skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I hope Java doesn't have a nuclear power plant control system under it - it's explicitly mentioned that it is not designed for that in its terms of service.

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Standing Still Predicts School Success Better Than IQ
I'm certain Startup School does not factor school background very heavily. I went to super crappy schools and never got an interesting degree, and was accepted to both the first Startup School here in the valley, and the next year to Y Combinator. pg and co. are not school snobs.
I looked through his comment history, and it's true! :)
The ability to hide a story, to make it possible for me to just show what i haven't read before.
5 more essentials for your programming toolbox
Aww that's cute.

I remember when I was a religious beginner programmer.
Why do you care about the output? You are certainly not expected to tweak the output. That's a really bad idea.

But do check to see if it supports the browsers you care about.
State genererally means the state of mutable things. Invoking a continuation will not reset the things you mutated, it will only reset the variables to their memory locations (in fact it does not "reset", the variables are still there). It's the same as with a closure:

(let ((x 2))
(let ((closure (lambda () (print x))))
(set! x 4)
(closure))) ; prints 4 not 2

The closure doesn't remember the old value of x, it just remembers the memory location.
I recently interviewed for a startup and decided to pass. They had a cool project and what seemed like cool people but their business model was prone to lawsuits and were still not generating money. I don't want to work for a company that relies only on VC funding.
We're (sadly) aware of this problem. Since we're using fcgi, the processes are not in memory all the time, which means a slow loading time if the fcgi is not in memory at that time.

We are using HostingRails for hosting, but I'm guessing it's a recurrent problem regardless of the hosting provider.

Mongrel would solve the problem (since it would have dedicated memory), if we would be ready to spend a few bucks more...
Looks great. Personally I love yubnub but I don't think they've taken the idea very far - lets hope wundrbar does. Yubnub has user added scripts which is an advantage though.
Ranting about Java...
My current job is test automation, coding in 4-Test, the test automation language in the SilkTest platform owned by Borland. This is pretty good, even an industry standard for test automation for GUI apps, though it has limitations. So we had some date/time stuff to do which we wrote in Java which would be called from the silk test script. Problem is as I'm sure most of y'all know, Java differs from build to build, and the latest Java version is not always the "greatest". So our Java routines being called work on some boxes, and not on others - the process fails to be killed upon completion. Since the whole point about test automation is not having to "babysit" test runs, we needed something that wasn't going to be Russian roulette as to wether it would work or not. So I wrote up a couple DLL's in c++ to replace the Java classes being called, and they work like a charm. Don't get me wrong - I like Java - easy to use and good for writing up lots of code fast - just I think the recent experience is turning me into a bit of a c++ "snob", lol. And I found a cool IDE for it too - open source - http://www.bloodshed.net/dev/devcpp.html - lots easier than Visual C++ for my money, and it has all the unix libs included.

Anyhoo with all the modern "high level" languages out there, thought fairness might demand one put in a "plug" for what could still be the best oo language out there! :-)
Wundrbar's site says they're a platform and soon hackers will be able to plugin services into the system to be used by anyone. I think we'll see some awesomely clever uses of Wundrbar as its community starts to grow.
Overall, nice work. It seems to have a lot of potential! It would be cool to be able to use wundrbar in a linux terminal and pipe the results to a Conky (http://conky.sourceforge.net/) window :)

If in doubt about structuring the query, I find its much easier to start by typing in the service name and following up with parameters specified in the feedback box.
280 North comes at the problem from a different direction. They're building infrastructure for making a new class of web-based apps that really feel like desktop ones. They just happened to pick Powerpoint to build first. But of the 60k LOC they've written so far, I believe 280 Slides is only 20k.

RescueTime and 8aweek are also quite different: RT is for people and groups who want to track their productivity, and 8aweek is an alternative to blacklist-based web filtering.

Our answer to the problem of collisions is that in any large market, which we encourage startups to be in, there is going to be room for several different approaches.
Gravatar.com rewritten from Ruby to PHP
That'll be great. One thing I've noticed about yubnub is that I don't have to think about listing the commands because you know most search engines will be in there and the alias easily guessable. Yubnub does basically stop at forming search queries though.
Will they be running Quaero on a fifth-generation computer?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_generation_computer
Flickr was sort of a hacker project, in that like Blogger it was a side project of a group who thought they were working on something else.
Interesting discussion, but I think the average is more usefully thought of as the best unbiased predictor. In other words, given no other information about the process the mean is the best prediction one can make.
Ideas are free. Execution is what really counts.
Because it's...funny?

