skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Does it have to be a competition between Rails and Merb?
New lambda syntax in Ruby 1.9
As the tech side gets cheaper and easier it may become harder to differentiate based purely on tech. This would seem to put a premium on entrepreneurship vs. naked technology. The easier it is for a lot of people to start tech businesses, the more the business model you choose makes a difference. It's possible that business guys increasingly won't need techies as cofounders.
Very few people who treat their job as 9 to 5 get promoted to CEO.
Whenever I see these type of analyses I always get to thinking how awesome it would be to make all these "translations" in my head as I read.

They also make me consider how easy it would be for one to come to a conclusion about the "twitter problem" by reading an article like the one on TC even though it goes out of its way to not come to any real conclusions. As in, "I read on TC that twitter's problem is..." and actually believe it.

In essence, he could have written "Twitter went down again two days ago," simply leaving it at that, and it would have essentially provided the same amount of meaningful content.
Well, I've certainly had campaigns against me. I've had people attack me in every blog post I wrote for months. Multiple times actually. I just deleted it knowing that they were spending hours doing that and I was spending seconds just clicking them away.

I more than anything just felt bad for someone whose life is so shallow and joyless that they actually care enough to put that much effort into hurting someone they don't even know because they were offended by some trivial thing he said on the internet. I have to believe that a person who would undertake that sort of campaign probably has serious depression and other mental health issues. I can hardly be upset at them given that. The emotional pain that they're trying (and failing) to inflict on me is the same they live with every day.

Short of threats of violence, who really cares? (I've had those too, which I turned over to the FBI, though nothing really came of that.)
Google Docs - the UI is easier to pick up and work with, seems to be more robust too. Importing presentations is near perfect in Google Docs, not at all good in Zoho. I'd hoped Zoho would be better. Think they are trying to do too much with too many different apps and the UI mimics MS circa mid-90s
Rails does not seem the best language to write essentially a messaging architecture in though. Surely the core of twitter has little to do with the web, and more to do with efficiently passing messages around - something that c or java could do like a walk in the park.

I don't know though, sounds like lots of it isn't in ror already which makes the point a bit moot.

Maybe twitter intentionaly break their system every once in a while now to get some coverage on blogs etc. Much like 'celebrities' release a dirty video or go into rehab.

Oh I'm just kidding :) although...
What happened to consistency? You people disappoint me. I clicked on this comment thread expecting disdainful sneers, not cautious optimism.
I would agree, but I think there's a common goal among programmers to come up with the most "clever" solution to a problem. It shouldn't be the focus, but it seems a lot of the time when I see a 100-line function distilled down into 5 lines I have this overriding assumption that it's just... better. I've always known this is a faulty assumption and if I know the code will actually be used and needs to be fast I will test it, but there's this sort of sense of accomplishment that comes along with coming up with really elegant, albeit perhaps unreadable and less performant, solution to a problem.
Try using it with a sniper rifle. You'll change your tune.
You might find this wired article interesting

This Psychologist Might Outsmart the Math Brains Competing for the Netflix Prize

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/magazine/16-03/mf_netflix
Can't we cut out the middle-man and just make all crappy -- errr shared -- hosting providers support Python?

In the world I see you are stalking elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rockefeller Center [...] and never writing PHP.
Who's going to put more money into Joost?
Whoah, that's so awesome. The M&M Man manipulation is nuts.

Jeff Han demos something really similar -- almost to the T -- in his TED presentation of the Microsoft Surface technology. He even mentions "the mesh," which leads me to wonder if it's the same rigid-as-possible approach. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKh1Rv0PlOQ at around 7:30.
We use Authorize.net's ARB platform.

But this question has come up before at HN and other places. Here are the collection of links on subscription. Pretty everything you need to know!

# http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthread.php?t=453028
# http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=115723 (Recommended)
# http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/753-ask-37signals-how-do-... (Recommended)
# http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?biz.5.550062.1...
# http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48040
# http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47960
# http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12010
# http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47958
# http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33322 (Recommended)
# http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49787
# http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12082
# http://groups.google.com/group/activemerchant/msg/635e1fec35...
# http://blog.robwebb2k.com/2007/10/19/braintree-payment-solut... Braintree Reccomendation- (Recommended)
# http://www.webmasterworld.com/ecommerce/3496741.htm
# http://www.merchant-account-services.org/blog/building-a-rec...
# http://www.merchant-account-services.org/article/payment-gat...
AsK YC/PG: Resource Section?
Some questions such as these (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=198502) seem to come up time and again and I was wondering if it would be a good idea to have a "Resources" section for these commonly asked questions (another one is on valuations and advisors). These resources could just be a collection of links at YC and elsewhere on the web...
Kayak at least doesn't have a terrible name.
Now, would it make the monthly plans cheaper? Probably, but not by as much as the additional money you'd spend on the phone.

