skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Chicago, IL - or Evanston, Skokie which are around. Great place. No need to have car, unless you want to have it :-)
Indianapolis, IN
I could tell from all the people already dissing Arc before it was released that whatever I released was going to be attacked on any possible pretense. So, like someone bracing himself to be hit, that was what I was thinking about as I was about to release it: what are people going to seize upon as a way of attacking it? Which meant that was what much of the initial announcement ended up being about.

It was a pretty odd situation to be in. If I'd been releasing Arc into a neutral environment, I probably would have said what I wrote in http://paulgraham.com/core.html. But maybe it's just as well I gave all the flames something to expend themselves on before talking about subtler questions.
You said News.YC uses some kind of persistent hash structure for storing everything. This seems to me like Greenspun's Tenth Law except with Berkeley DB instead of Common Lisp; I wouldn't want to write the logic to do what BDB already does much better and faster (I don't want to implement ACID transactions myself if I decide I need them).
Entrepreneurs and Evolutionary Biology: The Relationship of Testosterone to New Venture Creation
I mean the kind that will not let you create a list whose elements could be of any type.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=111278
Funny that you mentioned Slashdot as a paragon of intelligent community. I recently stopped going to /. all together because the signal-to-noise ratio got too low. You can't talk about anything there without getting past a bunch of 'first post' and GNAA comments, and once you find a decent thread of discussion, it is inevitably hijacked by some amateur Grammar Nazi pointing out the difference between its and it's (since the person who misused it obviously did it on purpose... definitely couldn't be a typo).

You could say "just browse at 4 and higher," but then you miss a lot of good stuff that was downmodded for political reasons, or was too far down the page to ever get upmodded to begin with. This gives more weight to early comments than later ones, and hence everything must be hastily done, and hence there will be a typo which will bring out the Grammar Nazis, etc.

Slashdot has a lot of problems. The only reason it hasn't become a Digg or Reddit is because human moderators actually screen the stuff that gets posted, rather than rely on the (lack of) wisdom of the crowds. Content-wise, Digg and Reddit tread a lot of the same territory as Fark nowdays, only on Fark the main point is writing a funny headline or photoshopping a funny image, not the story itself.

I think YC News works because it is small, and I think it stays small because it is focused. So thank you all for keeping it focused.
If I could vote you up twice for this comment, I would. :)
Incidentially, I'm reading John Gardner's "Grendel" right now, which my English teacher calls postmodern. Mostly it consists of Grendel ranting about how humanity enrages him and that's why he kills dozens of people. Similar to Perl, when you think about it...
M.Sc. in Electrical Engineering and Applied Physics (no, not two degrees, a combined syllabus). Oh, and I'm a programmer. Or something.
I lived in Cambridge, MA (Harvard Square in particular) for two years and would say that Somerville, Arlington, and Cambridge are all good places to check out. Boston and the surrounding area has become one of the leading centers for BioTech research, so that would be a big plus for your wife.

I currently live in Providence, RI which is about an hour south of Boston. Smaller hacker community, but at least there is one and its not to far from Boston either. We also have a growing BioTech industry thanks to Brown University. I have a friend that works at EpiVax and loves his job. Might be worth checking out.
It seems like most of you are defining the web to be separate from the people using it. Doesn't the Machine include the hamsters making the wheels spin?
I'll lend a hand and upmod it.
I'm a big Erlang fan, but I think that the concepts it introduces can be ported to other languages with enough work. Bringing Erlang concepts to more traditional languages has the potential to completely transform how we think about structuring massively parallel programs. Personally, I can't wait for python to transparently scale to thousands of machines. A pipe dream, perhaps, but that's what I'm pulling for.
Maybe people just didn't like the article.
Stay near 6th street!
Our secret weapon is Blub.
How about using "early" votes just to cater for individual taste, not for article points/karma/whatever? By "early" I mean before a user has acquired enough karma, or gravitas, or pompousness to actually be known to make a positive contribution.
Sadly I am kind of amused at that consistent record.

