skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You are missing the point.

We are talking ecosystems here. Namely Androids vs. Apples
My Weapons of Choice - Part 1
Facebook's OpenGraph sub-classes a lot of the relationships defined in the Dublin Core vocabulary. http://opengraphprotocol.org/schema/?format=rdf

Also, view-source a Flickr photo page. You can find some uses of RDFa and the Dublin Core vocab there.
I'm pretty skeptical of all advertising now. I learned that in college not from it failing to prepare me for work, but because that was explicitly taught in classes. If people need defenses from the colleges now then perhaps that needs to be taught in high school. I'm willing to accept that that skepticism is not a "natural skill" but then it needs to be taught to people before they can be exploited in ways that will ruin the rest of their life. Of course there's a counter incentive in that the whole consumer economy relies on a lack of that skill.

Edit: These sorts of lessons would best be taught by parents but right now many seem to have lost the same skills through marketing to their belief that their child is the best ever and that they have to do everything to make sure their child has all the advantages possible.
Don't eat anything besides lettuce and orange juice frozen into popsicles. Run 5 miles every morning wearing 3 layers of sweat suit, possibly carrying a smaller wrestler on your shoulders while you do so. Use chewing tobacco between class so you don't pass out during the day. As soon as you weigh in, eat as much as possible until the match, as both a recovery aid and to actually weigh more than you're supposed to for your weight class, giving a slight advantage over the guy who has to turn you over.

Cutting to make weight is not really a good model for healthy, sustainable weight loss.
Thanks. This is the series I have been looking for. I almost feel bad for not knowing this book existed.
How did this get twice as many upvotes as patio11's extensive, detailed notes from the Business of Software conference?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1795896
The Level of Uptime – Increasing Pressure Syndrome
Is it possible to make a enterprise website using PHP still?
I'm talking millions of requests a week, is there a way to scale PHP to handle this?

The reason I ask is because I have a co-worker that told me Foursquare had changed from PHP to Vala because PHP was too slow.

Ideas?
Even if it is more productive, I just don't feel like eating alone.
We applied yesterday and we are so excited! Go YCombinator!
Years ago I wrote signal processing software for a speech recognition project. My code did fairly sophisticated spectral estimation, which then feed into powerful statistical learning software.

It became clear that one had to be really careful. If the front end software had quite serious bugs, the back end was powerful enough to learn to recognize mangled speech, thus hiding the bugs. One could continue with ones research, vaguely puzzled as to why ones results were disappointing. One could continue to do research and improve the performance of the system without realising that it was all pointless; everything would have to be redone once the bugs were discovered.
Linked Data is the big initiative: http://linkeddata.org/

With Sparql, you've got an excellent query language.

Here's a cool app someone made last week: http://lamboratory.com/blog/2010/08/25/a-linked-data-movie-q...

It generates a movie quiz based off the linked data cloud.

Also, there is a huge amount of work in the life sciences that uses RDF.
Stat of the week: 64% don’t receive frequent recognition at work
San Francisco, CA - Plancast

We're looking for a Backend PHP Web Developer to become the 4th full-time member of our team.

Benefits:
Competitive salary, generous stock options, health insurance, a hardware budget, an office with an incredible view, a flexible work schedule, and you'll be working on a problem that actually affects what people do with their time in the real world.

Site: http://plancast.com
Job info: http://planca.st/ErS

Interested? E-mail me (peter@plancast)
Google is Not a one-trick pony
Well the entire point I was making from the start before I got dragged into this meta discussion was about the consumers not the developers.
I was rejected by YC a couple years ago, and I mostly enjoyed it (I loved talking to the AppJet guys).

The fact that I didn't build the company I was pitching is prima facie evidence that I agreed with their assessment. (and in retrospect, I wasn't the right person to do that company and you could hear it in my voice)
If you really care which programming languages I already know or which applications I have used before, I can only assume that you're overlooking my ability to quickly pick up new technologies and adjust to new ways of thinking.

