skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think the trend you are pointing out is already in full force: often you'll jump over to Wikipedia directly, or IMDB to get data on movies. It is really easy to make search work when individuals format their own data into a specific format for usage by your search engine. This keeps on being useful until people start abusing it. In a social app like facebook it seems relatively less rewarding to abuse the system though.
I assume by taking a fn as input you mean taking a fn whose return values would become the input. That would not be hard, but the clean way to do it would be to modify read so that it could take a fn as an argument.
VoSnap - Idea To Startup In one Weekend
A web application known as VoSnap is being development as I write, by 70 or so people who have gathered for the sole purpose of starting up a web application and business in a single weekend...
Fortune Favors Big Turds | Screw The Money, This Is My Art
"I think the future of software is in things designed like the Korean alphabet. Deceptively simple with incredibly complex powers that you cant even begin to explore fully."- Zed Shaw
"Mindrosity" is my new blog.  Check it out!
Your body font is too small...
Even the score is not necessarily reflective of the number of people that might dislike him.

It simply indicates the number of people that found the associated article interesting or valuable enough to give it an up vote.
Microsoft Outplaying Apple? Not the Way I See It, Scoble!
Facebook apps. Hype or Real. What is your prediction?
I've recently come across an interesting situation and would like to know how it would effect my company's chance at being accepted by YC.

An investor I knew in a prior experience has expressed an interest in investing in my new endeavor. The application FAQ lists an understandable preference to avoid funding a company that has already incorporated.

The amount the investor suggested is sizable (enough to sustain operations for at least 3 years even after hiring some very much needed staff/co-founders), and since the idea is substantial the money is very appealing.

But, though the investor is an engineer, he has no affiliation with the tech industry at large, so I'm afraid that I would be missing a great deal of support by taking this money.

Thoughts?
StartupWeekend: 70 Founders Create One Company in a Weekend
I don't know exactly what your situation is, but if he is not someone you owe something to, the optimal solution would be to apply to YC first. If you're accepted, you can invite this would-be investor to Demo Day, where he can compete with all the other investors to fund you; if not, he's plan B.

Note that this assumes that you're not indebted to the guy in any way-- that he is simply a source of money.

BTW, 3 years is a lot of money. It suggests to me that you're either raising too much or (more likely) underestimating your expenses.
Windows developers begin slow defection to Linux
GoPHP5.org - helping speed the transition to PHP 5.2
A truly advanced Lisp dialect will infer parentheses.
The problem with Netsuite and Salesforce.com is their business model. For instance, until last year Netsuite's sales-and-marketing expenses exceeded its revenue. In the most recent quarter, netsuite spent 78% of it's revenue on sales,marketing, and administrative expenses. And it still lost money.

So, Netsuite's customers aren't paying for software with a side of salespeople, they're paying for salespeople with a side of software.

If Netsuite and Salesforce.com's financial statements are the rubric by which we can judge the SaaS business, then it seems that SaaS is an inferior business model to traditional packaged software.

Someone needs to fix the SaaS business model to mitigate the sales-and-marketing expenses.
A Y Combinator acceptance is nothing compared to eternal salvation. Angel funding indeed.
And this is the caliber of individual YC funds? It's on the official Xobni site, no less.

I don't know how to compete with that kind of class act.
Has anyone created an RSS-based recommendation engine yet?
Like reddit, but input/output of OPML/OPML instead of votes/links.

We're obviously all going to be using RSS some day so this is inevitable. I'm just wondering if someone's done it yet.
this is something I've wished reddit had from the very beginning.
Yes, I think the way you have done it is better.
Real-Time 3D in Javascript using divs
using javascript, html, and css...
<blockquote>Costco's strict attitude toward product markup reminds me of 37Signals frequent assertion that often constraints are a good thing to be embraced.</blockquote>

Rails, Grails, Unit tests, woo!
The president of Evans Data doesn't know that "data" is plural?
So I'm thinking, "Well, I've never heard of this bug tracker called 'mongrel' so I'll check it out...". Turns out "Mongrel" is a web server and not a bug tracker. So, I'm guessing Zed never heard the one about the apple and the orange.

