skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have found that as I've gained more experience, my ability to rapid-prototype has gone down - it's extremely hard to break out of the habit of doing things the 'right way' and go back to doing them 'the fast way'. (On the other hand, my prototypes actually work).

Get to know some basic building blocks in one language really well (e.g. simple CRUD patterns in PHP), then design and build everything around those. It'll be messy, but rapid prototyping is often not the place for elegant architecture.

Experience is invaluable when you're prototyping something that requires a lot of knowledge (e.g. APIs), but for most web apps, most things you would want to prototype can done very quickly with limited knowledge.

If you're stuck on getting started, just grab some example code (App Engine has plenty) that does something close to what you want, then hack away at it until it gets closer, then let error messages and satisfaction drive you the rest of the way.
Yeah, can you get them to call your friends and say "you suck!"??
That almost sounds like the perfect use case for a google wave.
Yes! Still there will be a remaining huge code base to be maintained.
Just to clarify, it's not an 80x return or even close. I think you may have gotten that by taking the money in ($250k) and looking at the exit price ($20mln).

The truth is that if the round was priced, then the investors took call it 25% of the company, meaning the post-money was $1mln and thus at a $20 mln exit there was a 20x return... which of course is still pretty good.
A very good article, capturing the essence of competition these days.

If Netflix is not fast enough, Redbox will do to Netflix what Neflix did to Blockbuster.
There's a big difference between living somewhere and traveling through it - which one do you want to do?

Unless you magically have the right nationality, if you want to stay in a foreign place for any length of time you typically will need a visa, so you will need a local employer to sponsor a work permit. So if you really want to live somewhere else, take a job.

As to finding a telecommute job, it can be hard. If you want to go down that plan (i.e. telecommute in your native country and travel around abroad) I suggest you find that job and work a while in it before you start traveling.

Personally while I like traveling very much, there's nothing like really living in a different country to grow your horizons. I have lived in 4 countries - 5 if you count Scotland :-) - and don't regret any of it. If you have the interest and the opportunity, take it.
The heterogeneous nature of a data centre has really come to an interesting crossroads. If you pay attention to the mainframe world (and let's face it, nearly no one does) you might've noticed that IBM recently announced their new Z system [1] and it had an interesting feature.

Namely, it can run Z books along with POWER7 blades and x86 blades in the same (admittedly very large) box. Basically, run your compute workloads on Power, database on x86, and control on Z. Seems like a pretty good idea to me!

[1] http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/z/news/announcement/20100722_a...
I'm so incredibly happy for these guys. Deciding to use Cappuccino has been one of the best technical decisions I've ever made. It's an incredibly fun and impressive framework. But what really made using Cappuccino so rewarding was interacting with Ross, Francisco and Tom. The 280North guys have consistently gone out of their way to help me out, and it's very obvious that they are incredibly talented developers. They have also managed to create a great and very active community in a very short period of time, and are just very nice, great people. They deserve this like none other. Congrats guys and looking forward to where you go from here!
TIME Announces New Version Of Magazine Aimed At Adults
Great point, I did some quick irrationally exuberant math and that's how I got the 80x. :)
Unless the open-source drop blows a huge hole in Facebook, this was a story that got a lot of attention and its sad that they would continue to spend their time developing it. The original shock and gasping at the open graph is done. Everyone has kinda moved on. FB has added places, we have other things to worry about.

I wonder what they are going to do with all that unspent money.
Based on the Motorola guy's comment, I can't help speculating that they will retarget their system to parse Objective-C, implement Cocoa Touch, and emit something that can be run on Android phones -- maybe Javascript. If there were an easy way to port iPhone apps to Android, Android would have a lot more apps.
I once bought a package of smoked salmon at Trader Joe's. It was gross, so I took it back, and the guy asked me to try a different brand instead. I said "OK," and it was gross again. I went back very apologetic just asking for a refund, and he asked me to try a third type. I refused entirely, until he MADE me take the third type of smoked salmon. That third type was really good and I've probably bought $200 worth of it since that day.
Cool. So many languages get it wrong it doesn't even occur to me to check any more when learning a new language. I just assume that a mod b, where b is positive, can produce a value less than 0, and normalize the result to [0, b).
Funny you should ask that because the internet is just now taking a big lurch forward with Canvas and everything in HTML5. Would Objective-J quickly adopt new features in Javascript or stay closer to developments in Objective-C?

Since everything gets compiled down to Javascript in the end (and Objective-J doesn't feature 100% browser compat either) I don't see how they can offer anything not possible with Javascript to begin with. Actually that's a question? I don't understand how it is different than, for example, CoffeeScript - but I would be happy if you could explain how it is.
And by god, please don't use a screencast as the primary way of telling us what the meat is. Don't even consider it.
As a user this is an awesome tool, but as a content producer that relies on advertising revenue this is potentially a nightmare. While you can argue that it's similar to AdBlock, you're essentially 'forcing' the removal of ads on your users, whereas a browser plugin is optional and takes at least some work to install (finding it, installing and restarting browser). Just seems scary to imagine lots of websites picking this up, as that could kill advertising revenue for many sites.
Yes, exactly. This is why rewards cards are ultimately so evil: they're based on a bastardization of an incentive structure that needs to die.

