skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I totally agree. Regex gets easier and easier as you do more. It's just hard to do in the beginning (personally I started with trial and error).

But definitely, robust database design is among the hardest things I've had to do. I mean, it's one thing to just set up a couple of tables and write queries to get your desired data. It's a whole different ball game to ensure that it'll be scalable, and designing with consideration that you'll eventually have to split your database into shards as it grows.

In a way, it's a subcategory of what I think is the hardest thing, which is designing for scalability. Just because something works with a handful of users doesn't mean it'll work when you have millions of users and hundreds of simultaneous connections, which most of us are striving for.
Why We’re Suing Facebook For $25 Million In Statutory Damages
is there an instant messenger that also has a scribble pad next to the text that both people can write on?
How to Change Your Static IP Address
renting is still annoying, even on craiglist. there's lots of room to improve.
This is a scaling question. Clearly the question is, assuming the current set up is no longer enough, what would be the best way to scale this architecture.
Agreed that in-memory storage is by far the fastest form of storage available to a single server setup like this. However, I was thinking hypothetically if load was the issue, how would people scale the backend. I was curious if one option would emerge as a favorite.

I disagree that the only reason not to do it is if the data won't fit in RAM. Going to a multi-server setup has many advantages including redundancy for situations such as these, of course, at the cost of increased administration.
No one has any idea how much Facebook applications are worth
> I was under the impression that using extra proprietary data (like imdb) is beyond the bounds of the competition.

Kobayashi Maru Maneuver[1] time. Really though, I'm actually curious about this too. Anyone know if it definitely is against the rules?

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kobayashi_Maru#Other_test-taker...
For small businesses, when the going gets tough, get tough on costs
You could have said the exact same thing about, say, the Internet 20 years ago.

I'm not claiming OpenID is as important as the internet, but just because average people don't know about it doesn't mean its not important or won't be important in the future.
Probably the easiest would be to use memcache for some of the repeated queries, specifically the items that are relatively static, such as the original post or posted item details.

It probably wouldn't help too much on the front page, since that'll update constantly and therefore just be a waste of overhead.
I'll vouch for Campfire also. It's relatively easy to hook notifications into it so that commits, test failures, and bug reports show up. In my last two companies we've ended up with then dynamic of "if it doesn't notify campfire, it didn't happen."

I use Highrise also for CRM. If it's just one or two of you then it's probably the only CRM out there that's simple enough to get into your workflow. If you're managing a salesforce then you probably want something different. But for just remembering who my clients are and when I need to contact them, it's amazing.
Thanks for the info. Now I have an urge to create an open source standard for site themes based on Blogger templates or something else. Some things might be too specific (like the way a typical blog is formated) but lots of the elements could certainly be constructed in a way that they'd be interchangeable across totally different kinds of sites. Maybe Google Gadgets addresses part of this problem. Hmmm...
This is what happens when you tolerate Christmas ads before Thanksgiving---or, God forbid, Halloween. If we allow this March 31 madness, how long before people start making April Fool's jokes in February?

Won't somebody please think of the children?
One of my favorite VC questions was, "This all sounds nice, but if it doesn't work out, what other levers do you have to pull?"

I like thinking about my company that way--there's a lot of opportunities out there so it's never the end of the world if the one you're looking at dries up.
They still have an year and a half, which means twice the number of transistors on their next hardware. Give them the benefit of doubt.
It probably reminds you of that because its linked from that page, and is part of the same research project. It was published in October of last year.
I'd be interested in knowing how inaccuracies in JavaScript's Date facility affect results.
This already exists - you can accomplish this with a plus sign in your address.

If your address is bill@gates.com, then bill+anything@gates.com will be routed to you (the plus sign is critical). So you can use bill+work@gates.com, bill+foundation@gates.com, etc, and set up filters based on the address the mail was sent to. Voila!
"There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things"
-Phil Karlton

In all seriousness, I agree with your list with the exception of mod_rewrite. I'd also add mastery of algorithms and complexity theory to the list.
* How are you going to use my money ("put it to work")?

* To what point will my money get you?

* Who is your competition?

* How are you better/different than your competition?

(Paraphrased of course and pretty limited VC experience here. I'm not actually sure how common they are, but I've heard these questions.)
You would just have to assess your target audience and decide whether the cost of developing support for OpenID are outweighed by the benefits of allowing a portion of your users the convenience.

I see little reason to implement it if your most of your users will be unaware of it. On the other hand though, having the support for it (and similar providers) may help you attract those users who do use them. If you do implement support though, make sure it doesn't obfuscate your registration and login processes.
What about multi-threaded programming and atomic operations on shared data? Seems like something many people flub up or aren't even aware of.
I'm not sure if I'm disagreeing, but what I perceive from the essay is slightly different than your central point.

