skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Oh this seems interesting and I hope that unlike Reddit posts about PHP this will not degenerate into another flame post. So first off I would initially recommend using PHP as it is something you already know. Learning Python is cool(although I must confess I'm more of a Ruby user) but in the interest of getting something up and running quickly. And factor in that you already know PHP.

It would do you some good to learn a good PHP framework to rapidly build your app and get something out there immediately. A framework not only makes you look smart but it requires you to write code that does not merit you getting stabbed in your sleep. Ergo good PHP code.

Now we can all wax rhetoric that PHP does not support Functional idioms, brain dead functions, and name spaces. But in the interest of rapid prototyping and ease of deployment PHP comes first in mind. PHP frameworks now most notably Symfony(used by Yahoo to rewrite Delicious), CakePHP, Akelos, Kohana and my personal favorite CodeIgniter changed my opinion of PHP. You can easily abstract away logic using these frameworks. And they picked out some functions out of PHP's bewildering list of functions so that you have a solid base to work with.

So in a nut shell it's possible to write good PHP code but you have to exercise some discipline for it not to turn into spaghetti code.

Another reason you might want to carefully choose a language is the type of application you want for it. Let me explain, my company makes web based applications that customers can host within their corporate server. Now I don't want to waste much time trying to configure the server to run a specialize application. In fact I need something that can be installed and used right away in the shortest amount of time. So my choice of using PHP is more of a business decision as well.

So just weigh things out and ask yourself what do you wish to accomplish. Right tool for the right job.

edit: oh please consider reading this book http://www.manning.com/reiersol/ makes a good study on how to write good PHP code.
10 Reasons Why Documentation is a Startup Secret Sauce
Amazon S3 – Backstory for Nerds – Part 2
Oh wow, a stainless-steel MacBook would just be sexy.
I think the bigger implication of this is not that the costs for startups are now 0. The couple of bucks for a hosted server should not have been that much of an impedient for a startup.

Rather, this enables a new category of applications, personalized web applications for non-programmers. Instead of getting a blog on wordpress.com, in the future I will upload a wordpress image to google. Eveybody can have their private bug tracker easily now. And so on. I think there will be opportunities for new applications, or for enhanced user-friendliness of existing applications.
Yeah create_function is a half ass attempt for the use of lambda functions. I would not recommend using it.
New Yahoo! Pipes PHP serialized output renderer
That has always been my gripe with PHP. Perhaps by PHP8 we will begin to see things differently. That being said you just have to exercise some restraint so that the "monkey" behaves properly.
Richard Dawkins to appear on Dr. Who
If anything I think its a bad thing, people will start to assume 'beta' means fairly stable and usable.
If you are using a loop, you're doing it wrong
Nokia Showcases Nokia Tube; An iPhone Challenger
wow, awesome! seriously, just give this guy ++ on an infinite loop :-P
Oh, you're right, I had missed that. Yeah, that's dumb. I can't think of any iterators that would leave useful information in the parameters, either.
The great thing about merit based society is that non merit based societies crumble under their own incompetence. As long as the meritocracy can avoid getting sucked down with the incompetents, it will rise to the top. If it doesn't, is it really a meritocracy?
So why are you still using Ruby?

I am only recently trying it out, and it seems to me Rails gives the line number of errors.
Aggregation vs. Simplication
I recall now that I actually coded our final project in the (ha ha) AOLServer Python API:

http://cc.msnscache.com/cache.aspx?q=73022978418185&mkt=...

(real website down, check back later I guess...)
America's Mortgage Problem And Sarbanes-Oxley
Yeah. The way I see it, the purpose of the US is to make an environment friendly for smart people, not to create smart people. Looking at our history, I don't think a lot of our innovation is home grown. This explains why our universities are considered so good while our education system sucks balls.
Easy, free GTD in Leopard
Important topic, worthless post.
The most common english words
I use http://polliwog.sourceforge.net open source, runs on Java. Not suitable for large websites since it provides a LOT of information about your site.
Put aside the company failing, which is an obvious risk that you already knew about.