Actually, it's not funny at all. His attitude is a perfect example of how many 9-5 programmers act when faced with functional programming.

If he was a .NET developer he'd be using the new functional features of .NET 2.0 and greater in the same old imperative way and would just continue to miss the point.

I guess the reason why I thought this worthy of being posted was not to make fun of this guy personally, but to use his kind of thinking as an example.

Is that uncharitable of me?

If you think it is, then you'd probably downvote all the dailywtf.com submissions, too. Right?
The comments look like more blog posts, scroll down a bit and you'll see them.
Google takes swipe at Apple's iPhone - 'to have larger marketshare'
It would depend on how much you used them. In News.YC I try to avoid using even closures as much as I can. In the earliest versions I made practically every link on every page be a closure. The source is so simple that way. But keeping that many closures around (in case the user hits the back button a couple times then makes another choice) soon became unwieldy. You rapidly find you have a couple hundred thousand closures in memory. So now whenever I can conveniently get all the state I need into the arguments of a url, I do that.

You can see which links need to be closures by mousing over them. If the link looks like r?fnid=hashkey, it's a reference to a closure on the server. Usually it means there is something that has to be done after whatever the link does.

Though Arc has continuations, I haven't needed to use them anywhere in News yet (except for catch and throw, which is a degenerate case). Nothing has state that complicated.
My votes go to:

-RescueTime (So freaking valuable!)

-Kirkland North (definitely going to grow their userbase quickly! (once they launch))

-Chatterous (Because I had a very similar idea)

-------------------------------------------------

My notes are to:

-insoshi (you have an indirect competitor, lovdbyless, it's a rails based opensource social network maker thing)

-deluux (my first interpretation of what you guys do was a single login for every site (like openID or w/e) but then my second interpretation was that I can show my facebook page or elements from it, on my own site? Like a widget(s)? That would be awesome!)

-joberator(i think we simply need more developers, not referrals, because, at least in S. Florida, finding a developer through craigslist, career builder or monster is NOT easy, and my CS major friends dont have any referrals, period and they are in their last year of college, so I have to wait for them to graduate which is not sufficient)

-wundrbar(dont know if this is possible, but if you could simply be an option in the dropdown that accompanies that search box in top right of FireFox and IE7, that would ROCK MY FREAKING WORLD!)
Tableless forms
Definitely beautiful pdf output, but I was never happy with the available "latex2html" converters.

Bonus for being able to render mathematics in your docs.

Edit -- Also, I agree with you about the learning curve. Although it's very easy to get good-looking docs if you use one of the canned documentclasses and built-in commands, once you start to stray from those you're in deep water very quickly.
I don't think he meant the question literally.
My favorite is TipJoy

I like the basic principle of aggregating micropayments, but I think TipJoy going to be very limited until people can actually get money out (which of course means that TipJoy has to deal with the regulatory issues). So far they've accumulated $1531.54 in tips (assuming their website is up to date), which means that their 3% cut adds up to a grand total of $45.95... which isn't going to make anyone rich in a hurry.
Good ideas aren't quite worthless. Yes, ideas (for startups) are generally overvalued, particularly by people who have bad ones. Yes, execution is the most important ingredient in success. But ideas are worth something.
"Nuclear power plant" is a bad example. Actually, a lot of control software is written in the worst language in the whole wide world,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ladder_logic

...the reason Java [unqualified] can't be used is because of the indeterministic nature of garbage collection...thus Java RTS.
Yes. Thank you. I like POD for man-page -style docs, but for longer multi-section docs I'm not sure it buys you much more than plain text (except that you can easily convert to other formats). Also, it's harder to read than plain text -- though maybe easier than docbook xml.

The POD docs I see as html are just single long html pages. I realize this is just an implementation issue though.
They do have a search box plugin, along with a full fledged toolbar version (which has more functionality). http://www.wundrbar.com/static/extras
You can't tell much from the numbers of a startup this young. They've generated more revenue than Google had at the same age.
Agreed. I have no problem with government subsidising businesses to help get them off the ground, because a lot of the time it helps them grow to the level of competing quite quickly; except French farming.

However, no corporate group can ever perform well. One company running in a form of dictatorship over their product, like Jobs, can react quickly and, even for a large company, remain competative. However, if every decision has to go through multiple screening processes, tests, etc. you end up with a production cycle equivalent of Microsoft.

The Quaero project is doomed to failure. Not only is it going to have corporate bickering, but it's going to be in multiple languages. You can bet a large number of coders will enter from the UK, Netherlands and many other countries.

