skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you actually check out well.com, you should make a blog post and submit it here, I'm curious what it is like.
What's the basis for the claim "the sum of your points across submissions and comments does not equal karma"? Pretty sure karma = 1 + every point beyond 1 point for any comment or submission.
PG: How to make wealth
Done. I set a minimum of 10 comments or 10 submissions to get on the list:

http://searchyc.com/top/points_per_submission

http://searchyc.com/top/points_per_comment
The author also mentions that he just had a supercharger installed on his Lotus. He's not "normal people". He obviously has a lot of disposable income and the desire to spend it on expensive toys. There's nothing wrong with that; the MBA was designed with him in mind. If I had that kind of spare cash, I'd get one too - right after the supercharged Lotus.
It is for lower point stories and comments, but for 75 point stories you don't get exactly 74 karma. I'm not sure what the threshold and algorithm is.
Ah, Wil Shipley -- the original Fake Steve Jobs.
I've been ab;e to skip much more than 3 times...by refreshing my browser
Ask YC: What has happened to Zenter?
Does anyone know what has happened to zenter, post google purchase? I didn't get to see it & I'm curious about the editor design choices. Any images (or descriptions) aside form this one? ~ http://www.tonicstudios.com/sliderocket/Zenter_screenshot.jpg
Is it just me or all academic course management systems(CMS) suck (aka Blackboard, webct, moodle)
I am sure many of you are familiar with WebCT/blackboard. Your current/old university most likely uses either webct or blackboard. If you know what I am talking about, these CMS just plain suck. They don't follow web standards, they have a horrible user experience, they are not easy to setup, and most importantly they are ridiculously expensive.

Many of us are focusing on building amazing innovate apps/services, but I don't think any one
has given these companies competition.

This is one killer app this is missing from our web ecosystem.

I really want to do something about it and want some feedback from you guys.
Learn the definition of "illegal".
This is cool, but I don't understand why I would use this over an uber-piracy service like waffles.fm. I'm provided with all of the flac rips I could ever want in a way that enables high-quality music discovery. I just don't think free music that exploits a peculiar hack of legality can ever win out over DRM free piracy. If someone finds something they like on reble.fm, they have to pirate it anyways to get it onto their iPod, except for the people that buy it through your iTunes affiliate link.

It's tough to compete with free by being less free.

If anyone wants a waffles invite, by the way, send me an email.
The hardest thing is to sell into educational organisations. They aren't exactly the mosyt forward looking. WebCT has some inertia you would need to displace.

The only way to do so is to get a leading university to use the product first and you could leverage sales of that hence peeling away the webCT monopoly. The software side seems pretty easy though. I have no doubt you couldn't make a better product.

Perhaps the reason that there is no innovation in this market is a function of the inertia of these customers and the lack of financial incentive to build something better.
Haha, you got me. Good eye.

But in reality it does the same thing, so does it really matter?
OLPC seems like such a great product, yet Negroponte's incessant high-horse complaints about incoming competition contribute to a lack of confidence in the product.. he should just embrace competitors and continue to promote the strength of his product.. and his product development process!
Choosing a language is highly subjective to the people you have available and the application you are building. Discounting php developers off hand is foolish.

Many huge sites are built in php such as facebook and last.fm

There's a well known path to scaling PHP, whilst big Rails sites such as Twitter are having to build it as they go.

I'm working for a startup who are building on C# and asp.net. This is hugely to our advantage as our customers are large enterprises. Microsoft is on the approved vendors list, Rails, Django and others are not.
That's a good article, but I'm pretty sure everyone here knows about his articles, and has even read most them.

If you haven't read them all, you should. They're good. http://paulgraham.com/articles.html
I learned to dance salsa a couple of years ago with my ex-girlfriend, it just takes a lot of practice, and is much better if you have a good teacher.
Some alcohol might help too :P.

Learning is not hard, unless you're studying something that you don't like, for example years in school when I started studying Logic it was a real pain. Later when I started learning statistics I figured out that logic is awesome, and is the basis of many many things.
I agree. PHP is very powerful if you know how to use it correctly. I have been working with CodeIgniter lately and it is one of the better frameworks I have seen. Sure cuts down development time.

