skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To the founders (Ethan and Daniel?): will you reserve any editorial control? I guess the most obvious factor that could led to the entire site's corruption is bad data (e.g., Han Solo, God, etc.) or particular data that a party may not want public (e.g. Oprah's home phone number). Or has there been some clever thinking done to resolve that problem? I've read the guidelines and they seem quite cogent.
I was happy to read that one. And see that I was not the only one who's noticed the contradiction in TED: promoting innovation and educational projects (for example in Africa) but limiting its audience to a very few carefully-picked (rich (6k/seat)) VIP's.
Interesting. Thanks for that feedback.

We may need a followup poll on frameworks.

I think I'm beginning to like this poll facility.
correct decision

I can tell you right now that 100 percent of decisions in the marketplace are incorrect--at least, if I'm right in thinking the nytimes defines a "correct decision" as: Paying a price currently that will stay the same in the future.

Or, we can acknowledge that every transaction has one buyer, and one seller, and no matter how you define "correct", both of them can't be wrong.

Or, we could say that 100 percent of the decisions in the marketplace are correct, if we define the word itself correctly: The price that the market determines.
langpop.com is more up to date, and uses Freshmeat, which is better because it deals with released projects, not just started projects.
Ruby on Rails. It still amazes me that I can design, code, test and deploy even complex features in <= 1 day.
TED BlimpBot Report: Foiled by Air Conditioning
I am very curious about the same thing. All I can guess is there are still hackers developing CGI based web services for their startups. But why...
Missing option: Erlang
Straight from the penitentiary school of interior design:

http://blog.guykawasaki.com/DSC_0166.jpg

http://www.gov.im/lib/images/dha/prison/gallery/awinginterio...
This is a good point. However, what if you make your idea public and it is an idea that would benefit many people?
The first sentence is wrong:

ONE great puzzle about the recent housing bubble is why even most experts didn’t recognize the bubble as it was forming.

Almost every mainstream publication and plenty of regular folks saw the housing bubble for what it was years before it popped, including our own Matt Maroon: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=100156
The Rise and Fall of Thinking Machines: a doomed-yet-brilliant start-up
Look, I'm all in favor of opening up opportunities to more people, but let's get real: TED excludes people because the concept doesn't scale, not because it's run by elitists.

An open admissions policy would turn TED into something the size of Burning Man. Everyone would pile into the Rose Bowl, you'd get to "meet" the celebrities through binoculars, it would rapidly become even more of a scripted mass-market public event than it is now, and it would scare away many of the real celebrities, who would promptly go and invent TED II as a completely private, members-only meeting which we would never hear much about. You know, like Davos.

Instead of complaining about how TED isn't completely open, one should be giving thanks that it isn't completely closed.

I'm reminded of Richard Feynman's stories about how impossible it was to give a physics seminar after he won the Nobel Prize. If he scheduled a seminar under his own name, half the city would show up, it would get moved to a huge auditorium, and he would have to abandon his plan to discuss the tricky details of quantum electrodynamics with his peers and give a popular talk instead, because he couldn't bear to bore 95% of his audience to death. Feynman experimented with giving talks under a pseudonym, but found that this just made people angry when they found out, later -- there had been a Nobelist in town, and they didn't know, and they hadn't been invited!
35 People per Day Erroneously Declared Dead by Data Input Errors
He's not saying everyone who uses Java is a drone.
He's saying most Indians (and Americans) are Java drones.
Presumably, someone at TED brought up this very point, and the solution was to put the lectures online. Doing that put inspiring lectures in front of more people than possible by expanding the conference.

You might talk about the perk of being at Google is eating free food by great chefs, even though the actual reason you work there is because you want to work on great things with great people. In the same way, of course you're are going to twitter about bono and al gore being there, even though the real reason you're there is to see what people on the forefront of technology, entertainment, and design are doing, and do something about it in whatever way you can.

