skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Are founders significantly richer than most people?
Because i and t are such a waste of time! :-)
pr = print

prn = print followed by newline
What's wrong with mental masturbation?
I think this is a pretty good example of how averages can fail to really tell you anything.

Entrepreneurs by their nature have more individuals at the end of each side of the scale, whereas people who work are clustered in the middle.

All a higher average tells you in this case is that when you "win" as an entrepreneur, those payouts are larger than when you "win" in the workforce.

Duh.
http://del.icio.us/your_store
Given all the discussion on Hacker News and elsewhere, that is obviously not the reason.
That is especially ironic when you consider that its creator is Japanese. So let me get this right... a language designed by a non-native-English-speaking individual can gain massive popularity without Unicode support, but an American who has no interest in Unicode is supposed to do it anyways? How does that make sense?
Sign up for Myspace Developer Access
Stallman is such a weird dude. I once heard he's afraid of plants.
50 million people can't be wrong... Can they?
I could not believe you can make money with unix for the desktop.
The closest you have is www.prosper.com, which has much higher interest rates, default rates, and a maximum loan that is too low for most startups.
Wouldn't it be easier to type:

(repeat 500 (prn ...))

?
Yahoo should support the standard URL based OpenId too. The extra button makes it seem Yahoo is opening its user system, not truly joining OpenId.

Soon we're going to have 30 "login w/ x account" buttons. It reminds of the buttons for feed readers and social bookmarking sites.

Who wants to make http://addthis.com for logins?
Was I the only one who thought this was going to be an essay about procrastinating programmers who do everything under the pressure of an imminent deadline?

Still, it was pretty funny.
Right. Private spaceflight.

Anything less than orbit is a hack. And we won't have that until we build something better than chemical rockets. This venture has no more in common with spaceflight than a catapult has with atmospheric flight.

It is the launch cost ($20m a time) that restricts their use. A successor to the SpaceShip/White Knight combination could deal with that.

The reporter obviously doesn't understand the problems at hand.

"It's just a matter of incremental improvement to get into orbit, after all the lower bound for LEO is 160 kilometers. 160km-110km=50km, so we just need a bit short of 50% improvement in the technology. In fact, we just need to spend 50% more to get into orbit."

Find 3 errors in that line of reasoning.

It is famously difficult to predict the market for disruptive technologies, whether they be computers, muskets, jet engines or digital cameras. *But cheap access to space, and to the other side of the Earth, is likely to be revolutionary.*

Well, yes...but it won't be Virgin or Bigelow that make access to space cheap. Virgin will make 5-minute access to space cheaper. This development won't bring anything. If it is weightlessness you're after, going up in a jet flying parabolas is a much better option. Cheaper, plus you can move around the cabin and do acrobatics.
sigh every time I think that I know all the cool languages, somebody goes and builds a new one.

;)
stdout can be redirected, as to a stream that round robins it to a matrix of printers.
You are correct. I need to go back and reread the tutorial.
In America, there's so much capital to lend that lenders have to round up riskier and riskier borrowers just to give their money away. In Kiva countries, capital is so scarce that they can take the cream of the crop of borrowers, and then take the top 5% of them. Apples to oranges in so many ways.
Blast From the Past: Napster Client "nap"
Nap, writtin by Kevin Sullivan sometime in 1999, was one of the first napster clients besides Shawn Fanning's original Windows client. It was also the first client that ran on linux. Kevin learned much about the inner workings of the napster protocol by collaborating with Jordan Ritter, who was one of the co-founders of Napster and its Chief Server Architect at the time.
On of our professors used PageRank as an example to introduce matrices. He explained the algorithm in class. (Not this particular python implemention though.)
In retrospect I wonder why we did what the teachers told us. Mostly.
You can't get started on $25,000?
Matrix printers?
Yeah, they can. :)
OK, I was just confused because I had also noticed that consistent dissatisfaction and couldn't tell if I was crazy or if elgringo was being sarcastic. Thanks for letting me know I'm not the only one!
Anybody interested in social entrepreneurship should definitely read this book: http://www.howtochangetheworld.org/

I read bout Kiva, Ashoka, and the Grameen bank a few years back (which was the basis for micro-loans and its inventor won a nobel prize).

