skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
He's written about this in the past. "Can You Buy a Silicon Valley? Maybe." http://paulgraham.com/maybe.html and "How to Be Silicon Valley" http://paulgraham.com/siliconvalley.html. He trends towards, "go to them", though: http://paulgraham.com/startuphubs.html

It comes down to people, money, and time. Exporting Silicon Valley might be the wrong approach. Another place must have its own culture and value system in order to survive and those qualities can't be borrowed.

Boulder, Boston, Austin, and to some extent NYC and a few other east coast (of the US) cities (my heart belongs to Baltimore) have burgeoning scenes, but each is different than SV. Where they don't try to simply mimic, I think they're more likely to find success.
Well, I’m not sure how much Apple could or would want to change the next iPad at this point in time. At any rate, 2011 will be an exciting year for tablets.
Have you done a lot of price point testing also? I see that you have a free choice, so you must have some unique perspective on this article.
people already prescribe behavior drugs for bad hair days anyway
I get the concern about inciting the wrath of music labels. However, can you elaborate on your comment in footnote 5? Is there an unofficial policy of avoiding music startups, or just an extra special sanity check? What if the startup pre-clears (or is in the process of clearing) licensed use of label catalogs before the program?
I, for one, am extremely disappointed to hear this news. I use Xmarks extensively on chrome and firefox across 3 computers. It is so easy to setup and use. I've never managed to get the Chrome sync working as it always hangs up and never finishes setting up.

I think I'd have paid for Xmarks as a service.
Maybe I wasn't clear. I was disagreeing with the statement: "development on PHP started a year after Ruby"

The dates you posted show that this is almost certainly not the case, though they do indeed disprove the idea that "Ruby is a wizbangy new language that sprouted into being only recently".
This is good: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Jw31Howgqg
Microsoft To Release Out-of-Band Patch for ASP.NET Security Flaw
@Lien

ICON fitness & other companies are coming up treadmill, stepper, indoor cycle etc. that can send data over wifi or plugged USB drive or directly to internet. But these machines are expensive & not every professional/personal gym has it.

Completely agree on focusing on "analysis" piece rather than how we get data inside our app.

Comparing with Nike or Runkeeper app or specialized hardware such as Garmin/Sunnto pedometer+watch gets tricky. They target ONLY running. But still let us compare :)

There are dozens of mobile apps for fitness with various feature & price range. (1) Nike app works with external sensor mounted on hardware. Hardware costs $30. Probably runs for 80-100miles, 3-4 months. (2) Some app use on boardGPS some use on board accelerometer such as RunKeeper, but it will not work on treadmill or indoor running (3) App using on board accelerometer (4) Some app allows manual entry of exercise data (5) Garmin/Sunnto professional athlete gear is good in accuracy and shelf life. But it is expensive & cost $120 to $200. Also getting data to PC or online is multi-step process.

Overall, variety of solutions for runners based on their needs. Can our app offer additional value or complete replacement? Nope. BUT are there be ppl who do not want to shell out money to buy Nike/Garmin/Sunto hardware AND use gym machines AND interested to log data, probably yes. How big is the market? I am not sure, and I do not know how to even guesstimate it.

Probably we are better off targeting users of healthcare device such as blood pressure monitor, glucose meter, and such machines. New & slightly expensive machines in market have USB port that allows data downloading to PC. How about offering Smartphone App to allow users to capture data instantly & do all sorts of analytics? No need to plugin your device to PC to download data n analyze. How about we offer our solution to Omron & other device manufacturer for fixed price AND they roll out a free app for their user to instantly capture data giving them competitive edge over other manufacturers in terms of features.
The rules are some of the most developer-unfriendly I've ever read, far surpassing Apple in pretty much every way possible.

This will fail miserably.
He lost a few points in my book for saying new startups will not be able to take on the big tech companies.

Imagine if the founders of Google took his advice.
I Am Your Web site's One True Fan (And I Can Prove It)
I get why AOL - the cash, their focus on content, etc.