...I read up until he started criticising the Apache web server. Now, I won't claim to be an expert, but I'm guessing there's a reason beyong it being a "big turd" for the 2 billion installations.

Oh, well. Tip to writers: As long as you are anonymous, pour on the bile. Who cares? But when you've got your name attached, don't actively try to make every enemy you can.
Just curious, in which other blog posts does such unnecessary judgement show up?

I am perfectly willing to admit that I wrote a completely subjective, unbalanced post. If I wrote thousands of words in an attempt to keep things balanced, would you have read it? Would it have sparked a discussion? Probably not...
Reddit didn't even have comments from the very beginning :-). Ah, the nostalgia...
How to Create Many to Many Relationships in Ruby on Rails
This quick guide will make it easy for you to create many-to-many relationships between tables.
The plot for this "hack" is nearly identical to an old episode of "Welcome Back, Kotter."
fantastic hack!
Is it possible to add clickable URL links in this comment ? Beeing able to add an clickable image would be great too. Just a small image not higher than this edit box.

You know the saying an image is worth a thousand words. ,-)
Too bad that startup's product can't help you write grammatical, complete sentences, cause that guy could sure benefit from something like that.
I think it's become acceptable to use it as singular, at least in certain contexts. How often do you hear "Are your data backed up?"
Some people seem to feel that GK is mocking them with his mantras. Ie you are spending lots of money on your startup, he spreads the word that you can do it with 12000$ etc.

I think that is just the typical text communication issue. My impression is that GK'S intention is not to mock other people, but to motivate them to do something great. Also, to chill out in a way, I guess. At least in "Rules for Revolutionaries" he is also mocking himself, when he lists famous blunders and also mentions him dismissing the offer to work for Yahoo in it's early days, for how could it possibly successful.

I like his books, and even if not everything is new (how could it be), some things need to be repeated over and over again to finally sink in.

Also, I just looked at trueomors again: it seems the quality of submissions has improved greatly compared to the early days.
PG,
I think this is useful for your current setup.

But I think this whole 'bubble popular stuff up' is a tad off. Its too binary, IMO humans aren't all that binary - not all of us anyway. How about you use sliders so people can rate stuff more subjectively and you can also use relative font sizes to size up stuff which is more popular and reduce the font size on stuff that isn't. This does not mean that the text becomes too big or too small - its just a subtle change.

This will allow you to disable this whole bubbling scheme and keep things in a natural chronological order while making it easy to spot popular stuff without adding any cognitive load.

Finally, a discussion board must really have a feature that shows all 'unread' or 'updates since your last post' threads in bold or some sort of highlighting. While news.ycombinator implements the unread piece it would be helpful if it highlighted updated threads also.

How can I be sure you read this comment?
My YC application partner's votes also doesn't count for my submitted stories.

pg: Let's say I run Tor and sign up for 25 new accounts over the course of a couple days. I vote for random stories with each account over the course of a week or two. I make two or three comments with each account agreeing with the previous post. I submit the story I want to game onto the front page and then vote up with all of my dummy accounts.

Will these votes count?

Is there a way of preventing a determined individual with an army of pseudo-accounts from gaming social news sites?
I guess it just seemed like quite a lot was going on right on the home page -- too much for me to get my head around all at once. It's possible you're trying to achieve too much: discussions/comments like News.YC, longer articles, featured member pages, job openings, generic wiki, etc. Perhaps not; maybe just simplifying the home page a bit would help my perception.
Binary is good. Do I rate your comment above a 6 or a 7? What does 7 mean to the next guy, and is it the same as it means to me? Up down is good because I only vote when I feel strongly about it.
A 360 degree startup to effectively take care of your reputation
I dont get, why 5 is better then 4. TFA says "better xml parsing". But why implement XML Parsing in the language at all? You can do that in PHP. Put all that kind of stuff in libraries. I want a slim language that never changes.
Craig Newmark's lullaby
maxklien,

1.My own perspective is that it does not matter whether it is a 6 or a 7 and who interprets it how. That is the whole point of a subjective system it is not objective.

