skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you want freehand art (like sketching), I recommend "drawing on the right side of the brain"

http://www.drawright.com/
Need Canadian health care? Too bad you're not a dog.
Don't confuse software development with computer science.
http://www.researchchannel.org/prog/

http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=techtalks
Let's do it. I just registered the twitshadow domain and I'm willing to dedicate some of my company's resources to the project. I'm thinking about what would be the best language to do it in. My first choice would be Python.
I can understand his point, but that only applies to other people's frameworks. There's nothing quite like working in a framework you designed for yourself.
These articles always end up discussing the UI api. After having been in the shrinkwrapped industry since DOS, and thanks to MSFT using the UI as a cheap gimmick to keep programmers hooked, I can tell you from experience that the latest and greatest UI controls now yield diminishing returns that de-sparkle in about two weeks of heavy use.

Apple is finally getting some market traction, but MSFT has already devalued the UI angle badly enough that Apple can't be guaranteed that users will see Cocoa as superior to whatever MSFT has already pissed on.

My takeaway from this experience is the following:

0) Computing is becoming a necessary part of modern daily life, which is a lot more compressed than it was at the introduction of the pc. There's nothing novel about having a computer sitting on your desk.

1) Single commercial vendor control of UI standards is bad.

2) Other metrics, such as reliability, user flow, convenience, and by ext good use of user's time are of more enduring importance than cool looking UI controls.

3) HTML w/js is increasingly good enough, until something else much better grows out of that experience.
I am not sure. I got the impression they'll be pursuing those ideas (as in the case of the cancer-filter product), not just charging companies to use their patents.

The article was pretty inspiring, knowing not everyone is just interested in making yet another social website or a twitter clone, but something that can really substantially change people's lives.
I think there are software analogs of your office park.

You hit on a good insight in the essay: we don't know how we program. But I think you incorrectly assumed that this is unique to software development. Instead, I think it's an inherent part of any job that requires problem solving.
I'm surprised that we are able to get articles that are future dated.

It's not even May 12th yet but I get to read the articles now - now that's a discovery!
GodTube Gets $30 Million Funding
Yahoo: Out of Touch
Elegant though it is, I don't think that idea will work; people who I don't "follow" can "message" me in Twitter by including my name in a posting. That doesn't work if I explicitly have to be polling their server to see anything they say.
This appears to be a system that allows strangers to coerce my client into contacting their server.
I just looked through my delicious for tech videos and found these

Learning / Improving your Javascript videos:
http://www.catonmat.net/blog/learning-javascript-programming...

Machine Learnig and AI videos:
http://freescienceonline.blogspot.com/2007/07/machine-learni...

Google Research best of the year:
http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2006/12/google-research-p...

Videos on better public speaking:
http://isites.harvard.edu/fs/html/icb.topic58703/winston1.ht...

A bunch of Free CS videos:
http://freescienceonline.blogspot.com/2006/06/free-computer-...

of course google tech talks:
http://www.youtube.com/user/googletechtalks

free science videos (not CS focused):
http://www.freesciencelectures.com/

defcon videos:
https://www.defcon.org/html/links/dc-video.html
What's your point? You might as well say HTTP is a method that allows strangers to get files from my server! While technically true, it doesn't say much.

Yes, people can send you false pings, which is why you need to go back through the name server and do a reverse lookup, and once you fetch the message you need to parse it and make sure it within bounds (less than 160 characters or whatever) and addressed to you (has @foo in the message text.) and is not spam (the name isn't in your killfile, is in your whitelist, akismet says it isn't spam, etc.) Rate limiting helps too, real people aren't going to send you 100 messages a second.
What do hackers think of PHP?
Just interested to know, what do people in this forum think about PHP as a backend language for a website?
The problem with corporate programming is not the layers of abstractions or asynchronous communication etc. The real problem is the staggering incompetence of most people involved in the process.
"I'm thinking about what would be the best language to do it in."