Assume the company does moderately well, and is sold at a premium.

There is nothing that practicably prevents the company from diluting shares at that point and distributing the new shares among current employees, to the disfavor of everyone who left.

In fact, that seems to happen regularly. Companies get sold, and non-employee non-VC stockholders get nothing because of how the deal is structured.
I think many enterprise managers have a philosophically hard time with this notion. And for some business models, perhaps they are correct to be concerned. In general, I think async with error correction mechanisms is the way to go.
I developed my first web app last year. I decided to use python as I already knew it. I didn't find python got in the way at all. In fact MOST of the code for the site is in preprocessing data and python worked equally well for that as it did serving content. PHP developers I've spoken to say that while PHP could have done the processing, python was a better choice.

Just thought I'd mention that.

good luck.
Take Control of Your Maps (mapping without Google)
Accessible Data Visualization with Web Standards
Google raised more than 25M USD in its first year in a series A round, the largest round done by a YC backed company I could find was 12M (Loopt) and that was a B series round.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y_Combinator

http://www.google.com/press/pressrel/pressrelease1.html
Lock-in? Google "obtains no right, title or interest" in what is created; the creator is responsible for what is created and can take it down and host it elsewhere.

From the "Google App Engine Terms of Service" (http://code.google.com/appengine/terms.html):

"6.3. Except as provided in Section 8, Google acknowledges and agrees that it obtains no right, title or interest from you (or your licensors) under these Terms in or to any Content or the Application that you create, submit, post, transmit or display on, or through, the Service, including any intellectual property rights which subsist in that Content and the Application (whether those rights happen to be registered or not, and wherever in the world those rights may exist). Unless you have agreed otherwise in writing with Google, you agree that you are responsible for protecting and enforcing those rights and that Google has no obligation to do so on your behalf."
Professor Randy Pausch's life, 'Lecture' goes from Web to book
Ask HN: How long will it take, while Micro$oft starts to work on Unix based OS?
...
I hate to be stickler, but bright young women take these courses, too.
Nice article. Author doesn't mention one key point: your documentation MUST BE SINCERE. Nothing is more hilarious (and will derail you faster) than some B.S. mission statement on the front door.
New fully automated restaurant w/o waiters
I think if you keep publicly pressing the issue pg will be less inclined to relent.
There was a seed round before that to get them started which was a lot larger than most YC startups take. Anyway, what does the size of the round have to do with what you are trying to prove?
The code written and the content created is not the property or problem of Google. Read the Terms of Service (especially section 6) at:

http://code.google.com/appengine/terms.html
Birth of Newspapers, part 1: The very first newspaper
I prefer the loose coupling of Amazon's web service components. But that said, this is certainly an interesting development with a lot to offer. Python wouldn't have been my language of choice but it's a logical choice for Google.

I giggle at the fact that your users will end up creating Google accounts. Very smart on their part, but feels more than slightly underhanded :). Then again, maybe I'm just bitter since I got waitlisted, ha!
As someone who's used to Scheme (lexical scoping), I have to say that's pretty bizarre.

That's my second disappointment with Ruby blocks. The first was learning you could only have one block argument.

Do they resemble first-class objects at all? Can you assign a variable to a block? If you were to assign

{ |i| x += i }

to a variable outside that enclosing scope, and then used that variable in that scope, would i be overwritten in that call to the block?
And you thought money can't buy happiness!
It's surprising to me that this is getting voted up because data on common English words is easily available on the web and well known to anyone who's done basic crypto. stuff.

http://esl.about.com/library/vocabulary/bl1000_list1.htm
"you could only have one block argument"

Do you mean one method can only have one block?
Having only read about Ruby and not coded in it, I'm not sure what the correct terminology is. I'm talking about doing something like this:

someObject.someMethod({block1},{block2})
Top 10 Traits of a Rockstar Software Engineer
Still absolutely don't get it.
Unless perfume.com is about to sell things on ebay :/
ebay seller tools != Affiliate marketing

