skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I find that logical expressions are easier to parse.

(OR (AND ...)
(AND ...)
...)

is cleaner (and shorter) than the corresponding one-liner in Python.
I'll take one.
I really hope Scala 2.8 lives up to its potential. Having used Scala 2.7 for close to a year now during my personal time, I'm very impressed with the vision and direction of the language. However, the language and its surrounding tools are immmature and I almost feel like any productivity I gain through using Scala is more than offset by the battles I wage with its tools.

Every time I code up a new project, for instance, I swear I encounter a new compiler or library bug. I've had jcl libraries spin in infinite loops, I've had the persistent immutable Set consistently crash during a filter, I've had the compiler both die at compile time and generate bad code that failed at runtime when trying to shield me from the ugly details of jvm arrays, and I've had actor libraries deadlock, forcing me to switch to using java executors. Buildr's Scala support is very immature and buggy. The Eclipse plugin is also unstable and I've at least twice had to rebuild my workspace from scratch. It also degrades heavily in performance over time so that I am frequently restarting Eclipse.

I think that the above problems are partially because the language is new, but partially because Scala as a project is so ambitious. They are trying to cover up all the warts of the JVM and create a powerful OO-functional language hybrid on top of it. They are trying to reify generics, implement C++-style templates for primitives to avoid the high costs of autoboxing, and implement arrays efficiently in a way that they play nicely with generics and the rest of the language, just to name a few things that really the JVM should have taken care of a long time ago. And, of course, Scala as a language is much richer and more complex than Java ever will be.

Again, I hope Scala eventually succeeds in all of its ambitious goals and begins being adopted for mainstream use, and I will continue to follow it and hopefully find time to contribute to it. And, if you don't mind slogging through a few bugs and flaky tools yourself, I highly recommend learning Scala and consider it the best language on the JVM so far.
OK, it sounds like we may be in violent agreement then. University Avenue is a good place and the only trouble is that places like it are too few and too far apart.
I'd love one if you still have any left.
I'm pretty sure the initial insistence "native apps were unnecessary" was just a cover story while the dev tools and app store were being finished.
Can I just say that the fact that either party here is duking this out in a public forum is just..... unprofessional? Especially from the VC firm itself?

I suppose I'm a newcomer to this "VC/incubator/startup" community - but in any other life situation, when I decide to pack up and move somewhere far away, I make sure I have stuff in writing, and cash in the bank, and all my i's dotted and t's crossed before I quit my old job and jump on a plane. I also make sure, as best I can, that expectations are the same on both sides. I don't see why this is any different whether it's VC capital for some wild idea or a serious business proposal or just a plain old job somewhere else... what ever happened to common sense?
I agree completely with apphacker. Being evil or unfair on the Internet is anathema to a (web) startup-related enterprise. 3 out of 7 startups funded is ridiculous. With this hitting the HN community, your best hope is that all three of those startups make it big, or you've just lost whatever credibility you have (with startups that count).

Good luck.
Let's make sure we send a response. Also, leave a note for our ((great-)^$BIGNUM)grandchildren so they know the part of the conversation they've missed when it's their turn to talk.
> The reason for mentioning the $16k in the title isn't to say "look how much money I turned down" but to say "look how much money they offered me for this".

Right. It's to emphasize the fact that not only were they morally corrupt and doing horrible things, they were incompetent to the extent they though they could shut him up with a measly 16 grand.

If he gets a book deal out of this he'll be laughing pretty damn hard at a bribe attempt that, really, isn't even a house payment.
In part this is true, but I will add a third kind: ideas/startups that evolve.

Looking back at YouTube, PayPal or many others (now) most successful companies, their originally idea was completely different. PayPal changed 4 times during his first year, YouTube at the beginning was a video dating site. So, I think that another way to build huge companies is more in the ability of the founders to understand and iterate on first early adopters needs instead of "I need that" scenario. They have to be as fast as possible to change the product around what people want. But if they are fast enough a startup that looks a completely disaster at the beginning could turn into a gold mine.