"When you gotta shoot, shoot. Don't talk." Or, to put it another way: the best way to start is to cut some code, don't get bogged down in discussion.
Best Laptops for this year
I'm not sure that unsolicited message scenario will be viable if twitter becomes distributed. How would you stop the spam?
No, people who you don't follow can ping you saying they've sent you a message. Your software can simply drop them on the floor if you don't care to receive messages from people who you aren't following (AKA people who aren't on your whitelist.)

No polling is involved.
Loopt is an awesome service, and also not "just" a website. I have no doubt they'll be successful (assuming they execute), but the potential isn't nowhere close to Xobni's. Every Internet user is also an email user, and email is a mess. Big and hairy problem to solve, but I like how they pick which little pieces to bite off first.

Another YC startup I like a lot is Webmin: problems they solve are very real and I like their OSS approach. I use both webmin and xobni myself.

However, the point I was trying to make was that most valuable businesses that YC funded ARE NOT just websites, they actually do some heavy lifting, because too many guys here are too fixated of becoming next Reddit.
This is true, but most people don't care. Worse is better.
i think amazon knows that high-availability is important to some clients, and i wouldnt be surprised if they release a load-balancing service.
Stevey on why you should blog:

http://steve.yegge.googlepages.com/you-should-write-blogs
For web development once a site gets beyond the basics I find working without a framework to lead to a confusing and unruly codebase that is often a frustration to work with.

Your framework need not be rails, django, or cake for it to be useful.
Lua is kind of a mess, IMHO. There are other options. Here's mine, designed for a similar (small, embeddable) role:

http://plausible.org/nasal/

It doesn't have the mindshare that Lua does, nor the history, nor the testing frankly. But honestly (and yeah, I'm biased) Nasal is a cleaner, simpler, more robust and overall better language than Lua, especially for people mor e accustomed to the perl/python/javascript notion of how scripting languages should work.
Keep blogging in English if you want to find your voice.
I'd have to recommend against PHP entirely for a. PHP makes deployment easy and development hard - which one will you be doing more of?

When asking for recommendations for tools and libraries, a bit more information about what you're doing and why you're considering what you are would be helpful.
It's way too early for choice of language. But if I had to chime in, I'd say Erlang would be a fine choice, especially that we have ejabberd to build from.

Anyway, I'm up for joining.
Good point. Off to the whiteboard I go, see you in a while :)

edit: I'm aiming to put something up on the wiki here by the end of today, we can go from there:

http://code.google.com/p/twitshadow/
You must not read magazines (the dead-tree type) much.
You’re making a basic assumption that your design has sufficient detail to produce the program. The problem with this idea is your moving programming to the design phase (using pseudo code) but you’re not eliminating the act of programming.

AKA, I need a function called add that adds each element in an array and returns the result.

Now what data type is in that array? What should you return if the array is empty or null? etc.
They were trading below 20 prior to the original MSFT bid. A deal with Google might cause an increase in short term speculation but I doubt the stock is going to get back to 30 with such news. If you think MSFT is still going to pursue them, buy some YHOO, if you think Yahoo is going to continue on its own, they're probably over-valued and worth shorting until the stock gets down to 20 again.

I haven't really looked at the options chain on YHOO but looking that over wukk give you a good indication of what the market expects the price to be over the next few months.
I use PHP for basic stuff where I don't care much about performance or anyone else maintaining it. It's installed on pretty much every web host and it's easy enough to whip stuff up in. I haven't done a big web site in a long time, but I can't imagine using anything other than Python for it.
I'm starting mine to make a clear separation on which ideas or knowledge belongs to my employer and which can be public, and therefore, I may reuse it later. I really don't care too much on who read them but on publishing them.
i college i wrote a little man computer program that calculated gpa scores. when the assignment was given, the example would take an input, load them into an array, and then iterate through the array, to compute the GPA. our teacher, now a PhD, told us that there was not enough room to do more than 5 or 6 classes.

as a natural hacker i took that as a challenge.

his code was very functionally written, it was like a Java programmer witting some thing in LMC, where my experience in programming was in getting my mechanical engineering friends TI80s to play Tetris. To pull this off, you needed to know how to follow directions on the Internet, build a custom serial cable, and understand binary. The stunt involved you triggering some buffer overflow that was never solved, and seemed to be on purpose as I look back on it. This alt mode allowed you to execute your own assembly code.