Rewards payouts are funded by interchange fees which are paid by the retailer... aka the consumer. If you use rewards cards, your rewards payment is subsidized by populations whom don't use rewards cards.

The whole reason interchange fees existed in the first place was to move some of the costs of operating the networks away from banks to merchants. Merchants have a natural incentive to accept cards (sales!), while banks originally didn't have the same incentive to offer them. Interchange fees were meant to level the field.

In a competitive environment, interchange fees should go down and reach an socially efficient level. Instead, the US has the highest interchange fees in the world due to network consolidation and the four-party system catering to banks, not to merchants.

IIRC, the average US household pays ~$400/yr in interchange fees. Rewards cards are silly and I'm glad they'll be dying a slow death soon.
I invited Scott Adams (Dilbert guy) to a Google Wave book discussion of one of his books once, and he politely declined.
Dropbox: There's room yet in the cloud
Objective-J is a strict super set of JavaScript. All JS features are "automatically" picked up by Objective-J the second they are added.
Of course it would have nothing to do with their track record of consistently bringing to market game changing products starting with the iMac; clearly it must be some kind of buyers remorse induced self-hypnosis....honestly, just listen to yourself.
More evidence for 99&cent; iTunes TV rentals, Apple TV makeover
I use Windows most of the time, but I didn't have any trouble installing applications on the Mac. All I did was load the disk and dragged the application to the Applications folder. One step.

I'm curious - coming from a Windows background, how did you know to do this on a Mac?

It sounds so simple when you describe it but I think its one of the last thing a power Windows user (who knows about extracting zips, running installers, exes and dlls, etc) would think to do - since dragging and dropping a single icon would work for a very small percentage of Windows apps.
The HN Effect in Numbers
Guido van RossUM
It's very similar to CoffeeScript. It is a strict superset of JavaScript, so all valid JavaScript remains valid Objective-J.

You also shouldn't confuse the language (Objective-J) with the Cappuccino framework. Objective-J is just about providing certain language level features on top of JavaScript, the same way Objective-C implements features on top of C. It's also 100% cross browser, so I'm not sure what you mean by that.

Cappuccino is a full fledged framework for building apps which run in a browser. I'd argue that it's the best, but my opinion would hardly be unbiased. It does in fact implement an API for using Canvas (which also works in IE). Though, that isn't a JavaScript feature. And pretty much nothing in HTML5 is present in 50% of the browsers out there.
I think it will be the other way around. Major changes are afoot in the world, and these will have profound effect on every part of our lives, not just the "web". Severe problems with the economy will cripple some large internet-based businesses while letting others thrive. Lighter-weight efforts on the web will do well and be better positioned to take advantage of these changes. Larger less agile efforts will fall on hard times. A major war is likely as a result of economic issues and resulting political instability. Efforts of major countries spent trying to prepare for "Cyberwarfare" are a bust, with organizations (not countries, per se) easily able to take out major parts of the web with ease. This is the impetus to create a new set of intranetworks, including one for business transactions, that will eventually be used by most future (net-enabled) appliances. Basically, this decade will be the beginning of the of end of the "wild west" internet, and the dawn of reliable and restricted set of privately-managed and government-managed intranetworks, evolving from the current cellular networks (currently incapable of handling such traffic, but that won't always be the case).
I had a quick exchange with Matt Mullenweg. He is not the Pope but was one that I didn't expect to get a response from.
At it's core, YCombinator is a Venture Capital firm. A very different one, but still — they give money, advice and connections for equity in hopes of a return on their investment. You make returns on your investment by companies getting acquired (other methods are extremely rare).

I can't see why a VC firm would argue against a huge exit that makes everyone a ton of money and leaves the founders working on the same product they built and love.
Implementing a Trade Secrets Protection Program
scram little kid mode :)

Any scientist who can't explain to an eight-year old what he is doing is a charlatan.

—Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle

Because the hyperbolic metric Einstein created allows us to define how much space-time can change the amount of mass(and vice versa!). And this only works if the speed of light is constant—that's actually the God-like conceptual leap Einstein took when realizing the Michelson-Morley experiment implied much bigger things about space, time, mass and gravity, and not just mere light speed.

Also, it keeps several other super-important constraints in place too. That's the problem with gravity—it's more like an infinite Jenga puzzle and anything you add to the explanation must not contradict dozens of other old physics experiments about things having nothing to do with gravity. We can't throw out all the other stuff we do know after all. Like the constancy of the speed of light in any reference frame. And the conservation of energy.
And Maxwell's electrodynamic equations. And a bunch of other specific experiments I don't even know much about.

