skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't know much about Second Life but I thought a window to it in public places and night clubs that you feed coins into to make it work would be fun. It would have a camera so that the virtual people could see out also. Other side of the window would also be in a public place in Second Life world.
A way to make both the theories valid is that the good team eventually will find a good idea, and the reality is that to define how this good team is composed is very hard. For example hard-core technicians may not be what you want to write web applications: you need smart programmers but also in your team you need people that are themselves web users and able to understand how other people interact with the web and what is cool about it. A lot of high profile programmers have some kind of reject for the web that will not be helpful trying to come with a great idea and to realize it well (because the web is not a lot about great code but a mix of great code, great UI, great way to talk to your users, great ability to do the right selection of features, ...).

So simply there is not a recipe :) but this is what it makes this startup world cool and less deterministic than a Windows kernel.
Are you sure it was news.yc? I was seeing slowness across different parts of the net at the same time... perhaps it's just a coincidence.
The Triumph of the Nerds: The Rise of Accidental Empires
You can't save the earth with advocacy. People are only so generous. They will do what is easiest and cheapest.

The best way to save the environment is through market mechanisms. Make solar cheaper than coal, and you no longer need to advocate for alternative energy. It will just happen.

More often than not, barriers to change are through established parties that bend legislation in their favor. That's why we need more "libertarian environmentalism", and less of the anti-market pro-jackboot bullshit that plagues the environmental movement.
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Google Docs Are Going Offline
>There's no reason to doubt representativeness of his sample.

So the sample of programmers that he has known and observed over his life is unquestionably representative?

>There's never a case where ad hominem is valid.

Are you saying that biases and potential biases of people have absolutely no relevance in any "valid" discussion, even in response to subjective observations about why people act the way they do?

>Occam's Razor suggests that PG works with startups because he thinks they're better, not that he thinks they're better because he works with them. He is rich enough to work on whatever he wants.

Are you suggesting that this makes PG completely free from bias?

>It's how evolution tells the organism, "keep doing what you're doing".

So happiness is just a reward we get from pursuing those things that will result in the propagation of our genes?

>Not everything that mentions nature is an appeal to nature.

Sure, but that's irrelevant. Gabe says PG's essay is an appeal to nature and backs it up. If you disagree, then please do the same.
It's good business to be friendly to your users. Also, for people who already use OpenID, having OpenID on your site lowers the barrier for entry.
I like the demos. I can see lots of fraternities and sororities using it. Is there any plan to do marketing/pr? Is there also a paid version (to use your own domain)?
I believe number two is illegal in the United States. Over a certain number of investors, you start running into costly securities laws.
been discussed before. won't get into the gritty details of one versus the other. you can find those via some google searches on HN or on the web in general. here's a start for you:
http://www.google.com/search?source=ig&hl=en&rlz=...

but to add some value to the discussion with my post, i'd like to show you some metrics. usage numbers have them essentially tied, when last year prototype was far in the lead.
http://ajaxian.com/archives/nitobi-survey-results-on-ajax-de...
Cellphone Makers Realize: It's the Software, Stupid
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27962
Karma hurdle for voting, but not for submitting/commenting.
It's nice, but for rock-bottom low-friction signup and easy (Markdown-based) formatting you might want to consider emulating jottit.com.

It's also possibly worthwhile to add a "dump entire site as a bunch of text" button; to bring people back, send them away, or whatever the aphorism is.

Nice demo.
Looks nice. Being compatible with Blogger themes is a smart move. How do you plan to compete with Google Pages, Weebly, and all the other site builders? A calendar and a member directory might not be a big enough differentiator.
Well it is not too difficult to implement and it can speed up the registration flow for new users, which should always be a good thing.

OpenID is still getting better though. Yahoo! just became an OpenID provider which should help it catch on. And the ClickPass guys have built a great tool on top of it as well. So it looks right now like OpenID will survive and become better in time and perhaps achieve the goal of replacing the registration flow.

So while you say it is not the cure right now, I think that if you give it enough time it possibly could become one.
Tasteful Monetization and the Passionate Developer Community (SnapTalent)
Norvig didn't convert to Python, Python converted to Peter Norvig!
Possibly the value of a degree has been consistent for ~45 years (across all the age cohorts), as opposed to countries where the value of a degree has gone up (like Korea, where there's a huge spread).
Venture Capitalists Fight Back Against TheFunded
Thanks for this comment - I had a lot to say about each of these comments but they all take too long to compose correctly. This is dead on - a smaller country with a less diverse population can improve itself generally, while the US is too big, too populous, and too democratic to make the same general improvement in its population.

