skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you just want to read, there are a few books that are detailed, but still accessible. Any one would give you a much better understanding of what's possible:

* Human Molecular Genetics by Strachan and Read -- this is a tome, but it's a great introductory reference to the field. (A lot of first-year grad students read this book when coming to molecular genetics from engineering and CS, incidentally.)

* Molecular Biology of the Cell, by Alberts et al. -- an even bigger tome, but one you'll find on every researcher's bookshelf.

* Genes NN by Lewin (where NN is an ever-increasing roman numeral; you can estimate the amount of time someone has been in the field by the size of the roman numeral on their copy) -- this is more of an undergraduate introduction to molecular genetics. The other books (especially MBC) are more useful as references, but this book is fairly accessible to newcomers.

* Recombinant DNA by Watson et al. -- I hesitate to include this in the list, because it's now sadly outdated (written in 1992), but I still think it's one of the best-written, most accessible introductions to things like transgenics, genetic engineering, etc. Describes everything in a friendly, Scientific American style. It's also small. If you want a quick, friendly introduction to what was state-of-the-art 15 years ago, this is a great book.

I know that most of these books are kind of thick, and that you said you didn't want to digest the whole curriculum, but I don't tend to read pop-science books in this field. I don't have much of an opinion on any particular popularization of molecular genetics. But if you want to gain a real understanding of molecular biology, these are the books you'd most likely be told to buy for molecular genetics 101 at your local university.

PS: the giant metal birds eat Acme brand exploding bird seed, naturally....
> efforts such as PigLatin and Sawzall appear to be promising steps in this direction.

Sawzall is a parallel logfile analyzer. It takes logfiles stored into GFS and MapReduces them for reliable billing (which used to be a nightmarish, fundamental revenue problem and is now a nonissue -- all you Nooglers live in a relative utopia). A unixy tool with a unixy mindset (gee, maybe that's because Rob Pike wrote it). It's a special-purpose tool that is incredibly good at its job, not a general-purpose filigreed hammer that is supposed to nail everything in sight. And the fact that the authors could possibly overlook this speaks volumes about their myopia.

Stonebraker naturally refused to answer the most obvious criticism of all -- HEY ASSHOLE, WHAT ABOUT BIGTABLE?

But then, if he addressed that, he'd no longer have an essay. And if Google took his advice they wouldn't have the revenues to have made it as a company. But that's not really something that academics think about, is it?
HA! Its real! Priceless!

I actually meant the "Suck Kut" from Wayne's World...
Who'da thunk someone would actually try to build one!?

Thanx for that link. Made my day.
wow, how tacky

Interesting to see if the cartmanland marketing works though :p
I've never seriously investigated the work of Edward Tufte before, but this video really makes it look like he doesn't "get it" at all. He doesn't understand that Apple's reasoning for enhancing the resolution on the iPhone was to make the interface look amazing, not to stuff data into each pixel.

I can see how lots of people would agree with him-- seeing thousands of data points on one screen makes sense. But it sacrifices usability and makes the experience less fun and more difficult-- look at his weather "fix;" not only is it very ugly, but it's also difficult to find exactly what the temperature is because of the poor contrast and small, "image-sized" resolution. Apple's design is "cartoony" because it's supposed to look beautiful, be extremely easy to see, and show minimal data.

It reminds me of a quotation: "A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." - Antoine de Saint-Exupery
One small suggesion: do STRESS tests before submitting your page to Digg/Reddit/TC. On the off-chance that it does make the front page, it will get hammered, and any scalability bugs will instantly bring the site down. It would be unfortunate to miss all that traffic.

Also, put the company name in your signature whenever you send e-mails, forum or blog comments, etc..
Is there any benefit to Rails 2?
Ok, so I bit the bullet and bought the Agile Web Dev book that some people suggested here (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=101571 - thanks for that by the way!). It's a really well written book (so far), but uses Rails 1.8, not Rails 2. Is there actually any benefit to using 2 over 1.8?
Yeah, as entrepreneur if you believe in your work and realize hey this is the Internet people are going to say whatever you should not be deterred.