This is going to ruin your world view, so brace yourself

So, this is ridiculously tongue-in-cheek, and the reply is over-the-top to the degree that I can imagine with no effort the same being uttered from underneath a drill sergeant's hat against some fresh recruit who copped a serious attitude.

It's not an unfair response to brash cockiness, but it has set me thinking.

Whether a language, or a framework, or a library, or any other handy tool of the software trade, there seems to be two camps that drown everyone else out in the din.

There's the camp that declares that learning new things is a matter of extrapolating from the understanding one has already developed to fit with whatever assumptions this instantiation of thing X makes. For instance, you understand what Object Oriented programming is, and how it works. You are presented with a language you have never used before, but know it has support for OO. This puts you from a level of having to understand OO to a level of understanding this language's semantics for OO.

Then there's the camp that declares that learning new things always starts from a position of absolute ignorance. Prior knowledge and understanding of concepts that would seem to apply to this new thing you are learning don't apply, almost as an axiom. As with my example of OO above, it doesn't matter that you know what OO is, and what it means to the structure of your program. If you don't know OO in the language of discussion, you get no points toward credit of understanding OO.

If I may be blunt, both these stances seem like bullshit. You don't magically know the syntax of how to do OO in a new language simply because you know OO from a theoretical level; it's something you have to look up. But different languages' implementation of OO aren't so disparate that the only thing they share is the name. There is a basis there you can rely on, but it doesn't get you 100% of the way there.

I guess the question I don't think people answer enough, which I would like to inject into the conversation is "how far does it get you?"

I realize that the answer will vary for different theoretical ideas, and different practical realizations of the same. The point of my question is to challenge the presumption that understanding of related concepts either gets you to the finish by default, or leaves you gasping at the starting along with the people who didn't have that understanding. I think this gets left behind when we start having all of these political battles based on generational identity, and I'd like to see what people think when smacking other generations around isn't the primary goal of a thread.
While I think the reverse application shows a lack of dev prowess, it screams marketing prowess.
A bajillionaire whose name is hardly household might be able to buy eternal, historical name recognition by taking such a one-way trip as a way of "going out in style".
Matt - I agree autogenerated content is a problem and is polluting the search results so I'm glad you guys have taken action. But what about sites like bibleknowledgebookstore.com and articlesubmissionreview.com that are buying links, creating fake content, and spamming web 2.0 profile pages and forums? How come tactics like these are not only working, but dominating competitive markets? What's the point in going after high quality editorial links when sites are rewarded for essentially spamming?
Immigration rules are very complex and the best think you can do is ask for advice to an immigration lawyer or to a serious immigration service provider online.
Love Apture. They just keep pushing the envelope.
Yes. Experience is great, but everyone has to start somewhere. The unemployment rate for under 25 is extremely high.

Society doesn't focus much attention these days on "upward mobility." But but an overreliance on "experience" (generally "paid, professional experience"), in extremis, will permanently shut out an entire generation from the world of middle-class employment. Is that really a good idea?

"Resolved: Individuals who did not have a good (preferably government) job on July 31, 2007 and a record of unblemished professional success with progressive experience and responsibility and no failures or false starts should abandon all hope."

Is this really what we want to promote?
Facebook uses PHP for the user-facing portion of the site. Here's a link where they discuss some of what they do

http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=2356432130
Using DFind.exe and Blocking w00tw00t.at.ISC.SANS.DFind
Classic: http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:o4niyIQ6_O8J:w...

