skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I found this very interesting:

'the idea of... "unit tests" appeals to me only rarely... lots of time is wasted on activities that I simply never need to perform or even think about. Nothing needs to be "mocked up."'
The problem with listening to a radio is that it's going to go on all night, or until it wakes you up again.

I just play a podcast or a playlist of sleep music on my iPhone in speaker mode (no headphones).
I had a look at django recently. Last week actually. My advise would be to start coding. Make sure the thing is installed right and that you can talk to your database of choice and that your examples run.

Then start coding. It's not too difficult. Some of the things with template engine are a bit funny, so try and not write any big code here, move it to the view/model. But otherwise remember that google is your friend.

My app is a geo based app, but I couldn't get geodjango to play nice. So I just installed the libs and went with that.
http://showmedo.com/videos/video?name=1100000&fromSeries...
http://showmedo.com/videos/series?name=v7kABKL6R
http://blog.disqus.net/2007/03/11/a-django-primer/
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-django...
I often wonder ho this will scare over the next 10, 20, 30 years. It's hard enough now... by 2037 will there be any domain left?
I found the book "DOM Scripting" great. There's a brief intro to javascript syntax, then alot of focus on using javascript with the DOM and making sure you do it according to some best practices. The book finishes with an intro to ajax and is followed by a book called "Bulletproof AJAX" by the same bloke.
The gracefully degrading and unobtrusive use of javascript is important, and the author of these books preaches it well.
It's not always about size. Sometimes it's about memorability. I think we're way past the point of "web 2.0"-y names being memorable (though some will still make it out of obfuscation).

Take a word or two that work well with your idea. There are millions of these small combinations out there.
Computerized Combat Glove
Layering frameworks probably isn't a good idea to begin with. Prototype does seem, unfortunately, more powerful than jQuery, though, when it comes to class creation.
Liquid Vitamins
Information about liquid vitamins
Broadband 2.0 Poised to Reshape Web, TV
I know that marketing types tell us to ignore everything except .com, but is that still valid in 2008? There are a kajillion of TLDs available for global registration now, and many have lots of English-word domains available.
Startup 2.0 - 2008
3 hours ago | Pdf/scrib'd | comments

pdf or scrib'd depending on the outcome of the poll
I agree. JavaScript is a pretty crucial step before really tapping into AJAX, particularly if you want to execute scripts you retrieve via AJAX. I'm not sure if any script packages have that. Also, I find it useful to work from scratch, particularly for client-side stuff like CSS and JavaScript, so your users load the page faster.
Seconded - really excellent podcast, also a great way of catching up on what's happened in the past week.
For a slightly more broad-based look at this, try In Our Time: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/inourtime/inourtime_2002...

As for the article: yes, everyone's views are skewed by their personal perspective. The way to minimize that is to consider things rigorously - which is surely what philosophy is trying (not always successfully) to do.
Wow, this is an incredibly well-written article. I'm looking forward to seeing what happens; each of the situations will make for interesting reading :)
Ask YC: Which startup is really over-hyped?
Which startup do you think is really over-valued and over-hyped?
"Just" and a "few years ago" don't really mesh :) And jrock is 5 letters! Sorry if this is coming off differently than I mean it--I just think this comment is funny.
LessOns MotivAte LearnIng (includes puzzle, see if you can find the secret message)
So how does Twitter start earning some of this money back?

Ads are the obvious answer, but is that enough considering their massive SMS/API-only usage that wouldn't see ads?

Some kind of Pro version? (I suppose it could remove the API restrictions, but it seems to me like there would need to be more value there than just more API calls and more tweets per call.)

