't matter; of course they do, but they're only a small part of making good code.

So the code-review approach boils down to saying "do the big stuff on your own and look over the small stuff together". That seems backwards to me.

(By the way, I'm talking about commercial projects. There's an entire literature around formal inspections, as you know, and good results have been said to be obtained with them, but if you want to go that route you're talking about heavy-duty process control, slowing development to a glacial pace that is unworkable for most commercial software.)

I've personally observed two things that do work. First, pair programming. It's not for everybody (the community here, for example, is largely derisive of it), and I'm not arguing for it in general. But there's no question that it does what code reviews are supposed to (but don't).

The other thing I've observed to work is to write the code individually but review it on checkin. That's how we do it on my current project. We'll either watch the repository and look over changes as they are committed, or email a patch and ask for review. This kind of review isn't as efficient or as comprehensive as writing the code together in the first place, but it does allow major problems to be caught and dealt with quickly (at the cost of some rework).
http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/ ?
I wouldn't get too excited without seeing some sort of actual documentation. Hopefully this is done ala-WSGI
I actually hope they don't. Having a small, core YC crowd there would be much nicer than seeing all the Web 2.0 party hoppers you normally see at events on Upcoming.
Ning's business model
Code reviews should be much more to with medium to big ideas, not small details. Small details should be trivial to a good hacker.

so: "You've got that wired in backwards", "Tim built one of those over here", "When we implement foo, that'll bar" & "That's a security hole because ...." are good.
Consider also that you have to sell stuff to someone, that selling stolen stuff isn't as easy as selling stuff normally, and that people you are selling to are more likely to already have something quite similar to what you're trying to sell them.
YSlow is good for measuring page render time, using your computer and internet connection and provider meaning it might not mirror where your end-users are coming from geographically and from a network perspective.

There are companies you can use to measure performance of a webpage from various geographies, networks, and internet connections available from pingdom, Keynote, Gomez and other companies
The reason Europeans are not as accepting of warfare is because they screwed themselves over twice with it. War is always the last resort of negotiation. When nations become too belligerent or stubborn conflict will always follow. Europe forgot this lesson twice in as many generations and suffered the consequences.

There are only two ways to prevent conflict: 1. be reasonable in all of your negotiations and 2. make sure you are always ready for a conflict.

If you fail to do the first, others may see no choice but to fight you. If you fail to do the second, they may not see any downside to it. This boils down to one principle, you must always back every one of your demands, even the reasonable one which you have a right to, with sufficient force.

In short, there is nothing wrong with using machines to do our fighting for us. There is something wrong with killing civilians and unnecessarily invading foreign countries; but there is nothing wrong with using better weapons to do the same job.
I agree. Lisp is perfectly capable of sucking all on its lonesome.
The Hyperinflation of XMLSpy
The author seems to want to say that language features are invalid criteria on which to judge the quality of a language (instead, he suggests that you should look at the quality of the documentation, the libraries, the community, and perhaps the syntax).

It's true that there are some language features, like type checking and memory management, on which reasonable people disagree. I think that those represent opportunities for innovation. Type inference, for example, seems to be changing the terms of the debate about static vs. dynamic typing.
Ignoring gameplay issues, I think another interesting feature of procedural game dev is the memory/CPU tradeoff.

For example the 97,280 byte FPS: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.kkrieger
Judging by some comments, I don't think my initial post was clear.

My question is not about keeping others from copying my ideas, but demonstrating that I have not filched ideas from others.

Suppose you are working on a product. You have a discussion with some other company; turns out they are working on something similar.

You release your product, and they claim you stole the idea and sue.

How does one demonstrate that your work was done independently and began before any such discussions?
Unless I'm missing something, yslow just measures download size and latency.

I want to measure how well the browser progressively renders the page. For example if I made a layout with tables nested 50 deep, the browser would do worse at progressive rendering and have a higher render time than if I used just css.

Likewise, I'm not talking about network latency, eg pingdom, keynote(?). Or compatibility, eg gomez.
"For that reason, the idea that an iPhone confers social status really jumps out at me, because it just doesn't seem true."