Hear the positive , rather then all the static and noise. It is good to hear feedback that maybe negative, yet it helps render a better product! That's not noise that is feedback!
Fluxus - live coding system built on PLT Scheme
word of mouth can win you if you give people something simple to talk about, may not necessary be your core competency. SEO is the key, get your site crawled by Google.
I like HT Computer Warehouse http://www.htcw.net/index.html for used stuff.
Interesting idea. You would think the database user/password and a few grant/revoke statements would be sufficient to prevent issues like the one in the article.
Speaking from experience, yes.
> less chances of winning a fight

assuming you're following the same tactics
Let's Do Lunch in London
Wal-Mart's normal employees do inventory once or twice a year. They aren't paid anything extra, and most probably make half of that.

They do often hire outside consultants to help, and I've no idea what those guys get paid.
By formatting I was referring to the fact that he had to match the 6th field. If grep would return 100k and only 10 in the desired field awk is obviously handy (the exception). In the general case where you are just trying to hunt things down who stops and counts which field their target string is in. I could have run grep and analyzed the results by the time you count to the right field. If you miscounted however... how do you know?
yes besides bug fixes there are performance improvements - db caching, new features (in production all separate css files are combined automatically into one), and so on

http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2007/12/7/rails-2-0-it-s-done
Any good sources for all the sciences?

Also, is there an overview of how computer science impacts all the other academic disciplines?
Forrester's Marketing Blog
Beautiful Soup: We called him Tortoise because he taught us. HTML/XML parser in Python
I don't like raster editors for the web (gimp, photoshop), because those images scale up poorly. I prefer a vector graphics, like fireworks (or, from what i understand inkscape). You can stretch those images to the size of infinity, and they still look great.
you can use defensio, they have an API for that sort of thing
Plenty of benefits; improved support for REST is a major one, but there are tons of little fixes that make life much easier. The link in chaostheory's comment is a good overview, or (if you feel like spending $9 more) you can buy Ryan Daigle's Rails 2 PDF at http://peepcode.com/products/rails2-pdf - Daigle runs a well-respected blog that keeps track of the newest developments in edge, so was able to pick out the most important things to write about.
Light Bulbs, Cell Phones and Utility
Oh yeah, and also (replying to myself here) you can use the waste products which you get from crop production anyway -- e.g. the stalks and leaves -- so it can work in parallel with food production.

That stuff currently has negative value -- farmers will pay you to take it off their land.
ASK YC: What do you think of rewardpick.com?
The idea is to create an Amazon-like community for credit cards. All the card details (names, details, urls, etc) are user submitted. There is an admin approval system to make sure no spam or duplicate card get listed. Feel free to add some. Thanks.

http://rewardpick.com
I think you might be confused between Ruby and Rails.

Ruby's current version is 1.8.6, while 1.9 is nearing an official release and 2.0 is still very experimental at this point.

Rails' current version is 2.0.2, but the last release on the 1.x branch was 1.2.6.

I'm going to assume that you meant Rails 1.2.x versus Rails 2.x. Yes, there are a lot of advantages. Mainly though, there aren't really any disadvantages- there's no reason not to use Rails 2.0.
Rock star?
The social network that once you're 'good enough' to join, you won't want to.
Top Experts Dish with their Best Kept Marketing Secrets
PR is also important I think. If you build something people want, then it.s just about letting ppl know about it. We're in the media industry thugh, so it may be diff for others.
Only skimmed the Fast Company article, but seems like Watts' research mostly calls into question only the idea of key "super-influencers".

Though Gladwell emphasized "influencer" types in his book, the more general "tipping point" idea is that of "critical mass" -- a threshold beyond which a trend becomes self-sustaining. Think of the original context of "critical mass": nuclear reactions. No one fissible atom need be a "super-influencer" -- just getting enough identical atoms in the same space results in the desired chain reaction.
nice submarine article for dopplr
Seems to be entirely word of mouth and blogs-- we don't do any marketing effort.

