skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If when people talk about "frameworks" they're really talking about "monolithic frameworks", then maybe most frameworks indeed suck, because they're all guilty of the accusations made in the article (which amounts to: monolithism).

Imagine some monolithic framework. Now, a Super Magical Refactoring(tm) takes place and the public interface doesn't barely change at all, everything is the same except that the core is made tiny and almost all the functionnality is implemented as libraries that were extracted from the previous core but obviously fit perfectly well with the core and eachother.

You're telling me the framework is no longer a "framework" but just a "library"?! I think you're playing semantic games.

I say modularity doesn't preclude "verticalisation".
To sum, Sun launched: OpenSolaris, an open source OS [1]; a free AMI for OpenSolaris; MySQL Enterprise for EC2 [2]; an OpenSocial app hosting service [3]; and a Facebook app hosting service [4].

[1] Includes ZFS and DTrace. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSolaris

[2] Tiered support service. Cost: $599-4999/yr

[3] On Joyent's (OpenSolaris) servers. 1st yr: free

[4] To be released soon
F that. If it's really that much of a problem, wouldn't it be easier just to buy a used laptop from craigslist, or an asus ee? That way you're guarnteed to not have anything on there that you don't want to be seen, rather than worry you missed something critical.
I agree - would love to see how they scored a NYT article?! Impressive.
amazing graph. well done:)
Vi implementation written entirely in Javascript
I'm not saying that our system is capitalism. I'm saying that socialized medicine (which is what other countries have) and big government flies right in the face of what this country is based upon, personal liberty, responsibility and freedom.

And show me any place in history that price controls have been an effective fiscal policy.

Look at the third world and see how well it works for them.

I lived in a place where the price of a loaf of bread was fixed at x. Well when x was a fair price and provided profit to the baker everyone was happy. 10 years later, people were so used to bread being x that when noone could make bread any more because the cost of the ingredients had gone up so much there were riots. So what did the government do? They raised minimum wage and price controlled the ingredients for bread. So all the bakeries closed down. And now a bunch of other shops closed down or fired their employees. Then what? Laws making it impossible to fire an employee.

Price controls and fixing are not the answer.
Pining for the fjords?
but how is having an expensive workforce keeping small shops in business? I mean the really small shops like mom and pop shops can do it, but the 10-20 employee businesses must be running much tighter than they could here.
You only responded to 50% of my argument though.

Canada is a good mix if you ask me. 40 hour weeks are the norm, small business is encouraged, but the understanding that people have lives and are not beholden to their employer has an overall positive impact on society as a whole.

Granted, I've never tried to operate a business in the US, so maybe I just don't know what I'm missing, but I'm certainly greatful that my son spent the first year of his life exclusively with mom.
Yeah, I don't understand most of what he writes either. His page on inheritance is very confusing to me.
Ask YC: Any readers from Switzerland/Geneva?
If so, I'll organize a meetup! Just respond here or drop me a line - shafqat at newscred.com
To answer question about scalability - just one link http://addons.mozilla.org (written on cakephp)
Coming next: why some other stuff I don't use is really sucky, and everyone who uses it isn't a Real Programmer.
Sick. But I love it!
Heroku is pretty close http://heroku.com/. I think it is funded by YC.
>I'm saying that socialized medicine (which is what other countries have) and big government flies right in the face of what this country is based upon, personal liberty, responsibility and freedom.

Well, you're probably correct there. As a entrepreneur though, it's rather dangerous to let ideology dictate a solution to a problem, especially if something else can do a better job.

You can certainly argue about whether social medicine is that something else, but to remove something from consideration simply because it "isn't how we do things here" sounds like a recipe for failure if you ask me.
Summer Internship in NYC/Philadelphia working on next-generation display advertising platform
My startup Invite Media (www.invitemedia.com) is looking for a computer science undergrad or grad hacker to come work with our top-notch engineering team this summer - either in Philadelphia or New York City. Work on our core platform, be involved in our summer launch and gain invaluable experience. Email zach AT invitemedia DOT com for more info or simply reply in the thread.
Any really good skill is completely organic this way. Your brain fuses a whole bunch of thoughts, instead of producing just one that you can put into words, and you just do it.