I've never really considered Ruby, but maybe I should since everyone is raving about it.
Have you heard of the following:

LAMS, http://lamsinternational.com

dotLRN, http://dotlrn.org - great user or class-scoped calendaring and private forums scoped per-group, whatever that group may be plus other stuff (and can integrate with LAMS)

There is Sakai, although they are woefully late on delivering what they have promised to deliver. http://sakaiproject.org

Why don't you write up something that looks at these projects and explains what is missing from them?
TIOBE declares Python as programming language of 2007
Social Media "Friending" Etiquette?
When Will We See a Real Apples to Apples Comparison Engine?
Default(tm).
"... The TIOBE Programming Community index gives an indication of the popularity of programming languages ... TIOBE declares Python as programming language of 2007! ..."

Ho hum. Python has been a pretty useful language for a lot longer than the title suggests. [0] Is it just me or do lists like this one reek and makes me think this is the kind of "language-popularity" graphy PHB"'s look at to start new projects.

Read "Being popular" [1] to gain a different perspective on how language popularity has nothing to do with how useful a language is to hackers.

[0] Here is the graph of popularity ~ http://www.tiobe.com/tiobe_index/Python.html At what stage did google decided to adopt python?

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/popular.html
Brings back good memories: Hard Hat Mack, Bollo, Captain Good Night, Gemstone Warrior, Super Mario Bross, Moon Patrol, and lots of lots of good games. Let's not forget - Castle Wolfenstein!!!
> What should a language do to be a true hundred-year language?
> It should make it easier for programmers to write DSLs.

Agreed. And there are already a couple of us working on such languages. Have a look at Converge http://convergepl.org/ as an example. To be honest, I think we're barely even scratching the surface of what might be possible. But in the meantime one can have fun with odd examples like an abstract-ish assembler DSL that can implement things like a Fibonacci generator http://convergepl.org/cgi-bin/gitweb.cgi?p=src;a=blob;f=exam...
There was talk of ZFS for a while I think?

I guess it will be post leopard now.
Blackboard already has an AJAX interface in private beta. Don't know if it will be an improvement or not, I just heard that from our tech people. To be honest though about half of what makes blackboard suck is that teachers aren't very effective at using it. As professors get more savvy and the tech improves I think it will be at least a tolerable solution to most people. It used to drive me crazy but lately I don't notice it so much anymore.
I'm his brother - it's my job to take the piss ;-)

I was serious though actually - these analogies do ring true for me.
Well... good hackers are certainly good hackers with any language, but I wouldn't go so far as to say that popularity doesn't matter at all. Even hackers like to have handy libs, and those are more likely to exist for more things, the more people use the language.

That said, this is old news in any case, and my own site, http://www.langpop.com does a better job of aggregating more data sources:-)
> learning -- creating knowledge -- consists of creating something complex (an idea in your own head) that didn't already exist

This reminds me of The Programmer's Stone: http://www.reciprocality.org/Reciprocality/r0/ which talks about "mapping" and "packing" as two different ways people learn. The authors found it easy to teach programming to those that tended toward mapping--building a mental map of a subject rather than accumulating facts about it.
Oh, no problem.
ICANN finally starts to migrate root DNS servers to IPv6
From the article "most startups that start with the goal of getting bought, fail."

Hmm. Startups that aim to get bought fail before this happens. However, few startups float. The majority are bought and the remainder stay private. So, the best way to maximise your return is to avoid being bought, even if it is the most likely option. That is a paradox.
I just found this. This is a huge problem.
Blackboard has patented the CMS system for educational institutions. http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2006/08/blackboard_elearni...
This discourages innovation and new players int he market.
Would be neat to be able to see the pps and ppc values for an individual... I don't make either of those lists, but I'd be interested what my averages are.
I'd love to be someone who could sit in a state of trance and consume 500 pages of boring reference manual and immediately put all of that into action. But I'm not.

