skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Dare I say "Win-Win-Win!" The best choice for any negotiation. Quote Courtesy of Michael Scott.
HuddleChat: Did Google Just Rip Off 37Signals?
Read the slides.
Paul Graham backs companies that fit into the Paul Graham philosophy. This probably causes YCombinator to miss the majority of possibly profitable investments. I am not criticizing YC here, they are only looking for a few dozen startups each year so it is fine if they miss most of the good ones. However, there is room for several YC clones, perhaps run by other successful founders, that invest with a different worldview than Paul Graham.
Feature-wise, yes it's obviously closer to those, but what PHP did originally was wrap a Perl-esque syntax and dynamic environment (dynamic typing, interpreted code, GC, etc.) around C libraries as its "standard library". It's grown a lot since then, but the C connection still accounts for PHP's standard libraries, despite the big improvements in OOP and newer libraries in the last few years (SPL for example).

That is where many design limitations come from, and it's why PHP's standard library is still mostly just a collection of a million functions instead of something more OOP like the Python or Ruby :)
When I was looking for a list like the one I built I did run across this one. Unfortunately, I needed far more than 1000 words and I also wanted to have information on occurrence counts. If you have additional resources I'd love to see them - perhaps I could add links to similar lists to the post.
EU Recommends Slashing Search Data Retention (explanation from Slashdot)
Did they switch to Java at that point or was it still C++?

I had some great memories in that class and definitely gave me the background I needed. Probably learned more in that class than in the early college Comp Sci classes.

Definitely a shame to lose it.
What's with this idea of a "Rockstar" developer? Is it just me or is it incredibly stupid. Unless it means:

-Is so successful and in demand that he can do whatever he wants, and set his own rules.

-Makes a ton of money, at least millions of dollars per year.

-Is a household name, at least among some circles. People get excited by a software project just because he is involved.

-Has enough social status to get many women.

-Uses drugs.

I don't think there are many software guys in this category. John Carmack and John Romero in their heyday is what I'd have in mind, or Richard Garriot (I mean come on, he built a castle!), or Sid Meyer. Or Linus of course.
I'm surprised that the responses here thusfar are negative. Right now there are certainly more companies being funded by later stage VCs than YC knock-offs, so there's obviously a large enough pool of companies that can make it to that next phase. But can seed groups pick them?

I'll just make up some numbers:

Let's assume that the seed investment gets diluted down to 2% before an exit, and let's assume a buyout of $5 million. If we pretend that the only costs of running a seed firm are the investments, with seed investments of $15k, that means one successful at that level would cover 13 startups.

YC seems to be shooting for successful exits of 1/3 of their startups. If a group emulating could even do a quarter as well as YC hopes, then they'd come out ok (using my pretend numbers).
You are right. I don't mean to say they run the risk of bankruptcy. The amounts invested are only in the millions here (seed companies).
However, the rationale that led a lot of risk assessors to view the bundling and securitization process of sub-prime loans as meaningful is what I find to be parallel.

You are also right that VCs and their investors are sensible as of now. It boggles the mind that highly leveraged companies would buy and hold on to high-risk bets.
> I wouldn't consider losing 5k after exercising options (and knowing the obvious risks) as being "fucked," though

Except it comes at the same time the company folds, which mean you lose your job and have to pay for the privilege. I agree on a hypothetical 120k salary this isn't a big deal but in many start-ups you're basically at subsistence level.
wow, i did not know about git add --patch. that seems very very powerful.
The sizzle? ;-)
This one's actually a discovery. I was psychology major in college and had been reading about research on gender differences in language. People seemd to intuit that there was something behind the stereotypes about women talking more, and a difference did show up in brain imaging - men process language in areas one hemisphere, usually the left, women did some secondary processing in corresponding areas of the non-dominant hemisphere. Feminists had written about this too. But over and over word counts, comprehension tests, vocabulary tests had found nothing.

One day, I was at a small party that had started to break up. The remaining guys were in one room, and the two girls had drifted to the kitchen and were chatting excitedly about something. I had gotten bored with what the guys were talking about, and wondered what the girls were so excited about. But I couldn't understand them because they were talking on top of each other. Then it hit me: They can understand each other! Women can talk and understand simultaneously, we can't. They can use the secondary areas in the non-dominant hemisphere as back-up language comprehension areas. Men just use areas in one hemisphere so we have to switch back and forth between speaking and listening, we can't do both at the same time. It's blatantly obvious if you stop to think about it, but in all the research i'd been reading, nobody had stopped to think about it.

