skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Of course, but shouldn't we desire that every human has a decent standard of living? we're currently NOT producing/distributing enough for the world's 6 billion humans. people are dying for lack of food and water.

the point is that if we continue to expand at the same rate MORE people will be born into terrible conditions.

It's not so easy to take the stance that technology and free market forces will solve the population problem when you see the horrible results of demand outpacing supply for basic resources in real life. In real life, demand dropping means people died. this isn't an economics class.
Pavlina's site feels like one big informercial

Not as good as this guy's:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Trudeau
Digg jumped the shark 2+ years ago (IMO), right around the time that SEOs started spouting Digg == Free Google Domination

They were on to something big for a while, but it was like social media faked left, then went right, and Digg is still off running to the left.
BBC World Service, radio documentaries.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/documentaries/index.shtml
I was speaking in relative terms, not absolute. I meant the the average quality of programmers would go down.
YC On The Funded:  "Nice people, niched auditory"
If you only make $40k and are paying 30% in taxes, you're doing something very wrong.
How does replacing one entertainment with another equate to better time management?

I can understand wanting higher quality entertainment than South Park, but don't fool yourself into thinking an NPR podcast is a better use of time if it is likewise distracting you from things you need to do.
this question is why the financial institutions exist. companies that do nothing but solicit your money and invest it for you while living off a percentage don't really know all that much about how the markets work. Like the previous poster said, you have to be a contrarian. It's exactly that ability to invest in something when everyone thinks it is worthless that makes people rich. stocks were dirt cheap in the 80's, commodities were dirt cheap in the early 2000's, you have to figure out on your own where to go next.

I will say that these trends seem to have followed a 17 year period (on average) during the 20th century. If this remains true america has another 9 years of slow economic growth (and commodities have another 9 years of bull).
But we must always beware of the induction fallacy :)
"David, if your advocacy leads to even slightly more humane workplaces, you will deserve to be hailed as a saint by millions of people."

That applies to 37S. Regardless of whatever else I think, I wish them huge success for that reason alone.
you mentioned it yourself in another thread:
but yes, the growth rate in any given year is limited by resources available and human innovation

I think that human population can well outstrip innovation especially when you consider that an innovation now can take many years to disseminate to the world at large.
Niched auditory? What's that?
He probably has firebug.
Xkcd: falling sideways
thank you everyone for upmodding glib responses. that's exactly the kind of comment that fosters discussion and not hostility. ;)

you might make the point that my original post was glib, since this topic has been retreaded countless times. But it seems to have fostered some interesting thoughts, so i consider it worthwhile. A post noting that this thought isn't original doesn't really contribute much. Most thoughts aren't original.
everyone says dumb things. warren buffet says less dumb things than the average person by several orders of magnitude.

I'm willing to forgive him the occasional brain fart.
Not everyone in a startup has to work hard, so long as some people do. But someone had to be carrying a pager when the servers went down, or eBay wouldn't still exist.
100k plus options. 10 yrs experience. NM. Nice House in city center $800 a month. 20 min commute. But no comparable companies to move to in town.
Anecdotally, I've found that coding for 6 hours a days gets more features implemented and bugs fixed than coding for 14 hours a day.

Sure, in the long term. But when you have a big demo or a customer deadline coming up in 2 days, or a server crashing right now, it often pays to keep working past 6 hours.
Somebody is bitter about rejection.
Charles Babbage’s Proto-Brain Comes to America
this is wrong. there is no universal answer to what to invest in. smart people go where the money is without bias. if stocks are under priced and heading for a spike you invest in an index fund. but what about right now where the market is grinding sideways? people who invested in commodities are making a killing. when commodities stop making you money you abandon them too. getting attached to an investment just because it made you money is bad.

it's harder to do than to just invest in an index fund, because you have to go against the herd. if you had decided to dump your stock in 99 and invest in commodities people would have said you were insane. You'd be the one laughing now.

Go where the money is. (without bias)
also:
yeah, if you had dumped your stock in 99 you would have missed some of the biggest upticks in 200 before the crash, but trying to outguess when the highs and lows will be in the market will make you poor. I think it is better to set yourself a reasonable goal, and sell when you reach it. This keeps you dispassionate about it and prevents greed from letting you make silly decisions.
Determination, solid friendship between the founders, flexibility, intelligence, honesty, design sense, experience, in that order.
That would be right around the time they stopped listening to me. No I'm not egotistical ;-) I probably would have fit in better there if I had been.
AppZapper comes highly recommended: http://appzapper.com/
If good ideas are so worthless and easy to come up with, why are so many startups running around with really bad ideas?
I like it a lot. I doubt it would catch on though.