But the right fit?

Some of the stuff Arrington writes would probably be struck by a sales / publicly traded editing bay yah?

Beyond that I would love to see a list of TechCrunch's most visited articles over the past year.

It might just be the HN bubble but I feel like 2/3 of the non-fluff stuff comes from arrington's deep connections.

And it doesn't just seem like Arrington playing "founder" rolling out the big news, it seems like genuinely developing from his passion for the tech space.

After his extended vacation a few years ago, and the thoughts he expressed on loving / hating / being exhausted w/TechCrunch I can't imagine he's going to stick around.

Examples of other blogs built on a founders passion that made it through an aquistion (EG discluding Weblogs topical gossip rags)?
Oops. I just switched to Xmarks after Chrome's sync ate a chunk of my bookmarks because of a version mismatch.
Google instant is really useful for the unsophisticated users typing URLs into the search box instead of the address bar.

With Google instant, type the letter "f", you'll get Facebook.com as the first link because that many people are searching for it on Google. For almost every letter of the alphabet the first instant search term is a domain name.
The quote is: "Investors should remember that excitement and expenses are their enemies. And if they insist on trying to time their participation in equities, they should try to be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful."

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Warren_Buffett
The new Arduino UNO Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
Its great that they're trying to simplify it and use standards, its not so great that the way they've been getting there is to simply switch old things off without notice and not document or adequately announce the new ways of doing things before they launch.

Honestly, I get it but the damage has been done. The hype window surrounding the facebook platform has passed and their developer outreach effort is too little too late.
Good programmers write functions in the latter style, not the former.

Well, that stddev function could be much less verbose:

def stddev(pop):
mean = sum(pop) / float(len(pop))
variance = sum( (x-mean)**2 for x in pop)
return math.sqrt(variance)

To me that's easier to read than jumping back and forth between multiple function definitions. Of course, if you need the mean or variance independently then your way is better.
So the sort of person who buys these cases is the sort of person who texts someone while driving BEFORE going back to check if the thing survives, and then hangs out in the emergency lane with a kid in the car while he checks if it still works? Wow, what a tool.
Pink Floyd, Megaherz, Eisbrecher.
That's a good question. D has been around for quite some time, has some well-known names (Bright, Alexandrescu), but has yet to break big. Compared to it, Go, a much more recent development, tends to do quite well (just my estimates, PL mindshare is a bit hard to measure).

I think it's mostly because of some internal and positioning issues. I haven't been following it recently, but I remember some problems with different standard libraries, D 1 vs D 2, and three compilers that each had issues. Maybe that's resolved, but it certainly didn't make things look too good.

Also, it seems to be more a successor to C++, which makes some people a bit distrustful. Yes, it's much cleaner, but also quite a bit more complex than C, and not a total programming environment as Java or C#. So it mainly gets its users from the C++ camp, which isn't the mightiest army nowadays (And whose Windows battalions aren't supported very well by D).

Go is in the news a lot because of its Google and Unix (Pike, Thompson) heritage, because it's a bit simpler (more C crossed with Python than ++C++), and because it has some prominent concurrency support, which is close to the current hype (every emerging language has to prove its mettle there).

By the way, don't read this as a value judgment. It's just a personal assessment why I think that Go is currently a bit more popular and will continue to be so.
You can switch from right-handed to left-handed through the power of magnets
The issue I have with these app virtualisation technologies is that they all seem to work on the same pricing model: expensive user licenses are required, which pretty much dictates how I -as the developer- should sell and price the applications I distribute.

