skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Unfortunately, I've spent more-time-than-I-should time over the years debugging issues where a subclass was supposed to have overriden a superclass method's behavior but the subclass method had the wrong method signature (and thus was never called). Console log statements never lie..
This has been true for me as well. Moving was completely necessary for me to really get things rolling with Jabbik.
Valuations and fundraising
I was talking to a buddy of mine that's been through a few rounds at a few startups. One interesting point he raised is that investors want to own 25-30% of a company after they've invested. In his opinion, this was a hard lower limit.

What this means is that raising $250k implies a $1M valuation.

And that if you really do think you're worth $4m, you should raise $2m for a post-money $6m.

Have others found this to be the case?
Sometimes I think that "make something people want" should really be "make something people need or could really use even if they don't know or think they want it".

But then every shirt would have to be XXXL.
Read Learning Perl, keep a copy of Programming Perl and Perl Cookbook near (the three books are from O'Reilly).

Then, for webdev I recommend Catalyst http://search.cpan.org/search?query=catalyst&mode=all with it's great doc, http://search.cpan.org/~jrockway/Catalyst-Manual-5.701003/. Catalyst uses DBIx as ORM, http://search.cpan.org/search?query=DBIx%3A%3AClass&mode..., which also has a pretty good doc http://search.cpan.org/~ash/DBIx-Class-0.08010/lib/DBIx/Clas....

Finally, I suppose you will use Apache as a server, then you must look at its doc and mod_perl one (although you can also run the perl app as a cgi).
no that's not what this deal was. of course the talent of our team was attractive but that's not why they paid $5m. Live Current have a huge amount of organic traffic with genuine purchasing intent that comes to sites like perfume.com and electronic.com. but they have no understanding of what tools you need to provide sellers to get them to invest their time in another trading platform.

you'd be surprised how ineffective pitching the potential for a new distribution channel is to most sellers, they value their time so highly getting them to convert is incredibly tough. you can only do it by making it very easy for them to integrate their set up with the platform you're offering.

not surprisingly we have a deep understanding of what these sellers want and have developed tools they use. we always wanted to eventually build trading platforms but didn't have the buyers to seed an initial platform with. now we can promise them great tools and an immediate audience for their products.

incidentally there's no vest on our cash, we're working at Live Current because we see it as the next step of Auctomatic (hence we've kept a lot of autonomy) and not a well-paid job. it'd be very tough for someone to compensate us well enough that we'd be happy to work as web devs implementing someone elses ideas on domains.
Apple notebook lines to see major design changes
It's a book hotels on the maps site, we plan to add to it as we get more time. look it up http://www.seeyourhotel.com
The idea that different methods can have the same name but different signatures presents many challenges. IMO, if you are going to live with the drawbacks, you ought to be able to enjoy all of the benefits, such as you will find in full-features MOPs like in Common Lisp or pattern-matching languages like Haskell.

BTW, Ruby and Java both solve this problem. In Java, use the @override annotation. If you are not overriding a method, you get a compiler error.

Ruby "solves" the problem by only having one method per name. But you can mix in some magic and get pattern matching if you want.
Website runs all in S3, no server.
i think the white plastic look is a good branding tool... no other laptop looks even close to a macbook
I move everything that requires doing more work than just processing and displaying data to a simple little batch server. So, for example if you submit a contact us email, it doesn't email immediately. It just stores the info from the form and sends a signal to the batch server.

It seems trivial, but it is quite important.
OpenID is a Royal Pain
The other great thing about this is that your batch script can essentially keep plugging away behind-the-scenes when the data set to process is larger (e.g. a newsletter list to send). So even if something goes wrong and the batch script fails, by maintaining a queue and monitoring the script via cron, now you've got a level of simple fault-tolerance built in.
It doesn't sound like he's heard of clickpass.
Numbrosia's successor -- Wordrosia -- has launched.  Let me know what you think.
I left Perl behind some time ago, but I second epi0Bauqu's recommendation of Perlmonks. It's quite an amazing community and resource, and well worth exploring.
I was a little surprised to get to the end of this and see no discussion of actual asynchronous web servers, using non-blocking i/o rather than threads. I write such things often, using twisted. It's easy to handle a few thousand concurrent requests that way, but it doesn't seem to be an approach that's widely used for whatever reason.
No.

Longer answer: My great-grandfather Reginald Braithwaite was one of nine children (that we know survived) growing up in a one-room shack in Barbados. His son Leonard was the first Black Member of Provincial Parliament in Ontario. His grand-daughter Gwen was the first woman AND the first person of colour to work in Systems analysis with Empire Life.

