skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
hey, you are that dude who wrote the catalyst book (http://www.packtpub.com/catalyst-perl-web-application/book)

Nice to see you're into hacker news, anyway.

I would like to recommend Groovy and Grails, the main advantage of these over Perl/Catalyst for me was portability, Groovy/Grails or GG just work better on windows and SQL Server 2005. They were way easier to install, run and getting started with. For example with Perl/Catalyst, Perl doesn't have a DBD::MSSql, I think one can use JDBC or DBD::JDBC, but JDBC is at version 0.1 and DBD::JDBC is also old DBD::Sybase, is well Sybase!

DB support of GG via hibernate is just way more robust.

Java have many many more active projects which GG relies on and can depend on.

Perl's CPAN is for sure fantastic, but CPAN is just not as portable as Java's project, so with GG you know, and I know, that it will run on windows, with Perl, there is no guaranty

Finally the moral is, with open source, you really have to consider a project popularity. Project that are too centralized, that do not rely on other popular project are doomed to get in your way!

Catalyst relies on CPAN modules, this alone, assure me it is a better option than RoR, because a lot more people are working on the different pieces idependently, the work is better distributed, DBD::JDBC is usefull for a lot more project, not only Catalyst, this suggest it will better survive and evolve, RoR is full stack, so do evolve it will add a lot more work for its developer, and its open source, so no guaranty you will find one to do the work!

GG situation is even better than catalyst, it relies on an even more popular and solid foundation.

New Open Source Poject should always trie to introduce the least amount of new code!

I do believe that the future for Ruby, Tcl, Python and Perl should be on either Parrot or the JVM this will make it easier for new project to rely on other people's work, will improve portability etc ...

I will not drop Perl/Catalyst from my knowledge efforts, I very strongly believe in the Perl community, and that the current problems will be solved in ways that will even push Perl beyond Java

Hope i was clear
> hey, you are that dude who wrote the catalyst book

yup :)

Anyway, I agree that Perl on Windows is painful. Most of the developers use UNIX variants, so naturally support on the UNIX side is going to be better. Basically, I think it's best to take the path of least resistance. If using Windows is important to you, you'll have fewer problems if you use the Microsoft stack. If Perl is important to you, you should just use UNIX. It's a shame that we have to make compromises like this, but sometimes you just need to get your work done :)

But anyway, I've used DBD::Sybase with modern versions of SQL Server. It worked fine to get a UNIX application to talk to a remote SQL Server instance and call stored procedures. DBIx::Class also works.
I never really understood the importance of portability until I got this job

I work in the business applications group in the IT department in a non-it multinational company

I don't have a say, or least not much of it, on waht OS or DB engine, we can use, there is a different IT infrastructure team that deals with this, and honesly this is a relief, I dont have to worry about backups and stuff like this.

I try to be a an open source proponent, and try to introduce or slip in OOS application. But if that application won't work on windows, SqlServer and IIS. I will never be able to make the case for it and push it.

Maybe after I successfully introduce few OOS business apps and Dev framework, I can start to make a call for a linux server, but not before.
This is can be a pain if you are using the prototype library and trying to mix it with another library.
Check out the dateJS[0] library if you want to do more with dates.

[0] http://www.datejs.com/
People were all psyched up for more self affirming startup things. Even I seem to operate in a 'startup' mode and a hacker mode. It seems weird. I spent most of my week on machine learning. Yet after hours of talks on entrepreneurship, Norvig's talk of clustering and segmentation made my mental gears switch. I don't think people expected it.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=123879 from 53 days ago
The video is pretty crummy. The VC talk loses audio. The Google intro is cut off. Does anyone have a real "full video" of this which can be re-uploaded?
I first came across decorators in TurboGears where they are used extensively for exposing methods, pagination etc (similar to pylons and Django).