I have to have something practical, something that I want to use either personally or at work. And at first it has to be pretty simple. If there is no low-hanging fruit to explore I'll probably get bored and move on (i.e., fail).

I like to learn about the right way to do things in my given environment and am terribly afraid of people with more experience than me seeing my code and mocking it.
Choosing a Name for Your Computer
Most computer graphics artists in the film and adverting industry work on short contracts. Typically, film animators are contracted per film, or are contracted in later phases, as the project scales. Additionally, computer animation HR departments are accustommed to doing visa paperwork. So, you've got a huge pool of global talent which sloshes around a shortlist of companies. If you get a string of hit films then you'll attract talent, grow organically and hopefully perpetuate hits.

Pixar's deal with Disney gives it access to Beuna Vista's distribution. Without that, Pixar would have grown organically. Disney acquisitions will be outside of film and animation.
Mark Zuckerberg and his girlfriend make TMZ
RIAA Wants to Cut Artist Royalties to 9%, Apple Wants Them at 4%, Artists Just Want to Eat
I'll look into that when I have some time.

+-------------+------+-----+--------+
| Xichekolas | pts | ct | avg |
+-------------+------+-----+--------+
| Submissions | 64 | 7 | 9.1429 |
+-------------+------+-----+--------+
| Comments | 497 | 199 | 2.4975 |
+-------------+------+-----+--------+
The ShoeMoney Effect - A Shoemoney review drives more traffic than mashable
been a fan of shoemoney for a while - interesting to see the kind of traffic his blog is driving
I need to take a closer look at this.
The only blocker I see in what you mentioned is your attitude.
Google added the presentations tool to its online 'office suite' not too long ago. The tool might have Zenter at its core (http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/09/our-feature-presentat...)
> If you spent the last 6 years doing the same thing basically, it's really just 2 years with lots of sets/reps.

There was a comment of TheDailyWTF ( http://www.thedailywtf.com/ ) of the form "Some people get 10 years experience, some people get 10 * one years experience." There's also a quote "Wisdom comes with age but sometimes age comes alone."
"... Even hackers like to have handy libs, and those are more likely to exist for more things, the more people use the language. ..."

That could explain the popularity of 'c'. Something written in 'c' can be used just about everywhere. One of the reasons I despise Java & C#. Not because they are bad languages. Because they don't share very well.

"... That said, this is old news in any case, and my own site, http://www.langpop.com does a better job of aggregating more data sources:-) ..."

Looks like your have been thinking about this a lot deeper. Do you supply the data? One other minor quibble the x-axes graph titles are hard to read. What graphing lib are you using?
kind of interesting. but i don't think the main point that people think in one of two different ways, is correct. one reason is it's very hard to find a person who thinks well in most areas. partial mappers are much more common than consistent mappers.
That's easy: Learning Python 3rd Ed. by Mark Lutz.
Has college dropout done the impossible and created a perpetual motion machine?
I'm working on a web app that would eventually be a(n indirect) competitor to CMS systems.
> Looks like your have been thinking about this a lot deeper

I'm fascinated by it:

http://www.welton.it/articles/programming_language_economics...

http://www.welton.it/articles/scalable_systems.html

I get the data from Yahoo search (the open API is better than Google's, which doesn't exist any more) and direct scraping in some cases.

The graphing lib is Plotr, and yeah, it's getting too scrunched up, and I need to add some history functions, because I have a few months of data. Not much has really changed, but still, it's nice to show it.
Prediction markets on Obama's chance of winning nomination
From the article: "Don't overload other terms already in common use."

I heard that Nokia named a set of meeting rooms after cities. This was changed after it cost a small fortune in cancelled flights.

From the article: "Avoid alternate spellings."

An ex-colleague named servers after his favourite punk and metal bands, many of which have unusual spellings. Furthermore, it doesn't give the right impression if you name your mail server megadeth
That is just plain mean, thanks.
God, I hate WebCT. My school currently uses it; it's poorly designed and even harder to navigate.
Yay for him.

coughdouche bagcough
Yesterday it was 55% on Clinton.....
Will Shipley can be an ass... but this otherwise worthless blog post has one nugget of useful info -

"My MacBook Air with 2GB of RAM and 1.8 GHz cores and the SSD compiles Delicious Library 2 from scratch in 1:59.4. My MacBook Pro with 3GB of RAM and 2.3GHz cores and an HD compile it in... 2:04.3."