Sadly, the (possibly apocryphal) Chinese Proverb about returning to poverty in four generations may hold: her son is chiefly known for blogging.
Andrew Chen: 5 factors that determine your ad CPM rates
Agreed. Even Apache supports a variety of other models with its mpm modules. You don't have to stick to the defaults even if you do use Apache.
I don't know Perl, but I've read good things about O'Reilly's Programming Perl (also known as The Camel Book).

I am looking forward to a time when O'Reilly's Programming Arc exists. It's still too early for that, though.
Not to nitpick (because I found the rest of the article fairly interesting), but it seems like he has a poorly chosen metaphor right off the bat.

"The key to solve this problem lies in the classical definition of speed. In Physics, speed is defined as the distance divided by time required to cross that distance. So we can make the requests run faster either by decreasing the time, but we can also do it by shortening the distance."

If S = D/T, then to increase speed while holding time constant, you'd need to increase distance, not decrease it. I think it would be better if we thought about the performance he is talking about as what it really is... throughput.

If you have a big pipe spewing water, you can increase the throughput by either increasing the pressure of the water (optimized code) or by removing the rocks in the pipe (long-running/synchronous I/O threads). (Removing said rocks increases cross-sectional area.)
Granted there is a loss of clarity when a sub class changes a parent classes behavior. But, there are still times where it can be useful.

EX: You want to add a section to an online banking app that handles IRA accounts. It would be nice to reuse as much of the logging, balance transfer, and UI as possible but you don't want to alter well tested core classes. So you use inheritance to get something that works and is reasonably clean until you can refactor a cleaner solution.
I fail to see how this is evidence of anyone's ignorance.
In the starbucks shops from where I live, you have to pay when you order. That is before they write your name in your cup. So the problem the article is talking about simply does not apply.
While it makes sense, it's sad that creating a site that gets frequent return usage and a lot of user passion results in poor monetization.
I was also surprised he doesn't mention this.

One thing that holds true, however, is that a browser won't make another request to a single server if two requests are still outstanding. So if, say, you have a COMET connection open and a long running server side AJAX request, none of your other AJAX requests will run. This might make the interface appear to hang, regardless of how many connections your web server can handle. I would say the general idea of returning quickly is probably a good one.

I'm sure a lot of you have seen this already, but I love it:
http://www.sics.se/~joe/apachevsyaws.html
When I'm reading about how he does this, it looks like it has all the app logic in client-side Javascript. That scares me from a security standpoint.
I agree with the advice to read Higher Order Perl, but read Wall's (Blue Camel) book Programming Perl first. Both are fun to read, but I found HOP much more useful after reading Wall's book. If you don't already know regular expressions, read Mastering Regular Expressions. Then for additional ideas try the Perl Cookbook, also from O'Reilly. For additional inspriration along the lines of Higher Order Perl, read On Lisp by Graham, which is not about Perl, but shows how the same concepts and more are elegantly applied in Lisp. The web documents Higher Order Javascript and the Little Javascripter are interesting if you want to also understand that Javascript, like Perl is fun in the same ways that Lisp is.
Assuming your queue doesn't die with your script :)
I've got different advice. Don't start with a full blown web app. Getting perl and apache and a db going can complicate the issue a bit.

Start by simply replacing some bash scripts with perl instead. Everything you can do with a shell script, you can do better with perl. When I was starting with perl, I started replacing my init scripts with better perl verions on my Fedora system. You'll be pleasantly surprised by how much shorter and more elegant init scripts become in perl!
I never really had a specific problem (that I can remember), and would encourage you to use it. I just never got comfortable in it. It seemed like things were a bit harder than they should have been, especially when I started trying to make it work nicely with .NET stuff (which it doesn't support out of the box).
Sites which get frequent return usage and lots of user passion don't result in poor monetization: They get far more traffic, which compensates for the low CPM rate.
Sure, as long as you had exactly the same PRNG on every computer where you were going to read the logs, and as long as there was no other input (e.g., human input). Depending on how the music generation worked, it also might make seeking an O(time) operation.

Plus then he couldn't grep his music, which is the really cool part.
10 Must-Read Online-Recruiting Blogs
It is likely I'm misunderstanding, but why would you use inheritance instead of composition in your example?
Why Gears hasn't caught on:

From the Gears Developer FAQ:
Q: How do I deploy an application that uses Google Gears?
A: You should not do so at all.

http://code.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=69221...
Looks pretty good to me too, I just think part of it seems to be a lot more of ‘How golimojo works’ in section <How do you know when Golimojo is collecting information?>.
It seems to me that if the service grows in features you may have to change the privacy policy even if the same information is collected from user.
Kinda nitpicking here but are they really 'millionaires' with that low of a buyout after taxes and everything else get taken out? Not trying to diminish at all what they accomplished, but I think its more accurate that they are all '6-8 hundred thousandaires'

Think about it, 3 (4?) founders, YC investment (assuming 7%) plus additional investment (10-25%) - 30-40% to the government does not leave as much as you might hope.
Yes, and it has continued to get better through its revisions.
Well for drive through Starbucks you order first and pay second, so just envision that scenario.
This is all good advice, but I'm not sure the Perl Cookbook is a necessary component. HOP definitely is, though. Learning Perl and Intermediate Perl are great learning books...they make a nice starter before the camel (though the camel is a must-have, no matter what, so pick it up at the same time and treat it as a reference until you're ready to dig deeper).
I think what you are trying to say when you say "Why aren't there more open source web applications?" is something like "Why aren't there more web application sites that provide a service that are open source?"

