skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Borders Signs Lulu to Power Self-Publishing Tools
Seems like an 80/20 situation: they should make 80% of cases easy or easier, yet also make it easy when you hit that 20% where you'd be better off going directly to SQL.
This is one of my favorite topics. I like the movie "The Nightmare Before Christmas" because it's all about being trapped in a paradigm.

I think photo sharing is trapped in the paradigm of the early adopters (photography enthusiasts), and I write about that here:

http://ourdoings.com/2007-12-19

In general, the only way to break a paradigm is to throw it very hard against the wall of reality.

For product design that means immersing yourself in what people want. Evolve as you come into contact with different needs, wants and behaviors.
Yeah. That's what I'm going to specialize in at grad school. Be jealous.
SAP is an ops research company, not a software company. They sell optimized business process methods, not high tech. They will candidly tell you so.
> Do you know why this is the case?

Open a lab equipment catalog. What do you suppose the availability of grant money to most purchasers does to the prices? Also don't forget that the delivery of anything chemistry-related to a private residence is all but banned under American law.
You raise an interesting point. When I saw this in Motor Trend, I was bothered with how far off the designers of the car were...Of course, nobody can predict the future accurately and it's best to be "safe" in order avoid the criticism of others. What bothered me was the thought of myself being trapped in such thinking.

Sure, it's easy to laugh at how many superfluous ornaments that are visible. I get the impression that the futurism that is present in this car is representative of the auto manufacturer's perspective of producing cars in that the manufacturing process of the future will afford automakers to pack more "features" than is necessary for the customer to take practical advantage of - that is the message I see being communicated (I can hear the manufacturing engineers patting themselves on the back saying, "gee whiz! look at what we'll be able to make in the future; no matter that anybody needs a needlessly complicated door, by golly we'll have the process streamlined so that we can increase the complexity of what we put together!!"). By this I mean that the car reflects the car maker's vision and not the customer's vision.

Let's take a wildly different example of breaking the mold: The Matrix. I would argue that what made that movie (aside from the loyal geek following of Neo wannabes, myself near the top of the list) was the unusually original photography method of "bullet time". It was something so wildly different and brought a new experience onto the silver screen unlike anything else, and to experience that on such a large scale (the movie theater) was the big selling point.

I am very guilty of the type of mindset of the automakers in the 1950s and at the moment cannot claim to be as ground breaking as John Gaeta (the visual effects genius behind The Matrix). I just feel somewhat relieved that I'm aware of it!!
"Micropayments don't work", in other words, "because of high transaction costs".
Microsoft is definitely in trouble - not in the short term but in the long term. Their problem is that they are so accustomed to the packaged sales model that software-as-a-service is very foreign to them. When they try their hand at it it is half-hearted and not very well designed or executed. And they think they can buy themselves out of their predicament by buying another behemoth on a downward slide. They just don't get it...

Instead they should be buying all the startups they can get their hands on - the money they are willing to pay for Yahoo will go a very long way in the acquisition of startups.
Apple shuts down Hymn anti-DRM service
From the article: Shouldn't the ISPs be paying YouTube a co-marketing fee?

No. Firstly, this undermines the argument because if my ISP pays YouTube then how would my ISP give me a free broadband connection? Secondly, such payment is premature optimisation. This makes it harder for superior alternatives to come to the fore. This is a core argument of network neutrality.

So, I'd vastly prefer a level playing field with flat rate access rather than a free service offered on terms suitable to vested interests.
In a fuzzy little nutshell, they attempted to sell their product (PageRank algorithm) to the search companies of the day but got no takers.

After "failing" to cash out, they took their confidence in what they had and built it into a public service. Initially, I think they were dead set on not subsidizing their site with advertisements and were definitely not thinking of doing subscriptions or anything of that sort.

In the end, I guess they simply weighed the alternatives (i.e. closing the doors and finishing their PHD studies) and figured that instituting any sort of sustainable business model is not so evil after all.

Good for them (and us). :)
MapReduce explained
Well, I just turned 25 and was going to quit my job in April. Guess I’m too late.
"In general, the only way to break a paradigm is to throw it very hard against the wall of reality."

That's a great quote! I'm curious to know how your photo-sharing site is exemplary of this statement. I'm not trying to be a jerk here (I think I do a great job of that with little effort!), instead I'm just trying to understand from the perspective of a potential user (or for that matter an investor) of your site who is interested in innovative thinking that is distinctly different from the superfluous ornamentation that you see in the "car of the future" picture given.

