skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't know how you could say that. If anything, the article calls for the demise of walled gardens:

“Early services, such as CompuServe, Prodigy or AOL, began as ‘walled gardens’ before they opened up to become websites. The early e-mail services could send messages only within their own walls (rather as Facebook's messaging does today). Instant-messaging, too, started closed, but is gradually opening up. In social networking, this evolution is just beginning.

“‘E-mail…is the most important social network’… because the extended inbox contains invaluable and dynamically updated information about human connections.”

Without pressure to make it a business, e mail “can remain intimate and discreet. Facebook has an economic incentive to publish ever more data about its users…but [traditional e mail] can let users minimise what they share.”
Adsense has its widgets on a lot of crappy sites and also your targeting ability is limited by keywords, while what you really want is audience level relevance ie rails jobs on rails sites, flash jobs on actionscript sites etc

So if you really wanted you could post a job onto news.yc. We also make i easy to differentiate your company beyond just text giving you a genuine chance to impress who you want to hire on the sites they spend their time on.

Feel free to ask any questions: sumon [at] snaptalent [dot] com
"The Brothers Karamazov" - Fyodor Dostoevsky.

Perhaps the very first existentialist novel ever written. Dostoevsky was an existentialist before anyone knew what existentialism was.
I agree. The Microsoft universe is incredibly insular. This is a strange intellectual reflection of the Microsoft-vs.-the-rest-of-the-universe commercial situation that has been the case for so long. If you live in the Microsoft universe, chances are high you identify "innovation in programming technologies" with "Microsoft's latest release". Hanselman stands out for being one of the few who care about (or are even aware of) anything else.

But I wish he wouldn't broadcast his ignorance by writing LISP.
I'd love to use Django at my day job. Python makes me happy.
Moller Aerospace is based here in Davis, and I don't see any signs of them mass-producing anything.

As far as I know, he has a single prototype which may or may not hover when attached by a wire to a crane. There was a press release about six months ago which said they were entering production, but as far as I know it hasn't happened.
The simplest thing you can do to speed up page load times is merge all of your external scripts and external css into one file.

I never understand why some sites include dozens of external files (e.g., washingtonpost.com).

Even uncompressed, the reduction in load time significant.
This is the under-publicized reason why people do startups - because they can't find an appropriate job.

I was reading an article a while back about "older" entrepreneurs (mostly successful ones). Almost every one of them said their main motivation was lack of career opportunities.
brent, why not an MBA? With your finance background and (I presume) a bunch of undergraduate business courses under your belt it should be quick and easy. There's no degree requirement for hackers--"MBA coder with financial sector experience" sounds pretty good, and you can keep working on your HNd here among like-minded comrades. You could also try to use the program as a platform to launch your startup: business plan competitions, networking, possible co-founders or employees among your fellow students, etc.

I'm sure you've considered this--I'm just surprised you (or anybody else) didn't mention it.
I think you're right. I need to just bite the bullet, launch, and get some feedback.
Is there any idea more closely identified with Alan Kay than "small and self-describing"?
This sounds more sensible:-)
Quote from the page:

We're looking for good people. Fill out the form below, and cross your fingers.

Pass. Even Google was never that arrogant.
I think that's a good solution for more expensive apps aimed at businesses. The application I've been working on is really aimed at consumers with shared hosting/VPS accounts.
How LinkedIn Got Its Groove Back
SOX was created primarily intended to prevent the type of gross-mismanagement that brought down Enron.

That's right, that was the intention.

So what happened at Bear?

I doubt that SOX, in the way it's implemented now, will be useful in preventing any future failures.
Frankly I love it. Compared to other PHP frameworks I've used I think CI's way of doing things is pretty straight forward (but I suspect that Symfony comes close). Although I some qualms on how it uses validations, how CI's model implementation is different from Rails(personally it's not as magical as Rails implementation but I dig CI's more).

So I decided to tinker with the framework and fork my own implementation.

