skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Even large firm stars may not fit with small team
What's missing from high score lists in online games:  tagging yourself
The idea is to have players tag themselves to tell everyone their occupation, university, company, gender, hobbies, country, city, etc.

You would then have high score lists showing these groups as well as high score lists showing players within each group.

This approach encourages people to think more about competition between groups, which might encourage them to invite others to play -- even people who are not their friends but who are in the same group(s).
A Start-Up Says It Can Predict Others’ Fate
If it was well written it wouldn't be long winded.
I've been using wmii for about 6 months and I love it. I'll look into DWM though.
Yes, emacs is something to marry, not spend a night with:-) You'll love it more and more as the years pass and you continue to discover new aspects of it that continue to surprise and delight you.
Tesla Motors wants another $250 million (IPO)
I'm skeptical. At best, they'll have 20/20 hindsight. At worst, these are two kids who haven't yet enrolled in the School of Hard Knocks.
"for certain situations, it's very effective"

It may be for some, but this isn't one of them. I made it about halfway through before I completely lost interest, because there was no indication of the point of the article or where it was going.

This article is a study in tedium.
“Let’s have a tiny font that looks better.”

I was amazed at the number of templates at CSS Zen Garden that use tiny fonts (I was recommended this site when I started to learn CSS design). More artistic maybe but certainly not functional.
1. “Our article is too long, let’s split it up into many pages.”

This annoyance has led me to immediately look for the "Print" link for every article. Incidentally, this has turned my desktop into a PDF dump of everything I read.
CMU undergrad CS routinely checks the "people named dave" to female ratio. It used to be greater than one. My year at CMU's robotics institute had 3 Daves and 5 women.
I hope Tesla succeeds, but I wonder whether it's even possible for a new North American car company to succeed, regardless of their technology. With the falling dollar, maybe their odds have increased. And yeah, a Democrat president will likely make it easier for electric car companies. But we're only a couple of years away from Tata Motors cars, air cars, mass-produced DIY electric kits, etc. And in the midst of a recession, Tesla's cars are especially expensive! Brave souls, they are.
There are a lot of useless, passionate, dedicated people running around (misguided != talented). I prefer to avoid them.
No worries, but as I said I'm probably a really demanding customer, and I think that overall your app looks really great. Besides nothing is ever perfect.

Just get it out there and go for it :-)
Long post ahead.

It's not really that hard...maybe Emacs isn't for you, but I was in your place just six months ago, when I started my CS studies and heard that Emacs could make your life easier. I am still a newbie, but I have started loving the editor.

Here's how to learn.

You need a good cheat sheet, printed and preferably taped to your monitor. You don't need the most arcane keymappings, but you'll need document navigation, search/replace, the escape commands (abort, save, quit), set mark/region, kill and yank (cut and paste, that is). And maybe after a while a quick reference on how to create and kill buffers. I am sorry I have to present it like this, but the keybindings are IMHO the best thing about Emacs when you're a newbie. Don't use the arrow keys! I know that sounds rather ludicrous, but it will save you hours of hand motion in the course of a year. And if at some point you miss a document navigation mapping, it is likely already included in the standard distribution and hence only a web search away. Try for instance http://astro.berkeley.edu/~robishaw/comp/emacs.crib.html.

Actually, you could probably manage it with just document navigation, kill/yank and save/quit. Those will teach you how to hate your mouse. I love it when there's something I can do exclusively in Emacs, because it is so much easier to get my thoughts into bytes. I don't have to worry about any stupid motoric kung-fu. My hands never leave the keyboard.

If you're a newbie, Emacs won't serve you well for all kinds of work. I still prefer Eclipse for Java stuff, because it has a much gentler learning curve for getting debuggers, auto-complete, inspectors and syntax checking in order. You can do all those things in Emacs, but you have to be a lot more dedicated than I have been thus far. For scripting work, however (and that includes just about any Python work et. al.) it is glorious.