They are very useful and insanely easy to use in python.
25 leading-edge IT research projects
Sounds interesting. I'll have to check it out.
19 tips for designing accessible websites
I agree--I find the light of halogen lamps to be crisp and without the hazy effect of traditional incandescent bulbs, making it easier to work for long periods of time without excessive eye fatigue.

About five years ago I moved to a new place and had a very hard time finding halogen torchieres in stores. I never learned exactly why, but I suspect it was due to liability issues, because this was around the same time they started putting bird cages on top of the lamps.
Great article - seconded. I also liked the fact that it wasn't split across six pages, and reader comments were kept separate from the article itself.
That's so awesome.

"Fit for life" is a good mantra, because fitness--a balance of stamina and strength--improves every aspect of life.
Choose a different forum system then! There are plenty to go around.
Not really familiar with TurboGears, but it's always awesome to see an app leveraging a language's natural power and flexibility.

I concur about decorators being "insanely easy to use"--taking the memoization example I presented in the article; it's far, far simpler to tack on "@memoize" than to incorporate it into the flow of a function and risk losing clarity. I am sure TurboGears (and Django/Pylons) authors love that you can decorate something with @login_required (or equivalent) and have that method exposed to authentication.
I had a similar epiphany back in my youth, when I was working at a cafeteria. A co-worker and I had to sweep and mop the floor each day, so we decided we'd alternate which of us swept, and which mopped-- only we completely arbitrarily decided that the one mopping was lucky, and it was awful to be stuck with the sweeping. It didn't take too many days of pretending before it actually seemed to be the case....
Oh, on that part I agree in principle. Maybe these things are taught differently here, but there is a strong enough focus on the "why" part for me to feel comfortable with it...
Bah! Of course you an start up a web startup anywhere.

The issues comes with whether or not you need any of the advantages that come with being in/near one of the hubs that typically require in-person access such as 'smart money' investors, offices where lots of localized talent can work together, etc.

As to your website development consternation... why aren't you building the first versions of it yourself?

In terms of your schooling... is there some reason why you cannot start working on this yourself until you graduate and then go full bore if it still makes sense?
I have created a good growing company that leaves me financially independent anyway - on a monthly basis at least - and I can continue to do other things also. I think this attitude of short-term gain misses out that success is a journey and not a destination. Your motivation still IS money - most of the successful people I know achieved the money because they loved what they are doing and the by-product was a financial reward
Well, to play devil's advocate (since I gave the same advice :-)...

No, those sites still cost you in terms of your time both directly and in terms of opportunity cost.

Particularly in startups, one must always be asking: WITMVTICBDRN. :-)
Ask YC: (Contrarian) Is this a great time to start or what?
What did you think when you saw that the start-up school was a roaring success, its best ever showing (over 650 hackers!)?

COMPETITION, GLUT. And the smart money, like Marc Andreesson is already preparing for cheap roll-ups for the coming "nuclear winter" (his words, not mine).

I hope my prediction doesn't come true, but a lot of people here are going to get acquired for at or below cost. Market gluts do that, every single time.

In 2002, you could have picked up an optical company (or 100 of them!) for 1/10th of the total VC in.

Start up school 2008 == Contrarian Indicator?
SANS solves mystery of mass Web site infections
ISPs' Error Page Ads Let Hackers Hijack Entire Web
On writers, 'digital rights management', and the internet
Social Graph Foo Camp - Videos
For new technology, it seems to me to be a land-grab. Grab the users who want X, then either figure out how to make money off them (As google did), or sell to someone who sees the value of your audience share.

