skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I normally don't push products, but I can't say enough about slicehost.

It is very reliable, a great simple admin for adding dns entries, setting up backups for your VPS, etc.

Just another good quality option. Similar price I believe.
Yandex has always had better stemming. In Russian words have very many forms so you really-really need stemming. For that reason Yandex used to be immensely more useful if you have to find something.

Although I make very few searches in Russian these days so my opinion could be outdated. On the rare occasion I just use my default search everywhere - Google and it feels good enough nowadays, but again I use it rarely.

Technical merits alone are not sufficient, however, to evaluate Yandex. Not only the brand recognition is important, the "Russian Internet" (aka RuNet) is a community with its own sub-culture, celebrities etc. and one has to blend in. Both modern and classical cultural references take important part in what is worthy of people's attention and what is not.

Google has offices in Russia these days, and they are dialing up puns and cultural references as well. In one example Google's unit translation feature (e.g. "72 F in C") made a translation from meters to parrots, in reference to a child cartoon (see http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D0%BF%D0%BE%D0%BF%D1%83%D0%B3...). This cartoon was popular 30 years ago, when the current generation of movers and shakers were growing up. You have to do that kind of thing to gain credibility in RuNet. Google seems to be on the right track with that, but it's not clear to me they are willingly making this investment or rather a few employees did this on their own.
I am a designer and front end person and I have recently been jumping back and forth between Ruby on Rails and Django trying to figure out which is a) easiest for me to learn and b) works best in my projects.

Django seems easiest for me to learn in terms of general theory (the Model, View, Template makes more sense than Model, View, Controller in my head for some reason).

Both have a good number of resources, both are being updated very quickly. A lot of the issues I had with Ruby on Rails a year ago (hard to deploy) are disappearing now that it has matured a bit.
Do you have any experience with any of the resellers listed on Adamsnames? It seems you can't buy .gd names through the form they offer, and I've never used any of the sites listed.
Great post. There's as much to be learned from a failure (maybe more) as from a success. Thank you, Paul. I don't imagine an article like this is very easy to write.

Interesting that customer demand is never mentioned. Have we become so enamored by the idea of building the next killer app that we never bother to find out if anyone even wants it?
How about Catalyst? Ruby and Python are nice, but sooner or later you're going to end up reinventing the wheel because there's no culture of writing libraries in those languages. Perl's syntax may not be perfect, but it's a wonderful language with all the features of Ruby and Python, but with 10000s of libraries and tons of production testing.

Catalyst is a framework that does what you want instead of telling you what you want. This means a steep learning curve, but more productivity in the end.

Regardless, it's a shame to ignore Perl.
Finding laws in Economics reminds me of Psychohistory. I wonder if we'll ever have that field.
Actually, it's xmonad and erc.
5 Ways to Screencast Your Linux Desktop
10 days ago, I wrote "In two years, we'll probably have a device which is a mix of laptop, mobile telephone and Nintendo DS. It would be a clamshell design with two 11 inch screens with the bottom one being touch sensitive." ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=186508 ).

I had something like one of the OLPC's mock-ups ( http://www.xconomy.com/2008/05/20/negroponte-unveils-2nd-gen... ) in mind.
Here's my take, after working in Ruby/Rails for a year, and coming from a background in C++ and Perl (with a tiny bit of Lisp in my distant past): Ruby is nothing like Lisp. It has some metaprogramming features that make you think (vaguely) of Lisp, but fundamentally, it's more like the bastard child of a torrid, three-way affair between Lisp, Python and Perl -- the genetic heritage was passed on, but poor baby Ruby got little of the careful childhood upbringing.

The result? Ruby has the syntactical consistency and beauty of Perl, and the blazing speed and low overhead of Lisp. There are roughly six dozen different ways of doing everything (including really simple things, like delimiting blocks), and bizarre inconsistencies in basic use cases (e.g. most String functions return copies, whereas nearly everything else works by reference), and plenty of long-term code maintainability nightmares lurking in the corners.

It can be fun to code in Ruby, and it's certainly a language you should check out someday, but I'm still not sure it's the language you want to choose for a project involving a team of programmers or long-term project maintenance. My advice, if you know neither Ruby nor Python, is to learn Python, unless you've got some particular reason (i.e. a job) to learn Ruby first. Rails is an okay framework, but Django is okay too, and Python is the more elegant language.

(Now...if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go put on my asbestos underwear....)
If you want to implement a web framework, keep in mind that it will be a slow and iterative process. And don't expect to create it in a vacuum (1. make super great framework 2. use it). It will be more like, you notice some patterns of repetition in the code of your existing project(s), and then you devise a way to factor that into a library. Try to implement your web framework as libraries instead of a monolithic pile of spaghetti. There are tons of design decisions you'll have to take and it's better if you can use different parts of the web framework (and perhaps write new ones) for different projects. At first your web framework will be pretty specific to your project, and you'll hit walls whenever you want to go in a direction you hadn't thought of yet. You'll see what is truly general and what's really project/section/page-specific once you have a good corpus of samples.