Emacs' revered customization won't be of much value to you when you're a newbie (you have to download an emacs lisp file just to change the editor's colors, for instance), but hopefully such details will keep out of your hair until you are familiar enough in the environment to tackle them. My Emacs looks really pretty now, so you know it can be done.

Getting the book that was mentioned seems like an excellent idea. I have been wondering myself whether there was one. Good books make learning a hell of a lot easier than scouring the web.

Good luck to you, I hope you find a solution that makes you happy :)

[Actually, now that I come to think of it, it would be nice if someone made an Emacs distribution with tighter integration to the windowing system. With menu-bars for most of the commands, easier configuration dialogs and all that stuff. Maybe most emacs developers don't care for these things, but it is very intimidating to have to look up every unfamiliar keybinding on the web. Just pulling down a menu and reading it would make the editor much less intimidating. I think the reason most programmers scorn Emacs is that it frightens them, just like LISP.]
"I'd like to see a list of things he would say to an 18 year old that would actually lead to some change"

OK, I'll start.

"Anyone who's good at anything knows that there's an inverse correlation between talking about it and being good at it."

(Opps, I almost forgot...)

"Dude."
....and still only half of it would be good advice.
I think you think of consciousness as a singleton, whereas I see it as an instance. I think more instances (copies) can be created, but they will not be the original. I don't think these copies in any way threaten the original--it itself is just one instance in a particular location in space and time (analagous to whatever occupies a memory address at a particular point in time). I don't think the "I" has to be replicated and am still unsure why you think so. Can you clarify this more for me?
my posting technique is unstoppable?
Time to rewrite DBMS, says Ingres founder
I'm not sure if you're mocking me or giving me too much credit here..
Really I was hoping to be more rigorous and go more in depth but at some point it just felt silly to hammer a website, scrape the page and never have access to the whole data. Doing this got me thinking about issues like "time of day" though as there must be a way to take into account the rate of new posts and make old posts more 'sticky' when the rate accelerates, in the morning for instance.

I feel like starting my own social news website just to have a play with different algorithms!
"I didn't have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one."

- Mark Twain
For some people (not me) it depends on whether you're in Thailand or not.
Seeing at these are still "problems" after three years mean that a lot of people are doing them successfully.
O'Reilly's Learning Emacs.

I should just make a shortcut that recommends this book.

And one secret to emacs is to learn the hell out of the control-H commands. C-h k, C-h a, C-h f, C-h v, C-h m -- the results of those commands, and the docs that you can get to from there, really can help you figure out which key you're looking for and what a particular wierd key-combo does.
"I always teach my students that sex comes first,"

You mean all the time I've been working on a startup to get chicks has been wasted?!?
A friend of mine recently discovered that his most lucrative customer base is age 50+. The next day he doubled all his font sizes!
At best, they'll have 20/20 hindsight. These guys haven't been to the School of Hard Knocks yet!
The splitting an article into many pages has actually gotten worse since 2005. I personally find this incredibly annoying as it really disrupts the flow of reading.

Some of the worst culprits are technical review sites like Anandtech and Tom's Hardware where a single review will be split into 10 pages! Reuters is particularly bad too, and will split any article longer than a paragraph into multiple pages.

This is really page view whoring and should be called out as such.
Toshiba expected to announce death of HD DVD tomorrow
The website is http://www.e-texteditor.com/.
I haven't tried it.
"halo effect."
Speaking well instead of performing well will make you twice as likely to be hired by the average Megacorp, Inc. Quality provides satisfaction; appearance provides money.
Awesome. I'm a junior trader at a major investment bank and I have to deal with Excel all the time... it would be great to be able to programmatically generate well-formed Excel files without having to deal with VBA, COM automation, or anything else. Now someone just has to write a nice Haskell library...
This will probably have a positive effect on PS3 sales. For me, HD-DVD vs. Blu-Ray was my main reason for holding back thus far.
Engineers needed to know more math where I went to school.