An excellent read to show how innovative minds (read: startups) are changing the world
Some questions...

-What the hell is UOIT? No offense, but I live in Toronto and have a degree in CS, have interviewed candidates from almost every program in Canada, and haven't heard of this school.

-Canada's companies try to 'prove themselves to their big brother'? Let's look at RIM, OpenText, NCR and many other companies that have been innovative and dominated a global market.

- 'Stop putting maple leafs on every little thing you do. It just makes our society look like more of a joke because we have to constantly remind ourselves that we are in Canada.' National pride is not a joke.

-'The Blackberry Perl is a modest shot in the dark to get consumers hooked on the crack, but it is getting devoured by iPhone and other consumer oriented devices. RIM can compete because it works in an industry that is void of taste, and more often than not, substance.' All I can say is you know nothing about the industry. The Pearl is a great device (in both tastes and substance), and is selling exceedingly well. The iPhone goes after a different type of customer, and isn't even available in Canada.

Your comparison between Brightspark and YC is really off base too, they are not the same type of company. Both fund early stage startups, but they take a vastly different approach.

Sorry, Canada's innovation is no joke. This article makes you look like a joke by showing how little you know about the local business environment.
IM-like micro-startup for unlimited encrypted NAT-friendly file transfer in beta
He actually spent time to write that bullshit? I really hate articles that offense their readers.

All these people he mentions were lead to create something out of need or by a strike of genious, and I don't see this guy getting either of both.

Unicode is not a luxury, is a need.

Supported or not by Arc at this version or in the future, is another issue and if the community needs it, a totally another one.

But leaving a language without builtin support for Unicode, its destiny not far should it be from ending up like what is to day to writting C++ in Windows, which is a tottally NIGHTMARE to handle strings as there more than 10 different types.

I don't think anybody attacked Arc or its creatos by stating their "dumb" needs!
I think it could be interesting to see the "karma-change tally" (don't know how to call it) on stories, people and comments.

The rationale is that to me, there's quite a difference between a comment that has 1 karma because there was no upvotes/downvotes and one that has 1 karma because there was 20 upvotes and 20 downvotes.

So, we could have something like:

5-3=2 points by username
VMware Shares Plunge by More Than 30 Pct
TV for the Visually Impaired
It's more like he gave you a scalpel, a tool that's great - even indispensible - for a specific set of cutting tasks, but that might leave you disappointed if you chose to use it for cutting down a tree.

Except that scalpels aren't really all that extensible.

See, I told you it was a black hole...
Valve Releases Steamworks for Developers
Influentials On The Web Are People With The Power To Link - Publishing 2.0
Simian: Similarity Analyser v2.2.22
Oh, I got started on less. Strike what I said, at least for most of us following the Paul Graham school of startups.
Thanks a lot for your reply and details! I was very interested on it.
Nice idea. I wonder how well one can predict how happy a user will be. Perhaps there is a distinctive pattern in the length of the visit? Or how fast someone clicks through your site?

Still you need some traffic in the first place.
They deleted the inappropriate provision, so they passed that test.
Ruby has always had excellent support for Japanese, though.
Its not Steve Ballmer's fault. Microsoft just has an outdated business model/infrastructure. Their business model is Enterprise software development and sales, which is a problematic model due to many reasons (slow development, piracy, open source alternatives, etc). Microsoft's approach to competition (throwing money to develop copies of other company's products) was devastating to many Enterprise level companies during that era. However, in the era of the web that approach to competition fails miserably, and its not something I'd expect the older generation (which wasn't weaned on the web) to understand. What Microsoft needs is not a new CEO - its a new business directive that combines Enterprise level software with web-based initiatives in a startup mindset. Basically, they should create a Y-combinator for themselves with the ability to "buy out" whatever people make.