For many/most startups, I think the best strategy is one where users generate users. Viral/widgets, word of mouth, or SEO/UGC.

http://andrewchen.typepad.com/andrew_chens_blog/2007/11/why-...

Read that 10 times. ;-)

For a b2b startup, obviously that's not entirely practical...
This is worse than the first article.

They seem to be conflating the use of a high-level, SQL-like language with the architecture of the system. Of course you could layer a SQL-like language on top of a MapReduce-based storage and processing array, and for some queries that would be very user-friendly. If that is their whole point it is true but trivial.

I think BigTable does have a limited join capability now.

The real difference between a MapReduce-oriented system and typical SQL storage options is something like this. MR gives you assured scalability at the cost of limiting what kinds of queries you can do, and as the authors correctly point out, some queries get more and more onerous to create. Usually, SQL storage engines place ease of querying above all else, but have to go through painful and expensive procedures to scale well.
I think people want this information but, like with many UGC sites, there really isn't any reason for me to either submit or rank it.
Why Your Startup Shouldn't Hire Seth Godin
Nascar's Race Problem
That could be an interesting startup :)
Why would someone get involved with this site instead of doing a Google search for "credit card best ..."? No one needs a "community" for a credit card selection decision.

Failing that, Consumer Reports has the information at the library.
Yes, I Google for this kind of thing all the time...and quite frequently don't get good answers. I'm a rare bird, I guess, in the sense that I'm usually looking for answers about other people's systems, and so I'm dealing with hundreds of hardware, OS, version, etc. differences. Most folks only ever deal with a few such variants at any given time. Nonetheless, I can see this being a very useful service...not a terribly profitable one (at least in its early stages), but extremely useful. Assuming people use it, of course.
Is owning a PS3 a prerequisite for that class?
The most famous rock stars, and actors, and sports players, are paid a lot due to high demand and low supply. (Plenty of supply of willing people, but not plenty of supply of people with hundreds of thousands of fans.)
Applications now open for summer 2008 YC funding cycle
My other comments were edited since I sort of feel bad about jumping all over it... Theres normally so much sleaze associated with credit card marketing in general that it is hard not to jump on it sometimes... For starters, your plesk login page is indexed by Google. Probably not the best idea for site security.

After that if the site is to work you need to make sure you keep it really pure and unbiased. Don't allow users to submit affiliate links, put strict controls on user ratings and don't allow small groups to drastically affect the site. Inherently the site sets itself up to be abused by marketers but if you can put strict enough controls in place to keep it relatively unbiased you have the potential to create a decent resource.
Triggit uses Erlang
who goes to the library anymore?

[update]
I forgot to mention: with constantly changing credit card terms, you would think that even articles about the best credit cards would get stale (then again I could be wrong)
The huge disadvantage is that there's a lot of misinformation in tutorials now. The first page :scaffold section of just about every beginning Rails tutorial is broken in Rails 2.

Lots of little things are changed. Some of them are confusing and hard to decipher when tutorials and message boards say things should be working when they're not.
This is probably the first genuinely valuable article I've read on OnStartups. This is dead-on, and cuts across pretty much every aspect of running a software company:

* Engineering --- BigCo rockstars can be process-bound, require 30 page MRDs to start projects, and gummed up in the tar-pit dev platform choices of their previous project; your startup should not be using J2EE or ACE.

* Marketing --- You know you're fucked when you're pre-revenue and your marketing plan involves dropping 20k on vanity booth kits to take to conferences, or when your marcom person spends more money on mailing lists than on organizing meetups.

* Sales --- Just having an account manager backs you into a corner on pricing; now you have to make 50k off a customer to make them "worth having". BigCo sales rockstars need armies of sales engineers to be effective, and may spend more time selling you on why they should be promoted to Global All-Encompassing Executive VP Of Worldwide Sales.