I'm sure the mathematicians among us may disagree with my definition of "math."
"appearance provides money"

Until it doesn't.
Hell yeah the more the merrier. There's no way tiny yc can support the huge number of capable people out there who's talents are going to waste. That's becoming more obvious every cycle.

Edit: unless they really screw it up and scare away investors. Still, I am impatient to see angel funding to less well-connected people expand at a higher rate. Even risks considered, I welcome the yc clones.
Who says there is any clear line between experience and talent?

Research into the workings of the brain has actually been pointing the other way: people who are described as "talented" in a particular area have put tremendous effort into becoming so -- that is to say, they have experience.
Well, you can't be a total phony. There are weighted values applied to skill and appearance in corporate HR. My experience has shown that the weighted value applied to appearance is roughly 2x the value applied to skill. (Assuming that the typical HR person can even measure skill. Most can't.)
If you do that you're probably making a mistake anyway. You should be constantly releasing changes, and if you are, it would be hard to accumulate enough unreleased stuff for it to seem like a radical overhaul.
Not web related but: I have used it for game development in many proyects and it was fantastic.
That's not true so far. We've never rejected a group because we didn't have room. If we keep getting more good applicants each cycle, we'll keep accepting more, till something breaks. Then we'll fix that and keep going.
(This m.o. freaks out Jessica, but Rtm and Trevor and I
keep assuring her that this is how
you scale systems.)
One thing that YC has that no other's can get, Paul Graham. It only makes sense that the seed funding companies are headed by people who've created products in the same area that their potential applicants are in.

PG made a web application, which is why I think the majority of successful companies out of YC (from what I've seen) are web application companies. The leaders of YC know how to encourage the growth and profitability of web applications.

This "YC Clone" has quite a bit of business big wigs, but only a few technical types (AOL and Xfire come to mind). It seems like these would be the people who recommend that you hire a "businessman" CEO asap, accept millions more than you need in funding, and sell enterprise-oriented products only.

Really, who wants to make another AOL?
Some of these really sound nitpicky. The "Read More" links shorten a page so users can browse quickly through articles and see which ones they'd actually like to read. Sure, some sites don't need it, but its ok on other sites. Now, the splitting into multiple pages like NYT or Tom's Hardware, yeah thats annoying as hell.

If fonts are too small, your browser has a enlarge text function. Generally 8pt is small but OK and mostly readable. Any smaller (I doubt any site uses smaller) is a little un-userfriendly.

“Let’s treat the mobile web as a separate entity.” -- OK I take issue with this one. Of course you have to treat it as a separate entity. Have you ever tried to view "real" google on a Pocket PC? Its too big. The mobile version makes it easier to see. Same goes for many sites. Mobile versions of sites ARE functional.

“Let’s care about low bandwidth!” -- Well I used to think it wasn't important, until I realized that AOL dial up service actually still exists....

“Let’s read out loud the URL on TV.” -- Most people won't go google some unknown site on their own. If the TV tells them to visit the site though, theres a better chance they might.

“Let’s tell everyone Firefox is the better browser.” -- Firefox 1 WAS more secure than IE6. Right now however, I think the difference between firefox and IE7 is negligible enough... so whatever.

Overall, I think this article was written with too narrow of a scope.
the AI thing is really good linkbait im amazed so few people spot it for what it is
404ed!
or not reading the signs correctly.
I'd probably use the new Office Open XML (Office 2007+) formats rather than the old binary formats.
This story was too long to read, so I only skimmed it.

But really, now. "The erosion of general knowledge?" Pfft. Everyone knows it's beaches that get eroded, not Generals.
We must have very different definitions of "useless", "passionate" and "dedicated".

Here are mine:

Useless: Inconsequential, meaningless, that has no useful result.

Passionate: Derives genuine happiness and a feeling of fulfilment when doing some particular thing.