Oh well, good luck to you all :)
The syntax that you hate will grow on you. If you're like me, at some point you'll wonder why other languages do not use whitespace effectively. It may be annoying at first, but when you revisit code later it makes it much more readable imho. If you're referring to other syntactic details, many grow on you, but luckily there is a fair amount of flexibility in coding style.
Should read: The most common english words in rss feeds. I would imagine that it is not necessarily representative of the entire language. Specifically I doubt 'government' is the second most used word over 10 letters (although I obviously have no evidence :) ).
Webtrax (http://www.multicians.org/thvv/webtrax-help.html) is a good open-source tool.
Why downloading Firefox is like getting into college
Launching a startup gets even easier
Divya Narendra set to win lawsuit against Facebook
Code question? Search seven hundred million lines of open source code
"3. Continuously Refactors Code"

Good. At least I'm not the only obsessive compulsive refactorer.
I don't understand why Seth is pro-college on the blog all of the sudden. Every single one of his books takes at least a few passing swipes at college, and some of them downright trash the institution in general. I understand that this is about the social signaling value of school, not the pedagogical function. However, this is what is said in The Big Moo about the social signaling value of school only three years ago:

“The new secret of success is that winning the game has absolutely nothing to do with hard work and paying your dues. In the old days stable industries offered young workers a pyramid structure. If you did the work and stuck it out you’d move up.”

“In our fast-moving media crazed culture, the opposite is now true. Those who fit in now won’t stand out later. Those who follow the rules are never noticed - because the system has broken their spirit. There’s plenty work for the undifferentiated masses, so you can have as much as you are willing to handle. The fast-rising stars are those that question authority and refuse to do what’s done before.”
The great Google gold rush
Campus Bandwidth Limits Stifle Potential
Damnit, the one night of the week I wasn't online. Just signed up for the wait list.
"rockstar" - past its sell by date?
You can't pass more than one block literal to a method. But you can certainly pass multiple blocks; they're objects, just like anything else. Just add the token "lambda" to your expression:

def foo(x, y); x.call(y.call); end
foo(lambda {|x| 2+x}, lambda {1}) # => 3

It seems to me that in this case, the language degrades to approximately the same level as Common Lisp.
It depends what you want to do with it ultimately. I use both - generally PHP for web-based front-ends and Python for heavy lifting (crawlers, text processing etc)
Well, personally I'm going to stick with AWS for now. Firstly out of loyalty, but secondly because Amazon has great support. Ok, ok - Google have brought this out and are focused on Python for now, but that shouldn't be a reason :) I use Python on AWS btw
Personally, I'm suspicious of anyone who doesn't document what they did. If you are unable to take the time to leave a trail of your thought processes and reasons then the understanding you claim to have about your domain is suspect. The only exception is if it's throw away code.
Can The Y Combinator Idea Turn Into A Movement?
This definitely does seem like the Top 10 Traits of a Rockstar Java Developer. Agile, unit tested, gang of four patterns, refactored, usability-engineered.

I guess my favorite part is that it ends in "knows basic computer science". Yeah, that's good to know. Also, the rest of computer science can come in handy. But definitely, read Getting Things Done and Refactoring first; that'll definitely be more helpful than LALR parsing for getting forms hooked up to databases.
Similar coverage, a bit dated now, but I think clearer:
http://overstimulate.com/articles/2006/08/24/amazon-does-it-...
Impossible to say. Is there any evidence that Microsoft is working on a Unix-based OS? Why would they do that, when they still have a stranglehold on the market with Windows?
That brings up new issues as you now of 2 Account classes with identical functions in some areas and slightly changed functions in others so keeping fixes up to date can be an issue.

IMO you can build an interface and an abstract class that implements that interface with 2 subclasses for checking Account vs IRA Account but I think the abstract classes works just fine on it's own.
Your first example works fine until void a() Parent.a() calls Parent.d() and you need the code to call B.d().

An interface also works but you end up cutting and pasting a lot of the same code between the two classes.
Google App Engine - Changes Everything
i thougth your where talking about the grand theft auto "rockstar" company, that would have been interesting ;)
"GQL is a query language that is used with the Google App Engine datastore."