A good rule of thumb is that things that encourage people to be healthier or smarter will not be popular. The things that gain popularity are tools that allow people to be lazier and stupider. Social networking is a way for morons to say stupid things to one another with less effort. Google allowed idiots to search the web without knowing anything about boolean search terms. etc.
Well it's getting to the point where it's like a tabloid now.
From Welding to Weddings, DIY Rules at Maker Faire
I agree about the hardware design (Microsoft actually made(?) some pretty good peripherals).

I was referring more to software design. I have never encountered so many plain boneheaded interface decisions as in Microsoft products, from roughly Win95 up to and including WinXP. I'm not even talking about ugly (which I can forgive), I'm talking about simply unusable - tiny text areas without scrollbars in which you sometimes have to input a large amount of text, or worse, text inputs instead of text areas. Tabs being used where they really shouldn't, resulting in dialogs with up to 5 rows of tabs, and with extra "Advanced" buttons on some of the tabs that bring up another pop-up. That kind of stuff. Vista and the new Office have been really pleasant surprises so far in this respect.
Bizak: What’s Your Web 2.0 Startup Worth?
Actually I know quite a few couples where that's the case. Not all startups mind you, I have this musician friend...

But I've seen the "wife has high paying job with steady income, husband is kinda fly-by-night" pattern often enough that I wonder if other people see it too.

I never did find that kind of a women myself. Damn!
Evan Williams: Twitter not abandoning Rails
Google's Art of War — With Facebook
Twitter has millions of dollars.
A good read on the subject is A Random Walk Down Wall Street:

http://www.amazon.com/Random-Walk-Down-Wall-Street/dp/039332...

It's been touted for nearly 40 years.
WTF is a podcast? Will you speak English here please?
How your startup can scale up with MySQL
I guess it means specific. Unlikely, I don't have access to the site, they never approved me, but proposed a paid membership. I don't think I'm going to pay ;)
I must be blind. What does the direction of the edges signify?
It's a 500 error right now. sigh

edit: ok, it's back.
Their business model: Linkmium.
How could YC possibly pass up on teams with an 'exciting management' background?
because you don't really know an idea is good until you take a risk and test it... a lot of things we take for granted today seemed like 'bad ideas' before masses accepted them
Come on, everyone should take a break now and then.
"We lost a database server, which is causing lots of errors. Reloading the page may work. It's in the process of recovery."

From http://twitter.com/twitter_status
Index funds are great, but you should try to invest in different indexes that aren't correlated. Rebalance when indexes rise/fall.
Google Analytics without javascript
An anagram of "itchy round idea." The message is that YC want a very specific type of business concept.
Barbie dress up games
Dress up games for girls that like Barbies. Play hundreds of games with virtual online barbie dolls, dress them up in beautifuldresses and gowns.
Maybe they can use their new funding to go hire some engineers who know what they are doing.
Ruby, Rails Give Twitter Its Tweet
I understand the concept of being good and benevolent, but not thinking about making money is the hardest part. It is really tough to ditch your job, and keep doing good for people whose psychology (at least on the Web) has become to expect everything for free. You can survive your own goodness for 6 months, 1 year but after that you surely expect something in return. And then, if you do not have or want VC funding but just want to run your startup based on the good old way of 'revenues' how long can your goodness keep you going? Even Jesus 'sold' his woodwork to feed himself, isn't it? :) People throwing money at you for the good you do to them is living on a charity. Whatever happened to the good old way of selling something in return for money?
Is this the first time a twit has been submitted to news.yc?
Worked for VCRs....
Keyboards harbour harmful bacteria
My knowledge of Facebook's chat architecture comes from drunken conversations with Facebook engineers at bars. So no, I don't think I know any more than that. hiccup
$100 Laptop Program's New President
not true: http://twitter.com/ev/statuses/801530348
Well the VM's are running Ubuntu but the idea of a "virtual appliance" is slightly different than a traditional virtual machine in that you needn't think about the OS. Instead you focus on using the application and for all you know it's BSD or Linux or whatever under the hood but you're managing it via a web interface so you don't care.

to your 2nd question- JumpBoxes support the major virtualization technologies right now: VMware, Parallels, Xen, Virtual Iron, MS Virtual PC and Virtual Server. They'll also run on KVM, Qemu and Virtual Box though we don't officially support those.

I'm glad you dig what we're doing. If you try one out and really like it I would welcome any suggestions you have on how to better spread the word. We have this weird challenge where the people who use it rave about how great it is. We're not at a loss for a killer product- we're challenged in how we spread awareness of its existence.

thanks again

sean
This is a good snapshot of the population right now, I'm curious to know what the trends are. I suspect the 25-34 age category is growing and the 35-44 category is shrinking.