It's not that people don't want to talk about why they're actually there, but it's far easier to talk to someone else about perks rather than core reason. That sends the wrong message to those like the writer that feels outcast.
So, instead of democrats and republicans arguing about how to solve the U.S. health care emergency and how to pay for it, just get rid of the Department of Agriculture. Save a bunch of money and everyone get better. I like it.
Sony afraid of the Asus eee?
News.YC Dapp
Well, I thought about trying to argue that it's better to keep polls awkward and ugly, so that people get discouraged from creating the darned things and just ask questions instead. :) But, in fact, you're right: You've tried that already, and it hasn't worked.

I suppose polls are the online equivalent of asking people in the audience to raise their hands. It's a similarly useless technique for actually gathering data, but it can be effective as a rhetorical tool. And, given that the alternative in an online forum is to write for a completely invisible audience, maybe it is sometimes better than nothing.
Shouldn't updating a person's record to such a consequential state require double (or greater) data entry?
"It depends." Not a very useful answer, I know. :)
It's possible that they're building stuff with either a desktop component (RescueTime, DropBox, PikLuk) or a heavy algorithmic component on the back-end (I don't know of any, but then, I wouldn't...) Very few successful startups are only web; most combine a web aspect with some sort of domain-specific processing or data collection, which can be in any language.

There's code written in C and Ocaml in my current startup, but I didn't write it, so I didn't tick it off in the poll. But I could easily see us moving into an area where we'd want to do some back-end processing in a faster language than Python.
With all of the hate, Ruby's still on top!?

I'm using it because it makes me happy. Not surprisingly, that was Matz's goal.

Why are others?
One would think so. But what if the error was in the paperwork from the funeral home?
it's safe to assume this will be more prone to vandalism, since each page will have less of an audience (and thus less chance of a vandalized page being fixed) than any given page on wikipedia
"Social Security says an erroneous death record can be removed only when it is presented with proof that the original record was entered in error."

WTF does this mean?

Maybe Google needs to take this over, too.
I infer that it means that you struggle with the same pros and cons I do. Right?
[/me restrains overwhelming urge to point out the fundamental errors in the design of this poll. :]

[/me nourishes secret hope that the poll fad will die out soon.]

So, let's see: If you comment, but almost never submit, I presume you are nonetheless a "poster". So, that's me.

I sometimes feel guilty for not contributing more. Then I remember that if I were trolling the interwebs for interesting content I would be spending even more time not working, and I get over the guilt.
I'd also bet there are plenty of people (like myself) who only comment and very rarely post links.
There goes that hypothesis! Things seem to have shifted slightly older late last night and this morning. Hopefully this stays on the frontpage through Monday so we can see some effect of workday visitors.
Agreed, not only is he a good writer, his article hits the nail on the head for the areas where ruby has an advantage. He manages to nail down a diverse list of areas.

On a different note, I suspect he might be bipolar.

http://www.helpguide.org/mental/bipolar_disorder_symptoms_tr...
one of the simlplest and clearest web app interfaces i've seen so far. who did design? it's great!
Coffee pots.
Why bother hating a language that you never even use? That would be prejudice!

It takes a lot of training, practice, and experience to really hate a language thoroughly.
By a lot of accounts, Coffee Connection came out with a similar, but much better tasting ("better executed" as you put it) drink.

Sorry but no. In this context better executed does not mean better tasting. It means marketed in a more appropriate way.

If you re-read you own comment you will see why Starbucks get a better execution than Coffee Connection :)
If only it was that easy. You're talking the global economy through international trade agreements with vast implications across the board. The best we can hope for, I think, is slow, targeted changes. More reason to be involved with politics - lobbying your representatives to help educate them on the issues you care about.
It means you could walk into their office with ID and prove you aren't dead?
Famous assassinations: Who could doctors save today?
His books are great. Good advice about forgetting about who you are and focusing on selling the benefits of your business.
Ask YC: Is your blog self-hosted or are you using (Blogger.com|WordPress.com|etc)?
I'm just curious, but for those of you who have blogs, do you use a hosted solution like Blogger.com, WordPress.com, TypePad.com, or Tumblr.com, or do you host it yourself either using a pre-made blogging app like WordPress or your own custom app? Whatever the choice, can you explain why you made the choice you did?

