skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You don't necessarily know what's going on in the US, for example: http://jwz.livejournal.com/745986.html

I'm not claiming that the US and China are the same, btw, just that it's not a matter of absolutes. In this country freedom is violated in the interests of Disney and such.
While I assume that Google is evil, I am not sure that accepting censorship is actually evil. The alternative would be that Google would not be available at all in China. On the other hand chinese internet surfers are probably aware of the censorship anyway. I think Google acts just like a company trying to do it's job within the constraints of the environment.
Can you give one example of a person put in jail or executed for their political views in the US? One example of government forced censorship? The difference between the US govt. and the Chinese is more than black and white. You have the right to disagree with US policies - try complaining about Chinese politcal policies in China and see what happens. This issue has no gray.

The case shown in your posted link is not an example of political persecution against the ISP. We have no information on the reason for the request by the FBI, so I won't speculate. Even with an FBI gag order, the person made the whole case public and went to court. Try that in China.
I am extremely adept and comfortable with PHP. I've been using it for years. I'm learning python, but I'm still deciding if I'll need to learn rails or not. Is the time it'd take me to learn rails, really saving me time in the long run? I can do pretty much anything in PHP that could be done in rails. I'll still look into it though. I'm not one to jump on a band wagon, but masses of people don't move themselves by just themselves... not all the time.
MC Hammer is Web 2.0 expert
How many people here are too cowardly to start anything? Confess!
try dumping four ideas today
Who else is interested in making mobile UI not suck around here?
Or better, an open platform - ala Sugar CRM
Quickbooks has an online edition. It only works in IE on Windows and is expensive, but it does exist. If there were a good accounting system online, I'd use it (but it'd have to work with Firefox, since I'm on Linux on the desktop).

The problem, of course, is that business accounting is complicated. And you can't easily pick a smaller sub-set of features to launch with (what good is invoicing without a chart of accounts, and what good is a chart of accounts without reconciliation, and you've also gotta be able to import the most popular file formats for bank data imports and such). It would take several people working pretty hard six months to a year to launch the smallest usable feature set, and they'd have to move fast to get to the point where bigger businesses could use it--revenues from very small businesses won't sustain this kind of company.

That's not to say it's not a great business idea. Between shutting down my previous company and starting my current one, I toyed with the idea pretty seriously. I may come back to it in a few years if the need has not yet been met and I'm ready to move on from what I'm doing now.
SugarCRM is kicking ass these days. DFJ invested in it recently. And name recognition is really picking up. We had lots of people asking for us to add support for SugarCRM to our automated script installation module...we finally added it a couple of revisions back...would have added it sooner, if it weren't such a god-awful bear to install. It's really cool, though.
It isn't the tool that is important but what you do with it.
PHP is a pretty good tool. Rails is the (relatively) new shiny tool.
You can build fantastic or crappy things with either one.
M Dot: Web's Answer to Mobile
Sherry Turkle's sobering thoughts on communication and alienation
Econ 101 Management
totally unconnected from my world.
but thought provoking - the kings and queens of hitech.
Charles River Ventures' Angel Experiment: First Nine Investments
Search for Tomorrow
The Hitmen
One woman can't have a baby in nine months
It's Not Just Who You Know
Wow, there really hasn't been any press around these 9 funded companies. Or at least, I haven't heard of them.

I'm amazed by how much more attention YC startups get. Even if the CRV companies are in stealth mode, I still would've expected to hear more about them in the blogs / press.
Unity of interface
something = Django. http://www.djangoproject.com/
Want to get hired by the next Google?
Does your startup use MSFT technology?
'... One thing that causes me more alarm, is that I see a lot of startups using MSFT technology these days. See, startups give you early warnings on trends of what people use. Something is going here. Startups are the early warning signs of on-coming floods. ...'

Added this after reading this article (http://marcf.blogspot.com/2007/05/microsofts-long-demise.html ) from this thread (http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=214250 )

I thought the costs alone would have made this prohibitive? Unless of course your idea involves MS apps.
Not our startup.
Recomendations for cheap IP lawyers?
I've good at several lawfirms in and around Boston, but they all seem so expensive, when you look at all the things we need..

Once you get to TOS, Incorporation Papers, IP Forms, NDAs, and the like, it gets to be quite a lot of hours.

Lawyers in the Boston area are typically charging $225-$300 per hour. After you add up the hours, we'll blow through a lot of our savings just -getting ready- to launch..

Is there anything we could do for a better rate? I understand that Lawyers often provide good relationships with VCs and Angels, but for a lot of it, it's grunt work.

We've done our own drafts, but we're worried about gotchas- Maybe there are lawyers who are more comfortable just revising stuff that you've already done?
That was 2005 though. Wordpress.com now has quite a few paid premium services.
The great thing about secrecy is that you never really know what's going on. Exactly who is in Guantanamo or the secret CIA prisons, and why?