The feminist take on language and gender made sense too. If you assume that men could listen and talk at the same time if they wanted to, comments that guys make, like "Hey, shut up a minuit would you, I want to say something" and "Hey wait a minuit, I'm still talking" do seem domineering.
Fully agree with you. Competition can only be good for us all. With AWS we need better reliability
A wiki would probably work well. A Google Site perhaps?
Thats the problem with AP CS in Java. In our school CS 105 is the first programming class, it is C and you basically learn basic io/if/for/while/structs/pointers. If you take the AP class you skip CS 105 and therefore you jump into the next level class without having ever heard what a pointer was, looking for an ArrayList and wondering where the libraries. That next class is C++ and covers OOP and streams and templates and they get lost immediately. Worse, most of the kids in mine got 4 or 5s on the exam, and said they had never created a program from scratch before, since Java has so much boiler plate the teacher would give them a skeleton and they would have to fill in the methods, the whole idea of how to structure a program into functions was never taught to them. It sounded like it did more harm than good to me, I would rather see a high school CS class do some fun python robotics or graphics programming to get people interested and then when they hit college get into the details, don't let them skip the basics by taking a test that doesn't actually replace the amount of knowledge it says it does.
To sum this up into a sentence:

There were a whole bunch of solutions that sucked, then Google came along.
The problem with 'Software Engineer," with me anyway, is the that the title just reeks of pretension. There is an actual field called software engineering and it refers to an actual development style and methodology and is not synonymous with all-purpose hacking. Despite this, many developers refer to themselves as software engineers even if that isn't what they do, simply because it sounds more important.

"Monkey," "Ninja," etc may be informal, (I don't know how you mean naive,) but it at least doesn't usually imply posturing.
There has been lots of discussions on what YC is and how to emulate YC. I don't think these discussions are wrong or misguided. I just think they are missing an important point which is that we are in the midst of a great generational change of consumer pattern (both for hard goods and for information). And the only way to catch this wave is if you are part of this wave. Being an older entrepreneur (much older than the typical YC'er), I speak for myself when I say that I can only be a spectator and watch everything at awe. But it would be very difficult for me to lead any startup opportunities that exploit this change (at least not by myself).

So I think the key to success for YC is not the incubation aspect nor the micro-loan aspect (both of which exist outside of YC). I think the key here is that the YC'er are encouraged to view themselves as the ultimate "surrogate" customers, that they should lead the charge and they have the right to because they are both technologists (i.e, hackers) and representative of their generation.
A YC Clone in India
The history of computer data storage, in pictures
Google App Engine: History's Next Step or Monopolistic Boondoggle?
http://Programmermeetdesigner.com is quite popular as well for people trying to find someone to collaborate on a project/startup
The problem with teaching ODEs is that some people just are not motivated to learn that stuff. Why would a business man need to know differential equations?

I bet this country would be a lot better off teaching Econ 101 to every student graduating than teaching differential equations, or even Calculus. Who needs to know Calc? Math, Science, and Engineering majors. Some business and finance majors, but not all. That is not the majority of people in college must less the country. Yet everyone should understand the country's economy a bit better. I have always found a lot of smart people do not understand the actual demographics of the country because they only see the people around them, who are in fact also smart people. Realize that the country is largely made up of people who have never gotten closer to high math than what they see on the blackboards in movies like Good Will Hunting, and could care less.

Also consider most education majors never are required to get past Calc 1, who would teach it?

I'm all for offering it, I took Calc in high school and I know other engineers who took ODEs in high school, but requiring any more than Calc 1 in high school makes no sense to me.
Meet the World's Super Class: Why They Call the Shots
That's pretty funny! I got a good laugh out of the chimps image :)

I actually started in Perl about 8 years ago (well, before that it was just little Galaga and Snake clones in DOS :), so it's kinda my first love. But Perl was eventually too punk rocker for me...

I drank the Ruby kool-aid for a while too (mmm, pickaxe flavour :), and if I were to start fresh in a language without the framework I'm used to now, I would definitely be seriously weighing Ruby vs Python (or maybe finally get up on the functional languages).

Maybe I'm writing Ruby like PHP, but I probably write PHP more like Perl anyway. When I first came to PHP I was disgusted at ideas like "register_globals" and immediately ported CGI.pm and DBI over so I would have something sane to work with in PHP. This was long before PHP had its "superglobals" and even PEAR didn't exist yet back then.
i'm extremely delighted to know this ... BRAVO !

Now i'm waiting for waiting for a clone in Canada ...
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?TruckNumber

.............