This question pertains to both individuals who blog and startups who are using their blog to publish their updates/new features to their users. Doing a quick glance at some of the threads here, it seems a lot of personal programming blogs use Blogger.com and company blogs tend to also use hosted services (e.g., Twitter uses Blogger).
After some more research, I think Colemak (http://colemak.com/) is going to be a better alternative. The bottom row stays the nearly the same, which means that a lot of the common application shortcut keys remain the same. It's also based on more modern, computer-assisted research into English word frequencies. One cool idea it uses is to change Caps Lock to Backspace.

I'm still worried about vim, though. One nice side effect of my planned switch to Colemak is that I now have a legitimate reason to put off learning Emacs. After my switch to Colemak is complete, I'll try to tackle SLIME.
Sure, but the money criteria is not relevant when you want to select people for their quality. The people that history remembers over centuries are more than often people that were not very wealthy during their lives because they were too much ahead of their times and as such : misunderstood.

But I agree the journalist's rant is poor because it doesn't ask the good questions. An invite-only conference is not a problematic concept. Having money as a criteria is, because it conveys the idea that intesteresting people and "thinkers of tommorow" are necessarily wealthy. History makes this assumption very questionable.
Both. App is divided into components - the editor is one component, which is written as a JavaScript application that's kicked off with a single JS function call and handles all the HTML for itself, dynamically. The rest of the website is generated on the server and uses JS only for decoration.

I'd worry more about ease of programming than machine constraints. Webapps are rarely CPU-bound, so the overhead of template instantiation isn't likely to make much difference. You definitely want to keep related functionality together - in earlier drafts, I'd generated the HTML for the editor on the server and manipulated it with JQuery. This was a disaster - I could never remember whether functionality was in the HTML template or in the JavaScript, and I had to duplicate some logic in both places.
Bingo. I can't even say I lean in one direction or the other. It depends on the nature of the specific problem.
I voted for both the first and second choices. The thing we're working on now is sort of a mixed approach. Everything is assembled first on server but then sections can be swapped out without reloading the whole page.
Missing option, Java.
I'm not sure I would be upset if the federal government thought I was dead. It would certainly save me a lot on my taxes.
Intel was originally in the business of making memory chips, which had a thriving market in minicomputers. They invented the microprocessor because, well, they could. It was the sort of geekish hack that virtually nobody appreciated at the time. They only got big into microprocessors because the Japanese ate the market for memory chips - it was either concentrate on microprocessors, or die.
Are there any editors? I wonder if an inner circle will develop like on Wikipedia to keep the peace.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/12/04/wikipedia_secret_mai...
Polls are worth a try though the quality will depend even more on the creator/submitter than in case of a regular submission.

Feature request for polls: a simple bar graph (esp useful for polls with a ton of options like http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=127203) so that someone doesn't need to do this each time:
http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=p3ZpyEuzg1jyMSQxC-NBM...
for http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=126923
I use livejournal for some individual stuff, and I'm 90% done writing my own blogging software in Pylons.
Sarah Lacey wrote the puff-piece we've all seen on digg, and was quite amenable to leaving founder no. 3 out of the picture. So from my heart, I just want to say... she can go f*ck herself.
I make no response.
Who said that TED was selecting people primarily for "quality"? (If they say so, which I'm not sure they do, it's purely sales pitch.)

It's obvious to me that TED is, by design or by accident, an invite-only conference for people who tend to be rich. The fact that it's famous is just a side effect of that: if you invite one celebrity to a meeting, you'll get some press coverage; if you invite several hundred celebrities you'll get a slew of press coverage.