"Our Users API allows you to authenticate users with Google Accounts"

from some of the quotes earlier,

"you cannot write to the filesystem - due to distributed nature of the system, you have no idea where the file will end up."

"you cannot open sockets! you can only use the limited API that they provide (URL & mail sending API). Forget about Twisted :("

"no threads (Google says they provide scalability in other ways)"

To me looks very specifically that applications built on this framework can not be transferred without a major to full rewrite, thats very much lock in, it doesnt make it easier for google to buy startups, it makes them easier to no longer need to buy them. your users become their users. your applications become part of the google infrastructure.

This looks like the most dangerous and hopfully damaging thing google have done so far
Could you give a more complete example? I'm getting sane behavior in Ruby 1.8.6:

irb(main):010:0> f = lambda { i = 100; x = 0; [1,2,3].each { |i| x += i }; x}
=> #<Proc:0x05011b34@(irb):10>
irb(main):011:0> f.call()
=> 6
The code and user base (the two most valuable parts of a startup) will still exist and could still be ported to another hardware architecture.
The point is not to code the next great sorting algorithm the point is to know what sorting algorithm to use.
Seth must be starting to run out of things to talk about. If he had simply stated the fact that 50% of Squidoo users who make pages on Squidoo use Firefox to do so that would have been fine, Equating going to college with downloading and installing Firefox is a weak reference.
You should be careful about that "minorities" thing. Jews and Asians are minorities whose test scores are above the national average -- I think they would be very surprised to find that their collective underperformance was somehow an issue.

I think this kind of debate won't be fruitful as long as we're afraid to say precisely what we mean, and have to talk about 'diversity' or 'minorities'. Look at the Harvard math department: http://www.math.harvard.edu/people/senior.html . You've got Gottleib and Hironaka and McMullen and Yau and basically all the proof you need that they are pulling successful people from many backgrounds. They have a higher fraction of actual minorities than the rest of the country!
When to stop refactoring?
We all love continuous refactoring (... ok, not all).
But what happens when that becomes an obsession? I assume no code will never be 100% perfect. When should you stop refactoring? and ... continue ahead with more coding?
It's good to see that an upgrade to approximately the power of CL is possible in this case. Still, I feel a little let down. When I first saw Ruby block literals, I said to myself, "Hey, that's a great, concise syntax for lambda. Languages really are getting more lisp-like all the time." But now I know that Ruby block literals aren't really lambda. It does look like Ruby lambdas really are lambdas, though.
Qassia take Bootstrapping to the extreme | Edge Venture
I think the idea of treating Firefox users differently is interesting.
After almost 24hours, here's the update submission. I will keep this open until 11:59PM EST APRIL 8th and then declare the winner!

Please prepare a 125x125 jpg for your ad space.

1) Embought.com 6pts

2) bug.gd 5pts

The rest in no particular order

markkit.net 2pts

mytipnetwork.com 2pts

www.seeyourhotel.com 2pts

www.debatewise.com 2pts

spydentify.com 1pt

feedity.com 1pt

newscred.com 1pt

thephotostream.com 1pt

streamfocus.com 1pt

askurpals.com 1pt

mobtropolis.com 1pt

dailygreenproject.com 1pt
" since the SAT doesn't correlate with academic performance at all beyond a slight correlation with GPA "

Did you know that weight doesn't correlate very well with linebacker performance in the NFL? It could be that a 350-pounder is just as effective as a 150-pounder, and there's some pro-fat discrimination -- or it could be that you're talking about correlation within a school, which chooses people on the basis of multiple criteria including SATs, such that their students are about equal academically.

Consider: a school could look at two people, one of whom gets a perfect math SAT and a 500 verbal, and another of whom gets 600 on each and writes a killer admissions essay. The former student gets a 3.5 focusing on math and CS. The latter gets a 3.5 taking English and Philosophy. This is the kind of evidence schools find; that people play to their strengths, so as long as they're of similar average talent, they'll have similar success, even if an individual measure of that talent doesn't correlate with their relative success among people who by the average of many measures, are very similar.