That's the fun part.
Canada's great and all eh (sorry couldn't help it :), but there's a reason that what, 60%+ of the population lives within 20 miles of the US border.

But from what I know, the canadian system seems more likely to be what the US could transition to than, say the UK system.

FWIW, my understanding is that Canada's system is that the government acts like an insurance company, so rather than all medical facilities being government facilities, they are private and they simply bill the government. In the UK, all facilities are government run, so there is no billing at all [well I'm sure there is behind the scenes].
What’s happening at LinkedIn? Is it getting bought? [Or getting funded?]
That's pretty impressive. I'm no vinja but it had all the shortcuts I knew about.
The author seems to be making the assumption that Yahoo's leadership wanted to be acquired by Microsoft at any price. I suspect they did not, and simply wanted to say no under circumstances that would look OK to their shareholders.
Yes, please. I appreciate that Arrington has solicited feedback here at news.ycombinator.com, but that in itself doesn't make TechCrunch articles any more useful.

If TechCrunch isn't banned, please mod the system so that links to TechCrunch start out with a negative point value and can be modded up.
I respectfully disagree.

While I confess that I am an ubernerd (in addition to other fine qualities such as being a well-known chocoholic), I see plenty of people on twitter who are not techie at all.

I follow a few quilters, for example; one of them has a blog with neat how-to videos. And for some reason a lot of real-estate people from Phoenix are on twitter (they follow me, I'm not too interested in them).

I realize that they can be invisible to techies. Like LinkedIn: you only see the people on twitter who you follow personally, so there's a sense that everyone is like yourself. But that's not the case.
6 Places that Flash Does Not Belong
You can't - it's called human nature.
paranoid much? If this is a real concern, why wipe your whole box? Just store your sensitive information online and scrub it before you leave? If you really really must secure the entire system, then create a image of it an upload it (S3 or whatever). Keep a second clean image for use when crossing the border. Swapping images is significantly simpler than re-installing from scratch every time.
Don't tolerate it. If someone is going off the political deep-end, then let them go (in a legal way). You might think doing so could cause things to get worse, but, in many instances, the remaining team will breathe a sigh of relief once the source of negative energy is gone. Just my two cents.
Sure, it scales. But it isn't a very good language. (The word "blub" comes to mind.)

Here are features I like to have (in no particular order):

* lexically-scoped variables (and closures)
* lambdas
* continuations
* macros
* an object system with a MOP (PHP and Java fail miserably here)
* powerful regex engine (can be added via libraries, so not too critical)
* extensive module library
* flexibility (I want to write code my way, not the way someone else thinks I should write it; bye bye, Python.)

Things that are nice to have:

* multiple dispatch OO
* partial evaluation
* laziness

PHP has none of these features. That's why I don't use it and don't recommend it. And oh yeah... PHP is a templating system too. I would rather get that as a library, not a core feature. (But I won't count that against them.)

So what language does have all these features? None :)

But, Lisp and Perl are good compromises. CL does everything except continuations and having a decent module library; Perl does everything except have pretty syntax and macros. Sadly neither of those languages has (by default) the "optional features", which is a shame. I ranted about this on my blog:

http://blog.jrock.us/articles/Syntax%20and%20features.pod

Anyway, PHP is junk in terms of a programming language. It's fine if you don't know how to program, don't know what abstraction is, and don't like using libraries.
Require employees to watch powerpoint presentations about it. If that doesn't stop it, nothing will.
What's your reason for ironing?! That's way out of the Hacker mainstream!
Regardless of what you decide to do with the user registration.. could you add an example or two to show how easy it is?

Like a static page with the output the site would give for a common scenario (such as a TV, DVD Player, and Satellite dish/DVR, for example). Just to let me see how awesome Wirewize is without me having to sign up (or try to put in my details)?
It traps all my key presses! I use Vimporator in Firefox and this kills my ability to do that. Maybe if there was a sort of meta-escape, that escaped you to browser shortcuts, but I didn't see one.