"When starting a startup was expensive, you had to get the permission of investors to do it. Now the only threshold is courage." [1]

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/webstartups.html
Nintendo Is Ignoring This
Grand Theft Auto IV - Halfway to a Conscience?
They totally just missed today's story about Twitter perhaps dropping RoR...
I'm not an expert with configuring Google Analytics, but this still looks like a bad idea, except possibly in the case of the RSS (use feedburner, parse logs). If you experience any type of load, you're going to generate a lot of network chatter for no real gain.
I want to read books on my iPhone. I love Jeff Bezos, but I'll pass on kindle for now.
Recent downtime (the 500 errors) caused by rebooting database servers...

I just did a double-take... rebooting servers... really? really??

http://blog.twitter.com/
Part of 2) is that YC has made raising (seed) capital like applying to college, something that most people just coming out of college already know how to do. Previously it involved meeting rich people and smooth talking them out of their money, something that very few people just coming out of college know how to do.
"They come for the concurrency but they stay for the reliability."

Perfect.
Could be a good way for YC to pick its investments. I would be willing to bet that the winners would exhibit above average survival in the business world.
I've been surprised to note that a large number of people I've met with bad ideas are following them because they lack the ambition or the ability to execute on their better ideas. So they go after a market that's too small to be worth addressing, because they can see how to get there, without realizing that no one knows exactly how to approach the huge markets. The only difference is that they're willing to try.

Of course, I've also met people who actually are going after big ideas that are bad because they are too big for a startup. Things that change the shape of the world...it takes a whole market to do that. So, maybe I'm just making up generalizations just like everybody else.

But the point about "Which would you rather build, your own ideas or someone elses?" is the most important. Every time a "business" or "ideas" or "product" guy starts talking about his awesome idea, and he just needs someone to implement it, he's showing himself to be so self-involved as to be intolerable to work with for most hackers--every hacker he talks to has his own "good" ideas, but the "idea" guy thinks he's got a monopoly.

That's all the article is saying, and I've been around startups long enough to know that it's generally true.
Nope. Cringely gets submitted here with some regularity, for example.
New techniques hide PDF malware
You guys are being kind of tough on his blog. I really only see one ad (though the motion is distracting).

I just spent some time reading through some of his other articles. The guy has some great ideas: freeing mental RAM, read a book a week, putting ideas into action, action days, making goals visible, etc. I just subscribed and am hopeful that his future posts will be as insightful as what I've just been reading.
he had some good stuff a long time ago but then it became hard to read when he started talking about psychic journeys into the unknown.
Now where's the TC retraction? (oh, forgot, there's no link-bait in boring stuff like accuracy)
I'll get karma-bombed into oblivion for saying this, but I've found it disturbing that a programming culture so obsessed with "testing" has so many problems keeping their servers up and running...
In investment banking, you usually work on a small team of 3-6 people. The work day is very different depending on whether your team is currently working on a deal or is between deals and pitching clients.

If your team is on a deal, then there could be honest-to-goodness work keeping your team busy for 100 hours a week. Tasks include preparing the materials used to market your client to potential investors (including financial models, presentations, and dense official offering documents), managing and attending meetings with investors or the Board, running down data requests, and diverse other things.

Most of the bullshit work comes in when a team is between deals. During this period, the senior members spend a lot of time working their connections at potential clients while the junior members prepare "pitches" - presentations designed to convince a company to do a deal. Junior employees are expected to be at the office when their superiors arrive and stay at the office when their superiors leave. When I was working, I might start a typical day by finishing up a request from the day before, then have absolutely nothing to do for 4 or 5 hours, and then receive and turn around assignments from sometime in the afternoon until the evening. The boss would make his last calls around 7PM, which is when I would get my last batch of work for the day. I would work on that for anywhere between one to thirteen hours and then head home (or not, if it was 13 hours).

The culture at an investment bank is very unforgiving. An employee must be a competent worker to survive, but he must also be sure to keep up appearances. Half of an employee's pay is paid in an annual bonus, which is determined by a mixture of objective and subjective factors. It is not enough to be a good worker, an employee must also make sure he looks like a good worker - which entails being seen in the office a lot. The time of a junior employee is not considered valuable, since they are well overpaid compared to their peers their bosses feel like they should be willing to take unlimited shit without bitching. Managing Directors think nothing of asking an Analyst to do something on Sunday when it pops into their minds, even if the work could easily wait until Monday morning. An MD will also have no qualms about asking an Analyst to start on something at 7PM when he could have told him about it hours earlier. You have never seen so many bitter 23 year-olds as you can find at an I-Banking office.

