skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We've been hacking away building the technology for our startup since late last fall. We're finally close to launch time (end Feb hopefully). We're more focused on getting a product launched as quickly as possible and then letting our community have it's say re: what works and doesnt work.

Development took longer than I hoped, but we used our blog to really spread the word and get the 'movement' started in the meantime.

We're NewsCred, a digital newspaper that brings you news based on credibility from your favorite sources. Unlike Digg, which uses popularity, our primary criterion is quality/credibility. Plus we're an online newspaper, not a social news site. Whats the difference? Hopefully you'll be able to see for yourself soon!

Loved reading everyone else's ideas. Let me know what you guys think! http://www.newscred.com
Heh. Looks like they finally got around to making a decision. The blogs won.

http://blog.longnow.org/2008/02/01/decision-blogs-vs-new-yor...
Is it, though? But if I consider the safest way to get from A to B, miles seem more relevant?
Is this not sniping from the sidelines? Paul has proposed program size as a metric for the power of programming languages. Ron criticizes, but doesn't suggest anything better (other than "make creating programs easier", or "have well-organized and easy-to-use libraries") - he seems to argue that there is no perfect metric. Sure. Maybe. But you can't get far with such skepticism.

Personally, I think Paul is enticed by too simple a rule-of-thumb when he defines such an easy metric. Instead of settling for something as catchy as "programs should be short", defining the power of languages may be better approached from a psychological perspective. Programming is about bridging the gap between our mental representations and the computer's representations of instructions for (one) interacting with users and (two) manipulating data.

A better (albeit more complex/open-ended) metric would be to "maximize the utilization of our mental structures in a formal language".

For example, abstraction is an obvious way our minds understand the world, and hence we have all kinds of programming tricks to express abstraction in code. We should be asking questions like "what other ways do our minds comprehend the world?", and writing languages which mold to those ways. How could we express metaphor in a formal language?

Now that I think about it, maybe I'm proposing a slight generalization to Paul's metric - a language is powerful if it can express problems using the least number of mental structures. But code trees are easier to count than mental structures, so I guess we should stick to those for now.
I think I am willing to grant that "making the creation of programs easier" is probably closer to what language design should achieve than "make programs shorter". However, the two are strongly correlated, so by selecting make programs shorter as the axiom you do end up using a less appealing objective, though not by much.

However, Make Programs Shorter is vastly superior in another regard; it is explicitly measurable. When faced with a design choice, whether or not it Made Programming Easier might take lots of careful consideration on your part, and users of the language might have very strong opinions about whether Make Programming Easier was achieved.

If you're counting characters and tokens, design changes instantly and verifiably achieve the objective or they don't. No fuss, no second guessing.

Or, more crudely, selling your map to buy more decimals of latitude and longitude is not going to get you there.
That site looks like it is aimed at physical products ("model", "manufacture") rather than software. Physical products are much easier to knock off than evolving, quality software; so IP protection and the like are probably more important.
I thought the article was spot on except for two comments:

> Keep track of all your development and protection costs to help you put a value on your IP

No. McDonalds doesn't price its cheeseburger based on how much it costs but on how much a consumer would be willing to spend on it. That's a huge difference. How much you've worked and spent is meaningless in terms of the end value. The only question is how much would others value it.

And second, it doesn't clarify enough that inventors almost never make money on their inventions. The person who brings it to market makes all the money. Are Bill Gates and Steve Jobs inventors? Exactly.
is this all pseudo code or is pyflow actually built?
yup, it's built (not released though)
I've worked a long time in a completely different vein, under the premise that language design should focus on making programs manageable. Making them shorter certainly promotes that in many respects, but destroys it in other respects. And the notion of "making the creation of programs easier" is to me, the completely wrong premise. That ends up being a wonderful derivative of making them manageable, but should never the goal. Programs are easy to create in BASIC, for example. They're just not scalable, which is another way of saying they lack manageability, which is something that only shows itself as the system's complexity expands. To paraphrase Alan Kay, you can build a doghouse with cardboard and plastic, but you couldn't build a house like that.
Strange how on the surface much of the UI looks copied from windows (configuration screens, file copies, system monitor -- those tabs, yuk!). Apart from the start menu, things look very similar. I haven't used Ubuntu myself, but is this true? Is it very much like Windows?
How crushing was the miserable failure? (and I assume it was before the success).
Yes, Photosynth was the inspiration, but I managed to avoid the stages of image analysis and 3D reconstruction =)