For all the hating, automating programming is an obvious thing to do (the idea is both trivial and quite profound: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=645338), and there are some really cool ideas there (reversible debugging being one).
Productivity tips?
Hi guys...I find it a bit hard to concentrate on the work and motivate myself to get the work done. I just find excuses to read books, watch some movie etc. Would you guys mind to share some productivity tips and the kind of schedule that you follow. Thanks :)
Did anyone here make it to the interview round and then get rejected? I wonder what the %age is of folks who make it to the interview stage.
The YC experience is what you make of it. They're there to help whenever you need it/ask for it, and they don't pressure you to do anything you don't want to do.
it's obvious what jobs is doing here. he's throwing an opinion to build public consensus/sides-line on (doesn't matter if it's wrong or right). this is exactly what news stations like FOX and such do.
Sanebox has a nice implementation of the "Hit the snooze button" idea (just tag/refile to SaneLater and it will reappear in your inbox later). Feels great to punt on some emails.
> I doubt many hackers use twitter. It's for self promotion mainly, or consuming that promotion (Being a fan). Something I don't think most hackers are interested in.

From the outside, I'm sure it looks that way. Twitter is definitely for self promotion if you're a musician or other celebrity.

If you're someone who builds things, though, Twitter is an always-on chat with other people who build things. If you want it to be. I've learned a lot from the many developers I follow on Twitter. Heck, my current day job is something I found through a relationship that began on Twitter.

It's what you make of it, but a boatload of truly productive people use Twitter to share information every day.
You can write on a tablet with one hand. You need two hands to type on the iPad, unless you're reclined in the "Steve Jobs-on-a-couch position" or hunched over a table.
I rarely received feedback at previous jobs.
When I last tried Lisp (SBCL) i was surprised how hard it is to find standard, common sense 'batteries' as you would in python, and how hard it is to get things going if you're not experienced. I think the point where I jumped out of the boat was trying out 'Hunchentoot' or something like that (webserver).

I haven't seen that with Python, Ruby, C++, Java, even Haskell feels 'modern' in that way. Why must it be so hard to get simple stuff going ?

(Note: I like function programming concepts, but I would expect a programming language to be easier to bind into a context of reality.)
Curiousity - I used links2 for a while, it's like lynx with images and some minimal js support.

Anyhow, I find images in email incredibly useful - it makes it an extra couple of steps for a lot of things if one has to upload or serve an image and the recipient then has to follow a link to get images.

What area of work are you in? Not big on branding?

I'll have to get some time with Mail.app, does it make no distinction between inline images and attachments either? How about encoded images that are inlined - do they show as attachments too?

I do know that OSX handles vcards very well so I'm kinda surprised it treats them as straight attachments but still don't think that matters so much.
But a subscription is a simpler building block, that allows for a wider variety of relationships. With Facebook, every relation must be symmetric; with Twitter, relations are symmetric by choice; you can have friends (you add them, and they add you), but also fans, without having to extend the feature set or invent new terms. Facebook, on the other hand, had to create Fan pages, because they didn't have a preexisting verb that users could overload to do the same thing.
This has nothing to do with confirmation bias and everything to do with the prisoner's dilemma (game theory)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoners_dilemma
> "Yes, XBox 360 sales faired much better over the summer, but we will have to wait and see if this indicates a sustainable trend or a blip."

True, but I firmly believe this trend will be further cemented by Kinect. The amount of marketing and public awareness of the product is incredible (and damn well better be given how much marketing force MS is applying), and having used it myself I firmly believe this will be a bigger hit than the Wii. Sales compared to the Wii will be tempered by the higher price point, but overall public opinion will go towards it - and IMHO that's going to cause a sizable drop in Wii sales.

> "In the fiscal year 2010, Microsoft's Entertainment and Devices Division (which includes the Xbox 360) generated $8.5 billion in revenues and just $679 million in operating income. Considering Microsoft's consolidated operating income in 2010 was $24 billion, this $679 million represents only about 3% of Microsoft's profits."

Agreed. It's unlikely (if not outright ridiculous) that the Xbox will ever be a primary revenue driver for MS to the same tune that Windows and Office are. Even if MS owned the entire console market it still wouldn't be the case.