Of course, I think Microsoft should have given up software development long ago and just turned into an investment firm with the money they accrued. That would have saved web developers a lot of headaches.
I can only recommend that book. But do not try to act on it to pick stocks - the markets got a lot more effective since Graham wrote the book.

There's an explanation with quotes of Graham in another article from slate: "Why the world's greatest stock picker stopped picking stocks, and why you should, too." (http://www.slate.com/id/2158085/)
"In other words, CS guys, you must (gasp!) acknowledge that you don't know everything."

Is he still gasping? (He forgot his closing tag.)

Oh that's right, CS guys don't know everything.
He also forgot about flickr (though he has a flickr photo stream) and stumbleupon - 2 Canadian companies that had successful exits.
Why Yahoo Might Just Save OpenID
The cool stuff I want to build happens to involve languages with diacritics. And strings are (or should be) core to programming languages.
I can not believe you linked to yourself!

It does not speak well of an author's arguments when they rely on generalities -- "you don't know everything" and "programmers can't communicate". As for Leibniz, Euclid and Newton -- Gauss was by all accounts more productive, more important, more fundamental than any of those guys; and a famously poor communicator.

The smooth, poorly reasoned prose of this article bears the mark of a real English major. The manifest lack of respect for the mores of the programming community is the sure sign of a n00b -- or a Java/.NET programmer -- who can not see a new computer technology in the context of the life of the field, because they are unaware of it.
You can use Unicode in Ruby 1.8, it's just not very convenient.
"I would simply have made the language's "character" data type 16 bits wide instead of 8, and provided four trivial library routines to convert such strings to and from UTF-8 and CP-1252 encodings for I/O purposes. That's about an hour's work, and all you need for really basic Unicode support; once you have that, you"

If he can do all that in one hour, I am really impressed. It would take me more than one hour alone to research the utf-8 and CP-1252 encodings. Changing regular expressions libraries to work with 16 bit, as well as the index operations for strings might take some work, too.

I suppose that guy could rewrite the whole Arc within a day...
His point is that it is more "exploratory" not to use semantic markup, since you might not know the semantics of the document structure while you are developing.

It seems backwards to me though, surely the most "semantic-free" approach is to default to divs rather than tables to structure the markup.
John Galt, meet Paul Graham
+1: I see what you did there.
upmodded for sheer geniuses
Simplicity of Interface Design
I don't think Paul Graham ever said that unicode was not important. I bet he thinks it great. But, right now I think he thinks there are more productive (and more fun) ways to spend his development time. I bet he is right.
What inspires me most about Arc is that it was created strictly for fun (or so I suppose). In that sense, it having no unicode support is the best feature for the time being: it is a powerful reminder that if you don't feel like doing something, it might be an option to simply not do it. It helps if you have other means to pay your bills, but still.

I don't plan on using arc for the time being, but I hope that maybe I can steal some ideas from it, so I welcome it's release.
or ruby

(0..500).each {|i| print "I will not throw paper airplanes in class\n"}
That's just bad math... Using a mean when they should be using a median.

Throw Bill Gates onto a bus and the average bus rider earns billions a year... That's not particularly meaningful.

"Sorry, this is another myth. Entrepreneurship creates a lot of wealth, but it is very unevenly distributed. The typical profit of an owner-managed business is $39,000 per year. Only the top ten percent of entrepreneurs earn more money than employees. And the typical entrepreneur earns less money than he otherwise would have earned working for someone else."

(from Scott Shane, the author of "The Illusions of Entrepreneurship via http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2008/01/top-ten-myths-o.html)
Ask YC: Is the lack of comments on most submissions a sign of declining quality?
Are we turning into another sensationalist news site?
Cause and effect....

Why don't journalists and even academic writers get this simple point ?
Not as high-tech, but I once got caught writing a column of "I"s, a column of "will"s, a column of "not"s, etc.
As a developer who works with designers alot (cukerdesign.com), the things I have found most often in contention are 1. white space, 2. when fonts Need to be a certain way, and 3. colors matching (often with photoshop, comps and such, colors get a bit altered due to colorspaces).