People pick strange things to excel at, and I'm pretty sure that guy is unique.
In the US any college town that size should fit the bill. It will be cheaper if not a suburb of a big city (Boulder is pretty expensive), and have a better climate if in the west. Portland might be the optimum.
Columbus is a nice place to stay, as long as you don't mind the cold. I have been here for the past 4 years, and really like it. Its not too expensive, yet the city has a lot to offer, both socially and culturally. Having Ohio State's campus here brings a huge student population, and along with the working crowd in Columbus, makes for good balance.

Though I maybe I am missing what jmtulloss is trying to get to here... There is a sizeable tech industry, but from my experience, you have one of three options - work for a financial (bank/insurance) firm, work for the state, or work consulting. Not too many startups in Columbus.. either that, or I am ill-informed [I hope I am ill-informed :D]
I write C# professionally in my "day job". It's not a bad language to learn if you're just starting out with programming. It's not something that you'll pick up overnight, but if your cofounder is interested in mentoring you, that's the best way to learn. DO NOT under any circumstances bother with any Microsoft certification course training materials. They're utter garbage. I learned from Troelsen's Pro C# and the .NET Platform:

http://www.amazon.com/Pro-2008-NET-Platform-Fourth/dp/159059...

Then again, I was coming from a programming background, so YMMV. I would probably try going to the bookstore and flipping through some of the .NET books, and deciding which one feels like it's a good fit.

Before you take the leap to learn .NET, though, make sure your cofounder is on board. You'll need his/her help and support.
+1 for the Squirrel Hill and Shadyside neighborhoods in Pittsburgh. Incredibly cheap housing, biotech jobs are numerous, and there's more capital available than you'd think. CMU & Pitt churn out lots of science and engineering students as well.

Major cons: cold winters (it hit the single digits recently), shitty road surfaces
נחמד.
In the everlasting words of Pat Cadigan ("Death in the Promised Land"), what you are describing is akin to putting a dirty shirt and a pile of straw in a wooden box for the spontaneous generation of mice.

It took an enormous amount of cumulative optimization pressure to turn self-replicating RNA strings into humans. The Web doesn't have anything remotely on that order, and no, the "reproduction" of corporations and startups doesn't even begin to approach the quantitative selection pressures involved.

See: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/11/no-evolution-fo.html
Madison Wisconsin is a neat town-- I almost moved there. Winters are a bit cold.

I'm digging Seattle quite a bit... It's a big soggy in the winter but downright glorious in the summer. Winters aren't much wetter than the Bay Area, near as I can tell. Great access to outdoorsy stuff and a fairly lively startup community. Skiing 45 minutes east. Dry wine country 2 hours east. If you want to live in the sticks, there are some cool towns that people commute from on ferries. How cool is that?

Austin is cool. Decidedly un-Texan and charming.
By backend stuff I meant code for administration and analysis, not server infrastructure.

For persistence we use hash tables written to files as s-expressions, and lazily loaded after restarts.
Abstraction. Having Unicode strings (i.e. strings that are a sequence of Unicode code points rather than octets) allows you to work with strings without worrying about encoding (except when doing IO, which is where encoding matters).

If you treat strings as octets OTOH even simple operations like concatenating two strings might lead to headache if the strings are in two different encodings. And how do you keep track of the encodings of individual strings? Madness lies down that road.
Very very very cool
B.A., CS, 2000. A prestigious US university you've heard of.

Essentially had to self-teach myself programming after graduation, because all they taught was Java and C++ and Windows NT. Real programming is a totally different mindset.
It seems to me like this result would be true for anything a person tries to do that requires a significant amount of time investment.

For instance, I'd like to see this same study on people who have discovered Warcraft or the like.
I honestly think being in the same room at least a few days a week is priceless.
Congratulations, you have built an app with one user!

Now, if you want more users, and your home machine has a static IP, and port 80 is open, no problem. Except for the part where you will live in terror of any security holes. Oh, and the part where you've only got one server -- if this is your production server, where do you do your development? And then there's the part where you have to set up an init task to launch your server when the computer reboots. And the backups, of course.