This I think is pretty simple. If I got your question right. If you are building a new site that does rss feeds aggregation with dynamic custom filters that track your web surfing to automatically rate content based on pages you spent time on, for example. Wow that was a mouthful. Err. Forget that. If you are building a better reddit.You have some new idea and that is your competitive edge and reason for doing the work. If you open source that you just gave away your reason for building your site.

So there is a conscious decision to either build a site and try to monetize it, or build an open source platform and gain traction. The difference here is what you are trying to accomplish. If you are trying to differentiate a site with new technology or features you don't want to give away the secret sauce (source) to your incumbent competitors or your future competitors. While your busy focusing on and perfecting the technology. They can be busy focusing on getting to market.

If google or ebay had open sourced their technology how hard would it be for Microsoft or Amazon to clone it and take it to the next level? If we use google as an example here. If microsoft could see exactly how page rank worked and the architecture that allows google to scale. Could they create their own version and possibly improve it. I think they could. If google open sourced in the beginning super live search would have happened before google got their ridiculous market share and google may not even exist today...
let your cat walk on the keyboard, execute it, and try to figure out what it does.
HP Provides Unlimited Online Storage with Upline
I believe that's what DBs and log files are for ;)
http://mytipnetwork.com - just finished making it, thought it would be useful for bloggers.

creates a open page that lets your readers tip you off to news worthy things they find on the web.
Don't Just Blame The VCs For 'Free': Google's Killing Us, Too
Wait, is he saying that... correlation isn't causation!?!

Actually, I slogged through to the upteenth paragraph to find out that his point is even dumber: He just wants to substitute his own apparently arbitrary assumptions for the College Board's apparently arbitrary assumptions. "Substituting some of his own assumptions for those used by the board — including six years of tuition costs (and hence two fewer years of work), private college tuition instead of in-state public tuition, etc. — Miller calculates his own college premium."
NYU dental professor discovers biological clock
NASA is very serious about putting an astronaut on Mars
New face of IT recruiting
Speaking as someone who has implemented bank accounts...

Would you agree that all of our problems go away if we exposed an Account interface rather than an Account class? Then the impact of our choice about how to re-use the implementation is localized.
Scoop, the software behind Kuro5hin and later DailyKos and many other 'community' social blog/news sites
This is why prototype based languages allow software to model our experiences much more accurately. Inheritance seems to rely on a platonic ideal, i.e. there is some universal sense of chair (parent class) from which office chair, rocking chair inherit.

In reality that's not how we think about chairs. We can imagine the first chair was a tree stump which was incrementally refined, eventually into office chair, rocking chair, etc.

When we wish to add heated chairs to our application we can simply add a heating element to our chair prototype. We can even have heated office chairs, heated rocking chairs which use the same heating element prototype. Much more flexible.
> inevitably wind up supporting other people's children. Think what you will about that. To me, it is disgustingly criminal.

Leaving those children hanging out to dry would be what I'd consider disgustingly criminal. I'm not sure I can get my bile to rise to that level for helping them.

Being taxed to help children is about the last thing I'd fight against, as a matter of priority. First I'd go after the actual wasting of tax dollars, which helping children certainly is not. In fact, it's essential if you care about society even from a _self-interested_ standpoint.

It's similar to health insurance. Is it "fair" that if you don't need to use it, you end up paying for other people who aren't so fortunate? If you live long enough, the probability approaches 1 that you'll need it. And it may cover more in hospital bills for you than you paid into the system.

I think the essential basis of your objection is that life is a competition and that if you're winning, you should be able to press your advantage instead of having your lead reduced by outside interference.