The fact that TED is full of smart people giving smart talks is also a side effect of the guest list: smart people are drawn to present at TED for the same reason that Willie Sutton was drawn to rob banks: that's where the money is. Convincing, say, Bill Gates that your work is interesting is a pretty darned good way to advance your work, especially if the press is there, and even if he doesn't pay you a massive fee for the speech -- which, for all I know, TED does.

(I don't mean to imply that rich people are nothing but walking piles of money -- although, if they were, many of us would still gladly talk to them. Many people are rich for a reason! Bill Gates is nobody's fool. Rumor has it that Larry and Sergey are kind of smart. And other people make use of their wealth to become very expert in one thing or another: money buys a lot of education and research. Al Gore didn't rise through the ranks of the climate scientists, but he's talked to one hell of a lot of them.)

If you want to talk to poor, misunderstood, trained "thinkers of tomorrow" with interesting ideas, go to any local university and you'll find several hundred. I should know. Shouldn't we hold conferences for these poor, misunderstood thinkers? We do! There's thousands of academic conferences every year. There are three going on right now in your town. You just don't know about them, because the cameras are pointing at TED.

I don't think it's a crime for rich people to hold a private invite-only meeting. (Whether or not they should be allowed to make binding, enforceable political decisions about my life in such a meeting is a completely different question.) I'm glad that, at this particular rich-person's meeting, they decide to invite scientists and technologists and great artists, instead of concentrating entirely on polo ponies and booze. And I'm glad that they film a lot of the meeting and release those films for free.
A must read for anyone.

Even if you knew all the tricks already, the article will put words into each one. And as the saying goes: if you can't name it, you are not fully aware of it and you can't control it.
I think it's good that people don't submit any old thing that comes to hand.
Try Ruby:  Hands-On Tutorial
Extremely insightful, i like the moat quote - can definitely be applied to some online companies (amazon, google, facebook...).

Also loved this part:

A footnote: We paid the IRS tax of $1.2 billion on our PetroChina gain. This sum paid all costs of the U.S. government – defense, social security, you name it – for about four hours.
Sadly, I am not a heavy drinker. Usually 1 six-pack of Sapporo Light and 1 six-pack of some sort of Belgian white ale is my "thing."

But for what that's worth, that comes out to about $16 per week. Which I have full confidence I'll get to keep the majority of based on a poll like you'd describe.

I would venture that 95% of "startups" never get past my personal modification of question #2 from the consumer perspective, ie, "We do this."

Consumer version: "What do you do for me?"

Go ahead and start your poll! I got 16 bucks to play with!
On a site like this the lurkers always greatly outnumber the posters. Over the past 24 hours we've probably had around 8000 unique visitors, of which 234 have posted links or made comments:

> (let posters (table)
((afn (n)
(let i (item n)
(unless (> (days-since i!time) 1)
(assert (posters i!by))
(self (- n 1)))))
maxid*)
(len posters))
234

So 2.9% post and 97% lurk. The proportion of posters is actually higher than I would have predicted, based on what I remember about such numbers from Reddit.
Nope. I think you're just redefining execution and idea to blur the line so that what is the result of a good idea is now under the category of execution.

Why the hell are people still arguing this point.

In my mind the argument of "execution" vs. "good idea" is like arguing whether food or water or air or sleep is more important.

You need all. Case closed.

I think as people who "execute" programmers tend to have (from what I've seen over a year) a knee-jerk "execution is everything" reaction out of some deep insecurity or something.

The very existence of this "I can't think of any good ideas" is testament to the notion that execution is not the be-all end-all.

If I can never find a programming partner, worse case scenario I can still use my contacts to raise capital and then hire programmers, though my negotiating leverage in raising capital would be a lot less than if I had a partner who can help put together the idea.

What is this programmer going to do without a good idea that people want and a good idea how to make money off of it?

Start programming randomly until he accidently codes a useful service people pay for?