Thinking about Slide; Max Levchin has changed the company proposition many times, or look at Airbnb, they were a renting couch website with the focus on the events and not on travelling, they changed that very fast and now they are just making a revolution into the world of travel.

The most important part, is to start, with the conscience that your company could change completely, and you have to accept that before it will be too late to fit the market.
http://blog.bootuplabs.com/2010/04/14/wertz-joins-board-firs...

I'm not really sure how I feel about this. It seems like they behaved pretty reasonably for a regular company, but as a fiduciary, they probably should have held off and not funded anyone without funds in the bank, vs. relying on a mid-term capital call. (I wonder who bailed on the capital call and why)

After this, I would probably be reluctant to move to Vancouver based on their line of credit promise unless I could see the funds in escrow; a LoC of $100k should mean $100k in an account I control, with equity going to them based on how much I withdraw. If they were Sequoia I'd be willing to accept a promise, but clearly how they have demonstrated they have pretty limited resources.

They at least seem fairly transparent about everything, so it's not dishonesty, merely bad judgment.
> The stuff in these jets is moving towards us at a slight angle and travelling at a fair fraction of the speed of light, and the effects of relativity produce a kind of optical illusion that makes the motion appear superluminal.

Never heard this before, anyone care to elaborate ?
It's worth reading the comment thread, but to summarize: Perl 5 development never stopped, and it certainly wasn't "resumed" because Perl 6 isn't done yet.
Doesn't your legal counsel suggest you , you know, don't engage in arguments in public internet forums that could lead to actionable court cases?

Should this turn out to not be the truth, even the slightest unintentional misappropriation of funds for a pizza could end up costing your company a great deal.
The Kindle's big missing feature: iTunes
That headline is a thing of beauty.
Thanks for doing this.

Random acts of kindness may not make the world go round but it certainly makes people happy =)
Bootup Labs: Wertz joins board, first funding completed, portfolio reduced
I like what Gary Vaynerchuk had to say on this:
http://vaynermedia.com/2009/11/build-an-application-even-if-...
Please keep in mind color blind people. I'm red/green blind and about 1/3 of the charts I run across are meaningless to me. Here are a couple sites with info: http://wearecolorblind.com/ http://www.vischeck.com/
Rosie Jones, Daisy & India Reynolds for Nuts Magazine April 2010
Nuts Magazine April issue includes hot stuff pics of Rosie Jones, EM Diamond, Holly Peers, India Reynolds and Stacey Massey.
A colleague says great things about Cleveland's "The Elements of Graphing Data." It talks about how to leverage the way people perceive graphs in order to convey information. I've flipped through it, and it's on my to-read list. Sorry I can't say more about it.
I have been playing with the Chrome/Safari Web Inspector for a few weeks now and let me say that I kind of like Firebug more.

I hope this update make CSS editing more Firebug-like.
I'm also curious why 4/7 were cut -- was it that they were mediocre teams/products that Wertz didn't want to fund, or was it just that you ran out of money in the bridge period? It seems unlikely to me the latter, or you would have tried to structure some kind of bridge (or asked the teams to do this themselves by not drawing on the line of credit, which seems to be your only marginal cash expense per team). How else would you pick which companies to keep vs. eject?

I'm not trying to be a dick, but when you burn people (even unintentionally or with the best of intentions), it makes it harder for everyone else to do deals.
The “Facebook Ultimate” iPad Developer Speaks
Visual Basic - VB .Net - Lauftext von unten nach oben
In case this makes anyone think cperciva is not very bright, I replaced the original HN title with the title of the blog post itself.
I'd love to have one too, if you still have any.
That's funny, I actually found the link in this article http://www.gamesetwatch.com/2010/04/column_diamond_in_the_ro...
Just because I don't have fancy science to back it up doesn't mean it's not true.
I think the movie "Mall Cop" sums up the Ginger demographic nicely.
Boo the VC's in this one!

The investors of BootupLabs did not have confidence in 57% of their latest pool of startups. i wonder why they invested at all if they dont fully back their judgement?