It's cool technology that could be very useful in solving all sorts of deployment issues, but it's way too expensive.
Having to track, pay and manage these royalties/user licenses offsets -at my lowly ISV level- any benefit these products may offer.
Or coroutines, like eventlet uses in Python. It's very readable, and asynchronous.

http://eventlet.net/
I posted it because I feel like a lot of the advice they give in the post is applicable to a lot of the things people here do. A number of the points would be directly applicable to selling apps on the iPhone marketplace, for instance.
This may be just my impression, but if someone really had a need for an async server, they wrote it in something else before. I'm not saying node.js is bad in any way, but there are more established alternatives in languages people already use. They were used before and they did the job. Is node.js going to be a temporary thing?... we'll see. Is it that different from what we already had? (compare http://github.com/jamwt/diesel/blob/master/examples/http.py and http://nodejs.org/api.html#synopsis-0 ) not really.
Authors Feel Pinch in Age of E-Books
According to Valleywag, MA turned down a $20 million offer in 2008:

http://valleywag.gawker.com/5024888/aol-wants-to-buy-techcru...
I am only the 8th biggest fan of Hacker News, according to OneTrueFan. In time, I either get crushed by the loyalists here, or I work harder to visit the site more. Either way, this situation is untenable.
Miso Music wins people’s choice at TC Disrupt
So anyone can enter an email address and find out immediately whether it corresponds to a valid account, without having to enter a password or anything else?

Security FAIL.
Hah! Rails? Seriously? Rails is a framework, not a language. And there are far too many really huge project using PHP (larger than any Perl project I know of) to suggest whacking PHP for Ruby in any flavor.
There's nothing wrong with `is l`. Sounds like you're just splitting hairs.

He's defending against None because calling __len__ on None results in an exception.

3.14159 also results in an exception but it's far more likely that the object passed was None than that it was a completely different type than the one expected.
That Clojure's target is to replace slow old Ruby (actually that never happens, rather a successful language gains dominance in some niche and spreads from there) is only more evidence that it isn't worth breaking the abstraction called "numbers" to get merely an order of magnitude better performance. Seriously, I almost can't believe this is still an open issue in 2010. And Rich Hickey, who has designed such a great language otherwise, is on the wrong side of it? I'm boggled.

EDIT: If peregrine's comment is right, then we're arguing about something that isn't happening. I hope so.
that's not going to bring back the copies of my contacts, private photos, passwords and banking details which have been broadcast to the internet
The copyright problems related to music labels are nothing compared to the legal shenanigans of the contracts between labels and groups. They are horrific. The closest analogies would be share cropping or indentured servitude, though at least there is an out if the band fails.

The way a lot of record labels work is that they will give a band a cash advance. The band uses that advance to pay for living expenses. They are also forced to use it for various costs such as studio time, recording, producing a music video, etc. The band earns a percentage of the gross revenue for album sales (say 7%), the label earns a larger percentage. The band pays back their advance using their share of the earnings. Stop me if it seems like there's something a bit off about this arrangement.

Sending a fledgling startup company to work amidst that hell is not a smart move. Even billionaire multi-platinum bands have trouble.
Shouldn't we start talking in terms of gigabyte hours (GbH)? Cloud storage needs can fluctuate over time in most applications.
I found this surprising also. It seems like a very common task, but for the life of me I couldn't find a service to split a human-formatted address (i.e., one <input type=text>) into its component, verified parts. Some good solutions presented in this thread though.
Tischen: Ridding the world of unemployment.
This is just bullshit. The reason BlackBerrys have decent battery life is because they run underpowered CPUs and OSes that do almost nothing.

This thing is completely different, running a dual core A9 and driving a high res screen on a new OS. It's going to chew through battery like crazy. Guaranteed.
2^63 numbers ought to be enough for anyone, huh?
You explicitly grant access for each new set of permissions - accessing a friends list (and thus their publicly available information) is one of those sets. If the site changes their policy, they have to go back to the user and request permission.
This is redundant: if a list's length is 1, then it's true in a boolean context.