In the netherlands you can get a monthly plan for 50% of the original price if choose to go "sim-only" i.e. without a new phone. Depending on the amount of minutes you buy and the phone you'd want this can be significantly cheaper.
Because if you follow the link you'll find that the headline was in jest.

From the listing: The founding team has a strong vision for Sproost and can happily share all of the details with you. But we call BS on anyone who says they know what the future holds...

Well played. I like these guys.
Chris Bishop's Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning is a good recent book aimed at 'advanced undergraduates'. It seems to be 'the book' in ML right now. Norvig and Russel's AIMA is a good general AI resource. The twice annual machine learning summer schools get videoed and put up on videolectures.net. Really good introductory lectures from the basics on up to various application areas. Even better if you can go to one and pick the presenters brains for a couple weeks, they are intended for both new graduate students and interested people from industry. After that there are specialized books in the (many) subfields.
ads like these make me feel like I should change my major to CS, but I don't want to take all the required science classes
Hi, one thing that I might take issue with is this:

> poorly developed nation from a technological point of view.

There are tons of bright hackers in Italy, in my experience, and in various fields, there is good tech that comes out of Italy. The problems are political and economical in nature, in my opinion - the technology is there, it's just not utilized well because of all the crap that happens politically. As one small example, it between "capital requirements", and all the fees, it probably costs something like 10000 Euro to create an SrL (limited liability company), whereas in my home state of Oregon, I managed to create one for a little over 100 dollars. I'm sure you know all this, but many people don't realize how many smart, entrepreneurial people there are in Italy, and only see the results of years of bad policy decisions.

Complimenti, in ogni caso:-) Leaving Perugia wouldn't be an easy decision for anyone - I think that area is one of the most beautiful that I've ever seen, anywhere.
The clicky keyboards just feel right.

Really though the issue is that soft keyboards were chosen only for lower manufacturing cost - we nerds saw something that was really good (clicky keyboards) go away and get replaced with utter crap to the point that you can't even buy a good keyboard anymore in most stores. That's the real issue - that solidly manufactured stuff got replaced by crap - that has people so touchy about the issue.
The big deal is that it's honest, and funny, and still kind of crappy.

In good fun, "knows what bootstrap means and likes it" translates to "minority share and you'll be doing all the work."
http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Electrical-Engineering-and-Compute...

Machine Learning at MIT.
Yes, e.g. DreamHost shared hosting in his services and it works quite well.
Wow! Stop the presses.
Finally Google grows enough to explains his own concepts.
There will always be a level at which technology can't be commodified.
ironically this question gets asked all the time

http://ask.searchyc.com/

http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/startupswiki/Ask_YC_Archive
At first I was horrified, but after some thought I realised that this is great. I've turned down a few PHP freelance jobs because I don't want to code PHP anymore. Maybe I could use this instead when it's more stable.
Yahoo! pipes does seem to offer the desired functionality. My first impression, though, is that the interface is too mouse heavy (admittedly my main complaint about everything that requires the mouse). I should be able to create a filter without drawing a circuit diagram. And I worry that I won't be able to keep using it without having to tell Yahoo! my password every other week.

http://www.filtermyrss.com looks much more to my liking, although it's a bit low on features. My feeling is that it's about a 10 line perl script: fetch xml with LWP, apply regex, print.

I've actually been looking for something like feedity, but I need control over the code, since I'd want to use it for sites that require authentication. However, my feeling's that this one's about a 20 line perl script with LWP and Algorithm::Diff, so it's not a big deal.

Maybe I'll combine them into a 30 line perl script and get rich!
Is it just me, or does anyone else find 14 interviews (11 on site, 3 phone; one more if you count the fair) a bit ridiculous? I mean I know people are the most important thing and you have to make smart choices but damn!
I see myself as neither. I am an artist, and life is my canvas.
have your normal search results in the middle and paid image results on the side clearly marked as sponsored images
Search has made gazillions for Google because it captures purchase intent, which they translate into the best possible (for now at least) targeted advertising.
So if you're in search it'd make sense to try the same strategy (if it ain't broken, and it sure ain't, don't fix it). It doesn't have to be advertising, but it has to have something to do with purchase intent, helping people find what they're looking to buy, and monetizing that somehow.
Here's an idea - what if I'm looking for a particular product on ebay, but my purchase decision really depends on how the product looks. Maybe it's some object of art. Maybe etsy would be a better example than ebay. I don't know what you're technology is like so it's hard to tell.
In any case, I'd look at riya.com - are they your competitors?
SearchYC Firefox Search Extension
myspace, facebook, bebo, hi5 - they all make money from advertising.