2. I believe subjective systems should not use numbers or other notations and therefore I suggest a slider not 10 radio buttons or a rating system.

3. I do not imply that the binary/objective system is no good. It is good for some applications, I would just prefer a more subjective measure around things which incorporate human opinion.

:)
Very interesting. I would join an event like this if it happens in SV. Not for the equity, just for the fun of it.
Java vs. K: a screencast
K is a proprietary APL-influenced array programming language. A simple 36-line Java program becomes a one-liner in K.
What marketshare do you think iphone needs to make such an impact?

And why do you think it will gain that huge marketshare?

Its the first "nice looking internet in your pocket". But is that enough to take over the mobile world? Couldnt other companies create type-on-screen devices with round edges?

First Mover = guaranteed success?
Good one. Reminds me of the cool work done here too: http://www.walterzorn.com/jsgraphics/jsgraphics_e.htm
Younger job seekers hold the advantage (because they can do startups instead)
Interview with Doc Searls re: development of Cluetrain Manifesto
The way I advise founders to deal with abuse is to rule out the obvious stuff from the start (e.g. don't give out the root password), and deal with the subtle stuff as you become more popular. Reddit did that, and it seems to have worked fine. Reddit is now big enough that a lot of people try to game their way onto the frontpage, but Steve & Co still seem to have the upper hand.
It has become common - acceptable depends on your willingness to cede precision and expressiveness in the language.

And it doesn't inspire confidence that I am more pedantic about this than the president of a company the name of which includes the word "data".
I've never seen a single blog post wander in so many directions. Fogbugz. The nuclear arms race. Korea. The virtues of the Korean writing system. Japanese WWII atrocities. Fogbugz. Ruby. Tourism in Asia. Open source.

The irony could be mistaken for satire if it wasn't so unfunny. He rants about Joel making up numbers, and then does the exact same thing. His general call for others to cite references to back up their claims are preceded and followed immediately by his own bold, unsubstantiated claims.
Having a more dense language inevitably means that more programs turn out to be accidentally meaningful. Since Arc is designed to be an LFSP, that trade-off is worth it.
Having a more dense language inevitably means that more programs turn out to be accidentally meaningful. If the power of a programming language is the inverse of how long programs are (which is the best definition I've found so far), you can't make a language more powerful without the space of meaningful programs becoming denser.
It is nowhere near that complicated.
5%. iPod. It's more. No.
So, you upload your feed list (OPML) and get other feeds (OMPL) that you might also like?
His real point is that something can be "simple and powerful." In order to sound edgy he subverts the meaning of complex into something that it doesn't mean (powerful), and bases his entire argument on this sleight of hand. (leading to statements that, out of his twisted context, are totally bewildering like "its capabilities are complex".)

His argument about simplicity and complexity not being mutually exclusive is a matter of definition, and thus he undermines others by foisting his definition into their mouths and then screaming bloody murder when he deduces that changing the premises of someone's argument does indeed damage its conclusions.

Among other things I think his comparison of stats between Mongrel and Fogbugz is fundamentally broken. Mongrel is among other things free. Beyond the intense need to brag about his project's success I can't see any legitimate reason for making that particular comparison.

(Beyond this point I rant about his usage of Hangul for his example, feel free to skip rest of post.)

His comprehension of the Korean writing system, which is one of his "powerful" points, seems superficial at best. Hangul is a language that was designed by a small group of advisors when the royalty realized most koreans were illiterate (not enough resources to spend learning chinese kanji). How the hell are we supposed to be surprised that something explicitly designed to be simple, in fact, turned out to be simple? Some extra points can be deducted for the fact that they stopped using hangul for several hundred years until it was institutionalized by the strong nationalist movement post WWII and made the official writing system in an effort to establish a unique Korean culture. Additionally we can pause curiously while noting that the average Korean still uses 700-800 Chinese kanji in daily life, and that academic papers still use the kanji for particularly esoteric or complex concepts (although this is increasingly discouraged as it is viewed as elitism). He crucifies Joel and Don for using limited examples to justify a point... and then use a single example to prove his, along with unsubstantiated claims about linguistic researchers. The Japanese katakana alphabet can represent many words very well... until you try to do one with an L in it, and then it fails utterly. Using one contrived example wouldn't reveal that, and its the same reason I doubt his point about hangul.