For instance, if you titled the essay 'the inverse relationship between personal freedom and organization size', I don't think it would elicit such an outcry (or any attention whatsoever). Instead, you state that the loss of freedom makes going into large organizations a bad choice for certain groups of people (namely, programmers, because programming is about freedom).

The programming community is made up of many people with different backgrounds, mindsets, and interests. While I myself may program for the freedom to create things, I know other people who program for the fun of it, and others who program because its what they know how to do. All of these types of programmers exist in the startup community, because a startup can mean much more than just programming freedom to them (it can mean money, prestige, adventure, a challenge, etc).
If I am disagreeing at all, I would only do so concerning the scope of people that 'programming freedom' applies to. I think only a small subset of the startup community really thinks this point is meaningful - the rest do not give it much weight.

I think the main point of the essay is to convince people to startup early in their careers, even out of college. (If 'you weren't meant to have a boss', what are you meant to do?) You back it up by saying that corporate culture, from your experience, does more harm than good from a startup's perspective (especially in the matter of programming), and you explore that line until you come up with a good model that explains why corporate culture is harmful in its essence.

In contrast, many people don't think that programming freedom is a powerful incentive to starting up early, and are disagreeing because that is the only evidence that you provide to back up your claim that 'you weren't meant to have a boss'.
I've been trying to switch to NameCheap, after hearing the GoDaddy horror stories, but GoDaddy's domainbyproxy takes ages to forward me my transfer proposal. :\ Also I happened to register a few domains within the last 60 days so that didn't fly.

I really like NameCheap's simplicity. GoDaddy's domain controller is horribly inflated and annoying to navigate.
haha, sorry but we are not spanners, for all that I know is that is a news agregator where i can post my articles to , if this is not true. then what is this page?
To me what separates the men from the boys in software development is the ability to get the job done effectively. In my experience, while the boys are playing with programming methods for the sake of it, the men are actually implementing functionality using the techniques that fit the job.

I must admit spending a fair bit of time as a boy though :)
I'd put SoftLayer on par with ThePlanet. It was founded by former ThePlanet execs and I've had a great experience with them.
You can say many things about this article but I am not sure dishonest is one of them. In fact it seems quite clear that it accurately presents the authors opinion and is thus honest.
That's weird. I swear it was only listed used on that link for $60 when I posted it. Maybe I'm going crazy.
i know for a fact this works in gmail, since they advertised it, but i didn't know this was standard
picasa can kind of accomplish that
Agreed, I think we learn more from mistakes than successes. That's why I the Blogger interview in Founders at Work is my favorite. Getting things right could just be getting lucky, but dealing with things when they go wrong takes true skill and determination.
i second the whiteboard. this could probably be done based on the VNC source.
For those actually interested in the central point of PG's essay, the topic is given first rate treatment in book on Triarchy theory by the late Gerard Fairtlough: "The Three Ways of Getting Things Done - Hierarchy, Heterarchy and Responsible Autonomy in Organizations (http://triarchypress.co.uk/pages/book1.htm).
I use them and even recommend them. One thing that did rub me the wrong way is that when I went to cancel one domain it wasn't straightforward and they say they will reveal your real information on whois after cancellation (and I think during transfer). Seemed sleazy to me (but I thought maybe there was some good reason for it).
Is this a joke? or is this guy serious...
April Fools. Read to the bottom and it's clearly a joke.

But it's a day early (though to be fair, it is April 1st in some parts of a world)

Please please please don't post every single April Fools joke you see on the internet tomorrow. If it's particularly hacker-worthy, then sure. This is not.
Apple Sued for iMac Display Deception, Steve Jobs Suspected Closet Megatron
Perhaps it's weak, but why call it dishonest? It is plausible enough that I'm not convinced by your response, so it's reasonable to suppose it was sincerely made.

The argument itself I need to think more about.

a. I tend not to be convinced by arguments that invoke nature. It's a heuristic at best. Like you said it didn't bother me since it never claimed to be more than circumstantial evidence.

b. Your 'central' point was certainly the most interesting, but it wasn't clear it was central. In fact, I can't see how your style of essay can admit a central anything. Which is a strength, IMO.

In general I don't care as much about accuracy as I do about interestingness. I found myself recently looking back on notes from your essays of 3 years ago. I was quoting 1 in 3 sentences, sometimes 1 in 2. And these were long essays! It's safe to say that's not true anymore.
JohnN, at what moment did you realize that you were not going to continue with your startup? What was the tipping point?
A robot that successfully implements ideas found on this thread.

I'll probably get voted down for that one. How about a news site like reddit/digg/(maybe even HN, but expanded) that can successfully deal with the masses.