Do you honestly believe that prosecutions, FBI investigations, etc are never politically motivated?
Rails Developers, Junior and Senior
I'm not seeing it, unless your app has to use Microsoft software (eg. shell extensions, Winsock LSPs, IE toolbars). The small college-kids-in-a-garage startups I know tend to use Python or Ruby (or occasionally PHP). The better-funded enterprise startups tend to use Java. Once in a while you'll see someone using .NET, but it's usually because they need to do a desktop client.
'... small college-kids-in-a-garage startups I know tend to use Python or Ruby (or occasionally PHP). The better-funded enterprise startups tend to use Java ...'

Thats pretty much what I would have thought. Though I did run across a post here where someone wanted to work with an exclusive MS toolset. Seems using MS tools these days is a bit like trying to find people who remember "Get Smart" - you just get blank stares.
For a startup quickbooks is enough. In my last venture the other founder's father was a retired CPA and did our books with quickbooks (gratis!). I would qualify that as an endorsement because if a CPA thinks it is good enough it probably is.
Had a good look at the article, app and various other bits. Some comments:

- sydney based: http://www.martinjwells.com & previously of dot communications ~ http://www.dot.com.au/about/people.htm

- Founder wrote the article (how he wrangled that one I'll never know. one way to get some press)

- more a platform than a tool and used as discussion, blog, as a startup ( http://martinjwells.wordpress.com/2007/04/15/goodbye-blogging )

- realtime (slow): scalability problems will be a problem (testing scalability of your engine is the new 'create a blog engine')

- appears to be imitating myspace: supply the tools, create a community to grow

- ui problems in that from title link in index to detail content there is another layer. Imagine using google and having to click the item found, then another before you get to the content but they seem to be aware of this and concentrating on growing userbase and fixing it rather than wait and design the best user experience ever.
I was just in China on vacation last November, and in terms of the atmosphere in public places, the U.S. almost seems like more of a police state than China is. Some examples:

I had mistakenly packed scissors (y'know, sharp pointy things?) in my carry-on when passing through the Beijing airport. The security guard said, politely and apologetically, "I'm sorry, I can't let you take these on the plain." On the trip back through Chicago/O'hare, a woman was yelled at and pulled out of line for having hand lotion.

There are no announcements in Chinese airports saying "By order of the TSA, no liquids may be carried on board flights, and all persons are subject to search by uniformed TSA officers."

There are no announcements in Chinese subways saying "Safety is our number one concern here on the MBTA, and so we ask you to report any suspicious persons or packages to the nearest MBTA employee." People are not manhandled and pulled off trains for talking about explosions, as happened to the person sitting next to me yesterday.

Chinese people can and do criticize their government all they want - verbally. Several people we met told us "Yeah, the government censorship is disgraceful, but it takes time to change things like that." When we visited a Taoist temple in Hong Kong, there were Falun Gong posters all over the place.

China's certainly not perfect, and overall I think its political freedom is somewhat less than the U.S. The Chinese media is still very much controlled by the state, and people can have reprisals made against them for things they say in print. The Internet is censored, as everyone knows by now. China lacks the culture of dissent that the U.S. has, so many people seem accultured to political passivity. China leads the world in executions, though it's worth noting that only it, Iran, and Saudi Arabia have more executions than the U.S.

But it absolutely is a matter of degrees. China is not that much worse than the U.S. is. And China's velocity is at least in the right direction: if the U.S. continues the course it's been on since 2001, within 5 years it will be a far more repressive regime than China.
now that I didn't know ... checks ...

'... Almost everything on WordPress.com is free, and things that are currently free will remain free in the future, but we do offer paid a la carte upgrades for things like CSS editing and custom domains. How do we pay for everything? WordPress.com is run by Automattic which currently makes money from the aforementioned upgrades, blog services, Akismet anti-spam technology, and hosting partnerships. ...' ~ http://wordpress.com/advanced-services and http://wordpress.com/about

stands corrected. Looks like there is more than what first appeared. I notice they don't advertise this much.
That got me for a while too when I was first learning Rails (the what does "save" do exactly issue).

Personally I prefer letting a framework do its thing and make intelligent defaults, that can hopefully be overridden (usually the case in Rails).
Substitute "Amtrak" and it's basically the same story.
I am halfway thru writing an unpopular article on karma points.
when it's done, I shall submit it here, so that my karma will remain below zero.

Also see http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=15554
I have 0 evidence of anyone jailed or killed for their political beliefs in this country. Do you have any?
You probably didn't talk to jailed dissidents, the families of executed political prisoners, the mothers who 's babys were killed because they went beyond the child quota, the people who were forbidden to have another child, the prisoners forced to work in factories, the prisoners killed to have their organs harvested, etc. Vacation is one thing, but the evil of the government is well documented.