So... is it:

1. Find a problem - something's broken
2. Find a solution - make what people want
3. Price it
4. Get users

Or

3. Get users
4. Work out how to monetize them

I think either can work, and both have disadvantages. Charging up front sort of goes against what PG said in his talk (Great talk I thought) - about being nice and helpful and giving users stuff they need.
Waiting until you have the userbase before you start monetizing means you don't have cashflow, and may need funding.
The Machine That Made Us
Qwaq, which recently raised $7M, is also Squeak/Smalltalk/Croquet:

http://qwaq.com/company/press_releases/pr-2007_11_27.php

Qwaq has put a lot of its developments back into Croquet. A few more ventures using Squeak could cause the (already high) productivity of the environment to take off.
I like to think of my Grandfather's advice: "The universe rewards action". So true!
With so many blogs and so forth discussing GTD it's refreshing to read a great perspective written in a different era and in a different style.
Researchers devise new method for protecting private data
We missed it unfortunately. I think that was when someone spilled coffee on our power strip :-/
1 gram per pound of body-weight is a good amount for someone who lifts weights (not only those who compete) and is not hard to achieve every day. Would you rather they overload on carbs all day? It's even more important if you're trying to lose weight: cutting too many calories and not getting enough protein will most likely result in you losing a lot of muscle mass.
hopefully this is a feature not a bug
I still bet you all end up working on building the next facebook despite, as I write this, DHH has the most votes. LOL
You add so much value.
When he asked "Would you really want to give up programming, and start sitting in boring meetings, just for some moolah" (Something like that), I was thinking "Well duh hell yeah. Then I'd quit, and do programming again".
I'd certainly read a blog that shares the experience of working through TAOCP.
Often. At my last employer, we ran into it all the time with Prototype-dependent libraries. It was very common for us to rely on a single-developer open-source project or ISV for a component, find that they depended upon Prototype, then find that they depended upon different versions of Prototype and adding one component would mysteriously make the other fail.

You can't unit-test every combination of libraries that your potential users may eventually install. And if you are a user, you have no feedback on which library caused the failure other than testing every combination of installed libraries, which can be literally hundreds of possibilities.

For my recent projects, I just refuse to use libraries that modify built-in prototypes or dump lots of functions in the global namespace. I use JQuery and I'm willing to use YUI (though I haven't had a need for it...), because they play nicely together. I'll use anything else with similar care put into namespacing. But if it's not namespace-aware, I'll reimplement it rather than take the risk of it breaking other libraries down the road.
It looks like some of the relevant research (called here "attribute-based encryption" rather than "functional encryption") is freely available at: http://eprint.iacr.org/2007/323.pdf
Sure, it does make a lot of sense. If you can do bigger things perfectly, this is likely to be very well rewarded, too.
Django on Google App Engine: Serving templates and static files
If you want to solve the money problem, there are a bunch of ways. Creating a startup is hard work and is neither simple nor dependable.

For hackers, do IT consulting. For math guys, do trading. For everyone else, do finance. You get the idea.
(Constructive) Criticism to make SS09 even better
Like pretty much everyone else, I enjoyed SS immensely.

But everything can be made better, right?

What's your advice for next year?
More pizza! And a better distribution system. That was a bit of a zoo.

Given all of the "we're hiring" pages posted, I am sure some can underwrite that. Maybe Sequoia?
Birds of a Feather signs?

Hackers are often shy. How about in between meeting there are labelled gathering points about topics: scaling, Rails, hiring, PR, etc.

Bonus points if speakers can be be convinced to visit one.
Have HN names on the nametags. BIG. iamlamegringo did this and I loved (and copied) it.

edw519 had a shirt with it, and that was great too.
Question tokens? Perhaps only 2 for the day? or based on Karma?
Shut down wifi during talks?

inspired by Meg Whitman.
Ask YC: Crazy Egg vs Clickdensity
Anyone have any opinions on the main pros/cons between Crazy Egg vs. Clickdensity (vs. others? I think Google offers the heat-map model as well).
VC Deals In Charts (Q1 2008)—Welcome To The Slowdown
Decorators are very wonderful things, but if used as this article shows, they destroy the method signature of the function; fibonacci() goes from being a function that takes one argument to a function that appears as if it will take as many arguments as you give it. (That's the *args syntax; it collects all the arguments into a list.)