Dedicated: Demonstrates perseverence and involvement in a nontrivial task, spanning a nontrivial amount of time.

Per those definitions, I don't see how someone can possibly be simultaneously useless, passionate and dedicated.
Six signs your new job is lousy
Start a company instead.
I think the title should be changed. Your question is not about creative founders, but rather system changes.

I think most users accept, like, and even expect some evolution in your startup's product or service. The thing most users don't like is when you change something drastically, when it already worked well.

Justin.tv comes to mind. When they started, their site was about 4 pages, with the home page hosting the video feed and a few others for information. This worked for those who were interested in watching Justin and crew doing whatever it was they were doing. I remember the day they radically changed the design and layout of the site. The entire background changed, some buttons were missing, others were added. They had prepared viewers already, but the initial reaction was largely negative.

The reason for this change was to shift the direction of JTV. Users would browse through hundreds of feeds instead of only one. They would even publish their own feeds, and the site was redesigned to accommodate this.

This was a major change in direction for those who were watching originally, and many didn't like it. What JTV had before worked for what they wanted to do: Watch Justin. Now it became more difficult, but JTV took a calculated risk in making the change, and I think in the end it payed off because what they have now serves more people in more ways.

The difference is between improvements and overhauls. Improvements are expected and encouraged. Overhauls are only for radical changes in direction or to fix something incredibly broken. If it was broken, your users will thank you in the end, it it's a change in direction, you're taking a risk, and good luck with it.
Take a look at

http://google.decenturl.com/allinurl-cgilua-google-search

I know a couple of success cases in Brazil: http://www.vale.com (among the 5 biggest Metal & Mining companies in the world) and http://www.petrobras.com/ (among the 10 biggest oil & gas companies in the world) use Lua for some parts of their web site.
There could be people who belong to the set "talents are going to waste" and who might make a go of it that, however, don't belong to the set that you consider "really good". At least logically it makes sense that, being human, your judgment is not infallible and that some good ones might have slipped between the cracks. Having some other places to go, even if they're not as good as the original is good, and validates the original idea. I think the only thing to worry about might be that if there were so many really bad ones out there that it taints the whole lot by association, but that doesn't seem highly likely to me.
I have not used Lua for web apps, but I do know that the Kepler project is quite active these days. They're developing a whole suite of tools for a Lua web stack. www.keplerproject.org

Personally I love Lua as a language. It has just the right blend of functional, imperative, and OO concepts to let me dabble in different styles as I see fit. It's an elegant language which also has a great community.

Lua is what I turn to when I want to prototype an idea or just scratch out a rough draft of some calculations. I have yet to write any in-the-large software in it, but I suspect that it would scale nicely as well.

Anyway, have fun with Lua. I know I am!
you never know :p
Can't you do something like this in desktop tower defense?
Though I know and like these guys, I worry they have set themselves an impossible task. As someone who spends literally every day trying to predict the success of startups, I know how hard it is. And worse still, in this case, hard to automate: the success or failure of a startup depends almost entirely on the personalities of the founders.

What makes the problem more complicated still is, founders can change. E.g. when we meet someone who seems smart and energetic but a bit timid about starting a company, we have to ask ourselves if the guy's intrinsically timid, or just put off by the weirdness of the idea, like we were before we started Viaweb.
its been open for a while now
Ask YC: Company Blogs
I've been thinking about the obligatory "blog" link that goes on the front page of a new site. I don't know if I should roll my own simple blogging system (my site is RoR) or use some canned engine that has more overhead, but is tested and reliable. What do you guys think? What has worked for you in the past and what are the pros and cons of each?
WordPress (and others?) is perfectly good. No point in wasting time reinventing the wheel (unless that's your kind of thing).