There's an area I believe is ripe for improvement. Fell free to take this idea and run with it. Just give me an admin account when it's ready.
Hey, I live in Pittsburgh. There are a couple of us here on news.yc. The startup atmosphere is not very much. The investors consist of an angel group, Innovation Works, and private angels (which I just hear about, I've never actually seen one). If you manage to raise money, or can self finance, there are good programmers available at much lower rates than in SF.

Innovation Works is running an incubator this summer. The application is due today, if you want to get one in quickly.

http://www.iwalphalab.org/
Google Sees The Future.
Satisfying and functional is good and right. Are you prepared to argue otherwise?
Assimilation.
D'oh. Thanks, I'm not firing on all cylinders today.
It probably set in when I went to a conference for journalism related professionals. Everyone was scratching their heads and asking how the hell do we make money from this new new media.

For once I was surrounded by non-entrepreneurs asking tough questions, i didnt exactly have answers to. Entrepreneurs rarely ask each other tough questions (they want to make friends and network). These journalism professionals actually cared about their industry and its sustainability not the hope that someone will buy their company and make them rich.
Its a joke.

Though I have to admit he had me up until he started talking about second degree burns.
Right. As I said, and for exactly the reasons you state, the only aspects of jottit.com I'd recommend emulating are the fast (lazy) signup and the ability to type Markdown text instead of using raw HTML or a heavy rich text widget.

(And while I happen to think jottit is cute, note that I had reserved the ornate and completely pretentious praise of "nice" for orgu. :)
NASA builds world's largest display
AFAIK, it is part of the email standard, but not actually supported by all providers.
I mean the techniques he uses are dishonest. He doesn't seem like he's trying very hard to get at the truth. He's arguing like lawyers do.
@dmpayton - I work for Braintree and the company does not publish prices because they depend a lot on many variables including the business type, credit card volume, type of credit cards that are most commonly accepted (e.g. debit, credit, rewards, business to business, international, etc.) and other variables. There is no one size fits all pricing model that applies to all businesses.

Braintree practices full disclosure pricing with no hidden fees which is rare in this industry. Here's a blog post that describe where credit card fees come from if you're interested in learning more: http://www.braintreepaymentsolutions.com/blog/where-do-credi...
That doesn't sound like a robust design.

I think you mean implementation. Software sometimes has bugs. But thanks for the implicit compliment.
Thanks for the info rms.

I'm not in a rush so won't be submitting to Innovation Works just yet, although this would have been nice to know few weeks ago =) Bookmarked.

I'll have to ping you if I decide to move back.
Dive Into Python (an excellent Python tutorial for people who have programmed before) covers these things in chapters 8 and 11.

http://www.diveintopython.org/toc/index.html
I don't know exactly what your background/experience is, but experience in sales will give you good, everyday practice interacting with other people and demonstrating on the fly.

Like mixmax said, watch for Steve Jobs' presentations. He has a strange personality but his stage presence is outstanding.

How to win friend and influence people (Dale Carnegie) is also really good.

I would avoid most of the current "sales/presentation" self-help books out there. Most of them are not worth the paper they're printed on.

One last thought, try and find a mentor or a coach and/or join a speaking club. Toastmasters (http://www.toastmasters.org/) and the National Speakers Association (http://www.nsaspeaker.org/) are good, but they may be overkill if you don't do demonstrations regularly or to larger audiences.
In fact, the basic idea of The Selfish Gene is precisely a rejection of your previous statement: according to Dawkins, evolution is not concerned with the "propagation of the species", but with the propagation of individual genes. It is merely incidental that this sometimes results in competition among "survival machines", which happen to be grouped into species.
I'm so freaking Gullible, I was about to write a big long comment referring to Facebook. Touche Michael Arrington!
I don't care for differences between the 20 and the 24 inch monitors. Apple isn't claiming they're the same and I wouldn't expect them to be identical. But if the new 20'' model is actually worse (display wise) from the previous 20'' model, and Apple didn't make this clear, then I think the lawsuit is justified. When upgrading to a newer generation I expect everything to be BETTER unless explicitly stated.
Let's just restrict it to jokes that are actually funny. That should weed out most of them. (Including this one.)
Nomophobia: Fear of being out of mobile phone contact...
Ha, thats funny because I just downloaded that yesterday. But thanks for your input.
Benchmarking - optimizing performance (at the right time) is one area when junior people never even think of the things that senior people routinely do

Elegance - my definition is Elegance = Functionality / Lines of Code. Sometimes maximizing elegance takes everything you've got. (And dramatically reduces long term maintenance cost.)

Variable naming - (not a joke, although it seems like one). This shows that you really understand what you're doing and makes life easier for those who have to maintain your work. Real programmers never have to protect their jobs.