A big difference between Microsoft and your company is that, for better or worse, everything inside of Microsoft is at least designed to help people do what Microsoft thinks will improve shareholder value. At a BigCo, you can work your MRDs and add $50MM to the year. Nothing at your company is designed to make people successful. If you sit back and do what you're supposed to do at a startup, you die.
I don't think it's that bad - to me it seems clear as to what it's about.

It's not like a spammer or pr0n site which I feel is what you're making it sound like

Why not let ppl bitch or say something good about their cards?

it's like saying who needs another blog about startups and business?
I suppose, but you can't take a list like this at face value. It's fun, but still meaningless without controlling for various other factors (like percentage of high scores from public vs. private high schools, etc).
Its not spammy but the lack of disclosure that it is basically an affiliate site sort of gets to me. There are too many sites like this on the internet designed for google and thrown together to make a quick buck. The kid seems like he has at least some ability to code, why not put that towards something with a little more value-added.
Forget about online tutorials... they're all skimpy and short on details. Just get Obie's book 'The Rails Way.' It's definitely THE BEST book on Rails available today.

http://www.amazon.com/Rails-Way-Addison-Wesley-Professional-...
it is not using affiliate links. the links out are that way so i can count the clicks. plus all links are user submitted.
I found the iMac the least funny looking of the ten pictures.
I've gotta assume any publication that could write a positive review of this thing has to be pay-for-play.
J.J. Abrams' Mystery Box talk at TED
thanks for the input. currently, i'm allowing users to use affiliate link only as an incentive for them to add more cards. i want to make sure all the details that they add are objective and no spamming occurs. in order to rate cards, you have to be registered, and can only rate once per card. i'll add a captcha to the registration to make sure no fake accounts are made.

do you think it's really important to not allow affiliate links?
Oops, I should have read the article first.
I predict a big backlash against the whole concept of software patents soon.

Oops, I exposed my naivete in public again :|
It's a meat market. I applied (out of intellectual curiosity) and got in, but decided not to actually go through with it when I learned that birthday, age, height and "build" (choices are "slim", "athletic", "average" and "curvy") are required information before you can activate your account.
There was a time in this country, a long time ago, when reading wasn't just for fags.
Neat Javascript hack at reddit (with explanation of how they did it)
to me if there's no misleading information or favored affiliates due to better affiliate terms (without making it public/obvious ala 'sponsored results') and not based on community feedback - I still fail to see what's wrong

I don't see anything deceptive
After watching that movie... So much of it is happening now...

READING IS FOR FAGS. HEY THIS GUY IS A FAG!
Yes I would say its really important. If a person has the potential to earn money from a card submission they also have the incentive to start gaming the system (groups of people even) by rating their card highly even though it may not be the best card.

Also you really need to limit the voting by ip address, what prevents me from adding an affiliate link and then creating accounts with my 50 different email addresses and boosting that card to the top all for my personal gain...
I'd consider hiring people right out of highschool. I'm thinking of the kids who are obsessed about college admissions and are in that very intense competition to make into Harvard or MIT or what have you. From what I've seen, the kids who make it to these plaaces worked harder in high school than in college, and they work pretty hard in college. It's like, once they get in, they feel like they made it already.

A kid without a college degree is pretty undervalued nowadays, IMO.
yeah, i guess a lot of the work in trying to keep it unbiased can be saved if no affiliate links are allowed. i have updated the new card submission page to reflect that. thanks for your feedback.
Lessons learn from contributing to an Open Source project
But you can have lifestyle tech companies too, or can't you?
Well, it certainly does suck.
I liked the Cambridge YC HQ quite a bit. It's much homier than the one in MV.
I wish more people understood the ideas in this article. Opposing the minimum wage doesn't mean you hate the poor; opposing anti-discrimination laws doesn't mean you're racist; opposing generous maternity leave doesn't mean you're sexist. Incentives matter, and often---probably much more often than not---the most straightforward and intuitively appealing solutions introduce incentives pointing in exactly the opposite direction.