They're not making as much as you'd expect given the number of page views that they're getting though, so if you're planning a new social application keep in mind that you have to get huge in order to make significants amounts of money.
What about a wiki?
Some similar resources coming from Berkeley are:

[CS 188] Artificial Intelligence - http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs188/sp08/lectures.html

[CS 294] Practical Machine Learning - http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~pliang/cs294-spring08/#administr...

[CS 281A] Statistical Learning Theory - http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~jordan/courses/281A-fall07/

[CS 281B] More Statistical Learning Theory -
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~bartlett/courses/281b-sp06/

There may be more that I don't know of, but I know these courses are fairly well regarded (I'm planning to take 188 and 281A next semester).
searchyc.com already has a Firefox extension but you may have missed it because searchyc.com reached its transfer quota when it was announced. See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=177628

Also see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=198537 for a demo of this forum with a working search box and see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=197644 for the most recent dataset of posts.
Reply to Sriram Krishnan: Erlang,distribution & bspawner
used to be one but it doesn't work anymore

http://wiki.ycombinator.com/
Ask YC: JSON Editor
Hello,
Anyone know of a decent JSON editor for OS X / Linux, that doesn't require Eclipse?

Preferably FOSS.

many thanks
Javascript Security Wonderland
Hmmm thanks.

I did search searchyc.com for a plugin, but I couldn't find any mention in the blog / about pages.

Oh well it only took 5 mins.

PS: I think this is one more vote for a resources wiki :)
On the Braintree site, which is the payment processor used by this railskit, it shows that they may not always choose to work with you if you do less than 100K a month. Has anyone had any experience with getting approved?

https://www.braintreepaymentsolutions.com/get-started-now/fo...
Hawaiian natural beauty secrets articles
Find out what makes Hawaii the world's ultimate source of natural beauty secrets and skin care ingredients, treasured by Hawaiians for generations.
United First Financial
Homeowners with a traditional 30-year mortgage were on track to become mortgage free after only 8 to 11 years.
The video is quite cool, but I'd be much more impressed by a link to a paper describing the algorithm in detail. Does anyone know if/where this work has been published?
Sorry, we were going to re-announce the plugin on the blog with our next set of features. But then we got busy, and it kept getting pushed back.

The plugin is available at http://plugin.searchyc.com/
Erlang is terrible for distributed computations, it is even slower than ruby for math :( Network servers is probably the only thing that is worth doing in erlang.
It wasn't the transfer quota. Our web host decided to randomly shut down the virtual server that day--while I was out of town.
I believe paypal doesnt require customers to have a paypal account. Just entering the credit card should be fine (i.e without registration). But my usage with paypal is just as a customer though
Online Advertising To Grow Rapidly At The Expense Of Print Advertising 
"Marketers are continuing to put their ad dollars online at the expense of print advertising. Some 55% of marketers anticipate a decrease in print ad spend three years from now."
Sweet.

Thanks for Searchyc - it's great; very tidy. I hope it leads you on to greater things.
With an altitude? There are a lot of good ones outside of places like Colorado:-)

Joking aside, I am going to respectfully say that I'm not sure you have fully digested the meaning of 'hacker' as we use it here. This comes fairly close:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_(Free_and_Open_Source_Software)

(watch out for the mangled parens), although of course many people aren't working on open source projects. An 'attitude' isn't really part of the picture, IMO, as some of the best hackers I've met are also extremely nice (and well adjusted) individuals. When you're that good, you don't need an attitude to communicate how good you are.

To keep using PG as a useful specimen for examination, the reason I think he's more hacker than entrepreneur is that an "entrepreneur" (in my mind) is less likely to go out and build something that is (once again in my mind) completely useless in terms of making money, like, say, Arc. It's just a fun thing to build that scratches his itch.
I will eat anybody's words once anybody mankes Strong OR Weak AI.
I can vouch that BZR has one of the best plain-text diff tools - whether or not it's number 1 without numbers to back the claim is a different matter though.

However, what I really want to see is BZR and GIT catching up to SVN when it comes to binary diffs - SVN remains the most efficient at finding and commiting changes to binary data between revisions. It may not seem so important, but if you're ever in a backwards country on business and need to upload to a repository via dial-up..... and of course, the smaller the binary diffs the more space saved on the server and bandwidth charges.
I second videolectures as an excellent source. Just listen to the ones you are interested in! One tip I'd offer is to make sure you understand the math of each lecture before moving on. Skip over the maths enough and you'll find you haven't truly learned much.

However, in terms of books I would add Elements of Statistical Learning (Hastie, Tibshirani, and Friedman). It is an excellent text that covers a lot of ground. The down side of this of course is that it is written at the graduate level, so be prepared.
Yeah, because Linus is really impartial on the matter ;-)
Here in France we have a law that makes that happen. If you sell a product in France you can't be forced to by a service at the same time. It's one of the consumer protection laws, and for the cell phone people it means that all phones are available for direct purchase.
Actually, I misused the word "forever" to mean "a long time". Larry isn't really involved with Perl 5 anymore, though, so any conversion to Git was not his idea.
That's true.