SSD may be worth the extra money.
Guy Kawasaki shares what NOT to do when pitching venture capitalists
Blackboard is a steaming pile, that's for sure.
Scalability isn't reliability.
lyime, email me at myoung8@stanford.edu or ping me at myoung8 on Skype, i've got some information/experience in this area that should be helpful to you.
http://politicalmarket.cnn.com/ is another one, and it's from InklingMarkets (a Y-Combinator co)
It's a little discouraging to embrace your competitors if you're trying to fairly compete on merit and they're using every dirty trick in the book to crush you.
You may wish to evaluate this fellow with the Crackpot Index ( http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html ). The index is like spamassassin for kooks.
These crappy systems survive largely because of their support for enterprise integration. I know my school bought one on the basis of its integration with their banner management system. Not to mention that universities are demanding customers. (seems like a lot of enterprise software customers are)
"[0] Here is the graph of popularity ~ http://www.tiobe.com/tiobe_index/Python.html At what stage did google decided to adopt python?"

I remember using Google back in 1997 or 1998 when it was hosted off of stanford.edu and receiving occasional Python error messages that said nicely that an error occurred and it had been logged..
And tomorrow, even after the voting, it will still be uncertain.
There's an idea for a startup. Create a good, secure voting service (web-based, local machine, etc. who knows?) that calls results immediately and reliably and you'll probably be doing pretty well.
Such an unbelievable invention would challenge the laws of physics, a no-no in the rigid world of serious science.

The article contains other hints that the scientific community is a bit like the Church a few hundred years ago -- rigidly attached to the status quo.

That's an odd thing to claim, considering all the new scientific ideas we've had in the last century.
Why post this here?
It's probably more useful to think of mapping/packing as skills rather than types of people. But then you can't claim that all those evil packers are oppressing you.
He slipped to 54...
Except you'd have to sell to the government.

And convince technophobes that it's secure. And safe. And reliable.
That's OK, I didn't want to be a victim anyway :)
Learn Prolog Now!
Given the standard of software for vertical markets ( http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Rutherford,-Price,-Atkinson,... ), anything via a browser would be an improvement. In the worse case, you could wrap a browser component around your own client. This would allow you to install the browser of your choice on the platform of your choice.
If you tell me that Newtons theory of gravity is wrong I'll hear you out.

If you tell me Einsteins theory of relativity doesn't hold up I'll hear you out.

But if you tell me that the second law of thermodynamics is wrong I'll tell you you're a crackhead...
What's a good, current Prolog implementation?
And put money in the right pockets, which are tough to get access to?
There's GNU Prolog (http://www.gprolog.org/) and YAProlog (http://www.ncc.up.pt/~vsc/Yap/downloads.html), which look semi-active.
Richard Feynman:

This question of trying to figure out whether a book is good or bad by looking at it carefully or by taking the reports of a lot of people who looked at it carelessly is like this famous old problem: Nobody was permitted to see the Emperor of China, and the question was, What is the length of the Emperor of China's nose? To find out, you go all over the country asking people what they think the length of the Emperor of China's nose is, and you average it. And that would be very "accurate" because you averaged so many people. But it's no way to find anything out; when you have a very wide range of people who contribute without looking carefully at it, you don't improve your knowledge of the situation by averaging.

I think tarot cards are a lot simpler and more accurate. Mine suggest that Barack Obama should beware of the tall tower with the lightning bolts, and that a hooded figure carrying three sticks will bring him five golden discs. Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton will be menaced by a demon-like creature with the face of Rudy Giuliani, and will fight back by swinging swords at it while blindfolded. Or something.
Ask YC: Iterations
How often has your startup gone through an iteration where aspects of the idea or the whole idea completely changes?