That being said, I think it is much easier for a coder to pick up on what is important for designers than vice versa.
A bit more for the unicode support, though.
You Used JavaScript to Write WHAT?
Damn... I was so tempted to not comment on your submission.
How did Slashdot do it?
Or a sign of increasing number of submissions?
These are generalizations based on my 20 years of growing up and living in Canada.

Canadians are too bound up in credentialism - they want to see degrees, preferably from schools that are prestigious. They want to see a degree that maps to what you do (e.g. medieval music to Java programmer does not have the credibility of BA Business to Marketing Dept.) .

Uber-hacker jwz would not have been hired by a Canadian company, for example.

Canadians want safe money. They are more than happy to trade the safe valuations of more staid companies instead of adding more risk in doing something, well, riskier.
Author: Smug Veanie

:)
Some articles don't leave much to comment on. If there some new discovery, I think it's actually better that there aren't 15 comments saying "Cool!" and "Awesome!". I think that the comments that are made are generally high quality, so the signal to noise ratio is still high.
I think that is sort of the point people are trying to make. Pretty much every language messes this up badly. It would be nice to see something learned from those mistakes.
And Donald Knuth doesn't use email. Maybe there is a lesson here? Hint: timewasters, interruptions, multitasking vs productivity...
Or you could skip the magic algorithm altogether and just show both widgets on the page, positioned and cropped in such a way that upvotes affect the positive link and downvotes the negative.
Yes we do. What we don't get is the right to have our demands met.
Seems like a sign of discerning readers.

Better silence than 100s of inane comments.
The Arc tutorial is awesome! All the examples really hammer the dialect in to you. About half way through you start to realize, 'wait a minute... I can actually read this!'.

Thanks PG
A mind-blowing machine
The average number of comments per submission doesn't seem to have changed much.

In any case, the number of comments on a link doesn't seem very highly correlated with its quality: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=106893
How much time have you spent in the US? I would argue most US companies are "safe" in the way you describe. The US is bigger overall and thus has more diversity.

I agree that Canadian society generally has a complex with the US, ie. look at any local Canadian newspaper story involving the US.

But I dont think that affects the top tier Canadian tech companies much.
Since the comment to which I replied specified "American", YC's funding is already normalized for the startups' host country GDP.
I'd imagine the second half would play just like Galaga. :P
?"For the win."
Raising your hand to answer a question in class is so 20th century
500.times {print "I will not throw paper airplanes in class \n"}
If only I could read more than one thing at a time and then come up with something insightful to comment about.
> The typical profit of an owner-managed business is $39,000 per year.

Before or after the owner/manager's salary?

If the owner/manager isn't paying himself a salary, then it's more of an expensive hobby than a business.
Startup Handbook: How to deal with the slow masses, knowledgeable skeptics, and savvy dreamers.
500.times {puts "I will not throw paper airplanes in class"}
Yea, I can't stand print designers who try to do web. They think that all web browsers are fixed width. I have vowed to never work on another project with a print designer. It's just too much work and I end up designing the site myself.

I also think its very helpful if developers learn at least basics of good design in case they have to make some minor changes.
A first look at Profy, the newest blogging & feed reading platform.
Eh, I think most people (including myself) just read via rss, so commenting is a hassle
Low-cost ultraportable (think Eee PC) segment exploding
[Explain] news.ycombinator.com
I couldn't find any additional info on this site except the Guidlines. Can the users explain:

- the Karma use (points?)
- Is 20 Karma when your able to see the down mod capability
- why Google is the only way to search the site
That's a programmer speaking too ;-)

First, it doesn't matter whether the page is made with tables, divs, or strawberry marmelade - the user will never know.