But I also see and advantage herein. You don't have to save the credit number and other sensitive details, so they can't be stolen on your servers.
Summer of iPhone
I use Yahoo Pipes and created a pipe with 20 sources to show only posts with Australia and .com.au.
pic here: http://webfuel.info/p.png
Not exactly "hidden", but the two new features in the article are soft hyphens (for automatic mid-word line breaking) and CSS display:inline-block. Good stuff, although it's a shame that it hasn't been supported earlier, the Mozilla team have been slow to catch up on these.

The soft hyphens are going to be tedious in practice if you're going to have to insert them manually. LaTeX does automatic breaking, has anyone used any stand-alone libraries that will insert the soft hyphens into a given chunk of text automatically? The rules for this are different for each (human) language, so it's not a 100% trivial problem; in some cases soft hyphen support alone might not be enough, such as in case of the now obsolete German way of breaking words containing ck into k-k. (the new rule is that the ck isn't broken up and moved onto the new line entirely, so soft hyphens will work now)
I use GetClicky and Wordpres stats:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/stats/. Woopra is meant to be good too.
Tahitian Noni
Noni Office gives you access to more than 140 proven resources.
Will, Systems, Distractions, and Irony
Because the two resources mentioned already cover everything w/o creating any data duplication or extensive manual labor?
"... Anyone know of a decent JSON editor for OS X / Linux ..."

Vim, emacs or some other text editor.

One of the key ideas behind JSON is to make it editable by humans and readable by machines. So a text editor and check the output with http://www.jsonlint.com/ or use your favourite language to parse it ~ http://www.json.org
Ask YC: Why the degree?
I am a developer without a degree, I left school when I was 16, at which time id been programming for 2 years. I've studied several languages, worked for countless companies doing contract work, and been employed as a developer and lead developer full time.

I'm now 24.

I used to be very frustrated to see companies demanding degrees before they'll even talk to you for new developer positions. I have always put that down to the HR department that don't really know what they're doing when employing developers.

However, I'm sorry to see many startups that are employing developers in the early stage, are requiring that candidates have a degree.

For all the company knows, I (and countless others) could be the best developers they'd ever meet. And yet we're automatically excluded from even applying.

Why?

If/When I am employing developers, a degree won't even separate one candidate from another, as long as I judge both to be good developers, then they're on an equal standing.

I know several people that have degree's in computer science, and none have any magical abilities that you only pickup at university.

So what gives?
I just got done wishing that this would happen:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=197781

And here it is. Nice.
"... Tridge is considers (sic) Australia's best hacker. ..."

hmmm ... if it's "au-hacker-fanboy-time" what about http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damian_Conway ? Plus he's funnier ~ http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail880.html
Why the third degree?
I don't have a degree either and I have to admit: when I was in my 20s, it bothered me too as I thought, "I might be missing out on something." Today though, running my own business, I see that it worked out perfectly. In my latest job posting (for a .NET/SQL dev), I wrote "A Computer Science degree is not required but helpful" because I don't equate degree to good code.

Joel Spolsky talks about this in his book and he prefers a degree or, if not a degree, evidence that the person had to go through some sort of highly selective process.
Zoho for me. I like having one company to go to for project mgmt, CRM, docs, etc.
How Are Humans Unique?
What kind of binary files do you put under SCM?
I think my original question clearly states why, I would like to know why this is the case with the overall percentage of people employing developers..
the only degree that should matter is the quality of programming/coding a person can do - a degree certificate, which is basically a paper can not guarantee the quality of a hacker and his/her skills. The society has become way too demanding - also supply and demand is off-balance. situation in india is different than in north-america ... in USA/Canada i have seen that you can still survive without a degree but in india you just cant survive, in fact every other person (applying for a job) is a master degree holder - competition over there is crazy - but there are few entrepreneur who think out of the box - for example people behind the Zoho.com hire poor students from the high-school in a village, they then train them and within few months these high-school students become one of the best developers ... this is a must read interview "The Smartest Unknown Indian Entrepreneur": http://www.forbes.com/2008/02/22/mitra-zoho-india-tech-inter...
Maybe we will once again get a modern Python interpreter on the Palm OS?
Thanks. I guess in that case it can be an indicator that the person has some kind of skill.

Although I do have friends that have managed to get a degree in computer science and they still can't code unless they're copying from a book.

Is Joel's book based on employing people straight out of education? because presumably people that hadn't gone the degree route would have 2-3 years commercial experience by the time people the same age finish their degrees.
Facebook Platform, One Year Later
Online communities open but still limit movement
FriendFeed Still Has a Lot of Killing to Do
Yes, I use different passwords for every site. The idea of tiers of importance is a good one also.