Here's what probably happened, I bet the investors squeezed Boris and Danny with the alternative option being closing their doors early on all 7 companies. Sometimes VC's do evil things to extract more ownership in last minute negotiations (knowing very well that BuL was out of cash). I bet Boris and Danny would have wanted to follow through.
Well, unfortunately I think Bootup Labs had to respond to the claim that they "had no money".
I like the concept. I will edit this comment with my random act of kindness tomorrow.
count me in.
More on Vancouver's Techvibes.com...

http://www.techvibes.com/blog/bootup-labs-20-now-with-more-m...
Can I just say that the fact that either party here is duking this out in a public forum is just..... unprofessional?

Perhaps a bit unprofessional, but I'm personally glad it happens. The startup/VC world is all about reputation, and anything which moves the world from "talk to your friends at other startups and find out if they know anything about X" to "google for X and find out what people are saying about it" is a good thing for startups who are less than fully connected in the gossip network. Think of this as the natural continuation of what thefunded started.

Of course, as a Vancouverite I'm sad that it's Bootup Labs which is getting a bad reputation like this. :-/
That's surely not something that can be recommended with the latest Apple License agreement that say that apps can't be cross compiled, there has been a lot of posts submitted here about it.
Incubators that ask you for money _and_ equity make me a little bit sick.

Either sell me a service or give me cash for equity. Don't do both.
Bibliography from Godel, Escher, Bach, annotated by Douglas Hofstadter
In short: If you do not know what users want, build something that you need.
I'm building up a computer to give to a starving (digital) artist friend but it only has a 40GB drive.
Don't worry, Paul, I'm sure everybody here already knows that I'm not very bright.
I have been using Scala 2.8 for the past few months with Intellij 9 and it's been free of any major bugs. Definitely none of the unstable problems you mentioned with the Eclipse plugin.
The space for people-like-me startups is severely crowded due to an over-abundance of people scratching their own itch.

Empirically that doesn't seem to be true. E.g. there were not a lot of other startups doing Facebook at the same time as Mark. A couple, but not a lot.

Probably the reason is the point I mentioned in the essay: most people ignore their itches because they don't seem good enough sources of ideas.

Ironically, if people start doing what I suggest, it could cause what you're claiming to become true. But we can cross that bridge when we come to it.
From the previous thread....

"I was just getting the $100k off of the Bootup website, I understood that we got $150k, but that $50k went back to Bootup"

Is this spelled out somewhere on the website? I might have missed it.
In digital world, we trade privacy for convenience - CNN.com
I found this illuminating. Are there any other accounts of Jobs in action? He's very direct here, and to-the-point, and just so sure of what's right, and what's not.
How to enable automatic nightly Heroku backups to S3
It's pretty common for VCs to have the company being invested in pay for legal/research/etc. expenses out of the investment amount -- so you raise $500k and immediately pay $50k back to the VC for their costs.

It's weirder here due to the small scale of investment relative to the costs, and the non-cash services, but not totally implausible.
Kindle covers
Amazon Kindle covers - All covers and cases for the Amazon Kindle in one place. We have the largest selection of Kindle covers, kindle skins made from leather, plastic, ...etc.
Do you read HN at work?
As a programmer, is it a fair use of company time to be keeping up with hacker news? HN can be a great source of inspiration, and there is no doubt in my mind that keeping up with latest trends can make you a better programmer, but obviously a lot of the content isn't directly work-related. Even if most of what you are reading is directly work-related, is it fair to be keeping up on company time?
Couldn't you model that with closures?
Glad you got the discount!
And again:

"We have a few things they can't get," said Dean. "Specialty components with only one source."

"They'll figure out a way around that," said Jobs.

"I've spent nine years looking," said Dean, "and I don't think so."
Tell HN: I made a freelance translation site in only 5 months
Good to see more arguments on the 4th argument of "The 18 Mistakes That Kill Startups": Derivative Idea, where it was said "It seems like the best problems to solve are ones that affect you personally".

Which reminds me that the eassys really need some tagging, as there are very related "ideas" essays, but reaching out for google to remeber what was said and where takes more time than it should.
Further: "Microsoft and AOL tried to purchase Synapse and recruit Zuckerberg, but he decided to attend Harvard University instead."