Economic law is almost as immutable as physical law: trying to fix poverty using a minimum wage is like building a bridge using the wrong tensile strength for steel. Intent is irrelevant, because you can't fool nature.
Do what you like to my CSS, but stay out of my HTML
Nice. Game development will really benefit from the majority of studios moving away from C/C++ (someday, far in the future). This is a step in that direction.
I like the layout of the site, but you have an uphill battle. Most sites I've seen that go this way are all ad and scam-- it's very hard for people to push past that. Your site doesn't feel like that now, but you might want to tone it down a little on the graphics. I think being as subtle and simple as possible might help people take the site a little seriously-- you're fighting against some difficult stereotypes and every little bit helps.

Best of luck!
WebMynd Could Change the Way You Bookmark Websites
Much smaller too, right? I wonder how they'll fit all the groups if next year they have even more.
How Much Would It Take For You To Sell Your Friends; Apparently Very Little
How have YC founders agreed on product names?
And do you need to have the same url as your product name?
Tesla Motors crashes onto the market
Well, you don't need to have the same company name as your product name, but it sure helps to have the domain name for your product name.
We often take into account the most direct effects of a law without taking into account the indirect effects. Or, as Bastiat would put it, we look at the things seen but ignore the things not seen:

http://bastiat.org/en/twisatwins.html
Any recommendations on how to do stress testing?
i know apache has some benchmarking tools, and httperf is useful for stress testing
To wit: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080125/ap_on_re_us/farming_wate...
Nice picture.
That's why Java is still in the lead...

Edit: is that the Obie from the "do you think we are stupid" thread?
mint.com is featuring better checking accounts and credit cards than the users currently have. Check them out.
plugin detects people in public photos
New software for searching the content of a picture rather then a description
Isn't this similar to what Riya.com has been doing?
Plug: word count Greasemonkey script for yc application form http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/13291
"Are any of the following true? ..."

You forgot "are you a terrorist" ;-)

That question seems to indicate that there will be automated screening out of applications?
Yes, the very same Obie... And I agree... I just got the Rails Way, and from what I have seen so far, leagues ahead of any other book out there...
I don't think the YC crew is silly enough to automatically discard applications. Most likely they'll use this question to pull out applications for a preliminary "can we see anything amazing here" filtering stage.

PG has said before that traits listed in that question aren't absolutely disqualifying -- I think his exact words were "we'll bend any rule if you're a genius" -- but from a perspective of streamlining the application-handling process, I'm sure they'd like to eliminate the applications from non-genius rule-benders as quickly as possible.
I think this article misses the point of the book. The reviews on Amazon seem to frame a different picture of what he is actually writing than this Business Week article does.

"Scott has clearly and entertainingly shown why policy makers, entrepreneurs and investors should focus more attention on high growth, high potential start-ups and less on the ''me-too'' new companies than is currently the case."

I think this is something that most people here would probably agree with.
I think you can infuse a great deal of personality in your site, without necessarily showing faces.

Lots of "faceless" corporations have "faceful" sites, so I don't take the presence of absence of faces on a site as a hint about quality either way.
Er, "sell your friends" and "put a paid message in your personal stream" are NOT equivalent. I guess "sell your friends" will get more hits, though.
Excellent product and I'm looking forward to seeing all the new features the WebMynd guys have in store! Congrats.
Cool man, I like it. That's an area where Google searches fail consumers.
woot! Way to go guys!
I wouldn't want to join any social network that would have me as a member.
No, there's no automated screening. We added this question because people's answers are sometimes so unclear that we can't be sure of the answers to these. It serves the same purpose as a check digit in a credit card number.

We certainly wouldn't automatically reject a group that answered this question yes. Loopt would have, among others.
The visual history slider is really, really slick.
Computer-Aided Stalking :-/