Hong Kong used to be the freest country in the world prior to 1997, and it enjoyed one of the greatest generations of wealth in the world because of that freedom. Even their money was privately minted. I was fortunate enough to visit before the hand over, and what an amazing place it was. That tradition of freedom still lingers, but is being snuffed out. Those posters hidden away in the temple would have been out in the streets in the earlier freer days.

Technology, like the search engine provided by Google, is giving the government the power to keep the masses from doing what they should do - overthrow the repressive regime. Another Tiannamen square will come, and the regime will use any and all force to subdue it. Their only principle is maintaining power - that has been their history and present and future until they loose power.

Comparing this to the US system is dramatically misunderstanding and utterly taking for granted the amazing freedom we have and the reasons for it. The difference is in kind, not degree.
" who remember "Get Smart""

That was a seriously funny show!
I usually sidestep political discussions..

But you have got to be kidding me.
I found that strange also. Hadn't heard of any of these companies. Obviously that doesn't mean they don't exist, but it's still strange to me.
something = Pylons. http://pylonshq.com

"Pylons combines the very best ideas from the worlds of Ruby, Python and Perl, providing a structured but extremely flexible Python web framework. It's also one of the first projects to leverage the emerging WSGI standard, which allows extensive re-use and flexibility  but only if you need it. Out of the box, Pylons aims to make web development fast, flexible and easy."
Maybe you read more general startup-covering press than I do, but for my own part, I read NYT, programming.reddit, and news.yc. There's a lot of sampling bias there towards YC companies, because the NYT doesn't do that much startup at all, while the other two go crazy on YC. So I wouldn't be surprised that I and maybe you have heard of all the YC companies but none of the CRV ones.

As to the usefulness of the fund, it seems like a perfectly good second round of funding if you start at YC, or a first round if you don't get into YC. (maybe you can pay for PR with the extra bucks)
Amtrak was a subsidy to keep old technology around because that old technology employed lots of people; Thinking Machines was supposed to be new technology that would replace lots of people.

Governments are too schizophrenic to be consistent.
If you're good at Python, you probably don't need to learn Ruby. I hear Python has some frameworks that are comparable to Rails. Hopefully, someone that knows both will be able to answer this question more in depth for you or point you to one of the endless essays on the subject available on the web.
Geeks shall inherit the earth (vc blues in aus)
When to shut out the noise
Tell that to the people in this documentary (or their parents). Wonder if you'd still be saying that if it was your son in jail....

Take a look at:
http://www.thislife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?episode=310

There's audio, and here's a direct link to the written transcript of the episode:

http://www.thislife.org/extras/radio/310_transcript.pdf

An excerpt: "As best as we can tell, Badr Zaman Badr and his brother were imprisoned in Guantanamo for three
years for telling a joke. Actually, for telling two jokes."

I guess on second thought you are absolutely correct. These people weren't jailed in gitmo for their political beliefs after all - they just landed there because the US govt decided to listen to some random guy who was upset at being the target of their humor.
Currently, I'm doing everything in PHP, I know it, I love it. Sure I'm experimenting with Rails localy but Rails still hasn't appropriate support at hosting providers and Python after so many years also isn't widely supported and won't. Hope, Python's fate will be not Ruby (rails) fate.
I haven't seen a web application built with Microsoft tools since the first boom. But, I'm probably just not hanging out with the folks that think that way. They must exist...right?

It just seems so counter-productive. The tools in the Open Source world are just so much better, and so much more widely varied. One of my consulting gigs involved lots of MS ware (desktop apps) a couple of years ago, and I was able to look at all of the development tools via MSDN. I just don't get the mindset that leads to Visual Studio and .Net and such.
It doesn't matter. Youtube is PHP (if I'm not mistaken). Lots of startup sites are. The only consideration that really matters at this point are the coders you work with. What do they like?
I thought the idea was to be super focused on your one idea, which is why you should jettison extraneous ones.
"The next Google". Riiight. Some things look neat, but I definitely wouldn't go that far.
I'm pretty happy with Rails. It's not perfect, but it's widely used, does most of what I need, and looks to be around for the long haul at this point. Ruby's pretty nice too - I like it a bit more than Python, but for pretty much entirely subjective reasons. I think Django would be a good choice too.
Yes, but Rails at least points you in a good direction, with some good practices to use.

With PHP, you can write good code, but you have to be really careful, because it's easier to write bad code, and there are more PHP coders out there who do not know what they are doing.
"Wanna-be's wait for their lucky break. Entrepreneurs engineer four, five, six plans and execute them in tandem, wagering that at least one plan will get traction."

Ok, I've about had it with these advice lists. Do one thing well. Try 5 things and see what sticks. Bootstrap, don't bootstrap, etc... etc...