My point though, was that as far as their consumer products go, the Xbox team is the only one demonstrating any appreciable success - building products that are not only well respected in-industry, but outright loved by their customers. That's a level of success, vision, and loyalty that MS has never shown anywhere else in the consumer space. They've also demonstrated a willingness to toss out things that don't work and start anew (see: the new Dashboard UI that replaced the Blade UI). Heck, they're the only MS product out there that shows any real focus on the user experience - Windows is a damned joke in that regard. The success of the Xbox holds a lot of key concepts that the rest of MS must adopt it it wants to survive in the consumer space (and that includes home computing /w Windows)

> "Ultimately, the Xbox 360, the PS3, and the Wii may be irrelevant given the emergence of connected televisions, thin devices, and cloud-based gaming."

Possible, but IMHO unlikely. Consumers are very price sensitive to commodity items, and TVs are just that. Current connected TVs offer an incredibly poor user experience (I have one), and I don't see it getting much better anytime soon.

Software is not a demonstrable strength of the likes of Samsung, Sony, etc, and the level of hardware required to give a proper user experience adds significant cost to the set - something that IMHO consumers will select against.
The jobs should be auctioned. A job is posted, the top 20 candidates are identified, and each submits a bid for how much to do the job and the lowest bid is accepted.

This is the way many other jobs are assigned such as construction contractors or engineering consultants. CA taxpayers could save a bundle with this approach.
Very very cool.

A couple problems though. For terms with spaces in them it creates a tag for each word. For example "stack overflow" has tags for "stack" and "overflow", which aren't all that useful (although yes the tag stackoverflow is created): http://metaoptimize.com/projects/autotag/hackernews/term/5a/...?

What would be a solution to this? Parse the text so each token includes the first space it encounters and see if that multi word token occurs frequently?

The other problem is stripping out punctuation. The tag c++ doesn't exist, neither does c#. Not sure how you'd include relevant punctuation and strip out the rest.
Startup Map
"How to hyper-optimize yourself into a lonely existence" - great title for a book, which you can presumably write during all of this time you've saved!
While I agree that stating he's been rejected for 2 years isn't the best opener, many commenters are missing the point. He may not have impressed you specifically, but the fact that this is polarizing is an indicator that it'll probably succeed.

Having people love and hate you is a big plus whether or not you're marketing yourself, your product or your company. Much worse if people shrug and move on.

Other polarizing examples: Harleys, cruise vacations, the iPad, Crocs sandals and of course avocados.

Quite literally, he only needs to impress one person with this.
I used Eclipse daily for about two years, along with an internal C code plugin. I'm not sure which I can attribute to Eclipse and which I can attribute to the plugin, but my Eclipse workspaces were frequently getting randomly corrupted, global search-and-replace was not trustworthy, and for a while it was running so unstable overall that there were times I could launch Eclipse, load my workspace, and within a few minutes of just sitting there it would crash. This was running on Windows XP.

So I tried Eclipse at home on my Mac. I saw that it came with a utility for auto-packaging Java programs into OS X bundles. I made a simple Java Swing "Hello World" program and tried the bundle utility. It didn't work. I tried a few more times, and it never worked, but in fact got progressively worse in its output. Uninstall.

Some months later I thought I'd try Eclipse on the Mac again; surely it had improved. So I downloaded it again, created a new project, clicked through to add a new source code file and I got an error, that it could not create a new file.

I'm guessing that my experiences must be abnormal, since Eclipse is so hugely popular, but I now avoid it whenever I possibly can.
It worked out OK. They sold Kiko on eBay and made about as much money as they would have if they'd had normal jobs. Even their investors did OK, except YC, and they got Justin.tv for their trouble. :-)
i realize iMicrowave is a joke, but honestly its brilliant. Imagine a line of custom kitchen appliances running iOS. Apps for your oven.
However, Facebook uses HipHop (http://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/358) to make PHP faster (so it's not the plain-vanilla PHP).