I don't know how much of thermodynamics has been "relativized", but gravity can't contradict the laws of thermodynamics either. It's actually comforting that the world of thermodynamics is so tiny, cold, deals with such a large number of "particles"(ensembles), and is built from insanely complex mathematical machinery that we probably have no hope of ever devising an experiment that could say anything meaningful about gravity in terms of thermodynamics. (I so hope that I'm very wrong here.)

However, Gravity is famously in contradiction with Quantum Mechanics, though I haven't yet progressed far enough in either to be able to say specifically what the contradiction is. I suspect it's just the lack of a math "bridge" between Relativity, which is built up from calculus, differential forms, tensors, Rienmannian geometry, the calculus of variations and weird ways QM uses linear algebra, eigenvalues, infinite bounded operators and insane algebraic concepts like von Neumann algebras to setup infinite matrices of probabilities that map back to the periodic, bounded solutions of the Schrödinger wave equation that tell us what the energy levels of some physics experiment must be.

Oh and the model of gravity has to be able to fit in well with any new stuff we discover too. Being able to pull off all of that is why I place Einstein in the pantheon of geniuses! He's kind of like a one-armed man who holds off an entire army of swordsmen using only a pocket knife.
Mario Kart Bike Lane
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cbk980jV7Ao
If you were running a call center of stoned teenagers

People only call centers staffed by stoned teenagers because they have to - they have an immediate problem they want help solving. Or they receive unwanted and unsolicited calls from them. Nobody is going to pay $10/month to receive a daily call from a stoned teenager who mispronounces their name.
"Of course Drexler didn't have the physics to figure out what a real nanobot might look like, nobody did, and nobody does."

Well then I fail to see how anyone can justify calling this a technology then, when there ain't even any physics to describe it.
Perhaps he still has it in his mail archive, you should ask him.
I've also written Greg Graffin. I actually wrote him in 2000 to tell them that their website was terrible and that I could do a better job on it. It turns out GG was maintaining it himself at the time and said he would talk to some people about letting me. It never went anywhere unfortunately but it is my best story.
This is a non-moving "field." It is nothing but a marketing word for third rate research on things which used to be called "tribology" and "chemistry."
From a technical perspective, this isn't likely the purpose of the acquisition. Cappuccino does relatively nothing in terms of making headway in parsing Objective-C, implementing a (native) Cocoa Touch or integration with the Dalvik VM system except by way of a browser.

Not to say that the 280North guys aren't capable of that but Cappuccino certainly isn't geared toward that type of goal.
I feel like ESR, RMS and GvR would be recognised in just about every hacker-hangout. PG, outside of HN (and maybe some other places), not so much.

(Of course, it's self-reinforcing. People know ESR by his initials because that's how other people refer to him, and you can refer to him by his initials because people will know who you're talking about.)
Ask HN: What are the best resources for learning Ruby/Rails
I'm looking to teach myself a new Web Dev language and have landed on Ruby/Rails. What are the best resources out there for learning Ruby/Rails if you are already a programmer with web experience?
Objective-C knowledge helps, but if you have little programming knowledge and need to learn either Javascript or Objective-C, I think Cappuccino makes it really easy for you to rapidly get a non-trivial web application working because they've just done a really good job of abstracting out a lot of the annoying-to-implement parts of a desktop-like application. I didn't know either Objective-C or Javascript when I started work on Mockingbird, and it took me about a week to learn enough to have a prototype running that had canvas (and VML) drawing, drag and drop links, and undo/redo support.
Thanks for your feedback!

"Why isn't that description on your website anywhere?"
Will try to add a description.

"you say 'no frills dating' which has absolutely no meaning."
Will Reword/remove the "No frills dating". Need to come up with a good line.

"If I've got what you are doing correctly you are doing a 'who else has a free night and wants to go on a date'? that has value. But you have to tell people."
Yes, it's basically that. Have a free night/day and put yourself available or look for others available at that time frame.

As for the site activity i'm finding this the hard part to fill in. Still haven't found a way to grab people's attention...

I think that most people want to relate with the ones in the images so dating sites tend to use real people...

Thanks again for your feedback.
That's absolutely true Ramit. In fact, I even GIVE AWAY my eBook (litlefreebook.com, if you want to see how its typically done).

Reason: build a LIST ... the, build a relationship with this list (free monthly newsletter) THEN sell high-end product (eg membership system @ $19pm 7m7y.com for an example).

AJC
Steve Jobs. But then who hasn't?
What are you reading into my message that I'm missing? Of course Apple's track record has a lot to do with it, where did I claim otherwise? Are you claiming that the Apple PR machine hasn't perfected the art of making other people do all their hyping for them while they can sit quietly in the corner denying everything.
Thought this would be obvious: I was not talking about stuff that makes everybody ill. The body does not adapt well to many other things, but still you can get used to many things that make people ill on first contact.