Beyond technicalities, its ignorant to conflate the creation of one small group of individuals six hundred years ago with the cultural preferences of modern Korea. Using something as an example never works out if you don't actually know about it.
In a similar vein, the blockquote really needs to have some surrounding white space, as it is it is really crowded. Oh, and you should just give up and write your own blog software, its better than way. :)
Will Google Acquire Facebook? (A win for all parties concerned including Myspace and Yahoo?)
Not a bad read, although I wonder what reality some of these writers live in. If we look at startup participation / entrepreneurism amongst, say, people under 30 years of age, is the percentage really that high on a national scale? If even 1% of 18-30 year olds are opting to run startups instead of getting a job, I'd be surprised (although I'd love some numbers!)
I don't really think that not gaining access to the iPhone would be particularly devastating to Adobe or Microsoft. MS in particular has sufficiently large pockets to weather inconvenient storms. The computer based market will remain vastly larger than the phone based market. I don't have real numbers off hand, but lets assume 5% of web views are via cellphones, thus if we reach your 5% number for iPhone penetration then perhaps 0.25% of web views would be on an iPhone. I just can't see numbers that small being decisive.
Unreal Soccer (written in JavaScript using the canvas element)
Amazon EC2 + S3 Doesn't Cut it for Real Applications
16 Best-Loved Font Bits In Web Design
Social Bookmarking Showdown
On that note, you might take a glance at the lightweight concurrency paper; it proposes a new concurrency runtime for GHC, basically moving most of the implementation into Haskell, with just a thin layer of primitives in the RTS. Interestingly, those primitives don't include locks, but instead a very minimal transactional memory.

http://research.microsoft.com/~simonpj/papers/lw-conc/index....

(The paper is also notable for giving a complete operational semantics of the system it discusses.)

(But this stuff isn't in GHC mainline, and won't be, for now, because it needs serious performance work first.)
Unfair comparison.

First things first, his java skills are rusty. Here's how a real java programmer would write this. Does the exact same thing as his final java sample; it's just less than half the size:

import java.util.HashSet;
import java.util.Random;
import java.util.Set;
public class BDays {
public static void main(String[] args) {
int people = Integer.parseInt(args[0]);
int days = 365;
int sampleSize = 1000;
int total = 0;

Random random = new Random();

for ( int k = 0 ; k < sampleSize ; k++ ) {
Set<Integer> s = new HashSet<Integer>();
for ( int i = 0 ; i < people ; i++ ) s.add(random.nextInt(days));
if ( s.size() < people ) total++;
}

System.out.println(total);
}
}

secondly: Regarding the manual import writing and compiling stuff, well, I'll try and put this nicely: That's masochistic. Download jEdit, Eclipse, NetBeans, IDEA, or any other java programming environment other than 'notepad' and 'cmd', and you no longer need to compile anything, just hit F11 or CMD+R or similar, and you'll see your results right away. Note that in the above sample, the first 5 and last 2 lines were generated completely automatically by my IDE (Eclipse), so in practice we're talking about just 5 lines of actual code. The rest is generated or setup stuff.

thirdly: To optimize this code, you could stop generating birthdays the moment there's an overlap. Doing this in the K example is more complicated than the java example, in java you'd change the line 's.add(Random.nextInt(days))' to:

if ( !s.add(Random.nextInt(days)) ) break;

that's all you need to do. In K, by using the _draw shortcut (A method that exists in a number of mathemetically oriented add-on libraries, by the way) you lose that flexibility.

Between the cartoon swearing I actually like the java code better.

