skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Which is why you shouldn't be using HTML to "present" data. You do exactly this when you attempt to use tables for things other than tabular data.
Fon Wants Residents of San Francisco's Castro District to Share Their Wi-Fi
Something like http://www.electricsheep.org/ ?
Worried about the stock market? Don't be, says Tom Perkins
Yeah, the potential for success is huge, but you're operating on the back of FaceBook and you have to learn a new markup language. The latter problem is probably the reason so many hackers are "missing the boat."

But look at facebook right now; its arguably worse with the apps. Companies like Slide hijack your news feed and spam your friends. That's uncool and it puts me off.

A lot of those spamming tactics are how apps get so much exposure, but I don't see Facebook allowing that kind of stuff for very much longer.

My point is, relying on Facebook as your provider is pretty risky. I wish you continued luck, though.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degeneracy_%28mathematics%29

HTML w/ CSS is actually easier to use

You just don't seem to get that I don't use html. I generate it. Your argument is like saying it's easier to write programs in old-style instruction sets than RISC ones. Sure, but the best approach of all is to write in neither, and instead have a program generate it. Then it doesn't matter which you use.

Complaining that the html source of a software-generated site is ugly is like complaining that the code generated by the compiler of a high level language is ugly. Of course it's ugly; that's the whole point of high level languages.
That would mean that its behaviour would be next to impossible to design around if you were trying to account for all of your users screen sizes at the same time.

See, there's where we differ. I'd like to easily design a webpage that renders fine on 90% of my user's screens. I'd bet 90% of my users will be using personal computers, and use a resolution between 800x600 and 1920x1200. Want to look at my page on your non-iPhone? I'd love to introduce you to the m.mypage.com section of my site.

Something like "Center a child relative to a parent" isn't hard to do (we do it at work for our video game GUI), and it really seems like a few architecture astronauts got ahold of the CSS standards to cause these API usability problems.

Also, arguments like "You can't do that simple thing because.." are starting to sound like the arguments C++ pundits use to justify its monstrous complexity compared to C.
If you use Opera, sanity is one click away (user mode).
those are the only two outcomes max would view as acceptable anyway. and probably not even so much for the latter.
What Linux distro are you using for your servers ?
Just curious to see what the most popular linux os the ycombinator community is using to launch their sites.
Fair point. My counter to it would be two-fold:

1. Your generated code is fast becoming obsolete, even IE passed Acid 2 the other week. That might be a concern.

2. What do you do to fix it when things go wrong, especially given number 1?
Is anyone here actually using it for anything?
Max always seems like a "burn the ships" entrepreneur, so it isn't that surprising that he's taking the go-big-or-go-bankrupt road. I'm sure the VCs involved love that attitude too, so I guess everyone's happy...
I'm not a fan of the spammy stuff either. Those are tactical methods and apps which rely on those tactics at the expense of actual utility quickly decay. The apps that actually stay at the top are there because there's a demand for them.

Relying on Facebook is pretty risky - but so is doing a startup. The bigger picture is that they (and I) believe that applications built on SOME social platform are going to be the future of web applications. We're barely seeing the hint of that future today, and making a bet early could pay off big or we could all be wrong.
I never said you couldn't do it, you just can't do it the way you prefer:

parent {}

child{
margin-left: auto;
margin-right: auto;
width: 100px;
}
I don't get it. Just because it's generated by Arc doesn't mean it has to:

1. Ignore web standards,
2. Forgo readability, or
3. Make bloated code.

I mean, look at the source of hacker news. Its just not elegant. Whether or not you believe it should be, HTML/CSS was designed to be coded a certain way and browsers expect that format. Why change it and suggedt that you're turning HTML into something it isn't ?
It's a real shame ADUni was destroyed by idiot VCs.
Usually debian, security patches are regular. Cons: packages can be a bit old.
My question is simply, what's the reasoning behind my inability to type:

child{ center: horizontal; }

That would be very newcomer-friendly. Possibly naive, but I'm interested to know why.
Which might not be a problem for servers in most cases.
Wow, that's a huge assumption, that the applications of the future will be delivered though Facebook.

