skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So I learned Lisp long before either Tcl or a "pop infix" language. Common Lisp has it all, and then some.

I learned Python and Tcl at roughly the same time. It looks to me like Python and Tcl got in a big tug-o'-war fight over Lisp's features, and the rope broke and each got half.

Python ended up with the data structures, but not the syntax. Tcl ended up with the syntax, but not the data structures. And advocates on both sides scream "how can you do anything without #{feature_x}?".

And I say "ah, Lisp has both!", and everybody gets together and says "oh, shut up, you".
US Fedgov Corp. already has a claim on 10-35% of my life income! I didn't even sign any contracts.
There should be another point under TALENT.

Set up shop near a college with a strong tech program.
Thanks for this. I'm investigating Memcached now along with distributable applications across servers
The problem seems to be that life is a long time and most people who invest want to see returns in a short time. I guess banks could do it, but it seems unlikely that they would be the one to start.

I once met someone who claimed to be an entrepreneur and said they would be a mentor to promising entrepreneurs for a promise of equity in everything that entrepreneur did for his life. It sounded a bit ridiculous to me at the time, and it sounds even more ridiculous now that I know more about investing.
A positive proclivity for exciting activity
all about zivity's latest upgrade; is it more pleasurable for you? ;-)
This is good for me; I'm studying for the JLPT 1, and writing a simple web application to assist in vocabulary drills. The application is part of my final project, so I'm not stopping development, but I'll definitely look into adding some of these timing methods into the system.

Also, just to let you know, I've found that studying kanji on their own is generally a waste of time; without context, they tend to lose their meaning quickly. Even if you ask Japanese people to explain kanji, they usually do so by referencing compounds in which that character is present.
What Have Been Your Experiences With SEOs?
This is exactly the business model which most private US universities work with, except with the minor difference that people are not required to give money back to their alma mater. As high as the cost of tuition fees may be, it's much less than what it costs universities to provide that education; the difference is made up by the fact that over their lives, many Americans donate significant fractions of their income to the institutions which educated them. (A more macabre version of this calculation is done at universities which provide free education to seniors because experience tells them that this is a good way to be written into someone's will.)

And of course we shouldn't forget governments: By providing free primary and secondary education, and (in most developed countries) free health care, governments provide per-capita funding on the order of hundreds of thousands of dollars -- and then call their annual dividends on equity "taxes".
I'm not sure the Tcl code in the ACS was a good example of anything...

Pragmatism?

And, yes, I understand that nobody really chose Tcl at the time... nor would anyone choose Tcl again. It was more a matter of lemons and lemonade. And not always very tasty lemonade. ;)
Guess I need to turn up the sarcasm sensors!
Yes, please. Far too many people on news.yc are too self-conscious about self-promotion. If we aren't interested in the link we won't follow it. Just post it already.

At the very least, put it in your profile.
that's what EIR's do :)
San Francisco is a great city. But there are other great cities too. I for one, love where I live in Toronto. There is a general perception that Toronto is just another American city except it happens to be in Canada. That is flat out inaccurate and my colleague one office over who just emigrated from California and another American colleague who setup shop here after getting his Ph.D. from Harvard will attest to that. At a conference I attended yesterday, a British speaker asked which day "here" was fireworks day and some Americans piped up "July 4th" to which a whole bunch of us miffed Canadians shot back "July 1st!!!! Geez you're not in the U.S.":-) Anyways, Toronto is not just another American city although I have heard it shares a lot of characteristics with San Francisco culturally.

I live right downtown in Toronto, and while I have a car, I like to walk or bike places. I managed to find a great office that is a 5 minute walk from where I live and it is situated about 500 m from two major subway lines, close to the biggest university and one major college, a hop-skip-and-jump from the museum and art gallery, and countless other great places. I walk out my front door and within 200 m is a great café, a patisserie, a pub, health food restaurant (with food that actually tastes good), etc. I know more of my neighbours here than I did when I lived in a Toronto suburb.

I don't think the key is to live in San Francisco. I think the key is to get the hell out of the suburban hell holes that riddle North America like cancerous spots on an otherwise healthy lung, and find cities in which you can live that offer culture, art, helpful business communities (Google "Toronto BIAs"), understanding government, and diversity with respect to people and industries (e.g., don't live in a one-hit wonder industry city). I can understand that the proximity to the Valley is a huge selling point of San Francisco. You have to remember most of the people telling you to move to San Francisco are doing so because they want to invest in you and they can only do that if they can keep a close eye on you. If you're not looking for investment from those people, then live somewhere else.