Java could certainly use more functional stuff and there are legitimate arguments to be made for adding something to your toolbox (I suggest Scala; compiles to JVM so you can mix and match java and scala at will). However, these trivial examples invariably have archaic java compared to state of the art $OTHER_LANGUAGE. These straw man comparisons are thus pointless exercises as no actual java programmer would ever be convinced by this kind of thing. They'd just blame to horrible quality of the java example.
Replicating iPhone Buttons the '-webkit' way
It would not be a win for Yahoo.
Not trying to be a jerk here but all books are supposed to refresh our mind and open our eyes wider. Some can be applied, some can't. It's up to the readers to use the "mantras" (mix-match) to help them to be successful.

Take PG's essays (or books). Some of us love it because it has the sense of defending and making geeks as a superstar. It goes down to whom the author is. Is he voicing our mind? Is he in our field?

If you're a marketing guy, GK and Seth Godin are probably your top authors. If you're from Software industry, Eric Sink and Joel are probably your guys. And if you're in the euphoria of startups (specifically of Web 2.0), Paul is your guy.

When people from Paul's world read Joel's, they probably boo him because he's "too Microsoft" style-ish. But if you actually an ISV (micro or not) like Eric Sink and the rest, Joel's essays made sense a lot.

It's just a different world.
Fixed.

As for having my own blog software, I was under the impression that more people are likely to comment on my posts if I use standard blog software.
Some even have their parents in the room for added help, and many respected companies are willing to engage parents in the hiring process if that's what the candidate wants

(!!!)

Wow. Depending on the circumstances, I would escort the iddle bitty baby right to the front door, or...

Explain that nepotism is absolutely forbidden.
and http://ycombinator.com"style="font-size:30px ?
good, i guess; i was sort of having fun with that one.
Meet Joe Hewitt, iPhone Web App Interface Guru
http://kx.com/a/k/readme.txt
At that point it's not so much a comment as a description field for the link. You'd probably want to implement it as such and the question becomes, "Do you want to add descriptions for all links?"
SeekSift (http://www.seeksift.com/) is headed in that direction, though it works a little differently from what you described.

I hadn't thought about the possibility of producing OPML as the output, but it's certainly something I could add in a future version (it's still in a fairly early stage of development right now).
That would really depend on how you implemented comments. As you move toward requiring users to login/verify themselves this becomes more likely that users will not bother. Larger blogging platforms can often diminish this barrier because you only have to make an account for their entire network of blogs.

You can reduce/avoid that problem by not requiring logins, or by patching into an existing network (OpenID is the way of the future ya know). I don't think that is a major issue though (what I would worry more would be scalability).

It was mostly a joking comment so take it with a grain of salt. I built my own blog software and it (along with configuring the server its hosted on) has been a bit more of an extended learning process than I expected.
precisely

thanks for the tip, btw; let me know if you notice any other breakage
I am the Steve Jobs of astrology
Just one of my blog entries, experimenting with launching a commercial web page...
Unless things start to go quite wrong for facebook within the next year (which could easily happen) they're not going to get acquired by anyone. What I'm most interested in is when will facebook make it's first acquisition?
I don't think what the iphone supports will matter much in the long run, it's what devices like these nokias that will have the biggest impact on the future of mobile http://www.nokia.com/A4405104
That is unfortunate. I'll send an email to my friend on the Iphone sw team about it right now.
We made some changes from your feedback. We simplified the first sentence, and we created an explicit launch feature list on the homepage at http://www.streamfocus.com . Thanks again, and please let us know if you want to be a private beta tester. We are planning a private test in about 2 weeks.
Engineering a career at the PC's creation (Inventor of the first bitmapped PC with mouse)
arc:

(def bdays (people)
(count [no (iso _ (dedup _))] (n-of 1000 (n-of people (rand 365)))))
All Shook Up, Right Down to the Musical Core (Universal vs Apple)
I also think the K version is completely unreadable. I feel reminded of the Perl-One-Liner signature tradition (what was the name for it?).
I'm not sure why the format is important.

Building recommendation engines is really hard from an algorithmic perspective. How you format the inputs and outputs seems negligible in importance.