Combination thereof?
The 50 Million Dollar HP Inkjet Printer
Cheers for the honest and helpful feedback :)
Hmm, does that mean everyone who want to share their email should put it in their "about"? I just did so -- someone correct me if there's a better way to share.
Lots of good comments here... http://www.miniajax.com has some cool ajax "widgets" that can help you tackle certain problems with digestible chunks of code.
I think poepping's comments here are the most accurate so far (everyone else has been great also!). I myself replied to the author of the original piece with a tidbit that poepping elaborates on further. I said, "I would just add that I suspect many of my college-age and young-professional friends and colleagues spend significant percentages their cognitive surplus on not just the standard funny-media but the news. NPR, cnn.com, many news aggregate websites, etc. This seems a little more insidious than gin and sitcoms since they actually think they're benefiting in some way. I'm afraid I believe that they are not only wasting their cognitive surplus, but are also being loaded up with expert-vetted beliefs that they ingest with as little thought as with anything else."

Gin and sitcoms are only the beginning, we aren't through deploying all of our cognitive surplus yet, by far. I love hacker news, but I think I need to follow through with this understanding :D.
A 5 or 6 letter domain name isn't necessarily significantly better than a, say, 7 or 8 letter domain name. twitter.com is much better than twtr.com or similar.

The trick nowadays, unless you want some unpronounceable nonsense, is to conjoin two words in some way. Let's assume your site's main topic / product / quality is "widgets." You could go with things like: gowidgets, widgetstoday, hotwidgets, redwidgets, widgetman, widgetway, widgetinside, widgetwise.. you'll find a significant amount of domains with this technique that are free to register. It does take a lot of thinking and testing to find something that's good though! You can't just join anything.
Seconded. BustAName has proven very useful for me, especially in terms of coming up with word combos.
That's not a problem at all. If you compare the raw power usage, it's still both cleaner and more efficient to use electricity than gas. Also, gas engines aren't going to get that much cleaner, whereas the energy grid is only going to get cleaner with cleaner coal, nuclear, and renewables.

I wouldn't be surprised if in 15 years from now, if half of all new cars sold use electricity as their primary source. Energy independence should be a goal for every country, but especially for a country like the U.S. that uses so much oil.
To convert the document to HTML, you'd need to do OCR, and then some more formatting...
I guess I find the "Why $MyOtherPassion Make Great Entrepreneurs" a little tiresome. It's amazing how it works for painters, rock climbers, actors, pilots, family men, and so on. You know what I find it a lot like? Open Source. Guess why? Can't we just accept that having the drive to do stuff is transferable and move on?
http://sky.fm/ has about 40 genre specific channels with no commercials or DJs. There's an ambient channel (part of di.fm, I think) but also slow piano, classical, trance, and all sorts of things to suit your taste.
Boring Jobs Dull the Mind
Check out http://barenakedapp.com for Carson's from day zero to launch to sale intimate story of DropSend
This approach isn't as stupid as you might think. A lot, if not all, of the successful entrepreneurs I know would never make a product before they've sold it to somebody. This is a great approach because if you can actually sell the product before you've made it you know there is a market.
Look at a lot of examples and use the example code to help build a small web application that would be useful for you.
I found myself asking the same question as the poster a couple weeks back. I ended up starting with Dojo, which I was surprised to see didn't get a mention here at all, rather than jQuery. Out of curiosity, did anyone here compare the two and choose jQuery or is jQuery just more established?
Things to remember (and do, if it ever comes to that with your startup):

"Many public companies have a "staggered" board, where some directors are up for election or reelection each year, but the entire board is never up for reelection in a single year."

"A dual-class share structure is when a company's founding managers or investors own a different kind of stock that gives them voting control of the company even when they don't own a majority of the total shares."
Flying sailplanes is much better. And it costs a fraction of flying a powered airplane.

I doubt this is an option in downtown San Fransisco, but if you by chance live in an area where the airspace is a little less tight, soaring is a much cheaper and more "down to the basics" kind of flying. You are yourself fully responsible for finding sources of lift, and if you make a bad decision, you'll have to land.