That would be an interesting and depressing future, with companies like facebook dictating the rules of the internet. I certainly hope it doesn't come to that.

I've always thought that news sites like digg would become the eqivalent of the Web OS, the gateway to the internet. I can see Bacebook filling that space easily though, now that I think about it. The difference there is that digg is pointing users to other places on the internet, while facebook in that case actually BECOMES the internet for those people.

It'll certainly be interesting to see how it all pans out in 10 years.
Interview With Web 2.0 Startup Expert "Drama 2.0"
rPath ( http://www.rpath.com/corp/ ) with custom patches.
Debian Stable
FreeBSD. (Ok, not a linux distribution, but it's an alternative to using a linux distribution.)
Shutdown Day
Fedora core 8
Solaris
Ubuntu
1. center to what?

1a. child is 0px wide.

2. semantics: You're basically saying "Why isn't language x exactly like language y/how I want it to be?"

3. margin is what you're adjusting, so saying margin-auto makes sense.

4. Layers and layering are an important aspect of CSS, you've just broken all of them.
Ubuntu 7.10 server
Gentoo all the way.
1. How is using tables ignoring web standards?

2. Html is object code. What matters is the readability of the source code that generates it. Worrying about the readability of the output of a compiler is akin to premature optimization.

3. The front page of News.YC is 30k. If you think that's bloated, I hope you don't visit sites that contain images.

Do you understand what I mean about the distinction between source and object code? Saying that html ought to be elegant implies that you don't. As a rule, the more elegant the language, the less elegant its object code is, because the further removed its concepts are from the primitive concepts used by a compiler.
I'm picking it up now for one my company's products. We're doing some encoding that integrates extant C headers; I figured this would be a great time to pick up D.
I thought the VCs were only involved in ArsDigita.
I like the one that comes with Linux... ;-)
Who maintains 'hundreds of pages' of HTML? Don't you offload everything into templates or dynamically generate it? The last time I managed hundreds of pages of html, or even html with dynamic content spliced in, was in 2001, and that was against my will.

A quick rewrite took care of that too. HTML is an output format, not a language.
Is it just me or does the power icon look a lot like a vagina?
You can use tables or css, I don't care. Forcing one over the other is rediculous though. And yes, only snobs insist on never using tables.
You can't throw out accusations of hate speech at the reddit community without some specifics which I've yet to see you mention in this post.
Yes but men have a lower latency.
Why the heterogeneous environment?
And where do smart people put their cake? On a table, that's where.
He never said it would be Facebook.

I think a modularized web will be a big part of what's coming up.
1. http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10-CORE-TECHS/#structure It most certainly ignores accessibility standards; also the spirit of all the other W3C standards.

2. I guess we know where you stand on the semantic web, don't we! :-) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web)

3. It's your bandwidth money. I'm not paying for it. (Of course, I would disagree with the GP that HN is bloated)
Yes, people are sheep, but come on... there are always diminishing returns as price increases, but it's like any other sensory experience: just because you can't tell the difference doesn't mean that others can't. That's like telling Mac users that they're wasting their money because "I can't tell the difference". Every niche has its own hackers and fanboys, winos included.

And I'd love to know which Toyota he feels is better than a Mercedes C-class, and I don't even like Mercedes...
I use Ubuntu 7.10 64bit.
As an output format, it should be easily altered to display in various forms.

CSS with semantic HTML achieves this, embedded presentation does not.
True enough. I'm all for swinging for the fences I guess, but it's good to keep options open where possible.
1. http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fnews.ycombina...

2. Ill admit defeat on this point. (but see below)

3. With all the td, tr, etc tags, it seems messy. I don't know for sure, but I think using a stylesheet could reduce the size. I'll code hacker news in CSS when I have a few minutes and try to get the HTML+CSS under 30k.

Relatively, its a small site. That's awesome because it loads fast and I can comment using my treo, like I am now. Thanks for spending so much energy on speed.