My framework is now built on top of CI and is able to use functional programming idioms such as anonymous functions and the like. Pretty awesome stuff.
How to use a terabyte of RAM
Shhh, don't tell anybody--it'll just ruin it.
What a load of old rubbish: MMOs. They're doing it wrong.
So is this the beginning of the end of (free) Ask YC type posts?
X Prize offering $10M purse for 100-mpg vehicle
Steady decline in burglaries because "Everybody has everything now"
What's the deal with toasters...

And would you believe that the process of air travel is like...two steps:

1. Go to airport
2. Get on plane.

My god, if human heavier-than-air flight is simpler than applying heat to bread, then we are all boned.
"Gears of War II will take several years, hundreds of people, and tens of millions of dollars to create."

I read that it was actually 10 programmers working on the Unreal engine and tools and 20 artists doing something with their efforts for 2 years. They did have a $10 million budget, though.
I have been for over 2 years (and my first gig out of school) ... I suppose I'm spoiled. :)

The Django "group" at PyCon was just freakin' huge. I took off on Sunday, but I understand the sprint crowd was also huge for PyCon standards.
We went with an S-corp and I recommend that as well. We had an attorney work with us. While it was expensive, in the end it was worth it. Good contracts do nothing but protect you and make sure you have an investable company. I think it is worth the expense.
yeah that license really is BS regarding plugins. I saw them present at barcamp miami. exciting project nonetheless ++ for being open source.
Design/code reviews in a startup
I'm working with 5 other developers in a startup-like environment (within a large defense company actually... go figure!). Until now our code base has been small enough that we've been able to get by without design and code reviews. However, our code base is growing as is our team.

There are several formal processes for doing this (Fagan inspection, over the shoulder, tool-assisted, etc.) A developer at MS even came up with a lightweight inspection (url: http://www.stickyminds.com/getfile.asp?ot=XML&id=7152&fn=XDD7152filelistfilename1%2Epdf).

The problem I see with a lot of these processes is that they interrupt your work flow and decrease productivity. I don't want to take an hour out of every other day to go through these reviews, but would it be too much to spend half a day every other week doing these reviews (and what would be the best day for this -- Friday?)

I think it would be great if we could get a discussion going about what others in similar situations have tried and what works and what doesn't?

Thanks all!!
This is a little bit bogus as water seems to be treated like oil for the purpose of scaremongering in the article. Unlike oil, water is a closed system. The 2400 liters the article claims you use when you eat hamburger is does not vanish from the earth forever, rather it goes around again.

I think its a bit dishonest to use this scientists formula together with predictions about water shortages in coming decades in order to illicit a fear response. There is plenty of water, go have a hamburger.
Im curious as to why you think reddit can't serve those niches right now? You can create a private reddit just for you and your family, you can create a pet lover reddit, a reddit for you favorite sports team, etc. Is this perhaps a marketing problem of reddit's?
Yeah, there is a bunch of news there that's not personally that relevant to me, but I like reading it just the same, being a bit of an information junkie.
just started reading up on it. Glad to see people building on it. btw, @jdavid if you find/build a model + plugin that works with s3 easily, that would be awesome. I think you might just have to mod their file upload mod btw.
I think this article's sentiments is just to point out how tech business that are given highly speculative valuations rarely pan out.

Think about Facebook's implied value of $15 Billion. A traditional company is valued at about 2 or 3 times annual revenue, or perhaps 8 to 10 times annual EBITDA. This would require Facebook to mature with revenues around $5 Billion a year, and EBITDA of $1.5 Billion. Their speculated revenue of $50-$60 Million last year is about 1% of that mature target.

This article is saying that these tech companies may have indirect benefits that are hard to quantify, their core value continues to be questionable.
Ask YC: How to choose the best Open Source license for your project?
Hey guys, we're starting to go through the process of open sourcing our project. Problem is, it's hard to figure out which license to go with. Has anyone here gone through the process before? What licenses do you prefer + why? What works for commercial open source companies?
Windows Vista SP1 wreaks havoc on some PCs, users complain
The Rails imitators always seem to be like Elvis impersonators: some are better than others, but none are ever quite as good as the original.
There are two camps; people that want to make/play games, and people that want to make/play worlds. For now at least, it's easier to make games than worlds.
"It took me more than 11 clicks to send them $6."