Why do so many travellers get sick first time they enter a country with different hygienic standard, where the local population has no problem?

btw: I lived 2 years in central Africa, just returned from a 'local meal' in Luanda/Angola.
Apple threw their lot in with Sproutcore, the other cocoa-inspired (though not Obj-C inspired) thick client framework by hiring the lead developer (who's now departed) and implementing MobileMe with it.
> There we go, without js, which you didn't identify at first.

I thought it was fairly obvious that someone on a technical forum complaining about anchors not leading anywhere and hidden divs appearing on the page is using NoScript, or otherwise has javascript disabled.

>Rather, you just started to list things that seems like they weren't working.

Well, they weren't, were they?

> As soon as we post something there's usually somebody that steers the conversation to a different topic and then criticizes us for one reason or another.

Mm, kinda like how you complain about your competitors instead of addressing issues about your javascript degredation?

If you bring up your product as a solution, it seems reasonable to expect us to describe why it isn't.
OK, but is your workload like App Engine either? I can tell you right now that mine isn't; we'd grind to a halt if we tried to pass and share as much state as we do on it.
That's sounds like the feature that was needed. The software I've had to suffer under, had me do that by hand.

No, drag-and-drop is NOT unintuitive, and if that was all that it took then great. But Mac guys are so used to the ringamarole that they forget this part: "Oh yeah, then mount the dmg, then open the virtual drive, then drag one of the various icons (which one???) to your Applications folder, oh yeah open that first in the finder, then close the virtual drive and unmount the dmg, then find the downloaded wad (what was it called again?) and delete it." All of those operations accessed from different menus/tools.
SproutCore for one: http://www.sproutcore.com/demos/
GE Counting On Energy Monitoring And Solar To Cut Home Energy Usage By 70%
I am involved in bootstrapping a company developing solutions to improve outcomes in psychotherapy. Great feedback so far but no one has income from the project...yet.

Recently a fellow entrepreneur (non-tech) asked me for some advice about how to get his website off of the ground. He has one particularly complex requirement - a configuration tool for his product. Previously I told him how to find the resources he would need to get it built. While I can visualize exactly how his tool needs to be programmed, it would be difficult for me to find the time to help him myself.

If it will help me get to BoS this year I will make the time and offer to build the app for him myself, for free (hoping my wife will forgive me). The cost of developing this app would easily be greater than the conference cost. Having known this guy for a few years I will take it one step further and ask that he pay it forward too, I know he will. Trying to keep the positive energy flowing.

Having watched a lot of the videos from the previous BoS conferences I know attending in person would be invaluable.

Good luck to all, thanks for the opportunity.
I think you're being a bit dramatic. I agree that programmers need a little more respect, but what you're saying is a bit silly.

You can't coerce a programmer into doing work for you. They want either cash or stake for their work. They have the right to say no if they don't like the deal. I can't see how you could take that as a form of exploitation. Good programmers are in demand and are paid well; they have a choice, unlike low wage foreigner workers (for whom you could better argue were being exploited).
In 1993 I came across an email address that purportedly belonged to Douglas Adams, so I wrote and said that his nonfiction book "Last Chance to See" was even funnier than his fictional stories, and asked about the availability of a paperback edition.

There was no response until 1996, when he replied that a paperback had recently been published, wrapped in one of the worst covers he had seen in his entire career.
Yeah, I know droid != android. But since I was thinking about motorola I said droid by accident.

What I guess I'm asking is will motorola really use 280 North's tech for web based projects that any phone could access? Or will they be presented as bundled apps that appear to be native Android apps but really written in Objective-J using cappuccino?
it seems like getting founders to Motorola and Wufoo is ridiculously profitable? really? i'm surprised.
No word yet on what Motorola is going to do with them.

I don't get it: what could they do with them? 280North's main product is Atlas, a development platform that creates applications that run on Motorola's Droids, but on an OS that's not developed at Motorola... someone please convince me this isn't a desperate attempt for Motorola to appear somehow competitive.
My girlfriend works in publishing, she got an email from George Lucas the other day.
http://yandex.com (Russian search engine) recently launched global English search.
JWZ
This is a fun idea, I wonder if there are some kind of legal ramifications in this though?

Only reason why I say this, is Tim Ferris wrote an article on the Visa Concierge service ( http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2010/05/01/credit-card-... ) and they would do just about anything, but they wouldn't call you and tell you that you were awesome, they were "not allowed to do anything of a medical or emotional nature."

I'm thinking maybe not if there are other companies who do this, but who knows.
That is because saying "I have a startup" is the same as answering "what do you like to drink?" with "fluids".