The main problem right now is non-intuitive interface. It's hard to predict where the camera will go when you click. Working on it.
Ask YC: Taking a job with a startup
Before taking a job with a startup, what are some questions you should ask them? Also, how can you tell that they're not going to go under in a few months?

What generally happens when startups run out of money? I assume they get bought out for pennies or liquidate their assets.

I searched a bit and found a few websites that answered this, but I think they were more geared towards companies with IPOs as exit strategies versus smaller web companies hoping to either turn a profit or get bought out.
This just off the newsreels:

Gattaca HQ, USA: Crew member dies of heart condition on Titan Mission, investigation pending
so fluffy
Thanks! What would you do next if you were me?
I really enjoyed that one. I'd be grateful if you'd could suggest some important "classics" readings about this issue: free as the new paradigm.
Worldometers - real time world statistics
PHP:

if ($S['foo']) echo "you said {$S['foo']}";
elseif (PtoS('foo')) link('said','click here');
else form('foo');

For me, making programs short is not a design goal. But if it would, I would do it like above. My framework then would include this functionality:

S[] contains all session variables
P[] contains all posted variables
PtoS copies an entry from P to S. Returns false if P was not set.
link() prints a link
form() shows a form with the given fields. target is the current url.
I was going to launch pre-Railsconf and maybe recruit there, but this gives me an extra week or two of leeway... and hopefully filters out the corporate types, so I'm sold!
What Freshmen Don't Know
>how can you tell that they're not going to go under in a few months?

You cant'. Not even the founders know the answer to that question.
Incorporate before MS sues you.
That is so right...

You may be old but you get it :-)
Please see The Reg's article about this (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/01/31/kerviel/). The WSJ's article is nothing but parroting of SG's press releases. They are hard at work trying to save their asses, and everybody in the industry agrees that JKE could not have done what he did without his managers knowing, and furthermore, that he is now made into a scapegoat. WSJ is right about one thing: they are full of hubris.
is program shortness really that important?

what percentage or time developing an app do you guys spend typing? For me it is quite low but maybe i'm not a superhacker or i just type fast
Yes it was.

Pretty crushing actually.

The thing is that you get into it expecting it to be a huge success, and if you are a good entrepreneur you really do have to believe it. Otherwise it won't work. You have to invest in it emotionally.

When things start to go wrong you just won't admit it, and think that it must be the market, the customers, the investors. Anything...

The thing is that the line between failure and success is a very fine one, and it is hard to tell which side you are on. Basically you don't know until you either failed, or succeded. Eventually you have to realise you failed, give up your baby and move on. But it is really really hard because you invested so much in it emotionally, told your friends and family about it, convinced yourself that this would make you rich and famous, and all that.

I don't think you can really prepare well for it though.
I do remember stumbling on < early on, but now I don't get it wrong any more often than I do with infix.
Your definition is good, and I like it, but it's probably too vague to really get you anywhere.

The thing this article is right about is that exactly same program with shorter keywords isn't likely anyone's definition of a more powerful language. What pg is right about is that writing less code to achieve more is a workable definition of power - as long as the savings come in better program structure and not in cosmetic changes. Which category Arc falls in, I'm not able to comment on yet.
OpenPhotoVR is only superficially like Photosynth: I don't do image analysis, 3D reconstruction, or 3D display. And my project is non-profit. And I'm in Russia.
Sure. http://www.improveverywhere.com/2006/04/23/best-buy/
Well... there are windows... and buttons... and programs! So yes and no. It looks pretty much like any other modern OS.