Upgrading an account in Backpack, 37Signals' web-based calendar/PIM/organizer thing, takes 4 clicks.

Making it easy for people to give you more money on a regular basis is a good thing.

Note that it takes roughly the same amount of effort to downgrade or cancel your account altogether.
I've noticed this too. I think the decline has been going on longer than 30 years. It's because stuff isn't valuable anymore.
A couple arguments in favour of inspections, Fagan-style:

- Although it takes a brutal-seeming amount of time, many teams get a net time savings thanks to earlier bug detection.

- It's a learning experience for everyone involved, so there is a deeper preventative aspect. This can be especially valuable for the new members of your team as you grow.

If you do inspections, and find just one bug that would have been nasty down the line, it's easy to emotionally understand the benefits. Without that experience it's hard to be convinced that it really works. Then again, you feel awful when you go through a 2-hour inspection with four people and don't find anything severe.

Be careful with Fridays, especially in the afternoon. In my experience meetings of any sort don't go well at that time. I'd suggest other weekdays around 10am or 2pm. These seem to be ideal for some reason.

As for frequency of inspections, it depends on how much code you're churning out. I personally think it's reasonable to only inspect particularly challenging, complex, difficult-to-test or critical aspects of the system.
Yes, Dilbert, you can keep your day job!
I wonder if this 'consensus' is a side-product of the knowledge that social networks have low technical barriers to entry and their current horses could be toppled in a relatively short period of time with the right market sentiment.

I've said it before -- Facebook is not invulnerable. Especially in their bread-and-butter college market, it is a trend driven industry. Once the number of 'old people' and parents reaches critical mass, there is ample time for a new player to establish itself. And it's probably got the venture capitalists worried. The stakes for Facebook pre-liquidity could not be higher.
I hadn't even noticed that jobs link. Useful.
I guess it's to prevent phishing. If you have to take all the steps yourself instead of clicking on a link from the e-mail, the chances of someone being able to hijack a link are smaller.

If it's always (1) click link, (2) enter credit card details. You are teaching your users to become victims of fraud.
New sales program pays Facebook members.
Not one mention of the most likely cause, which is demographics. Break-ins are a young person's game, the number of young people have declined.
I would more identify that with John McCarthy, but I know what you mean. The problem is that it's making him bark up the wrong tree.
Smelling Trouble Behind AOL’s $850 Million Bebo Deal
Oh, and just one counterexample to the "Everybody has everything now.":

Canon 1Ds Mark III - 21 megapixels, full frame sensor, $8k.

I lust for it, but don't own one.
Functional programming in PHP? How? And, is it efficient? I know PHP has a callback mechanism, but am more curious about the anonymous functions claim...
More here:

http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2008/03...
June 6 = D-Day. Nice.
Where I work we use a simple version of Scrum.

Following the sprint review at end of every 2-4 week sprint, each developer either gives a short demo of the new features or changes they completed or a short review of the most significant code changes they made. Those who focused on features generally prefer to give demos while those who focused on bug fixes usually ask for quick reviews of just the most important changes. In total these meetings can go a few hours but they only happen on average once or twice a month so they don't interrupt the daily workflow.

We mostly just use our Trac wiki for reviews but I've been thinking of suggesting something like
http://www.review-board.org when we get bigger.
Introducing Game Theory
The worst designed telephone: http://www.jgc.org/blog/2008/02/worst-designed-telephone-in-...
do u mind sharing the name of the attorney - thanks
Man, Seth Godin can't even do a good job of reviewing a bad toaster. When writing a critical review, the bar is clearly set at what Amazon.com reviewers come up with. Godin should see where that bar is set for bad toasters:

http://www.amazon.com/review/product/B00004R92D/ref=cm_cr_dp...