Anyway, documentation is all well and good when it takes the form of a "how to". That seems to be what the author is getting at. But there's just nothing worse than reading or writing documentation that consists of proposed method signatures, object structures, or anything in any way related to UML.
"I would tend to agree that YC cookie-cutter clones are probably not going to succeed."

In reference to the web 2.0 genre, or hashed out in other models as well? The cost of starting a company is falling in other sectors as well...
If I write a witty phrase would I get any points in New YC?
Pg's Hierarchy of Disagreement Represented Graphically
Great place for a startup: rents up 10.3 percent in San Francisco
If it's meant to recast certain language functionality in terms of anonymous functions, why didn't they just make block literals return anonymous functions? It still strikes me as an almost-could-have-been-great syntax.

Idiomatic Scheme basically never has "do" loops, despite their being part of the core standard, and it's been that way for decades.
FairTax petition now has 96,000 names: Help us hit 100,000 today‏
Possible warning against using Google's App Engine for Startups
Rails god config
The risk of any given disease 1) occurring and 2) contributing to mortality rises proportionally with age. More generally, age is a risk factor for the majority of diseases.

One result of the increasing life expectancy in the general case is that mortality from degenerative disease must necessarily increase, unless the rate of improvement in a given disease's treatment effectiveness is greater year-over-year than the risk differential from simply getting older. That sounds easy but history suggests otherwise (progress is spiky, and while elucidation of risk factors is getting faster and faster, the follow-on work of treating consequences hasn't accelerated apace)

This is particularly important for degenerative diseases of the sort that most cancers represent, namely, accumulated genetic damage leading to what seems to be de-differentiation and malignant re-differentiation of one or more cell types into something bad. This is not entirely unlike what happens when an embryo becomes a fetus, with the unfortunate side effect that the host must 'deliver' surgically and the location of the 'child' is unknown (and in some cases unknowable). If you have children, you can perhaps relate to the systemic burden of such a situation. Now just take that kid and put it in a person's pancreas, or their white blood cells, and try to figure out how to do a 'C-section' or 'morning-after pill' effectively. Depending on the specific pathology, it may be almost impossible.

Anyhow, while it is true that earlier diagnosis can influence the recorded survival times, if you rip into the data using (eg.) Cox regression, the hazard rates do change with treatment, and that's about all you can ask for until we figure out how to target individual cell types for apoptosis in an agreeable fashion :-)
The more I use git, the more I like it. It's like a treasure trove of great features but still feels lightweight and close to the metal.
I am slowly coming to realize that the root of all human misery is jealousy and resentment of those who are more successful than you.

I have certainly felt these emotions in myself before, and I have noticed how ultimately counterproductive they are. Yes it is a lot easier to sit and hate, but if you instead choose to get up and change the world, it is much more rewarding in the end.
Looking closer at the Django support... it's Django except for the ORM, Sessions, and Admin! All that's left is routing, forms, and the templates, all of which have better alternatives. No out of the box Django apps will run without the ORM, and there are viable alternatives to the remaining pieces - FormEncode and Genshi.

But hooray for the limited transaction support. That was a real limitation in Amazon SDB.
The Google App API is crufty - too many pieces that are visible to the developer. Google needs to clean it up and unify the API, which should really be a variant of the Python language (probably a subset of Python).

Microsoft _could_ try to compete here but won't or will do it poorly. Their best chance would be a variant of ASP (not ASP.NET, more below) with additions:

1. Associative arrays - ASP had limited session and application hash variables. Microsoft tantalizingly demonstrated that they _could_ do associative arrays but wouldn't.

2. Allow tying associative arrays to disk, as in Perl, and incorporate transaction capability.

3. Add binary file I/O - File I/O should be built into a language. In ASP you write a C++/VB COM component to perform random I/O and dynamically instance the component on the ASP page. Guaranteed slowness/clumsiness in development/execution.

4. Develop a database API similar to Google's BigTable. Abandon SQL Server: the database division would oppose this. Development would have to be coordinated with the creation of infrastructure even given Google's API model.

A bonus: much existing ASP code could be reused. There is far more ASP than ASP.NET code.

Why not ASP.NET?

It's too much. Classic ASP was extremely popular and technically fell just short of a sweet spot for web APIs. Along came .NET, built more for Microsoft than for either developers or the Internet. ASP.NET was shoehorned into the "web apps" slot.

Harder questions:

- infrastructure: could Microsoft support something like Google App Engine?

- would former ASP developers forgive Microsoft's abandonment of ASP and flock to a new ASP platform?