Structuring of data - both internally and on disk. Streamlining data structures often reduces the need for complex processing. Eliminating the need to be elegant is often more elegant than being elegant.
Superficial Gallery Logo Design
Hey maybe the idea could still have worked but in a radically different form e.g. some kind of about.com/ adsense content syndication hoover. Maybe it was the focus on high quality content/ journalism that was the wrong direction - I'd encourage you to think about other ways it might work if you started from first principles.
Wow talk about a blast from the past...

I remember working on Xenix for a programming project back in my college days (early 90's). Back then my only work on Unix had been on AIX and Solaris, and PC's for me were equivalent to DOS. Seeing a PC do Unix was... weird. You had multiple consoles, if I remember correctly, and of course the C compiler, yacc and lex, /usr/bin, the standard library, man pages -- man this thing is deep.

A couple years later Linux came out and the rest is history.
- What do you think is wrong with Search? And how would you fix it?

- How would you fix email?
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.

'cause feature requests go here.
So when's your next startup going to launch? Second time could be the charm!
When I was in your shoes I got a lot out of taking a look at the language documentation for the http related libraries in the languages I used. Often times there are good examples that'll get you started for basic stuff.

In Ruby, for example, you'd check out open-uri: http://www.ruby-doc.org/stdlib/libdoc/open-uri/rdoc/index.ht...

For Java, I found both of the O'Reilly books (Nutshell and, especially, Examples) to be pretty useful.

If you're really looking to get started quickly on developing a database-driven web application, I'd highly recommend grabbing a Python or Ruby framework like Django or Rails and then making your way through Phil Greenspun's Software Engineering for Internet Applications. (freely available here: http://philip.greenspun.com/seia/).

Good luck!
Strange imagery found in Java String.class binary
"This supposed refutation can itself be disproven by reductio ad absurdum, because it could be applied to any explanation of our inclinations based on how we evolved."

Your argument doesn't do what you think. Just because every evolutionary psychology argument can be attacked this way doesn't make it a bad attack. The logic in your essay is far from being able to pass scientific scrutiny. Maybe you don't care.... This IS a fundamental problem in evolutionary psychology. Why do we engage in some weird behavior? Because it was adaptive. How do we know it was adaptive? Well, we wouldn't engage in it otherwise.
Actually, it's both. They made some great products, and they cast themselves as a lifestyle rather than a brand.

Others have done this, but Apple may have done it the best.
Yikes. Let's try again.

"Fast good programmer > slow good programmer > fast bad programmer > slow bad programmer."

Looks like that makes me a "fast bad programmer". Not bad for third place.
Run, don't walk to:

http://www.toastmasters.org/

Listen to mixmax - all the books/info in the world are absolutely no substitute for practice. Find the smallest toastmasters chapter close to you (so you get more chances to present), join, and go every week, no matter what. In 6 months you'll wonder why you ever had to post this here.

I always used my Toastmasters group to practice my sales presentations. It forced me to be ready by a deadline, and the people there provided excellent feedback. It gave me a chance to try new things, and best of all, it never cost me a sale.

(Oops, just noticed that dkokelley suggested the same thing. See?)
I think one point thats worth pointing out is that in a lot of Spolsky's opinions regarding whats good and bad CS seem to be highly influence by the fact that he couldn't cut it in terms of theoretical computer science coursework back in college, or at least thats the sense i get from his writings....
I really agree with this, because I've done so many things just for the heck of it, and for learning new cool things, etc while other big boys/men out there are implementing simple useful things which make them money.
I also noticed some random other slowness.
I use jquery because it's easy and a lot of plugins
Real nice application! I can't find anything wrong about it, great work!
The many faces of data portability
Obviously power consumption has gone up because demand for performance has outstripped increasing power efficiency. But the Forrest Curve is catching up, as we can see from all the enthusiasm for sub-$400 computers.

(BTW, laptop power supplies are double-sized, since they need to be able to power the laptop and charge the battery simultaneously. e.g. a 40W laptop will have an ~80W supply.)
i honestly laughed when I saw this, and I'm from PA.

Hard-working city and a fair sized University base.
So the event is confirmed at 240 2nd street on the 19th? If so, I'm going to book a return flight the next day, otherwise it's just going to cost me (hotel + rental). I'm willing to stay an extra night since YC'ers are a fun bunch. Speaking of which, any lone travelers out here want to split a hotel or something?
http://paulgraham.com/startuphubs.html

He talks about the advantages of being in SV compared to anywhere else. If you haven't read it already, it's good.
These sort of questions have resulted in the traditional web setup you see today with a database backend for storage.

Any reasonably large site will (relatively) quickly exhaust RAM, especially if the same server is handling the requests.

Plus, traditionally there are large sets of data that needs to be searchable, hence the desirability of putting it in a database.

So instead of actually having things in memory, people now use something like memcache to reasonably simulate that for performance.