Though it may suggest that the owner has a bit of spare cash, since they're not economically priced.
I don't think she's saying that all of her 5 points are unique to recessions per say, but rather she's saying they're more apparent and important during a recession. While her interesting points to me -- being frugal and taking a closer look at your idea -- apply to startups during the state of any economy, they’re further highlighted during a recession. The only real point that applies to recessions alone is #4, which is quite significant and important to keep in the back of your mind.
Ultima Online was on the right path.

Everquest set MMO's back 10 years in my opinion. :(
The appeal of being a person in a virtual world is in creating your own stories. If your experiences are identical to everybody else's, if you can't have a real effect on the world, then you're a passive observer rather than a real participant.

Passive interactivity (it's an oxymoron but I think you get my meaning) can be fun, of course. The problem is one of expectations; if you come into a static game expecting a virtual world, you'll be disappointed. It doesn't help that MMORPGs "look" like worlds, or that (to some extent) they're marketed as them.
If it's a toaster, it probably can run NetBSD.

Since you don't report any crashes, it's a plausible idea.

I don't think it's possible to design a webite as cruel as this microwave.
We use Code Igniter on all of our sites you see in my profile.

Love it, love it. Has its issues, but I can't really put into words how useful it has turned out to be for our team.

We may very well go with Django long-term, but I've never spent a day regretting that we're using CI. And this from a guy who has always had a fairly low hacker opinion of PHP. CI kinda changed that a good bit once I pushed back my skepticism.

I highly recommend it for PHP developers who want to move to the MVC model and get a lot of ROI on their development time.

If you're comfortable with Ruby or Python, you'll enjoy the other frameworks more, of course. But I wouldn't use PHP on its own without Code Igniter.
What about the significant drop in ad spending which occurs in every recession? Or is it "different this time" like in 2000?
Good time to start a company, what about the rest of the economic front? If a startup is being frugal, does that invariably mean the people who use services are going to be frugal?
yeah Crock is awesome. He also made jslint

jslint.com
I'm probably biased because Tipjoy isn't affected in the least by a drop in spending in Ads. We're probably boosted, all things being equal. Consumer frugality would certainly affect us though.

Your business model shouldn't change on the margins. A slow or fast season in Ads won't make a typical business die or become viable.
SpinVox Translates Voice-to-Text Service Into A $100 Million Round
Less Talk More Risk
Render time. (see above)
As a counter-point, I have the world's best microwave. There is only one button that I use - the add 1 minute button.

Put the food in, hit the "add one" button once or twice, and that is it. The microwave starts automatically. As far as I can tell, it took 40 years of microwave UI development to get to this point.
Try pair programming (unofficial, informal, real-time code reviews+collaboration)
15 Reasons Not To Be An Entrepreneur
Google Launches Helpful Site Aimed at Non-Profits
Saturn moon may have hidden ocean
Unfortunately, Safari for Windows doesn't appear to work properly in Wine. It might be possible to wrangle with it sufficiently to convince it to work, but I eventually just went with installing XP in a VirtualBox VM.
Still just vague analogies. It's not that hard to give a more concrete example of what's possible. Why don't people do this? Because you'd see that this doesn't really provide anything compelling at all.
Y Combinator Gears Up for Startup Summer
Good things come out of recessions, but a high valuation is rarely one of them. Anyone want to guess what Flickr's valuation would be today?

http://siteanalytics.compete.com/bebo.com+flickr.com/?metric...
Well, one thing a recession and resulting drop in ad revenue will do is slow down acquisitions by large public companies of small private companies that are still experiencing 'notional' revenue (ie with no business model).

Startups that are built on a feature rather than a business will find it harder to identify any takers. And less startups being bought will result in less entrepreneurs taking the plunge to start... not so much a collapse of the startup ecosystem, but a localized minimum inside of it.
OODA Loop - An excellent way of thinking about strategy
Virtualisation is definitely more reliable, but if you need just that one Windows app, then the overhead and interface discontinuity can be annoying.