Flying powered airplanes is a lot more forgiving in all senses - you get multiple shots at landing, you don't have to think too much about the wind direction for fear of getting on the lee side of a ridge, you don't always have to be within gliding distance of a suitable landing site, etc, etc. And you'll actually have to use the rudder pedals, all the time. These restrictions make soaring much more fun. And to top it off: if you do a low-pass over a hiking group in the mountains from a powered airplane, they'll likely think you're a jackass. If you do the same in a sailplane, they'll be surprised it is even possible to fly without an engine.

You do get a lot more freedom if you've got an engine, and I'm not bashing Cessna pilots here. Flying is fun no matter how. But if it's sports you're after, nothing beats gliding. How's this for an intellectual challenge: unless you navigate all around and circle at least every 20 minutes, you'll fall down?
If your company tanked tomorrow, would the experience have been worth it?
Unfortunately, search engine optimization is moving people to put even more topic-related words in URLs than they did 10 years ago when this was written.
The Whatchamacallit, Post Recession Phase Transition--Problems With the Get Big First, Monetize Later Strategy
Ignore the built in admin in the beginning. It is far more useful/flexible once you know how Django works in and out. I have seen quite a few people rely too much on it to do things that should have been implemented separately.
We do much of our web development at http://bitfauna.com in Lisp. Most of our clients don't care what language we use, and wouldn't know Lisp from Ruby or Python. At the end of the day, the client cares about whether the site is a) working b) economical.

Lisp is not all we end up doing for clients, and we have the odd job where we maintain and update legacy applications in C# or ColdFusion. But, we have never found an issue using Lisp for new projects.
I modded you up because I agree, but I also was in the situation where I was damaged by Java so I feel the need to respond.

Java is good, but I always felt so constrained when writing code. It just felt like I had to write so much extra junk code like getters and setters that it made rapid prototyping which I do a lot a hassle.

Python was a breath of fresh air, and is a great language for hacking around in. Java is very useful and I still use it quite a bit.
I wish we could save links like we can on reddit. I want to use his list (and other suggestions from this thread) as future reference (I am currently learning Ansi Common Lisp)
the reason for such high price is simply because with this printer one can print any amount of money he/she wish!
I don't think the author was claiming we should or would stop watching purely passive media. His statement was more that, on the whole, time spent passively receiving is cognitive surplus. If the floodgates are opened even a bit (1 hour in 100), the resulting output will be immense.

And this is only the beginning.
Actually, the obvious one is to charge people monthly, or per tweet (say a scheme like $5 per hundred tweets).
Can Africa produce a Google, Facebook or Microsoft?
are there hackers in africa and other 3rd world countries? and can they produce companies like google, facebook or microsoft?
I agree! Facebook is just a fad, it will go the way of Friendster, and Myspace
My answer would be a resounding no. Some things just cannot be bought. Everyone knows what things they would never do regardless of the money involved. If I could not do anything productive ever again, I'd be depressed.

Also, I think there is such thing as too much money. In terms of happiness, money provides diminishing returns. I believe that having enough to not worry about having to generate income is a good goal for most people. Beyond that, it can create a feeling of alienation with regards to the rest of the population, as you would be too far to the right on the wealth distribution curve and would have few peers. What do you get in return? Fame (if you want it) and access to extravagant toys. The real problems in life remain the same whether you have 10M or 1B: you will get old, you may have family or health problems, accidents happen, etc.

Alienation + productivity ban = sad life. No thanks.
The Great Ubuntu-Girlfriend Experiment
Any assembler programmer would know exactly what "secret shit" he's referring to. Microcode is highly processor-specific, lacks public documentation, and is loaded into the core as an opaque binary blob.
I don't doubt it . . .
One Guy Who Has Seen It All Doesn't Like What He Sees Now
I recommend that you get in touch with Clozure (www.clozure.com). They know more about contract Lisp work than just about anybody. There are many consultants who work, via Clozure, for companies doing work in Lisp.