I note, with some smugness, that "DANGEROUS --- SHAME ON TOASTMASTER" is also a catchier title than "World's Worst Toaster".
Hey there, No, you can still make those. This link is just for Non-YC companies that would love to give smart hackers awesome summer internships.

I'm sure you'll appreciate the chance to check out cool offices and great companies.
But how big is the black market for one of those?
RockYou $400 million valuation?
Dunno. I think that's why they call it a "black" market.
I know that Thomas Hawk had his 5D (only $3k for that) stolen while on vacation.
The Experts vs. the Amateurs: A Tug of War over the Future of Media
At the risk of being a Reddit pedant: it's not really true that there are other reasonable safe hash algorithms. We're in a bit of a hash crisis now; SHA1 is expected to fall too, SHA256 is unreasonably expensive, and no alternative algorithm has the peer results to allay concerns. So, I guess there is an article you could write about the situation.

But, of course, it has nothing yet to do with the Internet; SSL/TLS uses both MD5 and SHA1, simultaneously.
There are plenty of bad toasters out there. Many products are designed (destroyed) as this toaster was with lots of extra super duper features in mind, thinking that users absolutely have to have the ability to do X...and y, a,b,and c.

Then they hit you with all the options all at once. Yes build in that must have functionality but don't forsake intuitiveness. Don't mistake functionality with usability.

By making a simple task more complex you do not necessarily increase customer safety (or satisfaction) and as henning notes so aptly, "Making it easy for people to give you more money on a regular basis is a good thing."

In my experience air travel is more akin to the 11 click ebay example than a 2 step toaster.
Perhaps even more important than diversity in gender, diversity in age and experience contribute even more to a project. So long as people are bright and hard-working, they can contribute lots. In the technology world, age prejudice runs more rampant than gender prejudice.
I read a 365tomorrows story that talked about how burglaries of the future will involve the burglars dumping trash in your residence, instead of stealing something.
C-jump: computer programming board game
[Invalid Date] is shown on each item in the RSS feed (using a tabbed gadget in iGoogle)
Burglaries per:

United Kingdom:	13.8321 per 1,000 people

United States:	7.09996 per 1,000 people

Murders per:

United States: 0.042802 per 1,000 people

United Kingdom:	0.0140633 per 1,000 people

My suggestion: The wide availability of guns makes murder easier in the United States (for obvious reasons) and Burglary harder (...since so many homeowners have guns, and shooting burglars is generally legal, burglars tend to avoid the practice.)
Wine has, over the past two years or so, become quite usable for a couple of things that I used to have to reboot (or boot my lappy) for. Internet Explorer 6 and 7 run well under Wine, which makes cross-platform testing websites much nicer. It's not perfect, as ActiveX controls don't work, but it does allow one to check to be sure your HTML and CSS and JavaScript is IE bug-compatible, though I sometimes still worry whether I'm seeing a Wine bug or a bug in my own code, when things don't work right (usually it's in my code).

I also use it to play Dwarf Fortress. It, unfortunately, doesn't do very well with any of the other Win games that I occasionally play.
Five Ways Generation Y May Reinvent IT
Well basically I found this old library in PHP created by Ian B,Kos. His library allows certain functional programming idioms using PHP. What I basically did was fix the library up in order for my version of CI to utilize the library.

Is it efficient? well according to the original author you take a minor hit it performance (as of yet he has not provided any solid numbers) in exchange for programmer happiness.

The implementation of anonymous functions is quite clever. Please consider this library was created 4 years ago and has remained stagnant up until now. To put it shortly he uses a eval based approach in order for use of anonymous functions.
Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance By Robert M. Pirsig
True but I think CI is evolving to be something else aside from being just another PHP rails clone. (Well that's what I'm trying to attempt with my forked version)
Depends on your goals.