I mean, there's some cool stuff coming out of Toronto. Check these guys out: http://www.ideeinc.com/.
Mind Hacks: Get Consistent Mental Energy with Smaller, Frequent Caffeine Breaks
taxes aren't dividends, they are taken by force. they decide how much they feel like taking this year, and you pay or go to jail. it's not a business transaction.

and of course they still take tax money from people who never went to their schools.
Well, the release early and release often mantra still stands. Make something basic but that works well and get it out - tell people about it. Tell us about it. Take the feedback you get and if you agree adopt it and grow this way. Run a blog on your site and let people know about your plans.

Have a read of this. I found it interesting:

http://www.niallkennedy.com/blog/2006/05/mark-fletcher-blogl...
I guess pragmatism is valid, but there were quite a few half-baked modules tossed in there just to make it look like the toolkit was more comprehensive than it really was. Also, I think openACS expunged them, but in the initial releases at least 25% of the code was dedicated to Philip's rambling comments about how a particular function would be much more elegant in common lisp.
User Experience Design of Ubiquitous Computing Devices - Cs160-sp08
Sure I'll take a million right now, you can have 5%... if invested wisely the interest on that is enough for me to live on...
Warren Buffet mentioned something similar... If you were to invest in the future success or bet on the failure of someone, what traits do they have?

You probably wouldn't pick the smartest or dumbest and the traits are probably habits. You can learn good habits and unlearn bad ones.
I swear you guys read my email. Please stop.

Apr 11 (11 days ago)

for what amount would you sell 1% of your future income?
i should set up a stock market for individuals....
lets say how much would you sell 1% of your next 10 years income

Response:

Haha that would be interesting.

Of course if someone sells more than 90% of their income, then they probably won't earn anything :)
"A revolutionary company has to think bigger."
Your parents did that for you when they signed the birth certificate. :)
That is why I can't stand California. Everybody is trying to "sit next to interesting people" looking for an opportunity to "break into circles". Quotes from here:
http://andrewchen.typepad.com/andrew_chens_blog/2007/02/how_...

I especially dislike this common "you must have a blog" bullshit.
How To Hire Outside The Box
I couldn't find a link for you online but do you remember the story about how the competitors of Feynman's plated pen company were intimidated? They thought 'omg an american company would be having millions of dollars in funding and army of PhDs in lab coats' So they shut their company down. The company Feynman worked for actually had like $15 in funding or something like that.
Hmmm... you need a plan, man... Before you pen that press release, step back a nd put a plan together. Without knowing what your site is/does, we cannot even begin to suggest anything. Not that you would/should take marketing advice from us.

Don't shoot from the hip on this. Put a business plan that makes business sense. I stress "business" because it sounds like you are a techie. It's not so much "build it and they will come." It always pays for it to have a strategy in place.

Anyway, you don't even state that your site is intended to be a business, so yeah, maybe sitting down and writing a press release is the best thing to do.
Microsoft Unleashes Salesforce.com Contender
Hopefully you are not making a decision based on the results of this poll... It cannot possibly have any value other than entertainment value.
Seth's Blog: You're right!
Microsoft has had some impressive new releases, and some outright flops. Will this be a Surface or a Vista? The biggest thing Microsoft has going for it is that Office (and especially Outlook) still has a strangehold on the enterprise market.
I think this makes a better case for the anti-Bay Area argument than DHH does to be honest. :-)
Most people want returns in a short time does not mean all good investments make returns in a short time nor does it imply all good investors look just for short term returns.
Humor: Worst Captcha Ever
Wow. That is a stunningly bad captcha. Just really bad ... I sometimes wonder how these things went from trying to solve a simple problem, to creating unusable provisioning processes for users everywhere...
(A) Make it really obvious how to contact you via email.

(B) Answer the emails... Quickly, positively, and gratefully.

(C) Create a FAQ and make that easy to find.

(D) Update the FAQ as you answer emails.

(E) Update your site based on the feedback.
Good work! A few notes:

Use a colored header and a footer. There are two important reasons to do this: 1) it keeps the non-editable content seperate from the editable content, which makes your site's function clearer. 2) it maintains the webpage metaphor that people have grown accustomed to. My reaction to your site for the first half-second was "wtf?", which I mainly attribute to the fact that the page design gave no indication of where I should look to understand it.

Use directional arrows instead of a paw for the "move" icon. The paw looks friendly, but it makes no sense ;)

Demonstrate the fonts in the drop-down font menu. Ditto for sizes.

Don't allow the "People on ClutterMe" section to load more than one person with the same photo.
By providing free primary and secondary education

It just slays me that people could type such a sentence.

"Free"

As in, the money is stolen.

"Free"

As in, they force you to go there.
Nintendo has been the leader of the videogame hardware market continuously since the NES days. Though they lost the fifth- and sixth-generation console wars to Sony, their >90% share of the handheld market was enough to secure them as top manufacturer through the late 90s and early 00s.
The "networking class" in Silicon Valley is indeed one of the lamest things about the culture. However, if an EIR works for a good VC firm they can be useful to know. In fact, the only money I've ever raised was from manipulating an EIR.
What's your site? Let us check it out and if we like it you know you're on the right track. If we don't we can tell you how to improve it.
I had the same discussion with a good friend a while back. We were thinking of starting an entire new market where people can sell some shares in themselves and then those shares can be traded. Some issues that we though about (I'll add more as I remember them):

- As author mentions, once you get paid you have less incentive to work.