PG points out that this happens, and I have definitely experienced this again and again - my startup has probably gone through 5 complete transformations. I figure that as long as I have the funds, and the software is getting better, that's ok. I'm committed to launching asap of course.
Check out http://www.gprolog.org/

Edit: Beaten to it! So I'll add that I've played around with it a little, and it seems good.
"... I remember using Google back in 1997 or 1998 when it was hosted off of stanford.edu and receiving occasional Python error messages ..."

You have a better memory than me "gunga din". I remember using google when it was at stanford via slashdot [0] though I don't remember seeing errors. Looks like python was used at google from the start.

[0] http://web.archive.org/web/19981202230410/www.google.com/
other articles imply it does give a boost.

is it a definite no?
Behold the power of OO!!

CREATE TABLE User (
id serial PRIMARY KEY,
full_name varchar(100) NOT NULL DEFAULT 'Anonynous Coward',
...
);

CREATE TABLE FacebookUser (
fb_id int UNIQUE NOT NULL
) INHERITS (User);

CREATE TABLE AppUser (
uid int UNIQUE NOT NULL
) INHERITS (User);

CREATE TABLE Friend (
uid integer REFERENCES User (id),
friends_with integer REFERENCES User (id)
);

If you are able to pull the user data, you pull the list of friends and add to your table. The part where you use session information to check which user is accessing your web app is left as an exercise to the reader.
i haven't read this, but can confidently answer "no".
"Science progresses one funeral at a time." -- Max Planck

To be fair, revolutionary scientific advances spend a long time in the heresy box. The most recent I can think of was the bacterial causes of ulcers... took 20 years and some dramatic self-experiments before it was taken seriously enough to confirm.

That said, the more extraordinary the claim, the more extraordinary the evidence required.
ZFS is an alpha-quality optional add-on in Leopard; I guess most users won't see it until later.
For what it's worth, you may find the fluctuation theorem (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluctuation_theorem) interesting. It shows that the second law is incorrect in the same way as Newton's theory of gravity was: both are accurate, in their domain of applicability, but neither had such boundaries well defined. Where Newton's law fails for very heavy systems, the second law fails for very small (though by a far smaller amount).
"... Google added the presentations tool to its online 'office suite' not too long ago. ..."

Thanks. The link gave me some pointers. Pity there are no writeups on how the app worked. Seems google uses these companies for core technology spare parts and discard the product. [0]

[0] http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/06/more-sharing.html
I was stuck in a German harbour alone for around 2 weeks two years ago, as my boat's engine had failed and needed repairs. Since I had nothing better to do I decided that I would try to learn as much German as possible. So I basically just started talking to strangers...

After two weeks I could actually survive through a conversation. When I started I knew no German at all.
IBM explores 67.1m-core computer for running entire internet
And all this time I thought we were trying to convince people that electronic voting (without paper audit trail) is insecure, unsafe and unreliable...
Someday, I'd like to draft an article that maxes out this scale, and see if I can publish it in a straight-faced student newspaper, or pseudoscientific special-interests publication.
I'm at the University of Maryland, University College, or UMUC.edu. I'm almost done, and I've completed most of my degree online. UMUC is a "Forbes Favorite" for online education. And, while I think that WebTycho, their custom academic CMS system is okay, it's soooo.... 1999. It could really use a facelift and an upgrade. Also, towards the end of the semester, the system slows to a crawl.

So, yeah, it's a big problem that's begging to be fixed with something better, but you'd have to sell to Universities and colleges, which would be a nightmare. Not only do you have to schmooze the right people, the decision would spend months in committee. And then, implementation would take a long time, because you'd have to interface with whatever legacy database they are using.

I can think of a bunch of other ideas I'd rather do in terms of start ups, but if you want to tackle it... more power to you. You could make life better for thousands of students.
Want a job? michael at coursesonfacebook.com Founders Fund backed. We're not exactly building a CMS. We're building something different/better.
Is race/gender discrimination by voters acceptable because it counters workplace discrimination?
At first glance, US politics appears to be all about discrimination -- and depressingly so. But maybe that's ok and desirable even.