The guy was almost recruited out of high school by Microsoft and AOL. If that isn't impressive, I don't know what is.
Sleep is Death : a storytelling game by Jason Rohrer
alexandria, bordeaux-threads, cl-sql.

Really.
I've been working on it as a side project for the past 5 months. Tell me what you think!
I have doubts that Apple is planning to switch to ARM from Intel if for no other reason that ARM is not 64bit and from what I recall it's not in the roadmap. This works fine for small devices but obviously won't work for anything larger. I doubt a PAE-style kernel is a legitimate option.
Shared-memory MapReduce
i'm a broke college student whose running out of space on his very old 300GB HD. Will edit random act of kindness tommorrow!
I should clarify that by "decent explanation" I meant one that would make me think, "oh, that's reasonable", not merely one that fits the evidence!
There is nothing stopping you from writing gigantic one-liners in lisp, thats not the same as conciseness. Anyway, my point was that arithmetic doesn't mater that much, if you like the lisp notation, thats fine, if you hate it, you can at least manage it with proper indentation. Its a minuscule annoyance for me.
Good point, however bit.ly has a good customer base for a very simple product. Besides, I imagine that Twitter will have an api for their shortener + analytics, so bit.ly can still integrate.

Also, bit.ly can make a play to service multiple social networks.

Simply put, they must innovate or die.
I love this idea. Free swap meet for HN! A few companies have toy'd around with the idea of earning community tokens to be turned in for other forms of karma.

I have a few network devices and office equipment that i should post on here if i deem that it's not spammy.

BTW, im interested in the drive. Thanks!
Eli responds to him nicely:

http://reprog.wordpress.com/2010/04/14/the-long-overdue-seri...
Acquisition, investment or acceptance into an incubator are all great things but don't build your startup in such a way that success is dependant upon them.

Ultimately, your success will depend on one thing - you. Build your business for profitably and don't count on money until it's safely cleared in your account.
The new scala.collection.JavaConversions implicits are fantastic.

I converted a bunch of code that was using jcl wrappers in 2.7 and with JavaConversions in scope, standard Java collections just work now as if they're Scala (e.g. map, foreach, etc aclls). That alone is a HUGE step for me as i'm doing interoperability work.
Twitter already tried to acquire them and they declined the offer.
The Prolog dictionary
I've heard that Gates last wrote production code sometime in the mid-eighties, though he wrote gradually less and less before then.
bots are used for hugely common editing operations, such as various kinds on cleanup.
That's... not exactly a quote, now is it?
Flowfazer inventor and coder Dave Levine ports it to HTML5, for Safari & Chrome
Yeah but in most industries it's illegal to control the price that retailers distribute your product at. This was temporary pricing anyway to encourage interest in the online platform over the longer term.
Myth of China as a Superpower
Programmers should be like barristers or brain surgeons - you don't promote the best into management, you hire a manager. Like Fred's surgical team.

But it's not like that, because, I think, the main usefulness of programming is not in the code, but in the recognition of the problem to solve. ie. business
I think it's fair to say your efforts paved the way to a world where a major corporation could actually consider this. You may not have struck the final blow for video codec freedom, but the victory is very much yours as well.

A sincere bravo to you and the Xiph.org Foundation.
"Bootup is back on solid ground and ready to continue it’s role as a leading North American Seed Accelerator."

VERY bold statement.
While it's kind of worrying they have the ability to remotely disable ClamAV installs, I can understand why.

I hope this causes some sort of error in ClamAV, rather then just silently protecting anything.
The fact that the Managing Director of Bootup would confront allegations in a public forum does not bode well for his organization.

I would hope day to day business decisions at Bootup are not done in the same manner. It is ,at best, completely unprofessional.
Unless someone has a better idea, I'll give them out in this fashion:

1) Anyone who requests one gets added to the list (I'll do this tomorrow afternoon). If it's not requested, I'll assume not, just because some people are leaving comments about "good idea" etc.
2) I'll put them in a spreadsheet and then use http://andrew.hedges.name/experiments/random/ to generate 3 random numbers and attempt to contact those people. Someone doesn't work out, new random number.