I think the only thing that makes sense is to just start working and go from there. Then you can write your own 'advice' some day, if you are successful.
Andrew Chen: Google AdWords is not enough - focus on viral strategies instead
Code Igniter for PHP (codeigniter.com), anyone tried it?
Andrew Chen: Cracking the code - how to analyze viral strategies from the top growing sites
like http://teenwag.com
For all who think Viral strategies dont work Myspace for teens taking the online world by a storm
They've been getting a lot of press ever since they launched their flash version. Slide has been featured in every business magazine, more than any other I can think of. As well, Max seems to participate in a lot of panels and speeches because of PayPal. I am not sure how much of it is because of Slide, and how much the PayPal - eBay connection.

As a result, when you get that much press and users, you're GOING to succeed if you just keep adjusting the product to the users wants. Which, is exactly what he says he's doing. In every interview, he mentions that he doesn't know what's going to happen, but if you get as many users as you can, you'll get a large base of users to track statistically, and figure out what else to add or improve.
Sorry, YouTube is written in Python
VOTE this post up if you like viral strategies
50% of the market that we ignore? Half of Americans barely use new technology
Some of the first commenters (on the actual post) take shots at YC, one calling it a "feature mill". Their argument is that these CRV startups have seasoned guys at the helm, thus they will grow to become "real" companies. Ridiculous.
I've been thinking about this today and I realized that there's one thing that makes the carriers and handset manufacturers unimportant.... browser support. If the incumbents continue to stifle innnovation, then the best apps will come out as m.mycrazywebsite.com instead of as installed software.
I'm excited to hear someone is working on the problem do you have a link (err, um, you know) to what you have so far?
Actually, ads in Japan usually have a little black blob that looks like a checkboard barcode. If you point a Japanese cellphone camera at it, it interprets the barcode as a URL then loads up the page on your phone. If they're telling you to search for a keyword, then the idea must be "you know, later, when you're not looking at this ad with your phone in your pocket."

…Or the company doesn't know where to find URL-to-barcode converter software, but that would be weird, because they paid for a pretty good looking ad apart from the lack of barcode.
WTH? Facebook using oodle for classifieds?
Two questions:

1) Isn't it more efficient to mandate minimum safety standards through the government/OSHA than through unions?

2) When you took the job, did you know about the conditions there? If so, why did you take it? I can't speak for you, but I want to guess the money made up for the suckiness, right? So, it seems like if people know what the conditions are in a job before they sign up, isn't it up to the individual to decide whether the money is enough to get them to put up with the sucky conditions?

Just curious.
Do you think you would have gone that far when Google was just a search bar with better results? (I'm not particularly claiming that this is the next Google, only that the next Google is extremely hard to spot)
Anyone still developping with PHP or similar should spend a day trying a framework like Ruby on Rails or Python / ( Django, webpy, ... ).

The advantages of those frameworks are :

- Way faster development ( less code )

- No messing with databases

- Clean structure ( business logic separated from HTML )

===

Arguing wether to go with Ruby or Python with a framework is pointless, their concepts are similar. Choose one tool and get good at using it.

I went with Python and Django because :

- Python is simple, clean, multi purposes and popular

- There are many available libraries ( and it has been helpful to me )

- Django is the python framework with the most contributors

- Django has good documentation available

===

Django is not the fastest framework but when you'll have to deal with scalability, the solution is to cache and put everything in RAM.

Try the tutorial and see if you like it.

I needed about 1.5 months to get used to the underlying concepts.

My advise is to code as seen in the examples and relax.

Don't worry about optimising, they thought about it for you.

===

Tutorial:

http://www.djangoproject.com/documentation/tutorial01/
We need an actual polling feature.
Check out Cake: http://www.cakephp.org/
It reads a lot like Google, with the gourmet chef and the catering to hackers. Only the outcome is radically different.
Since this has turned into a discussion on Tangler;

I use Tangler occasionally (I'm Sydney based, so I've met Martin too - great guy, very helpful). The app was kinda slow initially, but it's getting much better. I read posts on it a couple of times a week now, although I don't necessarily prefer it to traditional forum systems. It seems unfocused at the moment, but I suspect that's largely part of their plan to let the users decide where to take the app.

I do agree with bootload that they need to get rid of the second click through layer for topics. That does bug me a bit. Some better visualisation of topics within groups might help too - I feel lost without hierarchical navigation.
I think he was not saying that he had the next Google; just that most startups have similar screening processes.
Audio Interview with Peter Seibel, Author of "Practical Common Lisp"
I'm not so sure about this veto thing. If there is even just one guy in the team who is really picky about, eg.: personality, then it won't work.

Long interviews are definitely worthwhile, though.
Google Searches for Mergers Big and Small