- In order to make an investment, you would need access to confidential information - risk of diseases, test scores, etc. Not sure the ethical/privacy implications of this.

- The type of people willing to sell may likely be the people who don't have faith in themselves - why would you want to support that?
This may be just for fun, but it's rather ominous and appropriate for the times. Daydreaming about VC and acquisition rather than profits and running actual businesses.
Ask YC: The Carrot or the Stick?
I'm getting close to a major update to my website. Right now I think it's
okay or maybe good, but after the update I think it will be a great site. The
kind that I hope people will pay for. I'm planning on introducing a paid
membership, and as such, I need to figure out how to get my users to switch
from free acounts to paid accounts.

I've been classifying my ideas as "carrots" or "sticks". By my definition, an
effective stick should force a large percentage of users to pay or leave.
For example, a 30-day free account. That's a very effective stick, at the end
of 30 days every user will either pay or leave.

By contrast, an effective carrot will induce a smaller percentage of users to
pay while not forcing any (or few) to leave. For example, I may be very
happy with my free account, but when I see that I can have access to really
cool bonus feature X if I sign-up for a paid membership, I just can't resist.

The trick is that the carrot can't be core to the application. If a free
account is crippled because really important feature Y is only available to
paying members, you're looking at a pay or leave situation and, thus, a stick.

If your users don't interact with each other -- that is, there's no network
effect -- I think a strong stick is obviously best. There's no benefit to
keeping users around in free accounts. Best for them to convert to a paid
account or leave. But, if there is a network effect, then, I think, it
becomes much more complicated. Should only carrots be used? Or, perhaps a
gentle stick?

I'd love to hear examples of effective carrots or sticks. What works? What
doesn't? Is it better to be nice and use only carrots? Or, is it better to
force the issue with a stick?
I just moved from Seattle to NYC after 5 years, and although it's only been a few weeks -- it's been nice to be in a city where there are other dominant industries other than technology.

San Francisco (and to a lesser extent, Seattle) does a great job of attracting the best and brightest technical people from around the world ... but that doesn't make for a very intellectually diverse set of people (both socially and professionally).

Even though I've only been here for a few weeks, I've been very impressed with just how many very smart, accomplished people I've met that are outside the tech industry -- that all comes from the fact that New York being the city to be in for a variety of fields (finance, media, advertising, fashion)

For me, it's a great lifestyle benefit that I wasn't getting in Seattle.
2) How much is the data Facebook has (the social graph, demographic information) worth to third parties?

To the right third party -- very. One sinister example is the government. Nice way to track dissenters, or round up everyone of religion/political party/group X, ala WWII.

Trying to get away, because of deserting the army/dodging the draft/avoiding arrest for civil disobedience? They have a convenient list of all your friends and family you might stay with.

Did you win the lottery? Someone can worm their way into your social circle by befriending the right people on your list. Or an entrepreneur might get an introduction to a VC that way.

But the main thing is it can be abused to surveil people. Do you trust your government?
Yet Another Blog about Startup School (This one's pretty good)
New blog tackling Cloud Security
whoo... tough crowd :)
They should have told the real reason they brought duct tape aboard Apollo 17 - in case there was a screaming baby in the row behind them.
When someone invests in something there is an implicit assumption on both sides:

As a buyer/investor, I assume that your present value is greater than your price. This is what happens when people buy undervalued stocks. In better cases, I assume that your value after investment is greater than your present value by more than the amount of the investment. That is, by investing in you, I add more value than the amount of the investment. This is what Y Combinator does.

As a seller, you make the inverse assumption. Either you have lost faith in the value of what you sell, or you believe that with the investment, you'll be able to make more than you would otherwise.

In the case of life equity, the first case is tough to see. If you believed in your life equity's enough to sell it, you wouldn't sell it. So, you must be seeking the second case: If only I had more money now, I could make more money later, greater than the percentage of the funds I need to give back to my investor. From this we can assume that a potential investor would want a justification of how you will earn that money. We're effectively reduced to the same venture funding and loan structures that already exist today.

The only other way life equity would work would be as a scam: If life equity investors took advantage of bad-at-math or desperate sellers. This is actually the same as third-world loan sharks, only we're calling it an investment instead of a loan.
I don't think this post isn't geared toward those who are building a company right away. Rather, I think the target audience is people who want to move to SF/Silicon Valley, meet people, and get on the right direction to build something at a later date.