Throw together a template to match your company website if you want.
Wordpress. Good developers create, smart developers reuse.
If Ruby's so great, where are all the Ruby apps and jobs? (FUD Alert)
Techcrunch.
First Day, how to establish your place
Whatever you do, I would suggest putting it on your own site (a sub domain, like blog.yoursite.com) instead of a hosts (like companyblog.blogspot.com). It just feels more professional that way. There's a higher level of quality compared to the generic feel of a hosted blog.
I've reviewed a bunch of submissions to ACM Transactions on Networking, all they were all double-blind.

Usenix, on the other hand, is is "single-blind" (if you want to dignify this with a name).

It makes a huge difference. Forget about gender bias. The real problem is bias against newcomers. I was reluctant to write anything negative about well-known researchers. When you're doing a bunch of these, you don't have a whole hell of a lot of time to track down cites and evaluate experimental results. So your default is going to be, people who could kick your ass in your field are getting good reviews.
To me it seems kind of "fake" (I can't seem to find the right word in english - "Augenwischerei" in german) "kitsch" might be another word? The quality and fanciness of the graphics makes you believe that something is there, when probably there really isn't. At least, it looks rather complicated, and really good graphics should not make the thing they want to explain look complicated.

Since you mention that it actually provides insights after prolonged meditation, I wonder if it would be acceptable as a Mandala, though.
This is not specifically web-app oriented, but:

<plug>Lua lovers on YNews might be interested by metalua [http://metalua.luaforge.net].</plug>
cua-mode (Common User Access) gives you Ctrl+X / C / V as per Windows, and mouse highlighting, apparently without interfering with standard emacs key-bindings too much:

http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/CUA...
You know, they're not splitting up articles because they think YOU like it better. YOU aren't paying them.
"The Group Scoreboard allows you to view the scores of you and your friends.
If you already know the name of your group you can enter it here:"

So it seems like these are friend groups. What I propose is more general and may involve a player being part of many groups -- not necessarily involving friends at all.
VB.NET (which now has static metaprogramming and closures) + COM automation isn't too bad in my experience. You could also use Python for COM.

(I've found that when you set the application to be visible and each command is carried out visually, it's very impressive to non-programmers, especially ones who don't use macros.)

Other than that, http://poi.apache.org/ and a marginal language that targets the JVM is probably your best bet for now.
No insight. Just a restatement of the problem. I'm no more knowledgeable about the bias against women in engineering, and I'm not laughing.
You could always whip up scripts that emit XML + XSL stylesheets to convert them to Office XML, yeah.
The theory is that the funds with the proven track record were just lucky.
From Enterprise Development to Community Driven Development - From a Developer's perspective
"I'm not sure if you're mocking me or giving me too much credit here."

Neither, I'm sure.

(Funny. lately when I get sarcastic here, people think I'm serious, and when I'm serious, people think I'm joking. I guess I need a little more practice writing to strangers.)

Scatter diagrams are one of the greatest underrated ways of conveying information in a heartbeat. You've done a great job of it.

You've also opened up a can of worms. There are so many ways to look at this data, you can keep yourself busy for quite a while. I suspect that won't be a problem, considering how much you already care about this. Keep up the good work and keep us posted.
For this sort of application I always recommend a hosted blogging service (wordpress.com, tumblr.com, blogger.com, etc) so that if something affects your servers, you still have a way to communicate with your clients//community.
Tesla has a great idea and product. What they lack is a solid mass-production/distribution system.

As much as I'd hate to see it, I think Tesla needs to be acquired by GM or some other American brand and then use their technology with their new owner's production and funding capacities to get the car to market. Current 2008 models have sold out, and they haven't produced any yet! to get one, you have to get on the 2009 waiting list, which should ship sometime in 2010, at this rate (Tesla is silent on anticipated delivery dates, I'm only speculating 2010 delivery). They're already producing and selling their battery system to Toyota I believe.

A Tesla - GM/Ford combo I believe would be what it takes to effectively compete against Toyota and Honda, who both already have the production capacity and electric cars in the works.

They could always partner with upscale car makers like BMW, too.