skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It varies from case to case, but you should keep doing it as long as it's the best option. Though it's hard to gauge, if the expected outcome is better than what you'd get for starting a new startup or working a desk job, then you should keep going at it.

1000 users is pretty good, in my opinion. They could help you morph your startup into something better. But don't give up on the startup, just change it around a little.
HFM is a Slashdot reader apparently:

"HFM: Yes, but I for one welcome our computer trading masters."
Wow. So, from what I can tell, his argument that functional languages have no future, is that they're not imperative, inherently object-oriented languages, and that they're not strictly typed. Well, that may be so. So really what's going on here is that he's not willing to learn and understand how functional languages really work. (and how they are put to best use)

"The jury is still out, but I wouldn't bet on scalability. As a project manager during the 90s two of my projects didn't scale and had to be rewritten, one in Python and one in Perl. But it could just be me."

Yes, I have a feeling it might indeed just be you.

~phil
I think it has some relevance, because it shows that being in IT does not imply unattractiveness. Talk about unattractiveness of male geeks is quite common, too.

Also, I think it would be nonsense to deny our human attributes. Men are interested in women's looks, and vice versa. Actually, isn't it another complaint of successful women that to be successful, they had to become like men (a ka Margaret Thatcher)? So if a successful women is still attractive, it might be a good role model after all.
Book authors get screwed worse than musicians with their CD deals.
Premise: If you don't even understand the simplest pieces of syntax of a language, you don't even grasp the basics.

Premise: You shouldn't criticize that which you don't even understand the basics of.

Premise: This guy gets lost with only a simple piece of defclass.

Conclusion: He should talk less and learn more about Lisp.
Photo Sharing Server Photwo Launches - Easiest I've Seen To-Date
The joke is that he implies the languages' FP orentation causes them to have clunky ways to define classes. Ruby is a good counter to that argument. It has one of the cleanest class-defining syntaxes out there. And you can actually write your own functions that behave like "attr_accessor", making your class definitions even more readable.

Guess how you do it? A combination of metaprogramming and closures.
A New del.icio.us Soon?
1:4!!! That's got to be a record. When I was in school, there were 4 girls in my entire year of CS. They were all TAs, and you know what? They were the best TAs.
Just ask 10 guys and 10 girls what they think the average IT/programmer girl looks like and you'll see why it was a useful observation. Both men and women put emphasis on women's looks.
That is very Ouch.
Google Announces Geo-Targeted AdSense Referrals
There's a wrapper for the news feed which works with the features of google reader:

http://harumi.ath.cx/newsyc
Loop Abstractions in D
minimalistic and simple themes
I looked into 'The Rails Way' over the weekend. As vdm correctly says, its definitely a very comprehensive reference. And it makes as a good book, but you definitely need to work with a basic tutorial to get you up and running quickly. I would recommend "Agile Web Development with Rails" but with Rails 2.0 although its a little behind the curve, its not a bad book.

I am currently reading "Practical Social Networking Sites with Rails", and although its a decent book, the author tends to skip some of the most important details, leaving you wondering how something came about. I would not recommend it.

I have read 'Ruby for Rails', and its definitely a good book. David Black is a very good author and teaches you Ruby and shows you how a lot of the 'black-magic' in Rails happens.

Here is someone else's review of some of the books -
http://antoniocangiano.com/rails-books/

For Ruby, I would recommend Peter Cooper's book over Programming Ruby any day... especially if you are new to Ruby and/or OOP in general.
Still, it would be nice to have some examples of pretty functional code for real world applications (like a blog).

I've started learning Scheme again recently, and some things are pure bliss, but others are horrible. Maybe I am spoiled by Java, but for some things I really can't imagine how to properly code them without objects. As an example for something ugly, look at the hashtables in MzScheme.
MySpace Plans to Launch Startup Incubator
First time I'd heard of uncov.

OK, it's ending. That's fine. But the picture of the track runner getting clotheslined by a hurdle was pretty funny, and the writing was funny too.