[just to be clear: I'm just asking for the sake of knowledge exchange, I am not at all a picture taker and I am not in the business of funding startups!]
Good point: setInterval() will fire the given function repeatedly no matter if the previous execution of that function is done yet which can lead to an unexpected pile up of calls to the same function.
So does this mean it's too late to get into the Facebook Application business?
Well, my blog earned $2.16 in Amazon affiliate commissions this month! That was on something like 10K views. Time to go swimming in my bathtub full of cash!
"cheated"?

Funny how 2 people can look at the same data and see 2 totally different things.

For me success in business comes directly from constantly saying, "I am willing to do whatever it takes to get what I want."

All I thought was how the story is an excellent example of that.
an example: http://s7d2.scene7.com/is/image/Fortunoff/5508214??bgc=255,2...
Quote from the article:

"SQL is a very nice, almost mathematical language which allows phenomenally powerful queries to be expressed simply and elegantly."

I agree and that answers the question for me. I definitely prefer SQL over the unreadable code/SQL hybrids that are otherwise suggested in the article. I never liked the Hibernate Criteria, either - although sadly all other Java developers I met preferred them to HQL.

HQL (Hibernate Query Language) is OK - it is so close to SQL that it is very easy to learn, and reduces some of the verbosity. It is nice to be able to SELECT FROM object rather than having to list all the required fields.

I think someone who can't get his head around SQL probably wouldn't make a very good addition to the developer team.
Ironically, the beauty of this article is that the title is wrong.

These 10 reasons are good at any age.

(Reminds me of the story of the 40 year old woman who was reluctant to go to medical school because she'd be 48 by the time she could open her own practice. Until someone asked her how old she'd be in 8 years if she DIDN'T go. She went.)
Free. Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business
Ask News.YC: What is the best scenario for the future of Microsoft and Xobni?
First off, Xobni is awesome. It's so awesome that it invokes feelings like, "I wish I thought of that!" (but surely such an idea requires proper execution, which I probably could NOT have managed as well as they have). I applaud the Xobni guys for what they've done and admire YC for investing in them and supporting a small band of amazing/innovative developers.

This question stems from the 80s/90s dream of being acquired by Microsoft. Those were the days when hitting the big time meant getting acquired by Microsoft. The game has definitely changed with the internet and in many ways Google is to the internet as Microsoft is to the desktop (but that's a different discussion altogether).

I noticed over the years that Apple has cultivated a culture of "grassroots development" such that there is an amazingly gifted community of developers creating innovative products that are growing the appeal of OSX as both user-friendly and developer-friendly (by "developer-friendly" I am referring to the anecdotally evident numerous small companies that have been established to fill a need for many small niche applications and those companies seem to do quite nicely; for example Delicious Monster, OmniGroup, Pixelmator...).

When I say "gifted developers" that could be restated as "enabled/empowered developers" in the sense that Apple has gone through great lengths to ensure the applications developed for OSX are clean, beautiful, and uniformly usable. I get the impression that Apple has more of an interest in spreading diversity on its platform through encouraging independent developers to innovate such that additional value is brought to OSX from many sources instead of from Apple as the sole provider of value.

And thus we arrive at the heart of my question: which of the following scenarios is "optimal"?:

1) Microsoft acquires Xobni. Outlook becomes better and Microsoft maintains dominance on their own platform.

2) Microsoft promotes Xobni as an example of grassroots development and starts to make it easier for independent developers to innovate upon the Windows platform.

3) <add your own scenario>

Which is the better scenario in the long-run for:

1) Microsoft

2) Customers

3) Xobni/YC
Best visual effects: The Golden Compass

Also nominated: Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End, Transformers

I saw all three of those movies, and even though GC was supremely craptastic, its effect were beautiful. I loved Transformers and I still think GC had better visual effects.
"isn't the facebook site so much as it where the friends are now"

The food and beverage industry has struggled with this for years. Welcome to the real world.
Maybe that's it, or maybe they have two of the most profitable products in the history of the world (Office, Windows), and things like that are hard to come be. Heck, Google only has one and Facebook has none.
I was talking about finding the cracks in a paradigm that needs to break, so I hope ourdoings.com is not exemplary of it. Traditional photo sharing breaks when it hits someone who has amassed a pile of digital photos but has no time to organize them into albums. It also breaks when your peers have litle time and you email them a link to your new photos instead of having thumbnails and explanatory text right in the message.

Up until late last year the ourdoings.com paradigm broke if people had a lot of photos but no time to choose the good ones. Finding what else is broken is tough, in that people may go months without using the site (putting up more photos) without that being a problem. They know they can come back and catch up easily when they have a little time.
In the short term yes, Microsoft can win the business market by grabbing SAP. But in the long term Microsoft knows that the web is the next platform and eventually Windows and Office are going to be obsolete by the web, and how long before some well funded web start-up produces a viable alternative to SAP? This is Microsoft's struggle to stay relevent in a time when Windows is just another OS that can open a web browser.
Java functors are ugly. I've seen an example where every column of a database had a corresponding class. This facillatated the use of functors.