This means you're going to need translators to get the documents to read correctly in each individual language, or there's going to be many screw ups. Not only that, but you'll be faced with several days delay between project heads to get to a meeting. Bascially for a weekly status update, it would take probably 3 days to get everything translated and checked. So it's a weekly-3 status update, and what you did today is never going to be on the agenda, it's going to be the 3rd day on the next agenda, by which time something important is gone from your focus.

I belive the best words to describe this are, eww, and, no!
Those seem to just be a collection of html files where you can edit them and fill in the blanks. I guess if you like having your docs in raw html, it could be useful for those who have a hard time choosing where to begin. Thanks.
Sure -- my point was just that taking a 3% cut of $0.10 payments means that TipJoy needs to get very very big before it will be making much money.

Can TipJoy get big enough fast enough?
Paul, I really hope Juwo isn't reading your comment. Let's not start THAT again.
Tipping is just the initial form of micropayment they've implemented. Eventually they plan to support all forms. Could being able to charge people small amounts for digital content be big? Yes.
I believe that's one of the greatest things of telling Thunderbird just to read the article and not add in any comment feeds. I don't want to read comments, unless I want someone elses opinion.

I read a blog for the writer not the readers, or I would be reading -their- blogs.
This could be very cool.

I am trying out the firefox search box (http://www.wundrbar.com/static/extras). The default search is still google so I lose nothing and potentially gain a lot. Bring on the plugins!
both of them are pretty clunky. I'm generally not a fan of the open source clones though it is nice that scuttle has most of del.icio.us api functionality
One thing people don't want to do is have to memorize a syntax just to use a search engine. A lot of people have trouble with Google as it is. I realize that the idea is to augment traditional search engines' capabilities (so that people will have less trouble), but it's going to have to be easy for non-hackers to catch on to it. The learning curve has to be shallow or the average user is going to give up on it. That being said I really like the way it tells you what it thinks you mean as you type though, and definitely think there is potential for this type of thing.
If I were a betting man, SnapTalent would be the first I'd put coin on. I didn't actually think much of it (and, in fact, I think when I first talked to them early in Winter08 they didn't even have any useful code written yet...but maybe I'm misremembering), until they'd actually launched. It really looks great, though--a perfect way to handle the tech jobs market, which is a HUGE industry in and of itself. Monster and Dice have been fighting it out for years, and spending millions just marketing themselves. SnapTalent allows the world of bloggers and tech sites to market for them. Recipe for win if ever I saw one.
It would be cool to have this integrated into Firefox's address bar (I know the wikipedia trick already is).
Youtube in High Quality (see actual video)
That's quite nice. Still not sure how I feel about wiki-style plain text markup formats though. I like them for simple and short docs, emails, and README's because it looks good in the editor, but it seems like the more you ask from that sort of format, the weirder things begin to look as you add features to support writing larger docs (and you end up with more syntax to memorize as well).

Thanks for the heads-up.
The search box version doesn't show the previews, but the Firefox toolbar does the trick!
Tipping is just the initial form of micropayment they've implemented.

Well, that changes things. :-)
I know you might expect this from a cofounder, but I think Tipjoy is going to be huge.
PG is right - we'll be doing much more.

You can give far more than $0.10. That is just the default. It is really simple to give up to $10, and we might raise or remove that limit.

Also, we earn interest on money in our system. That makes the earnings closer to 6%. But we don't take a cut per tip, only on cash-out. This means that if A tips B who then tips C, each of those tips is overhead free. If C cashes out, we take a cut. The potential for a zero overhead transaction system is huge.
Thanks for that heads up. It's the exact opposite: "pay for what I surf".

Does anyone know if there is some automated reason this might have happened?
Persistent URL Home Page
-insoshi (you have an indirect competitor, lovdbyless, it's a rails based opensource social network maker thing)

Interesting. Our app is also in Rails, so it could actually help us a lot to have another project with complementary code. Any idea what their license is? There's almost nothing about them yet on Google. (I found the site of the guys who make it, but they don't list lovdbyless yet.)
Right click on the wundrbar search box and select 'add a keyword for this search'. Then you can just type 'keyword' <blah> in the firefox address bar.

Edit: This doesn't work with wundrbar for some reason.
Vim tab auto-complete
Hey, for the vimmers out there, this is such a great customization that I thought I'd pass it along for anyone who is interested. Add the following to your vimrc and you can use tab to auto-complete words while still preserving it as a tab insert where most appropriate (whenever your cursor is not over a word).