It was worth the five minutes. But in the internet, isn't that all anyone can aspire to?
Haven't we already thrown quite a few away?
While I agree that you're right -- English is not an especially logical language, and one that is quite fluid -- I think what I'm really hoping is that ugly corporatisms like "learnings" and "planful" don't get their ugly roots very deep. I'm also arguing that "learnings" is unnecessary (as is "pushback" and "monetizing") because we already have words for the idea.
Whoopty fuckin-doo. Every single app you listed is a stylized piece of crap or can be done as well or better via open source save for your last two examples and even their true worth is debatable.
Pure, unadultered entrepreneurial genius. He should be awarded a visa immediately (assuming he'd like to come to US).
Something like (Implementing a blog in Common Lisp)[http://dirtyhack.org/vetler/docs/cl-webapp-intro/part-1/]?
I don't know who this Jeff Bezos guy is but I like the cut of his jib.
Porn industry still firmly behind HD-DVD
What happend to Haskell and Erlang, the functional hypes of 2006 and 2007? The Blogosphere has mainly lost interest in those lately.

I see. So "no future" == "you won't get as many digs blogging functional languages" in 2008. That may be a good thing if it lowers the S/N ratio.
One thing I really liked about MIT was that there were plenty of women studying computer science. It seemed as if the ratio were around 50/50.
There's AtomPub -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_(standard)
Agile Web Development with Rails is a little too old now. I'd follow the other people and go with the Rails Way instead.

And don't bother with RESTful Web Services.. if you're using Rails 2.x then you only need a half page tutorial on how to use REST, not an entire book.
Bah, whatever. I'm busy getting stuff done with Erlang.
Or this:
http://www.scheme.dk/blog/2007/01/introduction-to-web-develo...
And don't touch Ruby on Rails for Dummies with a 10ft pole. That book is horrible.

Here's my liveblogging take of my first three weeks with Rails:

http://internetducttape.com/category/ruby-on-rails/
If the startup's original market assumptions haven't changed and it can stay in business then I'd say it's ok. Unfortunately startups often don't notice what's happening to their expected market until it's too late.

If after 2 years your site does grow just a little, but stays around 1,000 daily users, would you call it quits?

What were you expecting 2 years ago? Are your expected users still out there for you or did they all go to Facebook in the meantime?
Yup. It's AtomPub.

Look up Sam Ruby for more info on it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Ruby
I get the feeling that by "in the enterprise" he means "in a cover-your-ass environment". Pointy-haired people and their followers seem to single out things they don't understand as the sources of problems. In that context, using Java or some other safe/soul-killing/curly-brace language might be better than putting your neck on the block promoting a functional solution, regardless of the increased productivity.

Shame, really...
Joel Johnson puts AT&T on the spot over copyright spying plan
Someone spends too much time on /b/.
"still firmly behind" - heh
Easiest would be a wifi-enabled SD card that knew your flickr credentials and auto-uploaded everything.
I think girls tend to be more social than guys, thus less inclined to be lurking on yc all day...and may I note that no female has seemed to respond here yet...

admit it kids! hanging around on yc isn't helping us get laid! ;)
Hey,

Books are not always the easiest thing to learn from. I found screencasts to be an excellent way to pick up all sorts of stuff for Rails.

Check out peepcode.com, railscasts.com and showmedo.com for starters.

Some content is free (railscasts), others not so free.
Profound stuff, man. :D
Wow, that guy has strong opinions on lots of things and he isn't afraid to share them. (did I understate that adequately enough?)

Edit: but the dtrace part is very good. Around the 1 hour mark he starts demonstrating using dtrace to instrument the python parser. Good stuff.
NBC to return on iTunes with its tail between its legs
Though several anecdotes aren't data, I hear similar stories (of Marxist economics being espoused at school) every time I spend time in France.
It's definitely a bit of a mental block. A lot of girls who would love to be able to do things requiring hacking skills, but they don't want to actually have to learn the foundational stuff, i.e, Data Structures/systems programming. They want to be able to jump from the intro-level courses straight to bioinformatics or graphics/multimedia courses, not because they think it's too hard, but because they almost feel like it's going to do something to them as a person.