Some decent comparisons (size, population, economies, demographics) are:

Finland/Sweden/Denmark to Minnesota: single digit millions, high levels of education, good technology base, lots of forests, water, and timber, homogeneous population (with recent immigration base). [Norway is similar but distorted by its huge oil wealth]

France to California: similar sized economies and land area, economies include tech/science, manufacturing, shipping, and agriculture, heavyweights in their region, diverse populations (with some tension, little integration).

Russia - Great Lakes region: great universities, high levels of education, but economies not performing like they used to due to deindustrialization. Exports scientists and engineers to more economically vibrant regions. [Also distorted by Russia's oil wealth]

Not sure about what to compare China/India/Korea to. China-Sun Belt might work (recent boom fueled by investment in logistics, infrastructure, distribution; manufacturing as opposed to high tech/innovation; real estate boom; success due to shift in macroeconomic values as much as anything else)

The Upper Midwest-Eastern Europe (Romania, Bulgaria, etc) might be a decent match too - slow economy due to agricultural focus, shrinking population due to few economies, etc.

[GAH! Do you see why I didn't want to respond to any of the comments!]
Side thought:

The web framework that I use (Weblocks) is built on prototype, but it only uses a small subset of the code with no reason to send 120K (uncompressed/unminified) over the wire. I think the next step is to use a code coverage tool to strip out all the unused code, which is a project I'm hoping to get a little time on soon. This should (back envelope calculation) reduce it to less than 25K.

jQuery also plays well with Prototype, so, with stripping, I'm hoping to try using both. Best of both worlds?
I love Twitter. I think the question is, beyond trying to get bought out/acquired, what is the business model? After reading that article, I just asked myself, how will they pay those 16 employees after the funding is gone (if that ever happens any time soon is another question). It has a strong, almost fanatical fanbase (and its fair share of marketing trolls), but where's the money going to come from? Adsense for Twitter?
OpenID is not a replacement for your users table. The first time someone logs in with an OpenID you haven't seen before, there's nothing to stop you from asking them for their e-mail address (you can even send them a challenge e-mail if you want to be sure). All OpenID really does is provides your users with an alternative to setting up Yet Another username and password just for your site. It also lets people opt-in to correlate their accounts across multiple services, which is useful for both you and for them.

If OpenID meant giving up the user database (the crown jewels of any site) it wouldn't have a chance of being adopted by anyone.
The Enterprise, The iPhone, and the Role of Silverlight
I think steve forgot the rest of his post. Short and to the point !
I somewhat agree with sah in that Roth's essay did not fully address the central point of Graham's essay: the effect that large hierarchical structures have on people. The discussion of ad hominem arguments aside, I would point out that you could phrase Roth's argumentative method as, "you've argued for x given method y, and I can use method y to also prove z, you don't believe z, therefore you can't prove x". A rough sketch might look like this:
y --> x
y --> z
therefore z <--> x (this step is hard to sketch out because it's unclear)
~z
therefore ~x.

The difficulty with this argument is a fallacy about implication. Roth states that the "evolutionary argument" supports pg's view, but that he can then use that same "evolutionary argument" to prove an absurd point of view. Then he holds that he has disagreed with pg's central viewpoint.

This method of argumentation is fundamentally flawed because pg's view might be supported by a multitude of arguments, the truth or usefulness of the "evolutionary argument" is not a necessary condition for the truth of pg's view of organizations, bosses, and human nature. Hence, Roth has merely attacked pg's method of proof while leaving the central claim untouched. I have other criticisms of Roth's argument, but even if I am wrong in such criticism the argument would fail to disagree with pg.
for people who already use OpenID

That's one thing I never got about OpenID and its ilk, though. "We'll fix the way logins work! Just sign up for one more thing and then sites that support this will be accessible." Why is this the cure for sign-ups? Yet one more service to fill out some credentials for when sites do not universally accept it? If the latter part were true, then sure, but in the meantime I don't really see the point.

I am ignorant of the major benefits of OpenID, so if anyone could enlighten me, I'd be happy.

Edit: this post helps http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=151376
"Fast good programmer > slow good programmer > fast bad programmer > slow good programmer."

Got a cycle in your graph :).
Things that separate the men from the boys and/or major concepts in software
Here are a handful of things I've had a really tough time with in programming which seems be something you either get or don't, and there's a big difference between those who master it and those who don't. These are in no particular order.

* Recursion and thinking in higher-order functions

* Continuations

* Monads

* mod_rewrite

* Pointers and the process of building a low-level mental model of machine execution in assembler/C

Also there was a huge weedout in my abstract algebra class in college, separating those who could do rigorous proofs from those who couldn't.

"Turtles all the way down" in Smalltalk was a significant moment for me as well.

What other major things like this have you come across?
groupingtogether.com is available if you want to go in a more real word direction.