Or, apply for a job at www.itasoftware.com. I love working there. See http://dlweinreb.wordpress.com/2007/12/24/16/.
Ask YC: What is your take on web2py?
i am new to web2py and i must confess that i have fallen in love with it. if you have used the framework before, what is your take on it?
On Managing A Community
Running Java in JavaScript
The Science of Thinking Smarter
The easy to get high risk funding simply isn't there, or almost anywhere in the world for that matter.
KLAXON KLAXON KLAXON

Dodgy Genera binaries are one thing - pirate Genera source could be poison. Any future project to implement anything resembling a Lisp Machine* might be vulnerable to accusations that the contributors had taken advantage of it. Reading or downloading or disseminating or advertising it seems like a Really Bad Idea to me. Though the article suggests that "the current legal status of the IP around the Lisp Machines is unclear", it seems that there's at least one institution with (at the very least) a good chance of vindicating proprietary claims to a large part of Genera in court - new Symbolics: http://www.symbolics.com

* Quite loosely, perhaps. For example, I don't think that "but my persistent, dynamic runtime doesn't implement Lisp!" is necessarily going to be a sterling defence against claims that it swiped architectural details from Genera.
No, but you'll definitely be able to get what you need, when you need it.
Perhaps painful is not the right word. It is extremely challenging and demanding, and it can take over your life and take a toll on your health. This is because you have to constantly inject energy into a startup or it will fade away. You get used to making tough decisions all the time with incomplete information, and uncertainty is the norm. Even when business looks great you know that things could change overnight for a number of reasons (market conditions, Google giving away what you are selling, etc).

I've been running a successful (as in, quite profitable) startup as a solo founder for the past three years. If my today self sent a fax to the past letting my old self know what it would be like... Well, that probably wouldn't change anything. Maybe we are just masochists.
What does age have to do with learning new ideas?
Haven't you heard? 2038 is when the world is going to end.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem
XEmacs is Dead! Long Live XEmacs!
I'm glad someone else said it. An article so great that you can't avoid voting it up, but is so thorough that there's nothing to comment on besides "READ THIS!"
System and Organizational Scaling
Average Web Page Size Triples Since 2003
Ditto. "Productive" is such a loose term. The question basically boils down to "would you take a billion dollars along with an interdiction from trying hard at anything that you think you might enjoy doing?"

Definitely no.
Right-Justified Navigation Menus Impede Scannability
Perhaps you meant: http://www.software-lab.de/down.html
Python was such fresh air that I felt Java was bloatware; no offense to Java, but I really loved the agile development with python that I downplayed java.
You should learn the basics before letting some higher-level framework do all the magic for you.

There are some good articles about AJAX on the Mozilla Developer Center: http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/AJAX

You can begin with http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/AJAX:Getting_Started

You can also find some good pointers to AJAX toolkits and examples there.
Our startup - Feedity ( http://feedity.com ) - allows commercial usage (as part of our Pro account). The service basically allows anyone to create RSS feeds from virtually any webpage, and use the feeds for personal subscription, mashups, or online publishing.
Satchmo's pretty cool. And just fyi to other new pythonistas(?) - the new o'reilly book Learning Python is good, but thought it was a bit too long and expensive; the online tutorials fare very well indeed :)
Internet connection is too high in most developing countries (let alone high speed internet). - thus a major drawback.

Sometimes, I just feel like cancer could have been cured 100% but the kid who was suppose to cure it was born in the wrong country ... (e.g. Iraq)
Of course not! I suppose I must have meant from the ground up :) Yet still amazed that caught more attention than anything else.
RESTful Service - Ajax Patterns
I'm not sure how this actually happens. I would assume everything goes from the DB. Did someone just enter an incorrect value?

Do they provide some type of API to the various vendors and one of them screwed up?