That's how it goes for my slowly-evolving will-release-it-someday-when-it's-ready CL web framework anyway.
Yeah for Plaxo! Lot's of acquisitions going on.
well of course the bottom 5th income wise shouldn't pay tax as they contribute less than 1% of tax revenue and receive on average much more in government aid than they pay in taxes. seems like a silly little loop for the money to go in when you could just not tax them. warren buffet has advocated this program.
people who don't pay taxes shouldn't vote. this would actually be an interesting opt out clause to experiment with. you can forgo taxes if you give up suffrage.
Missing matter found in deep space
We'd better tax leftovers, too.
You can also check out http://heroku.com for free RoR hosting and great new experience.
You can use it to your advantage at parties:

"Ive won two black pencils this year from D&AD!"
Also, for the next Earth Hour [1], we should consider the first minute to be 'Earth Minute', and all hold our breaths in the dark against global warming.

[1] http://www.earthhour.org/
I find python a lot more enjoyable/productive than PHP, but unless you're having major problems with your current code, it seems like porting it would just be a lot of extra work.

I would guess it mostly depends on how much code you have written now (if most of your time has been design/planning, then it might be worth it), and whether or not the people you work with have experience with python/ruby.

Whichever way you go, learning python (or ruby, I suppose) will serve you well in the future.
As I understand the libertarian argument (I can't promise that this is what Prrometheus means), a sketch looks like this:

Money is your property

Your body is your property

Slavery is foreign control of your body

Taxes are foreign control of your money

Thus, by the transitive property, taxes are like slavery
Right, which is where it's certainly open to debate. I interpret general welfare to include things like education and infrastructure since virtually everyone benefits from them in some form or another.

As for defense...if we focused on "defense" instead of "offense" that 50% could be sliced in half if not quarters. Think of how much money not invading Iraq would have saved us. There's no reason our defense budget needs to larger than the next 25 countries combined.

As for healthcare...I'm with you man - not a clue.
> Wow, this is actually a huge turn away from the direction that the original OLPC took.

Yes, and possibly premature. I hope Nicholas Negrponte doesn't repeat Adam Osborne, who boasted so much about the features of his Osborne 2 that few purchased his Osborne 1 and it bankrupted his company. "It is said that in 1983, Adam Osborne bragged about two advanced new computers his company was developing. These statements destroyed consumer demand for the Osborne 1, and the resulting inventory glut forced Osborne Computer to file for bankruptcy on September 13, 1983." -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Osborne

> I have to imagine that it would be tough to learn to touch type using a touchscreen with no tactile response mechanisms.

A variant of the DynaBook ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynabook ) was supposed to have a vapourware transparent piezo matrix over the screen to provide a tactile response. Alan Kay, who conceived the DynaBook, has been involved with the OLPC Project.
I don't get it. Software product lines are done by people who are the opposite of agile.
Why did LISP machines not win?
ive been reading up on LISP machines a little but cant seem to find a specific anylysis of why they didint become popular.

is it because people are turned off by LISP?

i mean the machines seemed to have decent interfaces so it didnt have to be for only AI but could be general purpose machines and a lot of stuff that we now use was created on them:

garbage collection, laser printing, windowing systems, computer mice, high-resolution bit-mapped graphics, computer graphic rendering, networking innovations and protocols like CHAOSNet — were commercially pioneered on Lisp machines

anyone using open Genera? it seems from the wikipedia article it is still sold.
Dbtxt: A tiny PD database in Python
Lockdown: authentication/authorization system for RubyOnRails or Merb
If it were me, I'd say take a look at the Django stuff at http://www.7days7apps.com and then try and make one or two of them with Rails. Then take a look at one of the simple apps at http://raa.ruby-lang.org/ and try and do it with Django. Then go with whatever one makes you more productive.
They are both great choices. Basically, it doesn't matter.

If you already know Python - maybe Django would be better.

Also, Django has geo-django, if you think you might be geo-coding things - this is great, and built right in.

I expect that ruby has something similar??
Yes. It's quiet a lot of code now. And, my friends are not familiar with python/ruby.

Thank you for your advice.
"Ruby has. . .the blazing speed and low overhead of Lisp."

How did you conclude this?
Interesting. I went through the same analysis a couple years ago and concluded that Ruby had the hype but Python had the goods. Was skeptical of Django for a long time, but finally warmed up to it last December and haven't looked back.

In all honesty, I think both are perfectly fine web languages, and it doesn't really matter which you choose. Pick one and get good at it. Either will be light-years better than, say, Java or PHP.
Scribd'ing of the PDFs should be a per-account config option.