Ironically I may use some of this advice when I move away from SF and to Seattle -- the opposite of what Andrew did -- later this year. :)
There's a third question, though, with regard to optimism about Facebook's future, and that's the quality of its end-user experience and the likelihood it will retain its current users and traffic and continue growing.
I love this article, kudos Ryan!

I was about to do similar research before committing our next project of 5TB data space with SimpleDB, ouch! It would have been a disaster. I will probably use the S3 just for mass storage nothing else.

We want more of these unbiased articles on HN.
I can't even count the times airlines or web hosting companies try to tell me I'm wrong, and that that's the way it's supposed to be. A little sympathy goes a long way.

On the other hand, when I gave feedback on kayak.com (a much better version of priceline), they said the CTO would personally reply ... and he did! And that made me like them enough to write about them here :)
lol, I just received my college's invitation to Alumni weekend next month. One of the 2 adult education classes is "Estate Planning 101". I guess that's a nicer name than "Let Us Teach You How to Give Us More Money".
can you explain your site more? I also have to say I like githubs pay for privacy or space.
"completed development"??

How did you decide it was 'complete'?
I'm glad you enjoy those wonderful Chicago winters, DHH.
This reminds me of the woman in France who, in her eighties, sold her house to a man in his fifties. He had to pay her every month until she died and then he would get the house.

She lived to be 122. He paid for the house 4 times and then died first.
How is this an advantage over loans, bonds, scholarships, patrons, angel investors and all the other investment options people have? Most people don't want to get a perpetuity as a loan when there are much better options out there!
I think I'd start by watching the startup school video http://www.omnisio.com/startupschool08/david-heinemeier-hans...
Neither really. Like I said in the poll text, I'm just curious to know how people on this forum are personally valuing their startups at the moment. Do we have a bunch of people who would sell for $100K or a bunch of $10M+ people? I just thought it might say something interesting about the community.
I'm assuming the site you're speaking of is vying.org, from your profile. Why don't you just ask a straight forward question pertaining to the site specifically? You'd get much more tangible advice.

Personally, as a user, if you gave me a 30-day free account, I'd either find a way to game it, or just leave once the free period is over. I get the whole DHH schtick with charging users for a nice service, but free is free, and I don't think many people would pay for a game site, unless something about your site shines far beyond the multitude of other web game sites, if you're referring to vying.org.
Does Octopart honor robots.txt on Digi-Key's site as it crawls it?
I was waiting for a script to finish running, and thought it might give interesting results.
Ugh, the one thing I really hate about Canadian cities is the WEATHER! (I live in Canada) It's nice to wear shorts and a t-shirt! I feel better when it's warm most of the time vs. 3 months! I rather live in California for the weather alone.
there were quite a few half-baked modules tossed in there just to make it look like the toolkit was more comprehensive than it really was.

Has there ever been an open source toolkit that didn't look like this? I assure you that Drupal is just the same, only the half-baked modules are numbered in the thousands...

Your statement about Philip's rambling comments is both ROTFL-funny and 100% believeable. ;) Hey, just because you're being a pragmatist doesn't mean you can't complain about it at great length...
Information overload - a VC's view
InfoQ: 8aweek on how they work
Have we made enough to recoup the six months we could have been consulting full-time? No.

Are we making enough within two weeks of the site launch that we're thinking about never consulting again? Yes.

-PJ Hyett
I've been to Argentina and I'm deeply in love with Buenos Aires – but heard that it's getting rather expensive living there fulltime. How is the job situation and such, for foreigners?
forcing users to leave is a hard thing for me to comprehend as being the "answer" to your question. So I think you should avoid most Sticks
DigitalJournal Rev Shares With Their Citizen Journalists
Total BS, Andrew.

"My general take on it is that ideally, you want to hang out with people who are a lot smarter than you ;-) Because of this, if you are hanging out with junior entrepreneurs all day (for example, the YCombinator folks) then you might not learn as much as if you spent time with people who have done a lot more than you."
I'm surprised that noone's really talking about money here. The Bay Area has one of the highest costs of living of any city in the country. That means its going to take that much more of your time to work, to make money, and to live. If you're spending your time working to live, that means you're not using that time to work on your projects.

Right now I'm taking a culture hit. Living in Worcester, MA certainly doesn't put me at the center of startup culture, but Boston and Providence are close enough. I can take the bus/train and find myself surrounded by technically oriented people. A low cost of living in this town is what allows me to work less and affords me the free time to work on my projects. To me, this time to work is alot more valuable.

(Oh, there is culture in Worcester. You just have to dig. :)
Wow, he really rolled up the day nicely. I especially liked the line about Jessica Livingston having an "elementary school teacher alter-ego". So true... could there be a more pleasant person?
Sent to the owner of our company, with a response I wanted to send a customer basically following the advice. The owners' response "I don't think his question even deserves a response" (was questioning our pricing) ... scares me :( I think all questions deserve a response (-rhetorical)