In fact, it can look almost exactly like other OS:

http://www.taimila.com/?q=node/11

http://gnomestyle.blogspot.com/2007/05/make-ubuntu-look-like...

http://www.gnome-look.org

It's your choice.
> Considering how often HOF is used, the impact is huge.

Well, yes, that would be the point :)

I think I understand what you mean, but I don't see how this is more dangerous/worrying than what is already there. Ok, so (funcall fn (+ 1 2)) may or may not evaluate (+ 1 2). But call-it is already willing to give total control to fn. Will fn call a continuation and never return? Launch nuclear weapons? Giving it additional control over the evaluation of the arguments seems innocent enough.
Sarah Meyers techno geek - one of a kind.
The effect of Microsoft acquiring Yahoo [pic]
He failed. Misleading title. He essentially took huge, undeducated gambles. Does anyone remember the name of the strategy that involves doubling your bet at every step, so that you could always with a single win end up "positive"? (assuming infinite money supply of course)
TIME

Since time is the most limited human resource, maybe the best metric for the most powerful language would be that programming language which, overall, saves the most time in creating, maintaining, and improving a program. Using "saving time' as the standard of value, PG's use of fewer nodes and less lengthy names both help in creating programs with less time, so ARC seems to be right on.

I intuitively like the lengthier names in CL for readability, but at the end of the day, you still have to not only know them all through memorization, you also have to know the order of parameters and keys, which is not consistent among all functions/macros in CL. So having shorter names to memorize, and more importantly fewer, would definitely save time in the learning stage.

The question I don't know the answer to is how fast can ARC be changed, maintained, and improved, but I'm guessing this will also be faster.
Internet gene tests provoke alarm
This link was posted on YC before and has the essential questions:

http://www.genuinevc.com/archives/2005/10/seven_questions.ht...
Made me go find the video.
'Yahoo sale could be bad for flippers' - that's what the article means.

Obviously, many people would disagree, but why worry about early exit when your business is profitable and/or grows like hell? Where would you get same rate on return / risk on your cash after cashing out (you know the risk of your business)?

I can name Facebook and 37signals as two cases when the founders were in no rush to sell. Those seems to be good decisions so far.
Totally disagree on AOL being a potential winner. They don't have much going for them now that they've started becoming more of an advertising agency.
Every Demo 08 startup ranked from 1 to 72
That betting strategy is called a Martingale, or a Grand Martingale.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martingale_(betting_system)
What a great place to do it. Grand Central is one of the nicest interior spaces in NYC, and it can be very crowded.
Ask YC:  Anyone put Apache/PHP/MySQL on Asus eee?
I'd love to get one of these little things for travel, but only if my software runs exactly the same as on my desktop. Any experiences? How well does it run?
I have an Eee, but I really use it more for note-taking, casual browsing, and connecting to my remote server via vnc when I want to run any real apps. The solid-state drive, and overall limited space, doesn't lend itself well to running even a test/development environment like you want to do (IMO).

Also, the keyboard is really cramped, so I'm not sure how well it would work for longer-term coding sessions.

For what it is (a small, cheap uber-portable), I happen to think it's great. But, it is not a desktop or laptop "replacement".
So? I don't really use Yahoo anyway :)
Bootstrapping your newspaper startup backwards
An interesting article, although nothing really new if you've been following AWS for a while.

The part I just don't get though is the mentality that having core systems in-house is a "liability". Yes, you do need to understand servers, load-balancers, network designs, etc to do this in-hosue. I've been bitten too many times by vendors that have their thumbs up their ass on even simple things. 12 hours to restore 100MB of data (after an email ticketing back-and-forth volley that rivaled a Wimbledon match). Servers being hastily shut-down with no notice. 90 minutes for a managed services provider to add a firewall rule to block an (admittedly juvenile) DoS/bot-gone-bad. And, I could go on.