Wine also supports OpenGL, so if your app (or game..) uses that, Wine easily beats any VM solution I've tried. It also implements part of Direct3D on top of OpenGL, but that's substantially slower. Still better than no D3D support as in most VM packages, of course.
A lot of startup people aren't interested in valuations -- least of all valuations made during a recession.
Saul Griffith: The Game Plan : A solution framework for climate change and energy
REST: http://code.google.com/p/django-rest-interface/
Agreed. This guy's problem is that most MMOs are MMORPGs -- games. He doesn't want to play games. He wants to live in a virtual world. So: false choice. He's complaining that an apple isn't an orange.
You weren't meant to have a boss
What about the fact that it is far easier to steal your credit card/identity and then just buy the stuff one wants, instead of trying to find someone with the stuff you want and then stealing it.
FCC Confirms that Big Winner in Spectrum Auction is Verizon. So Why Is Google Smiling?
I ran across this the other day:
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roc/archives/2005/05/renderin...

If there was an easy way to run mozilla headless, e.g., "time moz-render-to-file <foo.html >foo.png", that would probably give you an idea (even better if moz could report timings itself). No idea how hard that would be to do, though.
Gentlemen prefer buying diamonds online
I think it's more charitable to say that he's complaining that nobody's selling oranges, but fair enough. :)
So... starting a company during a recession is a good thing because it will force you to adopt best practices? What about just adopting best practices during a boom? Wouldn't that be MORE advantageous?

Seriously, how is adopting an advantageous behavior an advantage if its sole purpose is to offset a disadvantage? It isn't. If you're not frugal, your not going to be able to start your company in a boom, much less a recession.
Gmail does it apparently.
Ask HN: Any novel aproaches to being sick?
Just wondering if people here have any interesting ways of dealing with being sick (I'm thinking mostly of colds and flus, but feel free to chime in with anything else).

Do you push yourself to work through it? Still go into the office? Do you manage to get decent work done? Or do you give up completely on work and try to sleep it off? Do you medicate? Any good drugs you've found?
Perhaps, and I'm all for being charitable. :-) But he does spend a fair amount of time complaining about the apples.
I sleep.

... for like 20 hours straight. Then I eat something, then I sleep again. Repeat until healthy. I think last time I was sick, it was with a stomach flu for about three days. I probably slept 18-20 hours a day, with the rest of the time spent puking and crapping my guts out. (Hey, you asked.)
I thought being an entrepreneur was all about doing what made you happy, not doing what makes the most sense to every Tom, Dick, and Harry who graduated from business school? If that's what being an entrepreneur really meant nobody would be doing it.

I'd gladly work longer hours for less pay with more work to do if I was happy doing it.
Bug:

Steps to reproduce:

go to your comment page -> edit comment page -> delete comment

Directs you to "No such item" after the comment is deleted.
Verizon and AT&T Score in 700Mhz Auction
What perfect timing. We just solved some graphing problems with JS in our webapp, and the results so far have been great :) We'll be there.
'Augment' Reality with Contact Lenses
Five Methodologies to Deal with Email Overload
Constraints are good. Building a foundation in an environment full of constraints will make for a stronger foundation.
Was that meant to be funny? All but one of the points essentially say it's good to start a company in a recession because it's really really hard, and if you somehow manage to survive, you'll end up tougher, leaner, and meaner. Here's a tip, guys: start your company at a time and place where there are no constraints and even the biggest idiot can be successful.
I am a 27 year old programmer and have worked for two small companies ( < 20 employees ) and for one company of 200+ employees. The only thing I can say about working for the large company is that it felt like breathing through a straw. Go work for a small company or as Paul Graham suggests, go start up your own. Leave the big companies for the burnt-out folk with kids and debt.
If I had to structure an organization of 1,000 people, here's how I'd do it: rather than tiers of management on the order of 1, 10, 100, and 1000, I'd just have two levels. At the top would be a small committee that controls allocation of money and from time to time publishes non-specific guidelines about where they'd like the company to go. One person on the committee is in charge of hiring salesmen, who once hired are basically unsupervised and work for commission. The rest of the company is a bunch of small engineering teams of up to 10. All functions other than sales and engineering are outsourced. The most senior member of each team has hiring/firing authority for that team. He gets to decide the size but 10 is the max. These generate their own ideas and speak to the controlling committee only for budget requests. Salary is not part of the budget request: everybody in the company gets the same salary. Bonuses are awarded to teams that implement profitable ideas. More money goes to bonuses than to salary. If a team shows a pattern of underperformance, the committee fires the entire team. If this happens, they get 30 days notice that they're going to be fired, and they can use that time to find jobs on other teams within the company.