In a boolean context, the list is true if the length is non-zero. This example and the one the article is about is for the case where you know the list to have exactly one element. Not zero and not more than one.
I Heart Robotics: Playback: Robots built with Arduino
Funny Story... For a good 20 some years, there was a wonderful conference dedicated to hacking on the Macintosh called 'MacHack' that was traditionally held in Dearborn, Michigan (well, it started on U of M's campus in Ann Arbor, and was on the west coast once) but eventually it found its home just outside of Detroit in a quaint little Holiday Inn. It hosted many a wonderful keynote speaker including Woz himself, and most of the original Macintosh engineering team, amongst others (Ken Arnold, Eric Raymond, David Pogue, Andy Ihnatko, to name a few...)

We'd descend on the place every summer. In the old days, we'd have a massive machine room full of macs provided by sponsors. Biggest LAN some of us yoots had ever seen, and boy did we play some Marathon on it. In later years, we took over the lobby of this place.

The Holiday Inn staff loved us. We were courteous and kept after ourselves well.

Well, they liked us so much and thought we were so upstanding, they extended welcome to other "hacker" conferences that didn't go so well (think FBI making arrests in the lobby, vandalism, general hoodlum-ry). In light of this, they approached us and eventually the conference heads folded and renamed it the ADHOC conference (Advanced Hands-On Developers Conference). There were other circumstances, but the public perception of the concept of "Hacker" is what really did the deed. It died a sad, sad death shortly afterward.

sigh ...a rose by any other name...

RIP, MacHack. sob :)
There's a difference: YC's brand is not based purely on marketing. It's based on the success rate of past YC companies, which is objectively higher than average.

From an angel's point of view, YC is a deal refinery. Raw deals come in. High-quality, refined deals come out. Many investors will gladly pay a premium for those, because much of the early risk has been taken out: do the founders get along? Do they crack under pressure? Can they ship something? Can they adapt to changing circonstances?

YC figured out a repeatable, streamlined formula for a process which was previously a black art. They industrialized the gut feeling. And they deserve every bit of recognition they got for it.
Notch (Markus Persson) interview on the Indie Games podcasts
http://www.indiegames.com/blog/2010/09/indiegamescom_podcast...
> If we put together many of the same factors, angels, infrastructure, good mentors, could this be replicated, albeit on a smaller scale?

You need "enough" of all of the critical factors and then you have to overcome whatever penalty you incur from missing some of the "nice to haves". Considering the odds against success even with all of the stars aligned ....

Seriously - unless your customers care where you are, why are you so resistant to going to where the odds of success are highest?

It's okay to value things other than success, but you're competing with people who are focussed on success. How are you going to overcome that advantage?
Really? That'd be fantastic. Did I misunderstand this?
The very latest possible date real development started on Ruby was Aug 19, 1994. http://cvs.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/1.0/ChangeLog-pre-alpha

It is likely this code predates that date given that there is no reference to the 0.95 release or anything before that.

update: the earliest release I can find is Ruby 0.49 from http://eigenclass.org/hiki/ruby+0.95 (direct link: ftp://ftp.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/1.0/ruby-0.49.tar.gz)

The earliest date mentioned in the CVS entries file is March 17, 1994.

To me, the point of this whole thing is that the author's statement of "Ruby is a newer...language" is inaccurate. You're absolutely correct that I cannot definitely prove that "development on PHP started a year after Ruby."

And language age comparisons are entirely meaningful in this case, given that the OA specifically describes Ruby as a newer language than PHP. Ruby is definitely clearer and cleaner. But it is certainly not newer.
Social Bookmarking Startup Xmarks Heads To The Deadpool
Interesting idea, it was only a matter of time before someone applied the "Social Graph + foo" idea to jobs.

The jobs space is pretty crowded & competitive though, we already have:

- obvious places like LinkedIn or craigslist
- freelance sites like odesk or elancer
- Q&A sites like stackexchange
- portfolio sites are getting in (github)
- expert/consultant sites like Gerson Lehrman
- a ton of "job referral" sites that have failed or suck

And I can't imagine it would take much for LinkedIn to compete on any features they roll out.