It's not a bad question, but I wonder if someone hasn't written a definitive answer yet...?
Instead of merely having a home, why not incorporate it as a non-profit cooperative. The paperwork isn't very hard. We've done it from scratch here at the http://Ant-Hill.org in Rochester. The effort to found a developer/start-up co-op then goes on to sustain yet more start-ups. A co-op/social venture would grow independently and foster others, and even help sustain your venture in a positive feedback cycle too.
Diigo Revamps Social Bookmarking Service with v3.0
Higher Education Web Symposium at University of Pennsylvania
I head an open source project that provides bilingual semantic analysis of Chinese (http://www.adsotrans.com). The commercial opportunities we get come from having the best and most flexible software in the market. (If anyone wants to launch a semantic search or advertising network in China, I'm your man). Being open source is irrelevant.

There have been three advantages to being open source in my experience: (1) it can help potential clients find you and simplifies the sales process since everyone is already crystal clear what you provide, (2) it can attract users to contribute things that aren't software, but that the software helps you generate (content, data), or (3) you want other people to contribute to the actual code base.

Neither #1 nor #3 are good enough reasons to go open source in my opinion if your goal is making money. The only advantage you'll have over a closed source company comes with #2 - in which case you aren't a software company at heart. All of these rules go out the window if you're working in a really, really niche area, but then your business is really consulting.

My advice would be that if you REALLY want to go open source for some reason, use a license that permits others to use and develop your software, but doesn't permit them to redistribute it. This will prevent others from forking the code commercially, but won't deter hobbyists and/or developers from using it to build systems themselves. Restrictions on redistribution also give you the freedom to change the license in the future when you figure out what you should be doing while protecting early adopters from having the rug pulled out from under them. At that point they can either continue developing the software themselves, or start paying for it.
Picking a Basketball Pool (from 2006)
Reminds me of the Plantronics desk phone headsets. I don't know where they get the engineers to design these. Just a few examples of what's wrong:

- the base station has a "configuration dial" that requires a flat object to insert into the slit to turn it

- There are 2, yes 2, pairs of volume buttons on the base itself, AND one on the headset..

- The mute button on the headset has a sharp protrusion that literally pokes you in the finger when you try to push it..

Seth's post and experiences with such systems make me appreciate sites like tumblr and slinkset quite a lot.

PDF user guide: http://www.plantronics.com/media/media_resources/literature/...).
So was this "star" marketer fooled by marketing? "It's pretty fancy and shiny and microprocessor controlled. And it makes toast." Shouldn't the criteria have been related to function: like 'I only have to insert toast and remove toast... it's one step shorter than old toasters'.

As an aside, I'd love to post this on his blog, but that doesn't appear to be an option. Is accepting critical feedback in an open forum a risk not worth taking when marketing oneself?
We are currently using CI on a pretty big project and I have both good and bad things to say about it. The good news is that it is a "rails like" framework, but without the magic. Some of the helpers are really nice, the validation lib is pretty nice allowing for callbacks to both validate and alter data. Problems I have with it are support for transactions, which seem to be there but fail miserably when something goes wrong. If an exception is thrown the transaction has begun but it never hits a rollback, so all those queries are hanging in the balance and never get commited or rolled back. There is also this recurring theme in CI that they had to do everything themselves. This means that instead of using a well established Email lib they wrote their own, which has severe limitations. You can extend these all of these classes and easily integrate others so Email wasn't so big of a deal. We are just using phpmailer instead. You cannot however extend the DB class. You have to hack up the original, which is what we have been doing to provide SQL queries in the log file during development, and transactions that actually work. This wasn't too bad to do, but it is already introducing a problem. Upgrading from 1.5.whatever to 1.6 breaks the modifications that we did. So now we have the problem of versioning our own copy of CI with our fancy DB stuff, and the actual product we are developing. That being said it is the best PHP programming experience that I have ever had.
True, but it takes a couple of minutes to make toast and the whole house-to-plane process takes forever.

The airlines are still trying out different plane boarding techniques, with mixed degrees of success.