In exchange for most of your life, an entry-level employee is usually compensated well for someone just out of college. I'd estimate the mean analyst on the street earns $120K in an average year. I wasn't on the street, but I'm not working right now thanks to my savings from my days as an I-Banker. If I could do it again, I probably wouldn't. I like where I am but those were a bleak, desolate 2 years and the angina hasn't completely faded away yet.
Ask YC: If you were the CEO of Microsoft (with $45B budget) what would you do ?
how will you increase revenue/profit and gain market share without buying yahoo?
http://blog.twitter.com/2008/04/welcome-john-and-steve.html
Anatomy of Security-Enhanced Linux (SELinux)
I thought it was a great ad, on top of the Y2Combinator parody from around that time.
A podcast is a recorded radio show or the sort that is published via RSS usually.
You are right. It was quite an exaggeration on my part. Its more like 21.5%.
Howto: Linux Software RAID
Blekko is hiring
That's great! Everyone loves this comment since so many of us are banking on it (or have lived it). It just brought to mind my reading of some interviews in "Creativty" (http://www.amazon.com/Creativity-Flow-Psychology-Discovery-I...). There was more than one great mind who attributed his success to having a wonderfully supportive/responsible wife. He apologized for his sexist remark, but admitted that he would never have had his successes if it weren't for his wonderful companion who freed him from so much responsibility. (Sorry for fabricating some of this from the top of my head; I can't locate the interview right now.)
They're off to a great start...
That's because Twitter's architecture was designed using the Bob Dole school of infrastructure...it can't stay up.
I think Japan's problem wasn't population, it was credit. The banks got government license to grow the economy, so they threw it at their well-connected keiretsu friends who wasted it on bad business ideas. After the crash, everyone got "cautious" and money was funneled to big pointless public-works projects. On top of that, the VC's are famously conservative. The end result is that innovative people without business connections never got seed funding. So they come to the US. It's the same story everywhere, and China will probably repeat it.
Yep, got a 500 error to! I thought the post was a joke...reloaded and realized it wasn't, got a clean page.

If you reload the page 3-5 times in a few seconds, you get the 500 error page. Now those are serious scaling issues!
OR twitter abandoned rails long ago... nothing to see here
i will start doing things that apple and google will do with that kind of budget.
- Fix search engine to make it fast and efficient (like google because ad revenue is all about search).
- Create innovative marketing campaign like apple to increase the market share of my search engine usage.
- Introduce new and innovative h/w products like apple.
- Convert all my apps as web 2.0 apps with optional search and ad feature.
I think all of these can be done with way under $45B budget.
lisp-complete-symbol definitely does rob the brain. I've written plenty of braindead Lisp with its help :) Eldoc is not the same thing, though, since it just shows some basic documentation after you've remembered the name of the function. It's a nice "yeah, I knew that was the name" reminder. Finally, it's easy to "dive deeper" with Lisp, thanks to "describe-function" and friends. I would definitely not complain about having that for other languages. (Languages that don't have docstrings are really annoying me these days. Perl especially.)

Honestly, I use dabbrevs more often than lisp-complete-symbol when writing lisp. It usually gets me what I want with less typing. (There are a lot of lisp functions that start with the same prefix, but not as many that I've used in my editor session. So dabbrev-expand has less to look at, and hence it usually gives me what I want faster.)
YouTube tools for the Linux desktop
retraction or correction? TC is only partially right/wrong... Ev's says:

"Lots of our code is not in RoR, already, though"

Sounds like an ongoing process rather than a new thing
Well, yeah. What would prevent a language from scaling?

The reason you'd ditch Java or PHP is because they are lacking a lot of higher-order constructs. (PHP epsecially. Statically-scoped variables? First class functions? An object system that isn't a hilarious joke? Unicode support? PHP doesn't have 'em.)
Oh, there may yet be.

Melodramatic mea culpas can attract traffic too. Getting a story wrong can thus provide a two-fer: one batch of attention for the sloppy, inflammatory first piece, then another for the contrite (or alternatively, defiantly unapologetic) correction.

Ever see the movie 'The Corporation', which diagnosed the 'person' of a corporation as being psychopathic? Well, the DSM-IV diagnosis for an ad-supported blogging site will tend toward Histrionic Personality Disorder†. Clickonomics almost demands as much.

† http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Histrionic_personality_disorder
read the further down, it's mentioned.
That article was kind of tedious to wade through. In general, I'm in the camp of "design patterns are language band-aids". PG seems to be one of the quotables on this topic. I was recently trying to elucidate this in my own thinking, given that the languages I've used over the last few years have kept my GoF on the shelf. Here's the best discussion I'd found on the subject: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?AreDesignPatternsMissingLanguageFeatu...
How Fake Luxury Conquered The World
100 Killer Web Accessibility Resources: Blogs, Forums and Tutorials
If you don’t have a clue about the issues that surround Web site accessibility, then this list will help you to become well acquainted with the issues involved in this movement.
Afraid so. Rails got them to market, if they have to port to whatever, they should do it and I don't see why that is a big deal for anyone. I still like rails even if it can't scale to twitter.
I'll resign from MS with 100M or so severance compensation and hire someone more competant for the CEO position
WOW - you are right. I am seeing that right now. Thats terrible. They could do a server too busy message and it would be more correct I think.
Tech Start-ups Aren't Just for Wunderkinds