That said, it's a big money industry. They're just going to need a massive marketing push to get people to actually use it.
I don't want to encourage terrorism, but if someone wanted to destroy an airplane, they could bring onboard a more dangerous device disguised as a phone or other everyday 'black box' object such as a laptop. The dangerous device might emit serious levels of radiation, it might contain a powerful laser, it might contain explosives. The best defense against 'terrorism' is to be nice to other countries, help them and don't oppress them.

Usury (national debt), bombing, invasion and economic sanctions (aka starvation) are not nice. The countries and groups that commit crimes like those are likely to be attacked. Don't be bad, and no one will want to kill you.
It's okay. I've had so many problems with xmarks and chrome that you'll be glad you didn't get to switch.
Rumor: An Amazon Android Tablet May Follow The Amazon Android App Store
This is exactly what Android needs.

Many of the enduring criticisms of Android I've seen are pointed at the Market. No matter how much merit those criticisms may have--inadequate policing, malware, weak categorization, whatever--separate distribution channels are exactly what's missing from the mobile app ecosystem, forcing distributors to compete, learn from each other and improve.

I'm excited to finally see Android's strengths being taken advantage of. The fact that Amazon can do this and still have a thriving platform to target speaks to its strength. And hey, if it fails, someone else can try again and maybe do better.
Maybe it's because it creates an obligation for them to continue the service for a reasonable amount of time.
Well, it's easier for user to register a page in an usual manner, why? Well, because they have been doing this all the time. In a startup I'm working on, we forced user to use a Google Account to login, then I ran a usability test on my mom, her first questions were: what's a Google Account? Where is the registration form?

Don't force people to user any third party login, instead, make them have a choice to sync their openid or facebook accounts to have extra features like facebook notifications, GCalendar and GDocs sync, etc.

Registering to an app must be easy, fast and intuitive. The use of third party authentication service must be unobtrusive, and should not limit your application, just improve it.
Full text of the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act at the link.

http://news.opencongress.org/bill/111-s3804/text?version=is
South Korea was a often-brutal military dictatorship until the late 1980s. The US was there to stop Communism, not foster democracy. If South Korea is a better place today, it's because of the Koreans themselves far more than the US.
AdSense Forefather Makes 14 Million Business Listings Available for Free
Very interesting question. I would do it more emphatically, for one. The first couple batches we were pretty tentative, because we didn't know it was going to work.

It's painful to consider whether it would have been best to do YC in SV year round from the start. I loved alternating between the two places. I still miss living in Cambridge. And yet the founders in the Boston batches probably were getting short shrift. The startup community in Boston is so much smaller. We could never have organized something like Angel Day; there just aren't enough good angels. We wouldn't even have had enough alumni in Boston, because most of the successful ones used to move to the Valley.

You can figure out what we'd do differently by what we've changed. We give startups more money on average, but we don't give them any more for having more than 3 founders. Jessica now strongly encourages vesting, not to protect us, but to give startups a predefined way to deal with founders leaving. Interviews and Demo Day presentations are now much shorter, and I'd keep both short even if it weren't necessary for scale. We look more at the people and less at the idea when making funding decisions. We've added a bunch of protections against good groups falling through the cracks in applications. But we haven't changed that much structurally. We've made a lot of mistakes, but they've mostly been one-offs, like funding startups we shouldn't have, or not funding startups we should.
It's not as simple as that. Amazon offers developers at least two things even Apple can't: 1) a vast, vast pool of consumers (vast), and 2) a network of recommendations, referrals, and reviews, honed over years for the single purpose of finding the consumer something they will buy. There is a reason Walmart is still a must-have retailer, in spite of the demands they place on wholesalers.
Todd, will you open-source any code?
Why do I feel like my WP blog is suddenly contaminated?
Was the gap between HK and mainland China increasing or decreasing before the handover? What about now?
That's a pretty toxic acquisition.