Cool though.
ok guys it's not that amazing. stop upvoting this and write a better comment please.

edit: they keep upvoting it. i feel like gail wynand.
Allen & Co. Pitching LinkedIn At $1 Billion
Why are we banning any sources? You never know where any good news/information is going to come from. It just seems pretty silly to me.
Banning is hard... let's go shopping?
Keep the company flat!! I think most of it depends on the org structure of the company.
I disupte your choice of adjective, but concur with your conclusion.
A while back I was closely connected to the purchaser of hardware at our company. We used to buy hardware from one of these mom & pop shops (don't ask) because they would get deals that were basically next to nothing compared to the dell's and NCIX's of the world.

I used to feel bad for the retailer though.. he was making stupid margins like a dollar on an $80 HDD, and $30 on a complete PC. I'm not sure how he managed to stay in business, but man, there must have been a few stressful nights coming home to his family every month.

Run away from this, run far far away. Unless you can brand your own hardware, you're better off selling yourself as a tech support guy than trying to be a retailer.
It's like what PG says here:
http://paulgraham.com/startupfunding.html

"Fear of failure is an extraordinarily powerful force. Usually it prevents people from starting things, but once you publish some definite ambition, it switches directions and starts working in your favor."
Go for the framework that lets you develop quicker. The truth is that there's no framework on earth that has solved the 'scaling' problem for you. Anyone who says '<framework x> doesn't scale' in all probability has never scaled anything.

Scaling isn't even a real, real problem you need to worry about until you're a top 1000 site at minimum, or > 10MM page views a day. At numbers past that, no framework is going to magically solve your database partitioning problems.
Nice. Someone should do an emacs just so we can see the look on Steve Yegge's face. Combining JavaScript, Firefox, and Emacs might make his pants a little damp, if you know what I mean.
Between the employer and my own contributions (about 50/50) costs are 5k USD/year for health and dental. I have a 1200 deductible that is paid by my employer 100%. I see a couple of specialists and can see anyone at any time. That embodies my appreciation for the US system.
60% of Canada's population doesn't live within 20 miles of the border. 500 miles maybe. :)

The reason for this is though mainly lies in the weather, and really has nothing to do with anything else. Hell, not many people live in North Dakota either!

Basically, you're correct in your interpretation of how our Health Insurance works. There are caveats (no deductibles, bans on what a private clinic can do, caps on doctor earnings) but generally the system is a good compromise.
This list should be a lot longer than 6.

Sites you would like to load test or functional test with standard tools.

Sites you would like the vision-impaired to use.

Sites you would like to have a fully functional back button.

Sites you would like to open source, as the tools to write flash cost significant $.

Sites users might like to copy and paste from.

Sites where users might not have flash installed for security or other reasons.

Most websites not involving video or games.

Note: if the flash is just a "garnish" some of the above do not apply.
Hmmm... Interesting that, without cause, you gave such a defensive reply. I take it PHP has gotten a bad rap an not scalable? Any language can scale, if the implementation is designed correctly.
Quick Disclaimer, I work tangentially in the health insurance industry. That being said, I know what variables factor in to a rate:

1. Deductible

2. Age

3. Whether or not you use tobacco - This includes chew.

4. Your gender makes a difference.

5. Occasionally, your BMI makes a difference. But most often, it's age + tobacco use that makes the largest difference.

Insurance rates will also change by your location. Say you had a twin who lived 1 city over; you may get different rates depending on your location.

Occasionally, a rate quote will be different due to the time of year that you're asking for your effective date. That seems to differ between carriers, and not a lot of carriers do this type of discounting or loading.