Now show me how to give three remote collaborators secure access to your app's source code, but no access to anything else.

The default Rails install workflow is really nice, don't get me wrong. And Capistrano is great, and Slicehost is pretty easy to work with. But for a quick-and-dirty Rails demo, particularly in a teaching environment, Heroku appears to kick serious ass.
https://spideroak.com/

Flash intro?! REALLY!?
The value to the reader of being pointed in a rich new direction is obvious.

I'm not saying that you wrote a scholarly paper. I'm saying you introduced a (fairly esoteric) metaphor with a clear and unambiguous origin and failed to mention it; that struck me as ungracious. As for "forcing it in", it couldn't be more relevant. You named your post after it.
What to do when (everyone thinks) Google's out to get you
I grew up in Pittsburgh and it has another con you forgot: it is one of the cloudiest places in the US. IIRC only Erie and Buffalo are worse. I took it for granted when I was a kid, but it would get me down now.
Why wait for Python to reinvent itself? Just use Erlang and call Python libraries from Erlang if you really need them.
So we can now consider it proven that entrepreneurs are real men.
This is strange. The only place in America I would leave Chicago for is San Fransisco.
The real test is whether you can discover new questions.
or Berkley?
It was amusing for me the first few times I saw it, then irritating, then amusing again when he(?) actually quoted some Haskell.

However, what I found interesting is not so much whether there are novelty comments like that, but rather the ratio of novelty comments to on-topic comments. It seemed rather extreme at the time I posted this: AFAICT, none of the reddit comments were on-topic, they were all attempts to make jokes.

Just an observation really, who am I to tell people whether my own posts provoke any sort of technical discussion?
YC Feature Request: Going to page 2
This is a bit of a nitpick, but due to the way I use YC [1], when hitting the "more" link, I'll frequently get the "unknown or expired link" message.

I'm guessing it's either a session reset or something has changed in the matrix. Regardless, wouldn't it make more sense to make the "more" link be a relative pointer to whatever the next 25 items are in the story list at that time?

[1] I will open news.YC and leave it in the background, clicking on stories (or more frequently, going to directly to the commentary) when I have a minute or two to do so. This means it may be 30 minutes to 2 hours between when I first load the page to when I hit the "more" button.
I have no problem using Erlang when I need it, but eventually concurrency is a problem that every language is going to have to deal with more effectively than it does now. The Actor pattern makes a lot of sense to me conceptually, and makes it trivial to parallelize systems. It's not like Erlang's the end all, be all of programming languages, but it is a forward looking one. I look forward to other languages catching up with it.
At the moment I checked, 101 people liked it and 30 did not:

http://reddit.com/r/programming/info/67xk0/details

AFAICT, none of the six comments I've seen on reddit are critical, but on the other hand they don't praise it either.
No, you could still be an elitist, even if you (we?) really are better. Elitism is thinking that being better counts for something.
Just tried Heroku... very fun.

There are limits to my joy, though. I immediately miss:

- emacs. Or at least Textmate. When I press ctrl-a and I get "select all" instead of move-beginning-of-line, I sigh inwardly.

- git. Although the "snapshot" feature is awesome and is arguably all that many people would want in a tool like this.

- autotest. This is a big one. I'm not much of a Rails wizard, but already I'm hooked on the joys of autotest.

Rather than ask for any of these potentially obscure features, however, let me ask this: how about a secure API that lets me (a) run rake tasks remotely and receive their output in return; and (b) upload/download any of my source files? Then I believe you can leave autotest, emacs, and perhaps even git support as exercises for the student. :)
I actually don't know anything about the startup climate, you're right. I just know of a lot of big names out there. You would hope with a major engineering University right there and a sizable tech industry, there would be at least some startup culture.
http://toohardtopronounce.com/2008/2/7/the-three-must-have-r...
Hitwise Reports on Google's Top Properties
> ungracious

Oh goodness me, that word is redolent of drawing rooms and mannerly discourse.