"Yesterday, I gave a talk to our new cohort of Computational Media undergraduates about the CS classes that they will be taking. One student asked me about 3-D modeling, and I told him about our computer graphics classes. Then a young lady asked me a question that bowled me over, "If we don't take computer graphics and we get a Computational Media degree, is all that we can do is become programmers?" The last word just dripped with disdain, as if that was a mid-level in Dante's vision of hell." --Mark Guzdial
I got the wife an x61s for Christmas.

Little is in... Just wish it had a higher screen res.
I just noticed that that's where the guy pulled his example from! I also noticed how badly it supports his argument. That definition of the blog-post class also gives you accessors and a constructor, which would be more verbose to define in Java or C++.

*Edited for clarity
Tough crowd.
I don't mean to be an ass, but you are not going to have 1k simultaneous users. If you did, you would be able to pay someone who had a better understanding of how webservers work.

One decent machine running 10 mongrels on a reasonably well-designed Rails app will easily be able to handle 100 requests per second. That is more traffic than you will ever get, I guarantee you.
The Romans allowed abortion until a child started speaking. Before then, they weren't really considered human, I suppose.
I don't think hack is quite the right word - to me it implies that people actually sat down and came up with this whereas I think it just grew organically, incrementally.

We've been busy killing each other for thousands of years and I think it'll carry on for a long time to come yet.

Will it collapse? Maybe. But I think even the corrupt in power will want to maintain their position rather than let things go to pot (citizens tend not to pay taxes if they're submerged under water as a result of global warming).
Crunchies celebrate Web 2.0 successes, work to be done
RSS still broken.
wouldn't call it quits but would do a serious review of your goals, product, and current user acquisition methods.
It sounds like you are looking for more growth and more users (duh).
After 2 years you have a solid baseline to draw conclusions from and now need to review usage stats - talk to users (pick up the phone)- find out what they love and what they don't love.
Make a plan for updates - relaunch- and set a time line for this second stage - if your at the same spot in terms of users then that is a good signal for moving on.
Sorry Mike, Digg is NOT a User-Generated Content Site
Four Reasons To Avoid Using Dates In URLs
Overcoming Procrastination
The gifted have more existential angst
thread also at http://onsingularity.com/item/2905
Two street-view camera cars are based around the block from me in Mountain View. I talked to the guy running them, asking about what sensors besides GPS and cameras are used. He couldn't go into details unfortunately.

Ironically, the house isn't visible from street views. The house number is only approximate
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&t...

Whenever I see those vehicles, I give a huge thumbs up and smile, and record the spot, hoping to kickstart a modeling career by sending recruiters links to the gmaps page that shows my flailing like a baboon.
5 ways to pimp out your WordPress weblog
people still buy porn on discs?
This is how you should troll
Malformed RSS links from Hacker News again
slash
Erlang took the right approach by making something that has some real advantages in the real world. Don't just tell us it's a "better language" - show us by building something real that's not easily replicated.
Definitely. Learning the advanced features of Ruby will give you a big boost using Rails -- especially metaprogramming, which is something that few other frameworks employ.
Current stats on this thread:

Mentioning dating: within 1 hour of original post

Mentioning getting laid: within 7 hours.

I was afraid this would happen, I just hoped it would take longer. Please lets be polite.
Matryoshkus Russian Dolls: Bit, Byte, KB, MB, GB & TB
Yeah, it's more like civilization is the result of millions of quick, untested patches. Society is comprised by people and their ideas, and people pass their ideas down through generations. The only ways to eliminate schools of thought are to hope that they die out eventually by trying to make them unpopular, or by actually eliminating people, which is the source of all these cultural wars taking place.
I recently had an intriguing conversation with a female friend who is starting a CS program, after spending years in another field.