Hope that helps.
http://smashingtelly.com/
Quote from the site:
"Smashing Telly is a hand edited collection of the best free, instantly available TV on the web. Not 30 second clips of a dog on a skateboard, or the millionth person to mime the Numa song, but classic clips and full length programs, with a focus on documentaries and non fiction. Smashing Television, not Gimmick Television."
Uh, no. It's actively developed (100s of commits per week) and is quite close to a 1.0 release.
Scribd Launches "Most Interesting Hard Drive Contest" - Win a MacBook Air
Absolute marketing genius - they will get tons of interesting content, and thousands of people linking to it. All for the price of a macbook Air.
Interactive Graph of American Spending
That is so freaking cool!
What Kind of Software Would People Actually Pay For?
How much Objective-C software is written at Apple?
Haven't watched all of these, but the High Perf ones are great:

http://www.bestechvideos.com/tag/yahoo
Make Windows More Productive Without Installing a Thing
Why we write code and don't just draw diagrams
Career paths and concerns
Intellectual Ventures sounds like dinner in grad school
Lisp Lovers, how would you fix Lisp or bring it up to date?
Hehe. 4 of those links are to my sites. :)

Actually, if you looked more carefully through http://freescienceonline.blogspot.com (the right sidebar), you'd find around 10 posts on computer science videos (not just two you linked to :))

I'd also like to add more recent ones:

Learning Python Videos: http://www.catonmat.net/blog/learning-python-programming-lan...

Learning Design Patterns Videos:
http://www.catonmat.net/blog/learning-python-design-patterns...

Defcon 15 conference videos (more than 200):
http://www.catonmat.net/blog/videos-from-defcon-15-hacker-co...

:)
>a) that sucks for them b) they need a better job

You have a complete lack of empathy. I don't think that's healthy.

>You want the benefits of capitalism without the risks? How does that work?

Government that truly cares about the interests of the people.
This isn't near as ridiculous as the $15 billion valuation for facebook. LinkedIn is projecting revenue of $100 million for 2008. Additionally, because of the demographics and main features of LinkedIn (read: job listings), the CTR and CPM of LinkedIn is substantially higher than facebook.
Yeah, well... Guess they have good do something to keep those visitors coming...
I know what you mean.
Google Reader Gets More Social: Now With Notes
Twitter's problems are the result of architecture, XMPP may be the answer
Microsoft closing external Hotmail access by end of June 2008
Let's add 'a public website' to the list. The Flash runtime is proprietary and simply isn't available for many environments.

Opera on the Wii ships with Flash 8, but many new Flash video players use Flash 9. There is also no decent Flash build for many unix varieties, including 64-bit linux. (Yes you can install 32-bit libraries to get the 32-bit version running, but come on ..)
Everyone is going to put up an argument for different languages. There is no magical language that works for everything. It really depends what the project is.

With that said. I work on a PHP site that does 5-9 million page views a day. We have an in house MVC framework. We use MySQL, memcached and APC hosted on a handful of solaris zones. We have no issues scaling and have coding policies that our development team tries its best to follow. PHP is a proven language, it has been around a long time and has a huge community. It really comes down to preference and objective. I personally don't use any of the open source frameworks available. But there are plenty of decent ones that will work just fine for small to medium sized sites.

To anyone who says thats it's not a "real" language: do I care? It gets the same job done, it's proven to scale and it can turn a profit. Period.
Ask YC:  Should computer books contain intentional technical errors to keep the reader's attention?
The publisher could even have a contest to reward readers who find the most technical errors.

Unlike what Knuth has been doing, these technical errors would be intentional.
A long time ago, in an America far far away, the company my father worked for bought Gateway laptops that specifically had removable drives and advised all employees to have a "travel drive" for when they visited countries that were ahem less than civil. Good advice never gets old.

We have seen the enemy, and he is us.
Making Money via Open Source?
I kinda wonder how slow a pure-Arc regexp library would run. Could be kinda fun to write...

I suppose you could always hack the interpreter to patch through MzScheme's regexp library.
7 Things You Must Do in an Interview
There is life outside silicon valley...aka "Silicon Forest."
No. Should news.yc contain crazy questions to keep the reader's attention? No.
You don't believe in learning by debugging?