In any case, it can't be that hard to have some quality control checks. Why not just flag anything over $1M?
if you get stuck, hop into #django on irc.freenode.net. theres always someone around who can help out
The problem when entrepreneurs who created companies like DropSend and 37signals tell us to follow their "stay small/independent" model because it worked for them is that they represent the small pool of entrepreneurs who succeeded doing it. The is a classic selection bias. Although the argument you should stay small and independent and avoid VC money "feels" right, looking at just a few companies who succeeded isn't enough to prove it. I would like to see a real study comparing the success rate of VC funded startups vs. independent ones. It would research the success distributions for both models and highlight which model (small and independent vs. big and VC-funded) has the best risk/reward ratios for the founders. Until such a study is made, I will take the "avoid VC money" advice from those who made it work with a grain of salt.
Pain is definitely not the word. Pain is a very good excuse not to do it. Startup is in fact sort of like child birth. It is very emotional and no one can describe the experience (especially not men) unless you have been through it. I think few woman would recommend against having a child because of the pain even though there is tremendous amount of pain involved. They would tell you that you shouldn't be a mother if you are nor ready to be one. And like motherhood, entrepreneurship turns out to be a responsibility as well.
The showmedo was pretty good; also thumbs for the disqus one, seeing they have been Django substantially!
Click in the upper right corner of this page where it says "Novash" and then look for the "saved" link. Everything you upvote is there.
I hope the Ubuntu team sees this and learns from it. They've built a great system that I love using, and I'd really love to see it guide new users well enough that my wife would be happy to permanently switch.
Sorry, open-sourcers, but I have to second the emotion on GIMP vs. Photoshop. To say that GIMP's usability isn't in the same ballpark as Photoshop's is putting it mildly...
I guess you mean Internet conection costs being too high, also 3rd world countries are mostly beset with war, hunger and famine, with little or no basic infrastructure, so would be hackers would find it extremely hard becoming hackers.
friendfeed
Wow, the game sure does makes more sense once you've read this scorecard.

I would comment on one statement:

Microsoft could take its $44 billion and go buy virtually every new Internet company of any consequence founded in the last 10 years...

He means "every consequential Internet company that hasn't already been bought by Google or Yahoo". That's a rather different set.

Particularly in light of the fact that Microsoft doesn't seem to be motivated by a desire to grow their business through innovation. I sense that their real motivation here is to buy a big, expensive label that says INNOVATIVE and plaster it all over Microsoft in an effort to make the company seem relevant. So buying (e.g.) three tiny, modestly profitable, innovative photo-sharing sites, along with their brilliant founders, will not do; Microsoft wants Flickr. Because Flickr has the headlines.
I think it's possible and more likely so in a niche specific to developing countries like Malaria/HIV software, low-bandwith solutions, etc.

Otherwise it's much easier to produce a 37signals, just like everywhere else, I guess.

Disclaimer: I'm an African in Africa. In my day-job, I work for a non-profit developing a Rails application for managing delivery for HIV medication (baobabhealth.org)
What Apple gets about competition
"make the experience a lot more friendly for non-computer-literate people"

should be

"make the experience a lot more friendly for people who use Microsoft Windows extensively"
Ask YC: advice for a young programmer living in Africa
I am a web programmer living in Africa(Nigeria) and i will like to have some advice on anything that can help me imporve on my art(i.e. programming) and any other thing that may help, note: I only use open source software, e.g python,linux and mysql
There was a time where a sequence of assembly language instructions mapped directly to the processor's actions. But these days, assembly language instructions are cut up, reordered, and maybe interleaved with instructions from another thread; a conditional jump instruction that once had a constant cycle cost now depends on where that jump went the last dozen times and what is currently in cache.

What happened was that all the programs were being written in C, so the chip makers optimized their chips for C-generated assembly language. So now if you want to write fast assembly language, you need to write it more like a C compiler does -- which means in many cases that you might as well write it in C.
At least make urls all lower case. Consider how tedious it is spell out a url over the phone which happens quite often. "... dot com forward slash u s e r ... no, capital U on user ... upper case U ... user is upper case U ... no, the rest of user is lower case ...after the slash ... the forward slash... I'll start again..."