If someone has a better idea, I'm all ears.

Side note: to those who said they'll be doing a random act of kindness tomorrow, amazing! Every little thing counts. I just wanted to be clear it's not a requirement.
Looks really useful. Question: What process do you use to ensure translation quality? I noticed I can sign up as a translator without any barriers.. are you only going to rely on feedback? What if someone gets angry that their translation was poor?
first, 2 bad things:
1. if you "add to cart" nothing, it does something weird.
2. I don't like the "in only 5 months".

then, a good things:
1. Website is pretty clean, I like that.
Up to a certain point, you can do both just by exercising more and harder. A complete beginner starting from zero volume will definitely lose fat and gain muscle if they start working out, as long as they eat no more than enough to maintain their weight. The only problem is that you can only do it if you're pretty poorly trained to start with. Most people who work out seriously are well past the point where they can do both at the same time.
Other accelerators get the same fee as well. There are expenses to operate the accelerator plus an investment in the startup, which is exchanged for % in the startup. Often 5%-6%. If you add this up, effectively, the companies are getting $60k of real money spent on them for 6% of the company. That's a $1M post money value. (note: YC is probably an exception to this math since it has no physical space) But, that's how it works for most accelerators. In Bootup's case, we simply funnel the operating costs through the company in order to maximize canadian R&D credits which can amount to 50%+ of development costs. It's just a smart way to leverage more money into the startup, but in the end, the math works out to be the same and those fees are paid to operate the accelerator.
How Companies Can Protect Themselves Against Chargebacks
Design: Clearly "inspired" by Basecamp. It's fine for proving the concept, but will have to change once you've ganed some traction.

I'm not sure if the language dropdown is supposed to work. It doesn't work for me on the iPhone. You shouldn't care about this at all, just a note.

The design polish is a huge plus. It looks nice all around, something I don't often see with projects like this. I think it could use a touch of UI polish, but it honestly doesn't matter at this phase.

Product: Seems OK. Your core issue is solving the chicken/egg problem. You need to convince freelancers to join without jobs and you need to convince people with jobs to join without translators. In that light, features like forums seem like massive scope creep. Forums don't get you any closer to getting traction. That should be your sole goal at this point.

Marketing: The value prop isn't super clear to me. You're not effectively answering the question "Why do I need this?" and "Why do I need you, over the other guy?"

Overall decent job. Keep up the hard work.
For now, anyone can get either get a refund with a click of a button, or repost the job to be worked on by another translator. Eventually, I'll be adding some safety checks to see that it isn't being abused.
What a letdown. Hype us all up for ET and then spit out that it's probably a black hole.

The universe is a cruel mistress, astronomy reporting, worse.
It sounds like Bootup Labs wasn't able to draw down on some of their LPs. So, it's not nefarious, but it would make me think twice before accepting (the promise of) money from Bootup Labs.

It ain't real 'till the money's in the bank.
Residential Eviction
Free online rental property eviction notice or forms for your commercial, residential tenant provided by fast florida evictions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superluminal_motion
Why Apple's 3.3.1 is great for hackers and (smart) founders.
Please add me to the list. I've been running off of one 250GB since my 320GB had a hard disk crash, and I could really use the space.
yup :) (http://sleep.fm)
From http://blog.bootuplabs.com/2010/04/14/wertz-joins-board-firs...

"We supplied a great deal of support and value to the 7 companies over the first 2 months of our 2010 cohort, and we received nothing in return for the 4 companies that were cut"

It seems like they are implying that the 4 companies somehow owe them something.
Yes, I have to admit the front page design is very inspired by the 37signals website. I've been experimenting with adwords with no conversions, so I wanted to try some other ideas. You're right though, I will absolutely be changing it later :)

Thanks for the feedback
Yeah, I moved from Columbus, Ohio to the Bay Area. Ohio is actually very low pay compared to most places. You just don't realize it if you grow up there.