Computer books can be pretty boring. This would be a way to encourage deeper reading and understanding.
Previewing Acre, a Freebase app builder
The "E-commerce" entry left me flabbergasted.

Do some developers really think that people want to drag-and-drop stuff into their shopping carts?

Maybe I am too used to sensible on-line shops...
SI Teams With MIT Blackjack Ace to Make Facebook Apps
The Original Wolfenstein game in JavaScript
Remmember this game: http://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/wolfenstein-3d

Here in JavaScript (according to the page - Firefox, Safari only): http://www.nihilogic.dk/labs/wolf/
A list of the few places where Flash does belong would likely be more effective and exhaustive.
oh wow nice, only on hacker news can i find this
and reddit...
I disagree. It's a cheap trick. The real aim is to get a bunch of SEO-optimizing people to link like crazy to scribd.com.
If they are projecting $100 million in rev, what do they need more funding for?
Massachusetts now has student, employee, employer, self-employed, and low income earner insurance for free or at large subsidy, between the Commonwealth Connector and the Insurance Partnership programs.
Monster.com Founder Starts Social Networking Site for the Dead
I'd prefer a health care system with no regulations and no price controls.

But if forced to choose between the system in the US, and the system in France, I would choose the French system. France provides equal enough care for what I want, at a far lower price. I suspect that a completely unregulated system would be better than both. But the United States does not have such a system. The US system is not technically "socialized", but the regualations are so badly designed the outcome is far worse than a socialized system.

Libtertarians often get so caught up in the quantity of regulation that they do not care about the quality of regulation. There are many cases where outright socialism is better than a terribly misregulated private system. By reflexively defending the misregulated private system as the lesser of two evils, libertarians ruin the credibility of both themselves and of capitalism.
So how is that not marketing genius?
How Google’s Checkbook Stymied Microsoft
I'd start by asking a more specific question.

For the rest, I'd say lisp is at least fixable, unlike most languages, and that's already saying a lot. It just lacks standardization in some crucial areas: threading, graphical interfaces, etc. There are already implementation-specific extensions for this and compatibility libraries to write mostly portable code for non-standard features but more standardisation would help adoption of the language in my opinion.
I like the thought. I heard about a professor who, on the very first day of class, told his students that in every lecture, there would be one lie. It might even be regarding information on the tests.

It was the job of the class to figure out what the lie was and call him on it and the end of class. This kept the students attentive and on edge.

From what I remember, there were some sessions where the students could not figure out what the lie was, so they went home with a potential error in their notes.

The trick was, the professor was also lying when he said that there would be a lie in each session.

In the end, knowing that there might be a blatant lie in each lecture kept the students paying attention and ultimately getting more out of the class. Doing something like this with books (not even computer books, necessarily) might really help people to pay attention. I'd think something like this would sell well too, just because of the marketing angle it would have.

If anyone knows where the story of the professor came from, please let me know. It was a great story.
The Best Defense
I suggest your friend move to massachusetts, if possible. Last I knew, there was no pre-existing condition exclusion allowed in MA, and now rates are available through the state.

My sympathies to your friend.
Your list of features has nothing to do with getting things done. They are almost completely academic.
Bunnie looks at OLED TV
I pay $1232 per month, which includes wife and 2 kids, for pretty top end Blue Cross insurance in Massachusetts. No dental. I'm self-employed and this is through COBRA from a previous job. I suspect I could save by shopping around and going for a high deductible.
I've worked with SQL for a long time, with a variety of implementations and front-ends. Django's object model hurt my head. I didn't get it. There's simply too much black magic.

e.g, how is:

Entry.objects.filter(
headline__startswith='What').exclude(
pub_date__gte=datetime.now()).filter(
pub_date__gte=datetime(2005, 1, 1))

(from http://www.djangoproject.com/documentation/db-api/)

easier than:

SELECT * from Entry where headline like "What%" and pub_date... wha? see? wtf is that chaining filter actually doing?

my 2 cents: write your own DB access layer, fight the obscure black magic.

(nothing but quibbles with the templating engine, though)