In any case, my experiences were not based in java or c in fact the only code i had written was an autoexec.bat and config.sys at the time, but to get my DAMN games to work, you had to spend a lot of time hacking them and getting drivers to load in the right order so that the memory managers would not over allocate for one driver vs. another. In the end, my experience of hacking a TI80, cheating in SimCity with a Hex editor, and booting my Wolfenstien 3d prepared me better for this task than classic programing did.

I decided to go a completely different approach than my professor did, and instead of using an array, I used an input buffer, and and a grade counter. I then wrote two major functions, a float multiply, and a long division routine. The only problem was, there was not enough space to make both work in the 100 memory spaces that the LMC had to load instructions, so I added a mode switch routine, that would rewrite the code in a few key places that allowed me to share instructions between the multiply and divide functions. In the end I had a calculator that was able to calculate about 20 grades with 5 decimal points of precision.

When I turned in the project, I was sure that my prof would be impressed, but when i got it back, i received an F. An F, i was sooooooo pissed, i took my timid self and asked him what was this score for, i thought i deserved an A, did he mix up the grades or something. He told me that when he tested the program the last few digits were flopping all over the place. I told him that those were the second part of the float gpa value. He responded that I did not document it. I asked him if he read the readme.txt that i submitted with my code. He claimed that it was not written clear enough ( i knew he did not read it ), so he compromised and gave me a b+, because my documentation was insufficient.

I learned a valuable lesson,"A" students never prove a teacher wrong. It's the same lesson I could have learned in High School, if i was paying attention.

I really miss assembly, not x86 assembly, but embedded assembly, later in college i got to program boot loaders for my co-op, and hack some sound cards for a speaker recognition project. Today I want to get into CUDA as a side hobby, when I have the time.
On the contrary, I've found that picking up an application written in Rails by someone else is quite easy. Far from building walls between developers, I think a good framework like Rails encourages communication.

Daniel
I played with CakePHP a little bit. It's a great Ruby on Rails clone, but it's just that. Why not go all the way to actual RoR?

(Personally, though, I think it's a great way to get PHP devs to understand ActiveRecord.)
Thats interesting. What is it about Phyton that makes it attractive?
Ask PG: Shall we ban Techcrunch articles?
I think most users here read Techcrunch frequently. Shall we just ban submissions linked to Techcrunch? We can have room for more interesting stuffs.
I think the ratio of meaningful architecture to buildings is about 1:10,000, maybe even more. To make architecture, almost exclusively original thought is needed. I spent most of my University days unlearning preconceptions about solutions to building problems for that very reason.
Ruby and Python seem to be the current preferred languages.

I've used PHP for a while -- a few years -- and haven't developed a particular loathing for it. That's saying something, since I'm disgusted by most of the tools I'm forced to use.

It's certainly capable enough and isn't hard to use. It's also more ubiquitous, and therefore arguably more portable, than Ruby or Python, although dealing with differences between PHP versions is a pretty royal pain.

Pretty much any reasonably skilled programmer can do a job in PHP without too much trouble. You'll get more cred for using Python or Ruby though.
I currently do a lot of work in PHP, and although it isn't my favorite language to work with (braindead built-in library, for one), it's hard to argue with the results we get.

For the good of your soul, use a framework. We currently like Zend Framework, but I've heard good things about CakePHP and Symfony. If you stick with the framework and follow a sane MVC strategy you'll fix most of the problems you'll have using PHP as an HTML templating language.
I actually don't read TC.