This has been a well-known problem with the studies you cite for over a decade.
That does not answer the question are they using a random selection of 13 year olds vs a random selection of 17 year olds or a self selecting group of 13 year olds that take the text vs a random selection of 17 year olds who take the test.
We have a concept we call our "Bus Number." It's the number of people that know how to do what you do, or have been briefed on what you're doing, so that if you're run over by a bus, they can pick up what you're doing. It's a grim concept, but it highlights another point: what happens during the startup period should a key person fall ill, or die? Good documentation could save the shop and make sure your dream lives, at least for a while longer.
""rockstar" - past its sell by date?"

Yup. The only people I've worked with who thought they were rock stars were, in fact, prima donnas: temperamental, difficult to work with, unlikely to help. I'd hire programmers in the same way I vote for politicians: look for the boring, able, hard-working ones, because they'll be a lot less trouble than the exciting, mercurial, "I'm so gifted I don't have to try" ones ;)
Well we already get treated differently (badly) by IE-only sites! It would be nice to see the tables turned.
I'm sure the more astute startups out there already do this for the iPhone. Firefox would not that be big of a leap.

Special treatment? A/B Testing - where A = Firefox (with new power user features) B = Everything else. Feedback / request for enhancement links?
I took a look at your source, their numbers actually seem to imply the SAT is very good.

They mention that a 100 point increase on the SAT corresponds to a 0.1 boost on college GPA. Assume a linear relation: this means that a 1500 SAT student might expect a 3.0 GPA, while a 1000 SAT student might expect a 2.5 GPA. That's actually a great predictor.

Then they mention other studies of SAT scores within a fixed college. This is deceptive. A typical college has students from a narrow SAT range (say 1200-1400). By the above numbers, one expects that SAT predicts only 0.1 GPA above/below the mean (within the college). However, it also predicts that if the school were to ignore SAT and admit a cohort with SAT's of 800, then those students would underperform by half a letter grade.
It's not a choice of just arbitrarily selecting some level of success for various minorities. Some minorities excel, and you can either allow it or make everyone worse off by banning it. For example, someone who cares about racial equality might demand that blacks be prevented from competing in national sports, or standup comedy, or political oratory, because they tend to excel in these areas. This would deprive us of lots of great entertainers and speakers, and it would create a more equal situation. But obviously the black people don't benefit (they lose the jobs they want and otherwise would have); the white audiences don't benefit (they get worse stuff to watch and hear); and even the whites and other minorities who get the positions reserved for them suffer -- they're out of their depth, and the painful difference between their talent and their ranking makes them even less successful than they otherwise would be.

This might have some sort of application to affirmative action schemes, or the efforts to sculpt a course so it somehow doesn't discriminate among the groups that are better or worse at it. But I'm not sure what that application might be.
Announcing "Windows Beta"... "As the successor to Windows Vista, we believe 'Windows Beta' (formerly known as Windows 7) will bring unprecendented levels of stability and usability."
I agree with the spirit of his post. The college reference seems a bit off, and I'm not a big fan of college == success/smart. This is both because I couldn't bring myself to pay others to teach me things I mostly already knew (or could figure out for myself), and because most of the worlds top richest people are all non-college educated (most have some college, but no degree, not sure about Slim off the top of my head, but I doubt he has any).
HP's new laptop joins new breed of ultralights
My Yearly Investment
His blog is itself an example of the small-neuron phenomenon. If you're running the noscript firefox extension you see there are 26 sites trying to run JavaScript on just this one page.
Finger length correlates with testosterone production, which correlates with different ratios of mathematical to verbal skills. So it would tell you whether to go to MIT or Yale, but not whether to go to Wash U or Forest Park Community College.

You may enjoy this anecdote, in which someone even more self-righteous about such things makes a fool of herself:

http://isteve.blogspot.com/2007/05/finger-length-and-sat-sco...