I present you with two options:

1. There is a comment feature on the post, and it permits you to include hyperlinks. Help yourself. That's exactly what the comments are for, to allow you to suggest avenues of investigation for other readers.

2. If you think there's a rich connection that ought to be mined in prose, write a blog post and go into as much detail as you think appropriate. I'd like to read it.
so someone downmodded all of:

- a simple, popular comment

- a comment suggesting maybe the first one shouldn't have been upmodded so much

- a comment backing off

Why would you downmod all of them? If you like dislike the first comment, you should like the second, and vice versa. And if you're unhappy with me in general for the first two, you should like the third one.
To save you some reading time, the algorithm appears to be:
Load the first 10 or so people in alternating rows only (not the same row and not adjacent rows) from rear to front. After they are done, load the next 10 people in alternating rows only from rear to front. Repeat.

This assumes that loading luggage into overhead bins is the biggest time sink for most loading. It maximizes the number of individuals who can be loading overhead compartments at any one time, rather than everyone waiting for the person at the front of the line to load their baggage 1-2 at a time or so.
i'm pretty much in the same situation as you - just two months ahead. I found that the best way to learn is to find a simple project that you would like to do and do it. I am doing a web based project management site.

That way you will learn as you go, and have the joy of seeing something that works, and that you have built yourself. It will probably be buggy as hell, and sometimes you will want to tear your head off. But when you get it working it's great. And before you know it you have grasped the basics.

That's how it worked for me anyway.
"We believe OpenSocial now has what's necessary to launch OpenSocial apps to users at scale."
Investor worries hang over Microsoft bid
I can't believe nobody has jumped on this yet...
I-N-I!

All UIUC/Chicago hackers interested in meeting up should email me: jared [at] aftervibe [dot] com
Java will happily let you fill a list or hash with objects that could be of any type yet it is generally the quintessential blub language.
At least 30 people (the ones who voted) didn't like your article. A lot of your articles have shown up on Reddit, in part due to your strong branding of yourself. Maybe some people are tired of seeing them. Who knows? Apparently it is enough to get you whining about the site that made you popular.
One Internet cut explained, but four others still a mystery
Which of those are you planning to contribute?
They go on to state that doing it by blocks rather than strictly alternating may work better for cases of families that cannot be split up.
Foreclosure Web sites expand audience
That's where the money is
Ray Kurzweil has been milking the AI teat for a very long time. He's a futurist without much future.
Google ramps up Office challenge
I have to disagree with nkohari a little bit about C# being a good language to learn if you're just getting started out with programming. C# is a very big language and it may be hard to fit into your head without at least a little programming background.

If you're more interested in just getting a view into the programmer's world and have a feel for "difficult" vs. "impossible", I would recommend starting to dabble with a smaller language first. Something like Python or Ruby would be an excellent place to start.

You don't need to be a "programmer" in either thing to start grasping concepts, but they are small enough that you can tinker around to get a feel for things.

Once you have some rudimentary knowledge about the very basics of development, THEN I would focus on learning C#.

It is a nice language, but there's a lot to learn - especially since the .Net stack is so large.
Are you acting like a celebrity sheep with your marketing plans?
They started earlier; that's not what I would consider the normal definition of "outlive".
Check out Santa Clarita, CA. It's just shy of 300,000 in terms of population and it's just north of LA (at the 5 and 14 freeway). It is a bit expensive ($400k+ home prices) unless you opt to live on the outskirts of town. You can survive on under $30,000 with a family though, if you have inexpensive tastes and have some self control. It's only about 5mi radius, so everything is pretty close. The city is developing quickly and does have a few tech companies around here, but I have to be honest, the entertainment industry is much larger here. We have a bunch of movies and other things filmed here. But as far as job opportunities for hackers, we do have a somewhat entrepreneurial climate.