I'd rather have the knowledgeable folk on here upmod a good TC article, then I'll read it.

Crowdsourcing my reading :)
IPhone dev program opened worldwide? First report!
comparing yhoo to goog, is definitely apples to oranges, I would suspect (at least my intuition says) that the higher your stock price, the harder it is to gain percentages. so google being up 5% ($29.5) and yahoo being up 23% ($5.65) doesn't really correlate;
the real problem, is that software languages have not yet caught up with hardware. if software was as powerful now, as code is now, you used to be able to use one instruction and have a computer turn for a millisecond or so. yes it was slow, but it was still faster than having a person process 2 numbers and then add them, or divide them etc...

now i find it hard to find 'useful' instructions that actually take 1ms of processing time. heck, TI's lates micro controllers can turn on and off, and still stabilize analog circuits in less than 1ms now.

new processes and neural networks are becoming more practical every day as information overflow, and processing abundance are allowing us to write code on sample sets, and probabilities.

soon, for loops will seem silly.
I agree. People are drunk on web 2.0. My name is James too.
"Blogs used to be just that: a personal diary of what's going on. And silly things like "Rails Blog" or "Java Blog" just don't make sense: why would someone keep a blog like that - nothing is happening in their life besides Rails or Java?"

I disagree. Fewer people care about what you did last weekend than if you wrote a cool new library for Ruby. Blogs help connect people with shared interests and what's wrong with writing about your interest in programming? I think your definition of what a blog should be is pretty narrow and it excludes a big part of the blogsphere that people care about.
PHP is my preference for web development. However, you can do anything with any language. The part that has the most influence on how easy or hard it is usually the framework, not the language.

On that note, I am tired of articles comparing PHP to Rails. It's like comparing a Honda to the metal used to build another car.
I agree, but keep in mind that it has been only one day. This could keep going for some more time.
I agree, but I'd also like to have the ability to down-vote submissions.
This article craves for a global search & replace operation:

"framework" --> "monolithic framework"

I think a good framework should be developed as librairies each solving a particular problem, glued together. Of course, at first you'll probably have many things in core that don't really belong there but there must come a time where you refactor to separate functionnality into distinct librairies (that you can use without the framework!). The "vertical" integration is done by glueing the librairies that were developed alongside it in a coherent whole.

And I think frameworks should recommend approaches, not dictate them. For example, I'm fine with a framework that provides an authentication system out of the box, but it should be integrated as a normal plugin so that anyone can write a competing, alternative authentication system.

In other words, explode your framework in tiny pieces and then glue those together.

edit: I think that would be a boon for the adoption of a framework. People first start using some of your librairies, and over time they use more and more of your librairies and at some point they simply adopt the whole framework.
Summer Internship in Seattle doing computational biology
Are you a hacker and interested in experimenting with computational biology? I work at a mid-sized biotech in Seattle (ZymoGenetics) and I need a summer intern (undergrad) to help me out. You can pick a project and have lots of freedom. Contact me via my about page and I can tell you more.
Its been informative learning about your experiences. What do you mean by frameworks? Something like a backend scripting language, a templating tool (like Smarty or PHPTal), etc?
Wonderful Wikis… they are Free and they are Hosted!
It's incredibly clean and simple.
I'm in a similar boat to plusbryan. I would say that they're OK for basic, static site hosting. We use them for hosting free websites for some of our customers. Otherwise, S3 is still the gold standard. And since their costs are reasonable, why not just use the gold standard?
I don't know about everyone else here; but I like to read YC while I'm figuring out other problems. If I'm typing something up, I'd prefer to write code than prose.
It's a significantly better programming language; I don't think you'll be able to find anyone who knows both PHP and Python and will disagree with that statement. PHP is a very simple language with built-in features for web application development. Python is an advanced, multi-paradigm general purpose language that has evolved over more than a decade.