Usually this is not a problem, but some people want to see the correct method signature when they look up the documentation (often auto-generated) for a function. And there are some programs that inspect the method signature and expect it to be correct.

http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~micheles/python/documentation.ht... provides more details on this subject, as well as a library to mitigate this problem. I believe functools.wraps in python2.5 also solves this problem: http://docs.python.org/lib/module-functools.html
But could any random person be a good CEO? I don't think so. It's tough to judge the difficulty of a position without actually holding the title.
Loud and arrogant? It might come off that way, but that's pretty subjective, and I happen to disagree.

In any case, if you look past the delivery style, his speech contained many good observations.

I met him in Palo Alto on Saturday evening. He was honest, patient in answering people's questions, and very friendly.
If these are the 25 leading IT research projects, then the field is dead. Some of these aren't research, and others don't seem to have much depth to them (e.g., "All About Twitter", "Videoconferencing for Dr. Phil", "Drivers Wielding Cell Phones", "Geeks with Glasses"). Still others sound like technical nonsense (e.g.,"Sniffing out Insider Threats", "Analyzing the Dark Web", "Measuring Boredom").
I think you may have a point with this for startups where each employee is a huge contributor and innovation is required. But if you have a large company with multiple corporate levels it may not be that horrific to let a few employees work from home. If they are spending more time with their family they may be happier and more motivated to work.
Very good article. I think everyone with a motivation problem should read this!
In other words: http://www.structuredprocrastination.com/
I agree, esp with "Sniffing out Insider Threats", "Analyzing the Dark Web" being nonsense. Sounds like people blowing smoke up some bureaucrats butt to get funding. If nothing else the dark web project has an overly romantic view of what they are doing.
The guy with those motivation comments was badass. In these long preceding years, all the general advice that could be given has been given. Now, the only words remaining that can really help are those that make people act.
Are you talking about the guy that got up just to tell PG he was wrong (about going to college)? Why do you go to Startup School then, if you're so smart?
I pretty much use the same method. Today though its very important that you rid yourself from all the entertainment that's so easily available, (ie. TV, web distractions)

He's doing his real work in those "breaks" you take while he's doing the most major task. Its important not to just check facebook :).
This is a good discussion. The flipper mindset is probably localized to software tech, and maybe that mindset is required. The reason is the constant change of technology, the shifting attention span of web users, and the maturity of the field make it harder to build a "normal" sustainable business. So, most people take the path with less friction: build something that gets enough attention to sell, profits optional. Lack of technical depth and, hence, barriers to competition are factors, too.
Stone: Dead-Simple Ruby Data Persistence
Ask YC: How do you get the word out about your product?
Even great products like the Macintosh had an evangelizing effort behind it, and from talking to people at Startup School it seems like the "TechCrunch" effect just gives you a peak that dies out quickly, with low conversion rate.

Does a compelling product just do the magic by itself, or do you need a marketing plan? What strategies do you have to "bring the good news"?
How Scientific Gains Abroad Pay Off in the U.S.
The video is pretty good and much better than just notes, but it still doesn't come close to being there in person
Is there a good text you could recommend on the topic?
Enough with the straw men.
Rush, the Ruby shell & Integration library (Ruby Conference Slides)
I don't think the flipper mindset is unique to software. Day traders flip stocks, sometimes in seconds, and a lot of people in Miami (and elsewhere) just took a bath trying to flip condos (buying them in big blocks and then trying to unload them on out-of-towners for ridiculous prices). The general get-rich-quick scheme exists in every business.

I think the best software is built by people who are not looking to flip. Linus has been with his baby for over a decade. Richard Stallman even longer. Bill Gates had a lot of trouble giving up his software products, and Marc Andreessen said yesterday that his favorite part was building out the company... being a startup was just how he got to build companies. I think people looking to pump and dump will just do the minimum it takes to get by, and it shows.
Anatomy of an Ikea product: "When we decide about a product, we always start with the price"
by not doing other things
> If a wealthy multinational corporation can afford to build a factory overseas, it can afford to implement health and safety regulations that protect the workers. It's not like a country has to be ultra-rich to provide a safe, clean workplace.