But if it can be smaller by using CSS, I think that's a reason to switch. Don't you?

Anyway, regarding source/object code, I don't mean to disagree with you. I'm just saying that HTML was designed to be looked at and Hacker News disregards all of the convention there. I guess that's okay, its just extremely unusual.
You're right, bloated was a bad word to use.
CentOS 5.
I like YC's current look. Could CSS really improve it?

Here's a suggestion. If you think the answer is yes, then how about posting a link to a site that could show us how and we'll up/down mod your post accordingly.
CentOs 5.0, for the easy Virtualmin GPL install
Dvorak has outdone himself. This article has the highest ratio of fallacious arguments to sentences I've ever seen.
You may be right, but I thought the courses were part of the company.
> achieves this

The hell it does... Not to mention that separating the two is such a futile waste of time in so many cases.
What does it give you that Ruby doesn't?
RHEL4, though the site's a few years old. Would do RHEL5 if it was today.

Personally, I run Debian. But RedHat really does a good of not breaking stuff at the cost of less frequent updates.
You're changing the question on 1. Obviously whether or not I use tables is a separate question from whether the HTML I generate conforms exactly to the spec.

As for speed, no: when you've got a site down to 30k, you shouldn't be spending time making it smaller.

Are you sure HTML was designed to be looked at? I thought it was a subset of SGML, which as far as I know was a portable representation for the kind of documents that would ordinarily be seen with a WYSYWG editor. But even if HTML had been designed to be manipulated by hand, the general trend in technology is always away from that. Machine language was designed to be looked at. Then technology advanced and people started using programs to generate it.
This is what comes to mind to me, a CSS ignorant:

1. To the parent, the width of which is known by the layout code of the browser at any moment at 'runtime'.

1a. Fair enough, then it won't show up. But it will not-be-there centered, goddammit!! >:)

2. Which is a very fair question, and how languages get better.

3. That is one way to look at it, the one the language seems to force into you, and apparently it's the least intuitive.

4. If you can get an exactly equivalent effect with other expression, how come you can't have "center horizontally" just become an alias/shortcut/abstraction for that, if newbies expect it?

Then again, this is only an issue for hand-coded CSS. If you use your HTML/CSS as object code, this is easy enough to abstract in your generating code.
You're Ezra Zygmuntowicz, right? (If not, sorry.) So why so little about Gentoo in "Deploying Rails applications"?
My point on 1 wasn't specific to tables. Hacker News genuinely ignores W3C standards.

Are you saying that the future of HTML looks like what happened to machine language?
That document you link to isn't part of the HTML standard. It seems to be an additional document from the W3C outlining how they'd like people to behave. Conforming to software standards is one thing; you have to do that to make programs work together. But complying with the W3C's wishes on how the web ought to be used is a very different matter. I feel like doing exactly what the W3C says on broader questions is not merely optional, but probably a mistake, considering the people who make it up. It would be like running your company according to a list of "best practices" compiled by a committee at General Motors.
He's like the Andy Rooney of the tech world.

Soon he will simply complain about being old each week.
(which takes 10 seconds on any normal laptop)

Any normal macbook! My vista laptop takes 9 minutes to hibernate and then wake up.
What is "Professional" Code?
In your experience (or opinion), what are the differences between so-called professional code and code as a hobby?

I'm thinking of what actual code looks like in this case, rather than the overall result of a software system.

Personally, I'd venture that code that becomes part of shipping or bespoke products can often be highly constrained by compatibility with older products, and maintainability requirements for programmers who may be rotated in and out of roles with some frequency.

Can these restrictions make code better, or do they typically make it worse?
I am concerned that Hacker News doesn't even have a DOCTYPE in the source code.
This is a better analogy. The author has a job which makes $50k a year, yet he spends $75k a year = earnings < spending.