If I then had to scale this to 10,000, I still wouldn't add another layer of management. Instead I'd just add more teams, and expand the controlling committee to a confederation of committees, which all draw money from the same pool but have specialized expertise. When teams request budget, they approach the committee with the best understanding of their proposal.

The 1,000 person model looks a lot like a bunch of founding teams and one VC firm. The 10,000 person model bears some resemblance to the federal government, which is perhaps why an organization the size of the government manages to function at all, however poorly.
A startup only interested in quick valuations is a disaster either way.
I wonder if score is quite the word.
It's one thing to focus on best practices, it's another thing to have best practices forced on you.
But I think still PHP4 is more widely available among hosts, no?
What sort of problems are you trying to catch?

Niggling little bugs or major design flaws? Both?

Code reviews, as this brutal group process done after the code is committed, are wrong IMO. It's better to talk out the design before any code is written, or circulate a design note. (Not a full design document; the only good design docs are written after the code.)

As for catching the niggling little bugs, or generally improving your approach in the small, pair programming and check-in review work well.

Check-in review is simply a convention that someone else has to read your diff before it's checked into the repo. You can make that an informal or formal part of your check-in process. It works really well; not only does it catch mistakes but it puts the incentive on the reviewee to write readable code, so they won't have their colleague complaining they don't understand what's going on.

That may sound like a lot of work but it's not. Once everyone gets to the point where they know how to write readable code, the check-in review takes just a few minutes out of each developer's day.
squat

edit: by which I mean they are like domain squatters. They don't intend on doing anything nearly as interesting as Google or a rampantly out of control spectrum would.
As another 27 year old programmer, I 100% agree. The only real benefit I think I derived from working at a company (both large and small) is getting a good idea of what works and what doesn't work for large scale projects (which I wasn't exposed to in school). And even that lesson was learned pretty quickly, within 3-6 months. All returns were diminishing exponentially from that point on.

That same lesson could be learned in the same time frame in a start up - you'd just end up with some throw away code after a pretty short period of time, which isn't a big deal at all when it comes down to it.
Why not make it informal - just ask some other developer to give you feedback on your code?
If I had to structure an organization of 1,000 people

You might also want to read this: http://www.amazon.com/Maverick-Ricardo-Semler/dp/0712678867
I bought my wife's engagement ring on eBay. It was scary as hell, but I saved a lot of money and she flat out loves it.

I would do it again.
GPS on your Phone--cheap solution
TeleNav Navigator is much better than stand-alone GPS devices and, as this page shows, better than Google Maps as well.
Just based on the summary, it sounds like he has a lot of good ideas and one bad mistake: profit-sharing is socialized. So if the company does well then the employees do well, but individual contributors would have trouble getting rewarded.
Used to use a microwave with only 3 buttons, start (that performed similarly), defrost, and cancel. The cancel button worked as you expect and the defrost wasn't hard to use. The start button added 30 seconds until it got to 3.5 minutes, then 60 seconds. Easiest thing to use ever.

My microwave now has a similar quick start feature of hitting 1-6 for that many minutes and a plus 30 second button. This is how we operate it about 90% of the time.
Google Queries Decelerated in February--Comscore
Keynote DOES measure the time it takes for a page to be rendered using IE, Firefox, Safari and Opera.
"Mediocre hires hurt you twice: they get less done, but they also make you big, because you need more of them to solve a given problem."

I would say Mediocre hires hurt you THRICE. Twice for the reasons you mention, and the third one is all the good folks leaving since they can't stand mediocre people.

One big company that seems to do well, at least from the outside is Semco in Brazil. Watch Ricardo Semler's "Leading by Omission": http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/308/ and read his book "Maverick": http://www.amazon.com/dp/0446670553. This is of course an anomaly since most companies don't work this way.
Amazon: Our Most Fulfilling Web Service Yet
I tend to value people's bets based on what they're willing to risk on it. All of this idle surface speculation doesn't do much for me. Particularly non-insightful.