Java has another example to teach. JavaBeans can be called transparently via remote procedure calls. When developers discover this feature, they write everything as JavaBeans on the assumption that it increases scalability. Instead, it leads to obscene implementations with trivial operations requiring hundreds of remote calls within a server cluster. Understandably, this adversely affects performance.

So, don't prematurely optimise. Use map and reduce sparingly. You wouldn't use RPC to make a string uppercase. Likewise, you wouldn't sum an array of 10 integers using reduce.
Hash Function Test Program
No.

I use ActiveRecord and DataMapper every day at home (and Hibernate at work), so I know the benefits (although I consider Hibernate more of a hinderance than a help after using the AR model). What I don't get is why everyone acts like SQL is hard or something. It's like one level up from HTML on the difficulty scale and one level below any real programming language. The advantage of the ORM is that 90% of the time you get what you want in an abstract way. It's not to protect you from SQL.

Any developer that is scared of SQL should probably look for another line of work.
Regarding this, there is an excellent book: "Structure of Scientific Revolutions" by Thomas Kuhn
Dup. See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=122811
Even plants can't resist the twitter phenomenon
I'm going to pretend this says 26 since I turned 25 yesterday.
If only "futurists" had this type of honesty about their own visions of the future then perhaps we wouldn't have so many "visions" that are obscured by more of the same.
Good point. Well, except for the family one -- imo, that's the biggest advantage of a 20-something over a 40-something.
Exactly. This only thing (still) missing is the marriage of those methods to good software. Somehow, I don't get a good feeling about this when Microsoft is added to the mix.
"some well funded web start-up produces a viable alternative to SAP"

Patience. I'm working on it:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=114568
I'm also taking the "-1 is the floor" stance, so I modded you up too.
1) Scenario #2 - Xobni would be a drop in the bucket to Microsoft so they wouldn't have the incentive to manage it properly. The Xobnis can make it much more prominent and important than MSFT would. Plus, Xobni is about the only thing I can think of that gives MSFT products some hacker cred.

2) Scenario #2 - more people/companies are helping customers so they're more likely to get an offering that fits. Microsoft might do a good job taking care of customers, but a diversity of ideas is more likely to produce the right fit for any given customer.
Me too, but I don't like being forced to program functionally if I feel imperative programming would be more readable, efficient, or fast. Certain tasks are more suited for functional programming than others.

That said, I don't mind languages like Haskell where imperative programming doesn't fit in well conceptually. It's just that I wouldn't use languages like that for everything.
Not at all. These guys were late to the game and built a Top 10 application:
http://www.highscalability.com/friends-sale-architecture-300...

Being early was a huge benefit, but it certainly won't prevent you from building a viral app if it's something people will use.
From the article: Emacs Lisp, the language it is written in, is every bit as dynamic as Ruby.

Warning! Author thinks in Blub ( http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html ).

More seriously, Ruby's apparent class patching combinatorial explosion of bugs makes a very good case for aspect oriented programming ( http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8566923311315412414&... ).
Apple: The angst vs. the reality
Putting terabytes of memory into servers, the cheap way
Podcast: Why software sucks
Family and age are correlated, but not the same. Lots of 18 year old parents and 40 year old singles.
Demystifying “Above the Fold”
Oh boy, are you wrong. Age is just a number, an abstraction, it has nothing to do with starting a startup or anything else.

If you can't start a startup for whatever reason, put yourself in the position to start a startup before starting a startup -- you might not be able to control some things, but start with the things you can control.

Rose Blumkin started her second business that competed with Warren Buffet, at age 98, after selling the first one to Warren Buffet.

It's all in your head my friend, start there and remember, you only have to get it right once.

And, finally, a quote I read from Marc Andreessen "Take acute pain now in order to avoid years of chronic pain."
I personally think Yahoo is still a player and has a lot more to offer. However, I have a couple of questions.

Is it possible that their troubles stem from not quickly rebounding after making a "wrong" call; the "we're in the media/portal business, not search" line of thinking?

Is there any correlation between the acquisition of startups and a company like Yahoo's continued success? How does the number of startups purchased per year weigh in?

Is Yahoo simply suffering from BigCo Bloat?
5 Business Propositions to Say 'No' to
I don't think everyone is ready to start a startup at any specific age. It requires planning, study of what works and what doesn't, and a huge commitment.

But I definitely agree with you in the 'you only have to get it right once'. You can make 1000 mistakes that don't really have too much of a negative impact on your life, but the one really good move you make could make your startup a success.
This post doesn't discuss design in context of saving Yahoo at all. Here's a few excerpts that drive this point.