I just seems to me that if your core business hinges on your servers being available and on-line, you should be a little less removed from that operation.
Create your widget with SproutBuilder
> Is this not sniping from the sidelines?

No, because I'm hacking too :-)

> Ron criticizes, but doesn't suggest anything better

That's because my whole point is that programming is much too rich and complicated for any one metric to be particularly useful. (Ironically, the exact same thing is true of painting, which is Paul' central metaphor!)
Play A Multiplayer Online Game While Surfing The Web: PMOG
Why CVS sucks (humor)
Memo to Jerry Yang: Talk to Ray
In the last three months del.icio.us has lost 70% of its 3.2M traffic
Cable cuts, conspiracies, and lolsubs...
But trying to optimize multiple variables becomes an excercise in game theory. That is a value of each metric's benefit needs to be added for each 'player', the programmer, management, qa, the customer... This becomes an equation that I for one will wait on the Singularity to resolve.
It's just occurred to me that I'll have to switch my domain name registrar if this happens. Damn.
Someone downmodded you for simply asking a question. I didn't know we had Ubuntu nazis here...

The answer is yes and no. I cannot stand KDE because it reminds me of Winodws too much. Gnome is more "authentic" - sure there are close/maximize/minimize buttons, and hotkeys are the same. Gnome is much younger than Windows and picking up established standards for keys wasn't a bad idea. One of the reasons I went with FireFox instead of Opera some time ago was because FireFox had all the hotkeys I was using with IE.

However, under the surface Gnome is very different from Win. For instance windows can have two additional states: "vertically maximized" and "horizontally maximized" - and there are hotkeys for both. Additionally there are many little nice gems, like you can drag your windows around without use of the title bar, just hold Alt key. Virtual desktops are also tightly integrated, you can switch between the two and easily throw windows between them.

I also love the menu bar at the top: it has everything on it. By everything I mean literally "everything I want to see in front of my eyes at all times": status of hardware, weather, shortcuts, etc.

But the real "bomb" IMO is Ubuntu's font rendering. On high DPI screens the comfort of reading text is approaching that of paper. Granted, I am using non-standard libcairo (font rendering) package and my settings are adjusted from Ubuntu's defaults, but the point is that it's there: and going back to Windows makes me feel crippled and tired after a while. I end up taking my Ubuntu laptop to work and use it for web browsing and email, anything to take a break from thin and low-contrast Windows fonts.
What Python gets right
Nice to see you here, Lisper. Thank you for a nice writeup. If anything, it only heated up my desire to finally learn the language. Somehow it seems that getting disappointed in Lisp is very hard: people get disappointed in their other favorite languages much more easily and they sound more convincing in their blogs. I wish you had your contact information in your profile, I would have asked a couple of questions.
Syntax highlighting with Django
where is the mod down button.

This is about the store not the version control
"Renaissance of Programming languages"
> they're going to have to figure it out

Or be acquired by someone who has. This is not rocket surgery.
Introducing the XMPP application server: Scalable, Distributed Twitter-esque App
These lines don't have to be cut to be tapped. And if they did wouldn't the tappers reconnect them? It doesn't make sense that three are broken simultaneously. Are there three Jimmy Carter subs?

Plus, I'm pretty use that they can tell where these things are cut. Wouldn't a tap be found when they go to repair it?
Start up School 2008?
I keep checking startupschool.org to see when the 2008 one is going to be scheduled. Is it being planned? Is there a date yet?
Ask YC: Selling merchandise?
We've been getting a lot of requests from our users for t-shirts. There seems to be a lot of options: CafePress, Zazzle, and doing it on our own a la Reddit (American Apparel). Does anyone have any suggestions here?

I don't know if I can balance being a startup dev monkey AND merchandiser extrodinaire. Thanks for taking the time to help!
This is the most informative forum on Software Development with the EEE: http://forum.eeeuser.com/viewforum.php?id=19
The threads on LAMP indicate the drawbacks (usually UI-oriented) and point to the little quirks needed to install LAMP.