She's about as used to "geek culture" as a person can get, but even she finds the people in CS to be overwhelming. Her take? CS departments need to focus a bit less effort on attracting women (a task which fundamentally defines them as different), and a bit more effort on repelling socially retarded men (who really are different). I can't say that I disagree. CS is the last refuge for some really damaged people; I get sick of it too.

IMO, CS101 should be a mandatory class on hygiene and social skills for people who already know how to program.
Aye, for about 2-3 minutes. Pop a few viagra pills and they will still be behind for a long while to come.
Who Killed the Software Engineer? (Hint: It Happened in College)
People still buy porn?
I'll try to read this link later.
Your logic is impeccable. I am completely convinced. Cory Doctorow's arguments were difficult to resist, but they are nothing compared to yours. I renounce my Mac-using ways at once.

But perhaps you can answer a question: is there a version of SuperDuper for Linux? Here's how it works: you plug in an external hard drive, and you boot SuperDuper. A wizard helps you click approximately five boxes. Then your external drive becomes a complete, bootable backup of your main drive, and it refreshes itself once per day (or more often, if you like).

(Things are a bit more painful if you have to unplug the drive occasionally -- you still have to unmount it by hand. Apple's latest Time Capsule product claims to solve that whole problem, but it doesn't do bootable backups. One-size-fits-all, maintenance-free, user-friendly backup is a really hard problem to solve, even in a universe of restricted hardware like the Mac. So I don't ask for miracles. I don't ask for a "stylized piece of crap" like Time Machine. Just SuperDuper will be fine.)

SuperDuper is very reliable, with one dedicated author who maintains the FAQ and answers tech support emails, typically within a day. The cost is $27.95, one-time only.

What's the equivalent for Linux? This is not a snarky question. I seriously want to know, because I have a Linux desktop system, and I wasted hours setting up the backups, and I waste another hour each time I restore them.

A Google search for Linux backup software brings me to pages advocating rsync, which is a wonderful tool which I use every day, but which is not Mom-friendly, or even particularly me-friendly. And it brings me to a 2006 article...

http://www.desktoplinux.com/articles/AT2280165098.html

...that recommends "Simple Linux Backup", a nice open-source tool whose home page talks about bash, tar, gzip, gtk+, cron, the possible need to install Java 1.5 by hand, the need to unzip a tar.gz file, the many complicated options that I can use to organize my backups, and the complete lack of any warranty. "The Mac PPC version is brand new," it says, which leads me to wonder just how old this page is.

I want something better. I've been assured that Linux has the open-source solution for me. What is it?
You're both semi-wrong. The website, justin.tv, is written in RoR and always was. Their flash server, PMS (Python Media Server), is written in Python. It was always in Python. PMS replaces the need to run Adobe's Flash server.
MySpace to form start-up incubator named Slingshot Labs, financed by News Corp.
It isn't "human" it is "cultural". Still shouldn't deny it, but it can and will change. (And has changed a lot already!)
Christmas hacking project: Wikipedia on the iPhone
I get it now. Darwin designed our DNA. Intelligent design, and Darwinism, are both right.
Antikythera Reborn – The Hackers of Ancient Greece
IIRC, there's been a semi-private beta of the new version available to certain members for 6 months, so this isn't really surprising anybody.
Ask YComb: Should I quit to do a startup during a recession?
I'm 23-years-old. I've been working at a tech company for 1.5 years. I have an idea for a startup that I want to do but I'm afraid the economy is going south. My mama always tells me the only reason why I don't appreciate my job is because I haven't yet experienced an economic downturn. She tells me I have no idea what it's like when you can't find a job because I was able to get this one right out of college. I have enough money saved up to survive about a year without a job. (I am going to pay for my own health insurance.) What do I do? Hunker down...or take the plunge?
I just built a new computer. I make Windows programs for consulting and sale. I didn't want to buy another copy of XP (already have 2 for other computers) and Vista is a bloated mess that offers nothing to the end user (even if the kernel and memory management are better, you can't see that). I also didn't want to fork out the ~$180+ for Vista Ultimate.