I don't mind if it's enabled by default (Scribd being backed by YC and all that), but please allow me to disable this rather annoying feature.
I'm surprised he got Erlide and Eurlybird to run. I couldn't get either on my install on Netbeans or Eclipse. I've given up and am going to learn Vi to edit erlang in.
If the buzzwords are in the same row, column, or diagonal on your card you are permitted to call bingo even if you can't make a cogent paragraph out of them.
I wouldn't say PHP is not as good as Python or Ruby, it's simply different. For instance you could use a development platform/framework that lives on top of PHP that might make your life easier. You'll have the same issues with Python and Ruby and will eventually implement a framework or platform that lives on top of them.

I also recommend you check out NOLOH (shameless self plug), there will be a limited developer release at the end of this month.
I was about to post a comment about you being insane when I read 'syntactical consistency and beauty of Perl', but then I re-read what you wrote and my Sarcasm-O-Meter started beeping.

I'm not sure your argument about Python/Django being better for long-term use really holds muster. There are a lot of very passionate Rails hackers, and I can see Rails taking over the web application development sphere over the next few years. This isn't because it's necessarily better, mind you, but because Rails has a hell of a lot of mindshare.

So, you should be as worried about finding competent Rails hackers as you should be about finding competent Python/Django hackers. Or should you?

Rails is the web development framework for Ruby. There are probably others, but nobody has ever heard of them, so they don't matter. Python has Django, and Pylons, and TurboGears, and so on. Your hypothetical future Python web developer, then, has a lower chance of being an expert in The Best Web Framework than does the Ruby hacker, because with Ruby, you only have one choice.
No, I've never used any of the resellers other than NetSol (which supports .vg at a good price, even though I don't like them otherwise).

As far as I know, you can only buy the two-letter domains using the email form on the adamsnames.tc site. Almost all of the registrars tell you that you're crazy to try to reserve a two-letter one. It's a little cumbersome, but I (and my company) have purchased literally a couple of dozen domains via the email interface on adamsnames.tc.

One other cool thing about adamsnames.tc is that you don't pay for the domains for a little bit after you order them. So you get invoiced and pay later after you start using the domain.

Edit: Reread your question: I definitely have ordered plenty of GD domains through their email interface. The fact that their site doesn't mention GD just reflects that they only added that tld in the past year. Helps explain why so few others have stumbled onto the trick I found for registering these.
At the risk of repeating, well, every other comment, I would suggest that you develop using whichever platform you enjoy. Hell, if you really love working in APL, you should do your application in APL. Because at the end of the day, you will be a happy and productive programmer. Which is far, far better than merely being a productive programmer.
74 Great Web Apps for Web Designers we have forgotten about
Advice to Clickpass on gaining more traction
"you should be as worried about finding competent Rails hackers as you should be about finding competent Python/Django hackers."

It's not finding the coders that's hard (any smart coder can pick up Ruby quickly); it's the quality of the code that any new person will inherit. My experience is that the syntactical looseness of Ruby leads to write-only code. Lots of people complain about the readability of Perl, but Ruby is really only nominally better. In Python, readable code is the rule, not the exception.
I believe that in the book The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month ), Fred Brooks suggests that you "build one to throw away". I don't recall him suggesting that you change programming language.

If you are having performance problems or you code has become spaghetti and your team is most comfortable with the current language then you could start again in the same language. This has the advantage that you could use good sections of the current implementation with the least effort.
"All that this graph reflects is that as taxes were decreased for the upper %1 over the past half century, they were increased on everybody else."

False.

We have a dynamic system where the incentives of the top 1% have a disproportional influence on GDP. Further, tax rates of the top 10% account for the majority of revenue. So I not only deny your claim but put forth that your rhetoric is emotionally manipulative - pitting the rich ("them") versus the rest ("us poor little everybody else").

The "rich", the top 1%, are the prime drivers of wealth creation. They are the reason GDP grows faster than population growth. The incentives on the top 1% heavily influence GDP growth.

Also, the percentiles used are very misleading. The top and bottom quintiles today are not the same people in the top and bottom quintiles 20 years ago. So most stats we track about poverty and wealth are fairly useless because they follow that faulty assumption.

Just in case anyone isn't clear on this: if you're a founder of a tech company, you're in the top 1% - perhaps not in income today, but in wealth generators and life-time taxes paid and to-be-paid.
Ask YC: Naming a startup
Right now, it's me and a friend hacking together a prototype, and talking with advisors/customers in the field (we're working on a biomedical app). At what point do we need to have a name? Also, how did you name your startup?
Feels like reading a lisp function (in isolation). Each of those tokens might be a function with real power behind it, or the whole function might just end up printing "Hello World".
Are you trying to goad the nyt by aping their design style? Well done, in any case.

Love the credibility concept, but it will be challenging to pull off.