Second, don't think that just because something looks like it wasn't designed that it isn't. A large part of googles success lies in its simple design, bordering on the naive. Don't think that this isn't intentional and that a lot of hours haven't gone into designing it.
David Heinemeier Hansson step aside, Paul Graham is next to be voted off the island
It's all meaningless unless you intend it to have meaning. But tables are probably easier to work with.

(That may change in future, but right now I don't think any mainstream tools assume markup is semantic. And in any case, tables aren't much moreso than divs.)
I agree, but in fact Yahoo does provide the option of a me.yahoo.com/username or flickr.com/photos/username url, but by default you get some randomized URL which is impossible to remember.

I really don't like Yahoo's decision to essentially force any site which wishes to allow users to use Yahoo's login to include a stupid "Sign in through Yahoo" button. It's exactly opposite of what OpenID should be. I also don't like Plaxo's, Pibb's, etc decision to give into this and include the giant freakin' button (free advertising for Yahoo) on their sites.
Startup Camp?
While I totally agree, I read YC news as much for the comments as for links, hoping to find some interesting or illuminating angle on the article - which I often do.

And I really resist the urge to post comments that don't give a perspective, an opinion, or a fact. Often I really want to write a "yeah cool" or "LOL" comment, but I don't. There are plenty of those elsewhere on the net.

Sometimes I fail though.. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=106983
I figured there was something in ruby for that :P
Blist Launches at Demo (video demo of "database for the rest of us")
Of course, "us" here refers to non-hackers.... Still, would be interested to hear what people think about it. I was impressed. Makes me fondly remember HyperCard.
Just 1 this time.
LOL... I feel you bro. I am in the same page... totally
i'm very impressed with the ui,

i can't really think of a use for it in my life, but I'm not 'us', but then again even though I can use mysql, its not like I go around setting up and using databases in my personal life on the daily.
I don't think he needs it... but he'd have something to say about your use of the word "steal".
You fell into the trap :-)

and so did i....
Quality is something hard to measure, we're in a community, so I think that the quality of a thread is given by the number of points it has, not by the number of comments.

The number of comments just mean that people have something to say about an specific thread.
That would call the elements of seq.
Hahaha... comments like that really make me wish there was a super-up-mod arrow that was hot pink and blinked. Hell, I'd even pay some of my own karma to use it.
What if I send a picture of a barcode w/ the text "buy" and bam.. it shows up in the mail a few days later.
The Evolution of a Header (visual design related)
No offense taken, it's really a matter of how you think invites should be used. Personally I'm fine with motivating people to invite their friends - so long as it's not forced on them. At the bottom of it all, my users are given the choice, whether or not my incentive might sway them.

The other reasoning for my invite system is that I created the first "Top Friends" app to make it into the Facebook directory (when there were about 50 apps total). I had actually beaten Slide to their own TopFriends release and was pretty far ahead on users compared to their TF app for a couple of weeks.

At one point, however, I noticed they had been growing at a much faster rate. Turns out that Slide had been forcing users to mass-invite every single friend when they added the app, something I distinctly chose not to do (out of goodwill for my users). Well, I know where that strategy now got me -- beaten by the company that now runs the top app on Facebook with 20+ million users.

So as a developer, leveraging invites in such a conservative manner was a bad mistake and I'll never forget that multi-million dollar lesson.
Perfect, bringing the impulse of real world transaction to ecommerce. Could even do it with a normal upc barcode instead of Qr/semacode.

Imagine being to do that with a music CD and the songs automagically start downloading to your phone (possible iPhone app?)
I'm pretty sure the people in the Matrix will be confused when every printer in the world starts printing out "I will not throw paper airplanes in class." ... Of course, then the agents will reset the system and everyone will just experience deja vu.
17 Ways to Reduce Your Turnaround Times While Prototyping Game AI
We were trained to obey with the eventual consequences of insubordination being suspension or expulsion.
AWS now uses more bandwidth than Amazon.com
>promotes the language extensively

>relentless self-promotion

When and how did that happen?
UI != design, UI complimented by design = yes

UI designer != graphic designer
Proft = money left after paying expenses, salary included.
That's still an ad hominem.