SiteForYour.Org is also available.

Overall it looks good. You might want to put a live admin demo up so that a site visitor is one click away from seeing what the admin interface looks like.
Deploying Goog411
You might want to toughen up a little bit before you open your mouth on the internet. Seriously, people are going to disagree from you from time to time.
I like Campfire a lot, because it's simple and gets the job done. I can't recommend Basecamp and other 37Signals products, because they've just never been right for me and I don't have enough experience with them. ThePlanet, on the other hand, has been my dedicated server host since 2004 and has always been superb.
jQuery. I don't need classes and inheritance (I use closures for pretty much everything you would use a class for, and on the occasions that I do need either classes or inheritance it really isn't that much trouble to roll them from scratch) and philosophically I much prefer jQuery's approach of only adding one global symbol to my namespace v.s. Prototype adding global symbols all over the place.
To summarize/add:

You not only keep the users email address but you make it easier for users to give you there email address.

Check out disqus.com or plaxo.com's integration of OpenID, Plaxo in particular gets lots and lots of user contact info for users that use OpenID.
Back to Basics: Algorithms
Designing on a Dime: 100 Freebie CSS Resources
What percentage of non-techies has even heard of OpenID?

What is important to the computer world is different from what most of the rest of the world values.

For me, the ultimate answer would depend on how computer-savvy my intended audience is and how much extra effort is necessary to support it.
why do i have to sign up to give it a try?
It would've been nice if OpenID provided a way for Web sites to contact users without knowing their email address. This way, the Web site owner will not to put up an annoying page asking for an email address, and the user has control over who's allowed to contact them through their settings with their OpenID provider.

Facebook is hopeing to be such provider and they're giving these nice features. There are a few Web sites that allow you to login to using your Facebook cridentials, and by doing so they can email you without knowing your email address. And, Facebook allows you to optout at any time and they also measure how many people opt out and put a cap on the offending Web sites if they start to spam people. It's a nice system, except for the vendor lockin part.
The middle box where you have references to Calendar, Easy Photos, Member Directory and Group Blog should be clickable to sample pages. People want to see sample pages before creating their own websites.

It would be great if you let people create websites without having to signup. Once they are ready to save then you can ask them to signup.
Top ten reasons to quit your job (doesn't talk about startups, but in general)
I think the only real answer to that is if you think OpenID is likely to confuse users during signup and therefore you loose users. I think even though its early the increase of signups is likely to be greater than the loss of users through confusion. Especially if implemented well using Clickpass ;-)

Also another answer is that it is currently not completely trivial to implement, so if you don't think the benefit outweigh the time to implement than you wouldn't. Hopefully we will help fix that soon as well.
Cool, I'll check that out.
I see #4,5,6,7,10 as pretty common problems.
I get an error like "unknown or expired link" like twice in a day or so. Is that somekind of bug? and btw, the site was slower this morning.
Actually, Weebly isn't much in the same space. The newly re-designed Google Sites (Jotspot 2.0), site/wiki builders like Wetpaint, or social network builders like Ning are all in the "facilitate group communication" space, and all look to fill the same need.
I'm told it's not illegal, just costly and/or complicated. You could probably manage it by buying shares in a single entity for all the companies invested in, and having that entity act as an accredited investor. It's a lot like a mutual fund then.

Come to think of it, this aggregation is almost exactly like the micropayment aggregation in Tipjoy.

No wonder I thought of it :)
It's available for sale for $12.99 on the link you provided.
Advice YC: How to recover
This is my final submittion before my exit from YC.News.

I am really irritated by the quality of the community that I am leaving it.

The quality since the last month has dropped significantly.

The attitude is bad and it's obvious in a selection of comments.

A minority seems to act against the spirit of the community and to me that I've been visiting
YC.news since last year, I never expected to see it going the downhill.

Bad articles are submitted.

Gone are the times that level of quality was similar to the article of Paul Busheit's
attribution about ideas.

Hope you recover from this downhill. But I am done now.

Thank you for the contstructive converstation the past few months.

Bye

P.S

If you want my ideas how to save this community:

1. add levels of penalty to those that abuse down voting in comments

2. beyond a number of down votes that exceed a preset limit, pause the down voting until the comment gets at
least 1 upvote (and reset to a new limit the down vote, premasurable to a fraction) or 1 reply that will receive at least 1 upvote.
This can protect the people comments from people that attack others by down voting.

3. add extra protection layer, people with karma less than the user who commented are not allowed to down vote the comments.