From the linked article:

HipHop programmatically transforms your PHP source code into highly optimized C++ and then uses g++ to compile it. HipHop executes the source code in a semantically equivalent manner and sacrifices some rarely used features such as eval() in exchange for improved performance. HipHop includes a code transformer, a reimplementation of PHP's runtime system, and a rewrite of many common PHP Extensions to take advantage of these performance optimizations.
October 2010 GNU Toolchain Update
NP - I didn't take it as rude. Just wrong ;)
Get Inspired By: Writers | 9 Fresh Ways to Boost your Inspiration
When you are branding for a client, you shouldn’t just be trying to make them look good, you should also be telling their story. Isn’t that what a website is all about? Websites are tools for outreach.
I have helped plenty of people solve problems in languages I don't know. I would not suggest that this makes me an expert or even all that unusual. However, I suspect that a great C++ programmer would be more useful to a Python project than an average Python programmer in about 3 weeks.
I disagree on both counts. The payoff matrix is nothing like the prisoner's dilemma, and it's confirmation bias on the writer's part.
Just submitted ours yesterday too...pretty pumped to hear more. Thanks for what you do!
What's wrong with it? I just looked it up: http://clojure.org/contributing

It seems to be a cover-my-bases way of saying "If you contribute, we have joint-ownership of the code." Which is, I think, reasonable if you're going to contribute code to a project.
BlueGlass FL Rocks It Up: The Video
We have built a SAAS product which eliminates the headache of building and maintaining database. Looking at your pain-points, it seems like our product may be the perfect fit for you. It also provides the analytics out of the box. As the demand increases, the product automatically scales up. Since it is in invite only private beta release, I don't want to disclose too much. If you are interested, we can have a discussion where I can go through the product and features. My email address is: ketan_bengali AT yahoo.com
I thought this was going to be a rebuttal to Never Eat Alone (http://www.keithferrazzi.com/products/never-eat-alone/) but it wasn't. However, the book would serve as a rebuttal to this post.
Chris should probably do a post on how he uses the phone. He's very quick but never feels abrupt.

I often have a problem with letting people know a call is over and I need to move on. So, like you say, calls often become a time suck for me and I avoid them.
IIRC, they invited ~90 companies? And given the last few class sizes we know they accepted ~35?

I could be off so feel free to correct those numbers
Well, this is just like those casting call businesses that say they'll get you acting/extra/model work. Of course, you've got to pay them a big fee for representation and and overpriced head shot...

You tend to get less than you put in.
Theres a clear difference between your site http://poeet.com and a clean cut case of auto generated spam. Your site is actually quite creative where it is aggregating content from a twitter hashtag and indexing short poems that may otherwise go unnoticed, you are also showing the users original tweet and @user and not manipulating anything. The original poster was likely scraping content, not providing citation and for the means of having the duplicate content wrapped around ads.
It still isn't. They bet on their car winning, and they lost. They didn't go around trash-talking competitors or bragging, they just thought the agreement was not financially sound for them.
Myth: After Being Broken, Bones Can Become Even Stronger.
That's funny, the picture that you are using for a GPS receiver is a Magellan Explorist 210, it's the GPS that I've been using for biking for the last few years.

But I don't think that it's compatible with your service.
I made the decision to go ahead and use tech IE doesn't yet support in my app. I'll see how it works out in the end but currently I have users all over the world and none of them complained about this. In fact to be able to use some of the features they have to install a webgl enable browser which hasn't been an issue for my users either.

My users are scientist and researchers, but not all of them are completely computer literate. I hand hold them a little bit with the setup.
Wow... I'm sure no one anyone's heard that kind of attitude before, great to have you get that off your chest...

The funniest thing is you also hear people toss around statistics about 9 out of 10 applications not being able to X...

Well, if a potential employer treats someone as the "the lowest of the low", they might find out the person acts like that, aren't "up to our standards" and they stay with an unfilled position and the frustration of interviewing (and abusing) fifty more people, who are also "the lowest of the low"...
NoCAP