That's not a good analogy for a trade deficit. One way of increasing the trade deficit is to borrow money and spend it. If you mortgage your house to buy books, that certainly increases the "trade deficit" with Barnes & Noble. But someone with, say, a $500K/yr. job could easily afford to spend $75K a year on books, and would run a massive "trade deficit" with B&N without going into debt.

It's a potential problem if US individuals or the US government go into massive debt, of course, but whether they use that debt to buy foreign or domestic goods is immaterial. If some of that debt happens to finance the purchase of foreign goods, it drives up the trade deficit, but the problem is the debt, not the deficit.

This looks like a linguistic problem as much as anything---people get so hung up on the word "deficit". Given its pervasiveness, though, I suspect that causation actually goes the other way: mercantilism is so intuitively appealing that the imprecise terminology seems almost inevitable.
> Another one is building one's protocol as a layer on top of webdav.

Sorry for being a noob, but where does this come from and why is it bad?
Uuumm, Slashdot is over here:

http://slashdot.org

;)
"The crucial (and seemingly odd) distinction is that these projects are undertaken by individuals for no pay. "

When you pay someone, you need trust and contract enforcement.
You're up against hindsight bias here, PG. (http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/08/hindsight-deval.html) People don't realize how absurd the future looks when you have to predict it in advance. (http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/09/stranger-than-h.html) 500 BCE seems much stranger than 2008 CE, which seems very normal by comparison - so people look back and see a steady progression toward normality, things getting less absurd over time, and they expect this trend to continue. (http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/09/why-is-the-futu.html)

People don't realize how counterintuitive moral changes look when you have no advance idea of where you're heading. (http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/03/archimedess_chr.html) So they don't use the kind of cognitive strategies that would have been necessary for, say, Archimedes of Syracuse to question slavery. (http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/03/chronophone_mot.html)
If you use your HTML/CSS as object code, this is easy enough to abstract in your generating code.

Bingo! And that's one reason Arc is pretty exciting. I'll be able to do the equivalent of center: horizontal, and the details can be abstracted.
"Bordering on an act of war" in hyperbole.

Yes, it would be a huge financial loss for those holding bad paper (and the US could pick and choose what paper became useless - including discriminating by ownership) but what can they do other than yell and refuse to lend again?

Yes, they could impose economic sanctions and kill their export market.
Awesome! Thank you. That program is really fantastic.
you're using vista so i'm assuming you have like 3 gigs of ram. yeah, i guess that would take a while to swap to and from disk.
Investments are captured in the current account (which includes the trade balance, factor payments and transfer payments plus a fudge factor for illegal and unaccountable capital flows). The current account deficit, not the trade deficit, is the more important and worrying statistic.

The trade deficit shows that the US is importing more than it exports, but the current account deficit shows that the US is spending more than it earns. The problem with a growing current account deficit is that an increasing proportion of US income (GDP) is required for factor payments (ie. interest/dividend payments to other countries for their investments in the US). This is basically what is meant when they say that the US is borrowing from the rest of the world. And obviously it isn't sustainable.
If you ever used/administered Subversion, it will help you understand.
Ask YC: I'm pitching to an angel. How do I value my startup?
I have a meeting with an angel investor soon and he wants to know at what valuation I'm asking him to get in. I guess this is the pre-money valuation. My startup has two people, both programmers, and we've been working on it for 6 months now. We have a web site online and it's starting to grow, but it's not big by any means, although the potential could be huge.