The appeal of a laptop the size of a hardback book (but thinner) is sexy, since I carry a small bag that can hold a not-to-thick hardback book. Many years ago, I used a Sharp Actius ultralight A100 with a 89% of actual size keyboard (17mm). The Asus EEE is 79% of actual size (15mm). I can remember coding on it was basically pound out code now, pay later (it would hurt).
Not many "classics" on a "new paradigm" :)

Chris Anderson is writing a book called "Free". You should read his blog, made for another good book "The Long Tail"
http://thelongtail.com/

Lawrence Lessig and the whole creative commons movement have good thoughts. Here is a free book of his:
http://www.free-culture.cc/freecontent/

and here is an amazon link, but i think there is a way to buy it while supporting the cause...
http://www.amazon.com/Free-Culture-Nature-Future-Creativity/...
CafePress uses thermal printing (bad) and they'll give you 20%. Zazzle is better quality, also 20% of the sale. GoodStorm (recently acquired by Zazzle) will give you 70% iirc. SpreadShirt is another option.

I'm working on the sweet spot between Zazzle & the Reddit approach - American Apparel with better %s than CafePress/Zazzle, focused entirely on startups, outsourced - drop me an email - roddy at StartupSchwag dot com
Bartman, you really really suck
For some reason, this reminds me of way-back when Pointcast was all the rage. Pointcast had a lot of potential (but the API was flawed). Twitter has demonstrated its potential. XMPP servers might not only make a better Twitter but help bring it to the mainstream (twitter - "Mom, pick me up at school")
There was a post like this before, and I think the answer was that information was forthcoming soon, but that there will be. Sometime in April.
To think that Grand Central was under pressure to be demolished, until Jackie Kennedy lead a movement to save it...
I think so.
For this kind of application, you probably want it tight directly to your list of contacts.
Maybe this is the killer application for XMPP based instant messaging ?
Why people who don't like receiving advice love entrepreneurship.
Even though you may not like receiving advice from an authority figure or friend, it's not so bad when it comes in the form of traffic statistics from unknown users. That's my theory anyway.
Hmm...I think you're right.

I use this definition (http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html#attitude) as my definition of a hacker:

"Hackers solve problems and build things, and they believe in freedom and voluntary mutual help."

So, would you label our friend here? If so, what label would you put on him?
Hmm... Looks shady. What's the explanation?
OK, I've read Twitter has heart-stopping SMS usage bills (they use 3rd party gateways). XMPP client for OpenSocial/Android/iPhone anyone? We need to break the strangehold of SMS/Phone company gateways.
I am assuming it is the word, 'Hacker' that you believe is misleading, true?

If so, are you implying that because he failed, he is not a hacker?
My startup (http://www.HubSpot.com) launched its product in November, 2007. It's a web hosted solution for inbound marketing for small businesses.

Revenues are growing steadily. The team is 26 people (22 in Cambridge, MA) and we're getting deeper into search engine algorithms, Facebook apps for business and English text analysis.

Challenge right now is making sure the system will scale as we continue to grow our customers/usage. High quality problem.
XML..... why???????????????????????????????????????????????
I would like to write an XMPP client at least for the iPhone, but we are waiting for the native SDK from Apple.
For Android, we are waiting for the first devices.
But sure it will come.
NXP and Purple Labs Unveil First Sub-$100 3G Linux Mobile Phone
This is how the XMPP protocol as been designed.
It is very powerful and most of all extensible, most likely thanks to the use of XML.
If something is not in the protocol, you can add it for your own need.
Note that this type of archictecture could also apply very well to reddit like systems ;)
Ubuntu does not feel like windows. At this day and age it is not possible for operating systems to look completely dissimilar.

Finally, IMO the problem with windows has been its unstability not really it eye-candy.