They could afford to, but think about the labor problems that would result in such a market with some jobs that pay way way more than others (in terms of benefits and working conditions). Corruption run rampant, unrest, etc. Its just not viable to put the standards of a more developed economy on a lesser developed one.

> As for actual sweatshops, let's not pretend they are bestowing some great benefit upon the poor who they ruthlessly exploit. They use people up and spit them out.

The people wouldn't take the jobs if they didn't derive a greater economic benefit from such a job than other alternatives they have. In most cases this isn't slave labor.

I want better for all these people, but it has to happen sensibly, and in a way that is economically viable.
Great presentation! I'm already building a startup predicated upon the subscription model and I'm already familiar 37 Signals, DHH, and Getting Real. I just needed this talk to give my a little extra kick in the butt. New business plan in the works today.
Ncache: a web cache system base on nginx. faster and more efficient than squid
Logo Maker: Free Logo Design
It was beyond my wildest expectations (and that doesn't happen often). I got to put faces to the many names I've met here - it was great meeting all you guys!

I finally met kirubakaran, alaskamiller, iamelgringo, dfranke, dcurtis, Xichekolas, rms, and a whole bunch of lurkers. (Sorry if I missed anyone). Hanging out with you guys was very cool and inspirational.

I only wished I could have finally met nickb. Every time someone said they saw him, he went around the corner just before I got there.

The area and the facilities were top notch and our hosts were especially gracious - thank you pg, Jessica, and Trevor!

Every speaker was exceptional. Thanks to all of you!

It might be a good idea to start thinking about how to measure the effect of these kinds of programs by examining those of us who don't go through the formal yc program. I certainly intend to do my part to positively effect that metric.

Now back to the diaspora with my newfound energy and plans.
I disagree that that Wisconsin is a horrible place for start-ups. Madison is pretty big on entrepreneurship. If you go to school there, check out the entrepreneurship association at the business school. The faculty is also amazing, and they're happy to chat with you even if you're not a business student.
I think if you're not finding support, you're not looking in the right place.
Where else could you find so many speakers expousing diametrically opposed ideas while all being correct?
I don't think BW cares about the amount raised. They didn't ask me until after we were already confident that I was going to be selected. It was like, "Oh, we forgot to ask -- how much money did you raise?"
You don't need to rub it in. :)
"it still doesn't come close to being there in person"

Yes! It's not just better, it's a different experience altogether.

I wonder how many lives were changed yesterday. Not just by this talk, but by all of them.
why waste time fiddling with a company when you have all the money you will ever need?

and not everyone's passion can make them money
Because I'm interested in startups, in commerce and not everyone can run a company. I provide employment to people and a social responsibility via my own and my companies actions. That's just for starters!
I think it's more that many of these unfunded, small-team startups (possibly including mine) will throw in the towel and get regular jobs, abandoning their startups. Heck, they may join other startups, and the winners will emerge strong with many of these former single founders having rather generous stock option grants.

A good comparison might be the automobile industry in the 1920s or the oil industry in the 1870s. Market was glutted with small fly-by-night operators, who were bought up at or below cost. However, they were often bought for stock in the acquirers, which then skyrocketed when competition declined. Many of them became very wealthy as manager-employees, much better than if they'd been employees from the beginning.
Is there a list of all the recordings from Startup School 2008 anywhere? I've been clicking around trying to find one without luck.

I tried clicking on the user to find a list of videos and even that didn't work, there's just a list of times that bring up "watch my last broadcast" with a time/date picker. I tried looking in the News & Tech category but it's an apparently random list of unrelated videos. This site doesn't make any sense... is there's some secret to how it's organized that'll make sense of it? ATM it seems to be the bastard lovechild of YouTube, MySpace, and angry fruit salad.