Anyone care to share their favorite vim tips?

function InsertTabWrapper()

let col = col('.') - 1

if !col || getline('.')[col - 1] !~ '\k'

return "\<tab>"

else

return "\<c-p>"

endif

endfunction

inoremap <tab> <c-r>=InsertTabWrapper()<CR>
So there's no focus? Some totally arbitrary person?

Ah what the heck, I signed up.
“TimeDeleted” - great idea.
It depends on how you define a hacker project. That is a fair characterization if you say that a hacker project is something that doesn't come out of a normal business process, regardless of the corporate structure that surrounds the people hacking away on it.
I agree that SQL is painfully inelegant. It's one of those standards you wish had never been established. Like Windows, only worse.

As for starting with MySQL, it does reflect the actual SQL side better, but it's another thing to install and have startup whenever you boot your computer. For just playing around with SQL without committing to anything, SQLite's a nice option.
Is it just me that sees Wonder Bra as the name though?
Heroku and easy Rails deployment
Beware of "niche markets".
Hey no problem, I can give you their contact info...I am putting my contact info back in my profile now.

It was supposed to be released under MIT license.. from what they were saying.
Hey Joe, Thanks for the comments. We're starting out in tech but will be moving to other verticals eventually. The other key advantage we have is that as the web's traffic is more international and as we add advertisers from different countries we can serve Ip targeted ads on the same publishers and be extremely local at the same time.

We have a global and pretty ambitious vision - its how hotjobs started, we're aiming to be even bigger in this phase of the web.
Page last changed 3 years ago

It's a shame quirksmode isn't updated very much (at all?) any more. It was (and still is, and to an extent) a great resource.
FriendFeed vs SocialThing!
From this headline it sounds like this is an article about the lameness of schools, but actually it's a very interesting article about the importance of self-discipline.
Why Is It So Hard To Say "I'm Sorry," Sarah?
I saw it. It says "stop wasting your time" and "get a life." It's not very impressive, as magic eye's go--it's just text.
I just came in to say something very similar; the article's actual headline is much better: "Old-Fashioned Play Builds Serious Skills". Thanks for the excellent link though curi!
The part I put in the headline is what I thought was most interesting.

Most of the rest seemed to consist of saying that lack of obedience in modern children indicates something is wrong with them. And finding things to blame this on, like toys.

I don't think the issue was self-discipline because the example of how they studied it was about whether the children would stand still when someone else told them to.
Prioritize
Ideas are two-a-penny, implementation and marketing are everything.

Unless you happen to be a patent lawyer in which case you believe the exact opposite.
Here's a feature request: How about allowing me to create tags for my items. That way my wife who has no interest in my tech links could subscribe only to those submissions tagged as "techless" for example.

So in effect, your friends could subscribe to a subset of your interests.
I think you missed the most interesting aspect, not about obedience or toys specifically, but that attempting to control, regulate and educate children has severely hampered their ability to control, regulate and educate themselves.

"Essentially, because children's play is so focused on lessons and leagues, and because kids' toys increasingly inhibit imaginative play, kids aren't getting a chance to practice policing themselves. When they have that opportunity, says Berk, the results are clear: Self-regulation improves."
So, is it a good thing that I talk to myself when programming? My parents always look at me a little strangely when I do that. (I suspect that my coworkers would've done so too, except that many of them also mumble to themselves while programming.)
I found the fact that something predicts school success better than IQ very interesting considering about all IQ predicts well is school success. For me it really confirmed the idea that what IQ measures isn't as fundamental a representation of cognitive ability as I grew up believing. I realise psychologists have moved onto a notion of 'g' but they still assume its highly correlated with IQ.

I strongly disagree with your assessment of the rest of the article, it seems like you're trying hard to fit it in to a particular world view. Concentration is not obedience, its vastly more important, and I don't think the lack of concentration shown was simply as a result of the childrens new aversion to obedience (if such a thing exists).
Bear Stearns succumbs to Wall Street's worst fears
They wanted kids to stand still when told to. That's not concentration they are looking for.
Google GPhone timeline
Android arrived in November... Any updates since then?
It depends on whether they failed to stand still because they simply didn't want to follow orders or because they couldn't. Not really enough information to judge on in this article, but I believe that its because they couldn't based on what I know of kids. Your romantic notion of these individualistic children who'd rather be concentrating on something else just doesnt gel with my experience with kids. In general they're eager to please, especially in a one off situations.
Yeah but, what was wrong with tabled forms?
Cool, glad you liked the article. Yeah, I'm still working on the zen of making catchy "click me now!" titles :).