Any advice, resources, or tips on how to come up with the right valuation? Should I ask for a very high number and be willing to negotiate down? Or should I set a value and stick with it? Thanks everyone.
Survey of Technologies for Web Application Development
Not linux.. FreeBSD
Cringely on the Mac Book Air
Bram Cohen with a startup idea
The Commentator -- Automagically sprinkle your code with snarky comments
How much money are you trying to raise?
OpenSuSE
We have a low burn rate, so a $100K should be enough to allow the two of us to continue working on it for another year, including a small marketing budget, and occasionally bringing in a consultant for the things we need help with (graphics, marketing consultations, legal, ..etc).
Just curious, can you give some examples of hate speeches on reddit? I'm thinking of the recent James Watson controversies, but that would seem pretty fuzzy. Any clarifications are appreciated.
I hope I'm not in the majority when I say this, but my most productive periods (in the sense of producing something) have all involved some kind of death march, almost always self imposed. It's fun, and then painful, and then it brings up a lot of existential angst. Why am I here, and all of that.
As long as they eventually offer the battery for separate purchase, or at least affordable, quick and easy replacements at your local genius bar, they'll have solved one of the major gripes with the Air.
Damn. If that's not an exaggeration, you have something wrong. I have 2gb of RAM (Home premium, Lenovo X60) and both operations take something like 30 seconds. I haven't clocked it, but it's nowhere near 9 minutes.
I was going to say something snarky about "users" being the currency of the Internet... but you _can_ buy, trade, and sell them...
Don't. Say something like "I want to keep x% of the company". Thus if you end up getting more funding than you initially expected (happens often) you'll essentially get a higher val.
I'd also shoot for more than a year's expenses. I've found investors like to hear you're aiming for 18-24 months. Consider that you have to essentially start seeking funding 6 months before running dry. If you aim for 1 year's expenses you work 6 months, then start on fundraising. Raise 18 months' expenses and you work for 12 before fundraising again, so you get double the progress for only 50% more money.

And if you can raise $100k, you can almost certainly raise 150.
Ironically, the NY Times ran a serious article on this same subject--with essentially the same conclusion:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/04/health/04mind.html
Come on buddy, the resemblance of that pic in the website is uncanny.
What makes you think Arc will improve on other Lisps in this respect?
That's an interesting twist. Thanks. Is it common?
> The goal of this website is to gather every rule of thumb on earth into one gargantuan, easily searchable online reference database that will be accessible from anywhere in the world and continue to grow forever.

I'd say it also needs to be easily BROWSABLE. Currently, it is not.

I think it's a fantastic idea though. Just needs some hammering out.
[disclaimer]Mind you, I'm on the outside looking in. I really haven't started the startup funding shuffle yet, but I've read compulsively. And, this is what I've gleaned. YMMV.[/disclaimer]

First, a few important questions.

Do you have revenue?
How many users?
How fast have your been growing?
Proprietary patentable technology, or a user focused tool built on open source?
I'd say that how many people are on the team, and how long you've been coding is rather unimportant. What is most important is what you have in hand.

What is a startup worth? Ultimately what the market is willing to pay for it. So, it's worth whatever you're willing to sell a stake of it for, and whatever the angel is willing to buy a stake for. It all depends where the investors and the market are at in the greed <--> fear continuum. Right now, I get the impression that we're towards the end of the greed spectrum, and we'll be swinging back to fear soon. I know that's not very helpful, but ultimately it's all voodoo and people's best guesses. But, there are a few guidelines.

It helps to have a base case. Take for example YC funded companies:

Y Combinator offers $5,000 n + $5,000 where n is the number of founders for a 5-20% stake in a startup. That's usually for a group of founders with an idea, a prototype or maybe a little bit of code and a few users. That means that 0-6 months ago, had you been funded by YC, here's what your company would have been worth:

$5,000 x 2 founders + $5,000 = $15,000 for a 5-20% stake in your company. If $15,000 is worth 5-20% of your company, that means that your company was worth $75,000 to $300,000. Here's the formula:

startup value = investment/stake

or in the above YC case:

value = $15000/5% = $75000 at the low end

or

value = $15000/20% = $300,000 at the high end

Does this make sense? Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but this is pretty much how I understand it's done.

If you have more traction than a typical YC group, i.e. more users, unique technology, revenue streams, strong code base, etc... Then, you're probably worth more than the $75,000 - $300,000 valuation. If you have more traction, you're probably looking at a 300,000 - 1,000,000 valuation. If you have less or as much traction, you're looking at the YC range.

Anybody else have any thoughts on the matter?
Fedora 8
Yeah, if you read all the sites about raising money, you'll see that pop up in a few spots.