"O----kay"
7 Great Online Image Editing Apps
On another note, I just looked at your profile and read some of your articles. Why take issues with "my understanding of Google" when it turns out I'm making a similar point to what you wrote about in terms of being humble enough to put pride aside and find out what people actually want/need/will pay for rather assuming for them only to find out that nobody cares about the brilliant programming of an idea nobody but the programmer appreciates?

Isn't that what you yourself said in one of your posts on your blog, or am I misunderstanding your position?
I have a few friends who've done time here: http://www.imagination-engines.com/

From what I understand, though, that's an almost totally crackpot operation.
5 Inspiration Hacks for Creative People
We're obviously not talking about the same thing. Are the speakers invited for free or they must pay as well ? I was talking about the guys who make the speeches, not the general audience. I think I just realized that the talkers are really invited and do not pay anything. It makes more sense indeed :)
"Why the hell are people still arguing this point."

Because you obviously haven't got a clue what you are talking about, keep contradicting yourself, and don't know anything about neither ideas nor execution. At least not in real life.

I won't reply more to this conversation - it is a pain to write, and probably boring to read.
Animated map of 5000 years of empires that controlled the Middle East
Google Maps Without the Scripting
I agree.

Anyway, our educational system is pretty much uniformly great all the way to the end of upper-secondary school.

After that though, there are only a handful of good universities to attend.

It seems that among colleges etc, there are lots of really good choices in America.

For example I went to a polytechnic, "majored" in IT, and learned next to nothing about programming there.

Now I'm relatively far from being a Real Programmer (tm), but trying to slowly make my way towards being one.
You are creative (who the %$#@! says you're not?)
For some reason, content like this makes a periodic appearance every few months. A tutorial by IBM on how to better utilize command line tools is another.

Just one step from collections of interesting pictures. Here, all context is lost. History without context is rubbish.
My blog is hosted through blogger.com, but the link is through a subdomain (blog.example.com) that redirects to it, so it still feels a little more official, without the risk of having the blog go down if the site does.
Have you studied Japanese?

As far as I know, Finnish and Japanese people and societies share quite a few traits.

Some degree of introversion seems to be common to both, but based on two trips to Tokyo, I'd say that the Japanese are still considerably more relaxed than Finns are.

I can't comment on Switzerland or Germany, and I don't know much about the Japanese educational system, other than that they don't seem to be teaching English too well :p

I'm afraid that I'd need a more specific question to be able to offer some insight.
Oh my goodness can I really vote up both answers? It seems that way.
Even if you have no idea what these different empires were, it's interesting to see the pattern of conquests in this region. And if you do know what most of them were, it's fascinating to see things usually covered in different books all together one after another.

The main fault I'd find with this is that time doesn't flow at a constant rate. Also it would be interesting to watch the way territories shrank as well as the way they expanded.
The BIL conference (http://bilconference.com) is being held in Monterey after TED as a free alternative. They had to cap attendance at 150 though. Some of the scheduled talks look interesting.
Self-hosted. The only reason I would ever recommend WordPress.com or Blogger is if someone needs anonymity for some reason or simply doesn't have time or know-how to install their own software.
On server, on client and from cache
"I understand the concern. Though I do think you’re being very emotional right now. Let’s talk about this once you’ve had a chance to calm down."

I wouldn't recommend trying a passive-aggressive trick like that on someone unless you were comfortable with having them as an enemy for life. That is a declaration of war, especially said in front of other people.
Google Apps Already a $400 Million Business? (Probably not.)
This has been done: wikiyou.com
Good luck guys!
What makes TED obnoxious is that they market it so heavily (all those videos) but exclude most people. It's fine to have private conferences, and fine to promote conferences, but it is nasty to do both.
The Product of the FOWA "Launch a Web App in 40 minutes" panel
What percentage of readers contribute by modding (is that the right word?) comments or submissions?
Feeling tired? Exercise a little