For one thing, people will treat the 'credible' button as an upvote button, and use it for stories where they agree with the headline or think the headline should be seen by more people. Nothing wrong with that, except that the site isn't providing anything new.

Also people can be misled about credibility because the content comes from a branded site they already agree is credible, but that could be wrong too -- see how the New York Times messed up the Wen Ho Lee story.

Also the herd tends to miss a lot, so I'm not sure sorting which news I see and don't see based on the (distorted, see above) herd consensus is a good thing. We already have plenty of sites that do that, and they are riddled with rickrolls and two girls one cup.
I am also contemplating a switch from php to RoR. After developing another site in RoR and loving it, php just doesn't inspire me anymore.
Let's see... no vacation for at&t employees in june, iphones out of stock in apple online, multiple country deals signed in past few weeks, iphone sdk nearing beta end... You'll see the 3G iphone on the 9th. What interests me any new hardware it will have (gps, better camera, another camera (iChat?), ...)
> At what point do we need to have a name?

A name can stick from very early in development. See http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&s...

> Also, how did you name your startup?

See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=152896 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=141954 and http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44745
you may not get a full feel for django doing this. while you can use django on appengine, you dont get all of the features. for example, you don't get to use with django's orm, a pretty great feature.

its also worth mentioning that django has a development (wsgi) server thats simple to run and great for working locally, deploying globally:

http://www.djangoproject.com/documentation/django-admin/#run...
no culture of librraries, your kidding right?
I agree, but want to underline that the military is pretty efficient. You CAN get fired from the military if you screw up, and compared to the armed forces of other empires, the US armed forces do a pretty good job of kicking ass when there's ass to be kicked, and doing pretty good research (ARPANET, jet travel, Manhattan project).
I thrive in a busy environment. When there is nothing to do, I start to worry about what other people do (or don't do).

Some of the comments on the article are better than the article itself (his manager, a multi-millionaire is now a 18-wheeler truck driver and a great anecdote about the genius who made the first Ethernet card)
GNU on cheap hardware beat out expensive proprietary software on expensive proprietary hardware. I don't think it was due to the language at all.
Apple's Next Step: 3D, Wii-Like Gaming?
""All that this graph reflects is that as taxes were decreased for the upper %1 over the past half century, they were increased on everybody else."

False."

I have to disagree. The Tax Reform Act of 1986 (as well as the cut of 64) disproportionately affected the lower income brackets. As a matter of record, tax rates are higher for the lower income brackets, and lower for higher income brackets than at any other point in US history.

To cite wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_Reform_Act_of_1986#Income_t...

"The top tax rate was lowered from 50% to 28% while the bottom rate was raised from 11% to 15% - the only time in the history of the U.S. income tax (which dates back to the passage of the Revenue Act of 1862) that the top rate was reduced and the bottom rate increased concomitantly."

"The "rich", the top 1%, are the prime drivers of wealth creation. They are the reason GDP grows faster than population growth."

Anyone who has capital gains from the labor of others. It is misleading to say that they are responsible for this growth themselves. Their wealth is invested in those in other income brackets, and used to drive up GDP. There's nothing morally wrong with this system.

I agree that incentives for the upper %1 have a disproportionate effect on GDP. That said, from an economic perspective, I happen to believe that the Laffer curve has a very steep right side, and that we are to the left of the peak. This means that by raising rates, more revenue can be collected. For example, the 1981 tax cut did not improve revenue collection.

I believe that we should raise rates in order to pay for progressive social programs. The upper %1 have benefitted from not only their skill and ability to drive wealth creation, but also a good deal of luck.

Progressivism is a form of social insurance. It is an acknowledgment that perhaps, through no fault of my own, I might have been born poor, or with skills not suited to the modern economy. It is the understanding that in the richest nation on earth, no one should want for food, shelter, or healthcare, no matter what their ability to contribute.

This is not rhetoric. It is a judgement of values, and an assertion of a logical argument.

Think of it in terms of human capital. Those born into poverty today lack the access to crucial resources, such as education, to contribute to the economy to their full potential. It is a colossal waste of human resources to allow these conditions to continue. Imagine if Bill Gates had been born in Compton instead of Seattle.
Social Software and Simplicity
Yea makes sense. I misunderstood Matt's initial post and have been off today.

Basically in order to come up positive at the end (with no rakeback) you'd have to win more and more the higher the rake % went.
Umm. If you don't already do it, remembering (recording in a safe place and (calling preferred over emailing) near the day of) the birthdays of people who are important to you and/or who you'd like to keep in very loose contact with is a platinum networking technique.
I was recently halfway through a project that was going strong in PHP, but I started reading about Django and Python and decided to port everything over: turned out to be a very good decision. Django keeps my code clean and Python keeps me inspired. While PHP is a good language, I would argue that it takes more self-control to program well in it.