4. and most importantly a system that tracks downvoting perfomance.
if a comment is down voted and afterwards upvoted, affect the perfomance of the user down voting and therefore
how they are allowed to downvote.
Are you kidding? jottit is "nice" in that you can "start using it" right away, but you're slamming users up against the empty form wall in full force. Upon arriving at jottit.com, I don't know what jottit does at all, and I certainly don't know what to put in the damn box.
I've used Dreamhost for five years, no complaints. They have had a couple of down times, which were annoying to say the least, but were pretty good about letting folks know what the heck was going on.

I'd recommend them for small sites.
Site Request: Blockquote
I think it'd be awesome to have a mode in news.yc where I can paste in a quote, mark it off with like a "|" and have it turn into an indented blockquote with some special styling.

As much as we copy and paste snippets from articles around here, I think it'd really help readibility of posts and encouraging debating quoted points.
Yeah, voice activated iPhone app, "guide me to the nearest available parking spot"
Skybus announce third focus city at Portsmouth Pease
Skybus Airlines Inc. will announce in a conference this afternoon that Portsmouth Pease will be its third 'focus city' with twelve daily flights from the airport to eight

cities across the country. The new destinations are Austin, Gulfport, Chicago Gary, Wilmington, Kansas City and Providenciales and will start between June and July.
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You know, I'm not really sure where to find VC's. I've done a lot of homework on Angel investors, and there are lots of good resources, like FundingUniverse.com as one example.

Sorry I couldn't be more helpful. Good luck!
> Are you saying that biases and potential biases of people have absolutely no relevance in any "valid" discussion, even in response to subjective observations about why people act the way they do?

They have absolutely NO relevance to the argument. Ad hominem is an error in logic. Bias has nothing to do with the argument. It is the argument we refute, not the person. Unfortunately, you

It is utterly amazing to me people still argue about these errors in logic. One can only assume it is defensiveness.

You might want to look up "straw man" as well. It's another logical fallacy, and you're using it.
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I'll take a stab at an explanation.

This guy went to the trouble to gather data, chart it, try to show his readers something interesting, and your response is, "He produces dull, reliable software, so he can't know anything about who is a good software engineer."

You did not address his point, the validity of his data, or his reasoning. You simply said that his argument is not valid because of who he is and what he does for a living.

Maybe if you'd said something like, "To the extent Spolsky's essay implies that Fog Creek is a place where geniuses crank out the Requiem of software on a daily basis, I disagree because X, Y, and Z," it might not have come across as an ad hominem attack on his point about the differences between good and bad programmers. Frankly I don't think many YC readers care about Fog Creek -- they're here for the more fundamental wisdom about programming.
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Sarosh,

Thanks!

I know about Csound, but I've never actually used it. Lately I've been playing around with Common Music, which is written in Lisp and has a Lisp API.

Now that Mathematica supports MIDI, I want to do some music programming in Mathematica also.

Here's a site I maintain on music programming, by the way:

http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/spaces/algomusic

Paul
> Somehow, "civilization", "culture", and "society" have guided human development away from that model.

Nonsense. If that's your "statement", it's wrong. The entire field of sociobiology (read Wilson) speaks to phenomenon like "civilization", "culture", and "society" being driven solely by nucleotide replication.
Plesae add a feature that shows "Top ten articles" as in "Top Ten This Week" and "Top Ten This Month" and "Top Ten This Year." Heck, maybe even a "Top Ten of All Time."

LewRockwell.com does this and I really enjoy the feature. Especially if I haven't had time to take a look this week, and I'd like to see what the best submissions, discussions, etc have been lately.

There are some really good articles from years ago that new users would really enjoy (like me, since I wasn't here a few years ago but have just heard that those were the glory days). It would be cool to see those articles organized into an easy to access format like the Top Ten approach.
Ask YC: Books/Links on giving better demonstrations.
I fudged my through a demonstration this morning and really want to improve the way I do it. I'm not looking for info on presentations so-much but just books on how to give a better run through of software. Are there techniques I can use to do a better job next time a client comes in for a meeting and I'm left holding the ball.
Using Blogger templates is an awesome idea. How you're supporting them (was it easy)?
The Grand Illusion: The Real Tim Ferriss Speaks
I remember that Register.com sucked. I tried a couple others, but I think they're repressed memories now.
5. Don't make posts like this. Instead of publicly announcing your dreary departure, limit your criticism to the constructive aspect; if you wish, mention in passing that the quality is causing you to leave, but don't make that your centerpiece: focus on your advice and beckoning for open discussion.

<small>(P.S. His name is Paul Buchheit.)</small>
I think part of the problem are people who create polls such as the "what part of the world do you live in?", attempt to patronize pg in a thread, while talking about "meaningful HTML" when that person's site (it's the same character BTW) had HTML errors in it . . . to which he responded "it's not a bug - it's a feature!"

I mean, c'mon . . . that's kiddy, Windows user stuff . . . this is a site for HACKERS.