The only "Universities" are 2 community colleges: College of the Canyons, and Cal Arts. College of the Canyons is decent though, with about 20,000 students per semester and growing. Under an hour drive to UCLA and USC without traffic, and there's Cal State Northridge too (my school).

Another notable feature, Six Flags, Magic Mountain is here.

And as an added bonus, we are in a valley (surrounded on all sides), and it just snowed on the mountains. It looks beautiful.
clarification: Arc should probably have some kind of database hook at some point, not much point in reinventing that wheel when it works so well for many problems. But that's not the point, as the author has repeatedly pointed out.
Trep did you ever hear anything on this? I don't think I'll be able to make it in person either.
The demo failed on my personal site (http://michaelhartl.com/) by trying to serve ads on the left of the page, thereby obscuring ~1/3 of the content.
Copenhagen is a great place. I'll buy you a beer if you go here :-)
Columbus OH???

I lived in Columbus. Your opinion is invalid.

Topography: absolutely flat

Size: Columbus is a sprawling stain of concrete blight of about a million people.

College: If you obsessively love football and Natti Light, OK.

Tech Industry: name one. A small, dying satellite office of a huge multinational doesn't count. Neither does insurance or fast food.

Beautiful: Short North area is OK, but nothing special unless you compare it Toledo or Dayton
BS Comp Sci / BA Philosophy - Monash University (Australia)
Ask.com launches 'BigNews' with social media spin
Again, we have two detection options, "Automatic" which is what the demo is using in addition to "Let Me Decide" where you can specify the HTML elements that you'd like the ads to appear in by simply adding the "ESAemptyspace" class attribute to the elements you'd like (http://www.emptyspaceads.com/publisher/customization_options).

For the purpose of the demo, we use the Automatic detection method... but if you signed up as a publisher with us, you could get the fine grain control that you desire.
Web pioneer hits critics with Lisp gauntlet
Ask YC: If you could buy any company in the world who would it be and why?
Okay folks, a fun one for you, if you had an infinite cash mountain, which one company would you buy and why? Remember only one company!
It does, that's precisely what þ and ð represent (the unvoiced and voiced variants respectively, which got folded into the same "th" in English). Also, þorn is the best letter name ever :)
Thanks for the serious reply. I'm not sure I deserved it :)
I appreciate your clarification of the distinction which is not clear from the "manifesto" (http://arclanguage.com/).

I suspected you deliberately mentioned ASCII-only and presentational markup because you knew it would tick off (and hopefully scare away) a certain type of perfectionist which you consider non-productive for explorative hacking.
If I had an infinite amount of cash, I would buy the United States of America. Then, after the current government is abolished I would establish a monarchy. As a monarch I would declare that all companies owned by my subjects are in fact only held by my subjects but owned entirely by the royal family.

...Hehe. This is some of the stupidest stuff I've ever written.
That's exactly what the comments are for

Good idea! Don't know why I didn't think of that.
Creators, Synthesizers, and Consumers
> I would recommend starting to dabble with a smaller language first. Something like Python or Ruby would be an excellent place to start.

While I'd also recommend starting with something other than C#, I'd be hesitant about using the phrase "smaller language".

Good Ruby or Python is a deeper subject than C# (IMO); I agree that it's easier to get started in either of these, but becoming proficient in the language itself may actually be more difficult.

As you say, the .NET ecosystem, like Java's, is large and many-headed (I'd argue Java is even worse) and using it efficiently can be a steep climb.
3 times? That hurts. Shows your dedication though.
document.getElementById("input").addEventListener("keypress", function(e) {
e = e || window.event;
if (e.keyCode == 13) {
$('#eval').click();
e.target.value = "";
}}, false);

...or the equivalent in jQuery. Not IE compatible (no, I don't care)

In the meantime, here's a bookmarklet you can use to "patch" it:

javascript:(function(){document.getElementById("input").addEventListener("keypress", function(e) { e = e || window.event; if (e.keyCode == 13) { $('#eval').click(); e.target.value = ""; }}, false);})();