- would ASP.NET developers consider using an ASP framework?
I think the fact that people know that Wikipedia can't be completely trusted makes for healthy skepticism. People are far too willing to trust print sources written by experts, or too assume the author must be an expert because they got a book published.

College textbooks, for instance, are full of minor unintentional errors. Textbook authors rely heavily on secondary sources and simply can't double check all their sources when they're trying to summarize an entire field, and more errors creep in when they're summarizing other people's summaries.

People use Wikipedia as a starting point to find information, but usually have sense enough to double check it before they assume it's true. They should do the same with books too.
"Take Down Obligations: What Google Can Do To Hosted App Engine Web Sites"

That's seems reasonable to me. If I violate their TOS or in any way act immoral, they have the right to ask me to remove my content from their server. If I refuse to do so, it's completely within their rights to take it down themselves.

"Non-Performance Clause: How Google Puts All Risk and Liability on App Engine “Customers”"

AKA, you're responsible for your data. If something goes wrong and a commit fails, Google isn't responsible, just like if a MySQL query fails, you don't lay the blame on Sun. Again, this sounds pretty reasonable.

"Personal Data Capture Machine: How Google Usurps Private Consumer Information"

In the interest of full disclosure to my customers, I'd be more than willing to say "We use the Google Apps Engine!"

This article seems like one big mess of FUD. Google is providing some cool services at no cost. You don't like it? Go somewhere else.
I had the opposite reaction when I first learned Python--I thought forced indenting was genius. It's something that should be enforced in every language because it makes the program dramatically easier to read. One problem I've noticed with Python code online is when leading and trailing whitespace is stripped from code examples (e.g. posting code to a forum). The code just stops making sense all of a sudden.
Real hackers do it in ascii.

/\
/ \
/ \
/ DH6. \
/ Refute \
/ the \
/ Central \
/ Point \
/----------------\
/ DH5. Refutation \
/--------------------\
/ DH4. Counterargument \
/------------------------\
/ DH3. Contradiction \
/----------------------------\
/ DH2. Responding to Tone \
/--------------------------------\
/ DH1. Ad Hominem \
/------------------------------------\
/ DH0. Name Calling \
/----------------------------------------\
Summary: one shouldn't assume uniform prior distributions in psychological experiments. Bayes-rule is your friend.
You got it. You put it so well (edit: by well I mean 'concisely') too. I wrote a 3000 word essay on this very topic yesterday (though it looks at the background to the problem in more depth), so I couldn't resist linking it here:

http://peterc.org/2008/54-how-to-be-content-with-your-life-i...

If we all just keep chipping in without competing, everyone benefits.
The central thesis of this article appears to be that Google should assume all of the risks and all of the uptime obligations an entrepreneur might face in hosting their app, but ask nothing in return, and do it for free.

I'm not sure this would make a good elevator pitch...

More seriously, if Google does this and gets a MSFT-like reputation for demolishing successful members of their developer ecosystem, Amazon provides a for-pay service with higher barriers to entry, but much lower barriers to exit, and a good deal of developer trust already established.

Take your pick, but if I were you, I wouldn't base my decision upon this woman's judgment.
Overblown fear mongering. Given a service such as App Engine, the policies sound reasonable. Google is covering its ass like all service providers do.

If you want total control over your site, then this is obviously not the service for you. You don't need to read the fine print to know that.
there has to be rules, and even perhaps a price to pay to get access to one of the best infrastructures in the world..
Early notes on GoogleApps
Is Google Hypocritical on Net Neutrality?
No.

When you publish and promote an application, it is fair game. That Campfire (which we use and pay for) is so easily reproduced as a side project is a problem 37Signals has, not a problem for other teams.

I played with HuddleChat and the interface similarities are apparent; however, HuddleChat is not a class-for-class, id-for-id knockoff of Campfire.

Add to that the fact that most of the design of Campfire is obvious; the only distinctly 37Signals-ish aspect of it is minimalism. If you (fairly) started a project with the goal of being "at least as functional as Campfire", it's easy to see why you'd end up with something that looked similar.
Developers, start your engines
Lisp Web Framework: Kanamit
This was the last year of C++. It is entirely possible that the Java version of the class was less useful.
Soccer Robots Compete for the Title
I agree that block syntax should semantically result in expression evaluating to a Proc object. This would be great:

y = {|x| x} # => #<Proc>

I agree that block syntax could therefore be greater than it is.

I disagree that you can fairly knock Ruby for this, since blocks and implicit block arguments are still better than what you get in other languages.
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Disqus was funded by Y Combinator in the summer of 2007. The company recently raised a round of funding led by Fred Wilson with Union Square Ventures.

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