"In what ails Yahoo, design is a non-factor. Neither search nor online advertising, the real battlefields on which Yahoo, Google and Microsoft spar, are meaningfully impacted by how very good is Yahoo’s design acumen."

...

"By no means am I saying that design is without value. Rather, I just think it’s odd — and slightly disingenuous — of the champions of design strategy to fall silent when it comes to the failure of a company that’s very good at practicing it."

I think a better analysis here of Yahoo's design is its design failure -- they couldn't design search nor online advertising that succeeded, which are what make up the market value of a company like Google. As such, they weren't much able to compete with Google on the issue.

Its a bit silly to say design couldn't save Yahoo. It absolutely, without question could save them, they just haven't figured out how to extend their /interface design/ skills to be /strategy design/ skills.
it's so inspiring - & that it's good too that someone lacks grammatical knowledge can still be successful & is heard widely also.
There's a famous paper calling ORM the "Vietnam of computer science":

It represents a quagmire which starts well, gets more complicated as time passes, and before
long entraps its users in a commitment that has no clear demarcation point, no clear win conditions, and
no clear exit strategy.

This is hyperbolic but it's true.

Instead of ORM I develop object-oriented tools to help with SQL manipulation. I also make use of data transfer objects (like most ORMs).

But I would never rely on an ORM to handle complex queries.
Thirded, I always expected it to work that way.
Social news rumors - Yahoo buzz to launch tomorrow
Here's the problem, I think: There's no escaping what you know (or what you think you know). So adding more is much simpler than changing how or why. To do so you must fundamentally break from your most basic assumptions.

My suggestion is read more broadly on a daily basis and let the ideas percolate into consciousness rather than as an strained product of it. Once there gradually shape them on their own path. I also find that talking to a broader sample of friends and family and even strangers on the bus forces you to re-evaluate those basic assumptions. Groupthink affects us all but it's really a symptom of who we associate with (and why) than it is of how we think.
I upmodded a couple of comments of yours because of a comment you made on the programming reddit. I think you would know which comment :) Consider it a positive karma bomb.
How To Understand Combinations Using Multiplication
I also like the book, but more as a diagnosis of the disease than as a path to curing it. Still, seeing why dinosaurs develop (and hew to their turf) is a fundamental exercise in creative thinking.
AskYC: Bookmarklet or Toolbar
I'm starting a new stealth project and this project will have social-sharing features where users can bookmark a site/page and indicate they like a site, much like stumbleupon/delicious. But I'm not sure if a bookmarklet script is good enough or a FF extensions would work out better. Any advice?
It seems like this logic is self-defeating. How can the cost of managing money remain the same if all other electronic products and services are going down?
At work we have locked down computers / browsers (IE6), so a I always prefer bookmarklets over toolbars.
Of course you wouldn't uppercase a string using RPC that's what you have map reduce for... split that string into chars send each node a single char to uppercase and combine the results you get back.

And they said programmers have a tendency to make things overly complicated...
R.I.P Stage 6
BGP is a protocol used to exchange routing information. Pakistan's main provider is a company called PCCW, so they are Pakistan's "upstream" provider.

Each BGP peer announces which set of routes they are the final destination for, e.g. Level3 announces themselves as the final dest for my Class C, 206.192.23.0/24 .

In blocking YouTube, they either meant to be malicious, or, they meant to null-route YouTube inside Pakistan but instead fat-fingered it and issued commands that instead of null-routing, made them the final destination for those YouTube IPs.

Mistake that YouTube made was that this Class C was also where their DNS servers were, so they were unable to redirect people elsewhere once they were aware what was going on (since corrected).

Also see http://www.renesys.com/blog/2008/02/pakistan_hijacks_youtube...
The money always comes from somewhere, even it's now twice- or thrice-removed.

Follow the money.
Wasabi: Metaprogramming
Advice Twitter hasn't followed: "design something to charge for into your product and start taking money within 6 months"
The content is wrong too.

"Your cost of failure is zero, not to say negative." -- no. Opportunity cost: enormous. But I guess this is where he invokes "Ignorance is bliss."
That was the most useless analysis I've ever read. Common people
Companies Typically Raise More Money In Subsequent Rounds
In my posts about how much capital should be raised from an entrepreneur’s and VC’s perspective, I wrote about the incentives that drive the target size of a given round. However, there is another dynamic to consider: which round of capital is being raised. Later rounds are typically larger than earlier rounds. There are a few reasons for this...

See more @ www.markpeterdavis.com
As one my teachers used to say:
"It is better to use a bad language well than a good language badly" The blame is not so much the language but the programmers.