Here are a few Python language features that I seriously miss when I'm working in PHP:

- Modules and namespaces! This is the feature that initially drove me away from PHP.

- List comprehensions (let you construct a new list based on an old list in a one-liner)

- Built in iterator support (easy "for item in collection" support for many different types of collection)

- First class functions and closures (so you can treat your functions as data)

Those are just four off the top of my head. If you haven't looked at Python before (but already know how to program) I suggest taking a look at http://diveintopython.org/ which is a free online book.
Zope, Grok, Plone and Django, mostly.

Python is a very good language: easy to learn, powerful and fast enough (provided you understand how to make its various frameworks scale).
i've been using it for all of my websites for about 6 years. It's robust enough to do just about anything. it's just close enough to see C to be familiar and just different enough to slightly irk you. I'm getting to ready to roll out my first Ruby site though.
A hack, but not in a good way?

/me ducks
I am. While their motives and intentions seem genuine, the fact that they have to patent all this seems scary.
Why a decentralised Twitter won't work
I prefer Perl
Good points, A great percentage of the development work I am doing only uses a browser at the client end with all processing being managed at the server. HTML (backed up by JavaSript/Ajax is becoming the business client end platform of choice.
I'm not sure if this is a troll question. Elaborate on why you are asking. You are asking: "what do you think of pudding" instead of "hey, I'm having a dinner party and can't decide between apple pie and pudding, help me!"
The network effect is Twitter's barrier to entry. Everyone goes where everyone else is. If you can easily move the network elsewhere via the api, the barrier is gone.
Potter! Stop bragging, ten points from Gryffindor.
Super Sweet API's?
Do you guys know of any awesome api's?
It's a fine backend language for a small to medium sized website, but you need to be aware that at a certain size (in terms of complexity of the application you are building) you'll often find yourself fighting against the language. That's not to say you can't build large applications in PHP, just that you need a great deal of discipline to do so. You'll either need to adopt one of the MVC frameworks (Symfony for example) or roll your own. A lot of the features in the framework you chose will be workarounds for limitations in PHP itself (such as its lack of decent namespacing and poorly designed database access primitives).
Cool to see it more. I'll add mine to the list once I launch. I really like the Clickpass service
America's Fastest-Dying Industries
The argument is that you are less likely to crash when piloting a smaller vehicle, not that a smaller vehicle fares better in a crash of similar nature.
from an investor point of view it's a fair comparison.
I'm reminded of the fact that the Ferrari Enzo is one of the fastest but also safest cars in existence:

"The Enzo is one of the safest cars to be in a crash because it’s designed to come apart at high speeds, similar to a Formula 1 car."
http://www.motorauthority.com/cars/ferrari/another-enzo-bite...
Technocrati rank is kind of like karma isn't it?
Out of curiosity could you give an example of a language where this isn't the case? As far as requiring a framework of sorts when dealing with large sized/complex websites?
If they said it, it must be true!
I just listed to one at your suggestion. I'll vouch a +1.
It is a great service, especially if you integrate with other services that also use it. For example OurDoings users who share publicly can use Disqus to let people comment on their news and photos. Clickpass smooths out what might otherwise be a an awkward combination of disparate services.
Has anyone heard of a case where someone needs an idea and turns to Intellectual Ventures to buy one? I'm referring to the way people make this kind of arrangement with universities. If someone has, then Intellectual Ventures could legitimately claim to be innovative.
Instead of comparing that to software written, compare it to software used. My copy of MS Office looks a lot like my neighbor's, my uncle's, my father's brother's nephew's cousin's former roommate's. While there are some unique combinations, the pieces are largely the same.

The McMansions and office blocks aren't that different from 95% of people using Windows or Mac. It's just more painful in architecture because it's so visible.
"Reverse engineering without permission"
Tks for your comment. Strange that not so much articles about the subject when Web 2.0 companies are run with very low staff and considering huge number of mails. tks