By contrast, those of us in the "cooperation" camp think instead of fighting over who gets the bigger piece of a smaller pie, we can make the whole pie bigger. And taking a broader view, even eliminate competition altogether by providing computational resources to each individual that will maximize hir experience of life (via completely convincing VR), given what our limited brains are even capable of and how it pales in comparison to the possibilities of nonbiological intelligence.
I've actually gone from $10k to $15k once (technically $12 to $17) and it was humongous.
Well, just using average earnings doesn't paint the full picture. Look at both tails too. What percent of college grads live below the poverty line? College arguably gives you a better shot at the other extreme too.
I'm interested in better SEO tagging; what would you suggest would make a better title in this instance?
Henry Ford once said that if he asked his customers what they wanted they would've said they wanted a faster horse
I work in a company that writes almost everything in Perl, and as a result I have personally written tens of thousands of lines of the stuff, and I maintain and debug several times that amount. This code is used for everything from serving web pages to interacting with carrier SMS-C to number crunching. So believe me, Perl is definitely the devil I know.

That being said, the only advice I can offer you is unsolicited: don't learn Perl. Perl is a very powerful language in a lot of ways and in its day it was the only game in town for serious rapid development. It is fundamentally broken in a lot of ways though, and unlearning the brain damage that you will get from becoming a Perl expert could take a very long time (it has taken me years). I won't launch into a diatribe about these language characteristics unless you ask me to, but do not doubt that I could.

People talk a lot about how great CPAN is, and it does have a certain charm, but it is ultimately more trouble than it is worth. There are CPAN modules for everything, but just as often as not they are flawed or buggy or too limited and you don't realize this until you've sunk a considerable amount of time into the problem. Just the other day a colleague wasted an afternoon trying to get LWP::Parallel to work as advertised before realizing that it could not be done.

Perl is great for building prototypes, but when you go to deploy the stuff you realize that DBI fundamentally can't do connection pooling in the way you want, and mod_perl has an execution lifecycle that can only be described as 'whacky' (depending on how you include your handler modules, sometimes mod_perl will simply stop evaluating your module when it reaches an error, leaving your symbol table partially filled in with no error warning), and once you've used a couple of CPAN modules they'll all invite their friends and those friends will invite their friends and pretty soon your Apache children are using 15-50 megabytes of _unshared_ memory each. Yeah that's right, the interpreter goes and touches a bunch of pages of Perl 'code' post-fork and blows the COW and now all your RAM is belong to mod_perl. It's really cool when an 8-way Xeon server with 16GB of RAM can only handle a couple of hundred req/s before it starts faulting and crashing Apache children on malloc.

Do yourself a favor and use Ruby instead. Ruby is so much like Perl that you can almost call it a dialect, but just not quite as broken. Pretty broken still, but not nearly so broken as Perl. It has all of Perl's good characteristics and only most of its bad ones. And if the availability of libraries, or the lack of decent threading or other deployment characteristics bother you, then use JRuby which is now basically the fastest production Ruby and can call into all of the Java libraries (which _can_ do connection pooling in the way that you want). Personally I prefer Common Lisp and Rhino but you can't go too wrong with JRuby.

If you go the Perl route you will definitely come to regret it.
Actually YC companies are less biased towards IPOs than the average VC backed company because of the smaller investment and lower average burn rate, and even VC backed companies rarely IPO in todays market. In conclusion I wouldn't hold my breath.
Correct. Those sort of cases were the main motivation for building the batch server.

In regard to the other point: the batch server should never fail since tasks are spawned off as another thread, and even if it does, the tasks are in fact stored in a database.

Fun times!
The best book for learning the language is "Learning Perl" published by O'reilly. If you work through all the exercises you'll "know" perl well enough for doing most things. Also helpful is the Perl Cookbook. Contrary to other advice, I didn't find Programming Perl (the camel book) as valuable as Learning Perl.

You could learn via web and man pages but perl is weird enough so that the Learning Perl workout is valuable.
Starbucks in NYC will radio or call out your drink order to the barista while you're waiting in line for the cashier, then correlate by drink type (barista yells "iced tall 2-pump classic iced coffee!")

side note-- there is a specific order to the way they call the drinks, too, as in the example above: iced (go to the stack of plastic cups) tall (pick the size) 2-pump classic (put the flavor/sugar syrup in the cup) iced coffee (finally put the beverage in). Helps the baristas remember your drink order by correlating the auditory with the physical, aiding short-term memory.
There are a few YC companies for which IPO is a pretty reasonable outcome, though acquisition may still end up being the way they exit. As you note, IPO is much less likely than in the past, due to the regulatory environment and tanking stock market. But, it's still early yet. I wouldn't rule out an IPO from a YC company or two in the next three years.
Not a bad list. Strong Anglo-American bias, and no religious books (both understandable). The 'books that changed your world' feels like a dumping-ground for recent UK bestsellers that'll be forgotten in 50 years (Schott's miscellany; Eats, shoots and leaves; A child called 'it'), but most of the rest are bona fide classics. Better, many of them are classics that are still fun to read.
Slashcode (Slashdot's engine) has been open source for so long it's written in perl :). There is also MediaWiki (Wikipedia).
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