I had just one day earlier spent an hour on the phone with a customer because a program I wrote actually uses the correct ProgramData location, but the program hadn't been added to the User Account Control (UAC) yet so Vista was preventing it from writing some files. Once added, it worked perfectly. Who wants to deal with that crap?

Long story short: Ubuntu costs me $0, it works with my dual monitors, it was easy to install, the second hard drive got mounted easily, and I'm switching to web programming. I'd also like to say I am in love with Ubuntu. It's like rekindling a flame with a previous lover (Linux).
Bug Labs Store Grand Opening
So you mean in other cultures looks don't matter? Maybe if the parents set up the marriages? Do you have any references?
don't be too discouraged by the economy. do you really want to make a major life decision based on what your parents think they know? and learned before the internet? at the very least, research the topic yourself.

but also, it's not good to have a boolean choice. you can make it less so, on both ends. you might be able to reduce your hours at work, in a potentially temporary manner (they might not like that idea at first, but if they want to keep your hours up, then obviously they don't want to fire you, so you have some ability to negotiate. reduced hours, for them, beats none by a large margin). and you could start on your startup in spare time, to learn more about

A) will it work
B) how long will it take to finish
C) how much you like working on it.

you can also research competitors, look for cofounder now, and other things, without some permanent "taking the plunge".
Ask YC: Your favorite startups
What are your favorite startups/projects?

Preferably ones that are not very known, and that are innovative.
Having a job is no guarantee of security during a downturn. With a startup, you have more control over whether you succeed or fail. If you have one year of savings, you should be fine either way. But if there is a downturn and it lasts more than a year, you're SOL. If you take that year to develop something valuable, you can deal with the macro economy on your own terms. Given your situation, I don't think the economy should be a big factor in your decision. Even if you make a product for an ailing sector like real estate, if you can help them either save money or make more money, you'll do fine.
I just googled for Ubuntu backup and this came up: http://onlyubuntu.blogspot.com/2007/03/backup-and-restore-ub...

It does not look too bad, maybe? But I must admit that I myself have neglected backups so far (source files and emails are on another server that has backups, though). My server uses something else, but I forgot the name (did not set it up myself).
Take a look at RailsSpace, which is an extended tutorial introduction to Rails. As one of the authors, I'm biased, but the Amazon reviews are pretty good: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0321480791

N.B. As with virtually all Rails books, it's a bit out of date (despite having only just come out last summer!), but we focus on general techniques that are plenty useful in Rails 2. I'm currently building a site with some of the same features as the book application, and I often find myself referring to the book for guidance.
"My mama always tells me the only reason why I don't appreciate my job is because I haven't yet experienced an economic downturn."

That's a good reason, but not the only one.

Maybe you don't appreciate your job because you have a startup inside of you just bustin' to get out. Not even the greatest job or economy could help with that.
I can't do anything with this "information". It seems utterly arbitrary.
If you're looking for excuses not to do a startup, you're kidding yourself. Actually starting one up is going to give you incontrovertable evidence that you shouldn't be doing it, and there's no way you're going to be able to work through it. Leave entrepreneurship to the crazy people and get back to your job.
I don't mean other existing cultures are different. (Although, there are differences.)

I mean it is a matter of culture (ideas) not "humanity" (DNA).

There are many reasons to believe this. Two are:

- memes evolve orders of magnitude faster than genes, so once they existed, they responded to almost all selection pressures first. anything with complex social interactions that require intelligence couldn't have evolved before memes (ie, before we had intelligence).

- people sometimes make changes to how they treat women, how they interpret appearances, to all sorts of related ways of thinking and behaviors. this points to culture because our ideas are designed to be changeable at runtime, and our DNA isn't.
Because during a recession very few people will do startups and when the economic situation will be better you will be among the few that developed value that can be turned into money, advantage over competitors, ...