skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A good question to pose would be: assuming a significant economic downturn is likely, how would this affect typical 'web 2.0' businesses?

The answer may well be 'badly'. A great deal of these sites presume a healthy, wealthy economy: they hope to generate income from ads, or subscriptions, or hope for investment and/or buyout. All of these routes will be significantly impacted by a liquidity crunch.

Many sites with small margins, or hoping for investment, or looking for a big sale, or counting on getting big fast may then have real problems.

I am not denying that there are many opportunities on the web, or saying that it is necessarily a bad time to be in the internet business. I am suggesting that anything less than a solid business may prove extremely vulnerable to a small-medium recession.
Aug. 7, 1991: Ladies and Gentlemen, the World Wide Web
A quick back of the napkin math shows that they won't even recover a fraction of the revenue they're foregoing.

This move has nothing to do with ad revenue and everything to do with fighting Murdoch and WSJ. WSJ will go free (mark my words) and will take a away a ton of NYT's traffic. NYT is fortifying its traffic and is trying to boost it before Murdoch makes a direct assault.
Great site. Very self explanatory. I like that it removes all the hassles of creating, saving, and distributing spread sheets. Definately bookmarking this one.
At best, the dollar is facing a slow, inevitable decline. At worst, something like this happens.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?xml=/money/2007/...
Now that I think of it, perhaps the USD going down means the US markets lose their importance, also in the eyes of the US companies. Their problem would be, when you're based in the US, it might be difficult to understand international markets. At least I've yet to see an ATM where you can deposit money ;-)
A smart move, long overdue. The web news business will probably evolve and mutate significantly in the next few years, and NYT was already well positioned for that. Dropping the wall puts them in an even stronger position.
Just about the only thing the USA has that is truly valuable is our international brands like Coke and Nike. The rest can be duplicated overseas and I think powerful international brands will emerge eventually, unless we're already past the age of brands.

I think the peak of US civilization was the first bubble era. After that, George W Bush and his horrendous economic and imperialist policies combined with the worst Congress ever have further hastened the decline of America.

Our currency is worth half as much as it was in 1999! It's hard to notice for the rich, but for young people without money, life is getting harder. If you don't have an engineering degree or a CS degree+portfolio, there aren't any jobs without graduate education in something relevant. And good luck paying for graduate school when your net worth is already -$100,000.

Inflation is creeping up but it's hard to tell because the government doesn't publish M3 numbers anymore. I just don't see anything that can reverse this trend and I'd like to get out while I can. If I don't make a good amount of money soon, I'm afraid of being trapped in America instead of being able to move overseas and cheaply rebuy America later.
Intense Debate - A Disqus Competitor?
Also see TechCrunch coverage: http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/08/07/intense-debate-soups-up...
It wouldn't be a popular misconception if a lot of people didn't believe it.
As a consumer, it is nice to see market shrinkage.
Are we ready for an off-topic site yet?
PG, you've got the code ready, let's get a general link discussion site going. Do you have any ideas for the domain? Maybe the community here can help you think of one.

I saw this article and though it would be great for the kind of sociology discussion this community seems to like, when it ventures off-topic.
>Vancouver != Toronto != Montreal

But can you give an "equal to" map between US and Canada. Like SF=Vancouver. New York=Toronto etc. I will find such a map very useful.
yes - looks like it.
We speak Spanish and English.
Also Python/Turbogears and Javascript.
Do I hear people complain? Please come and check out how bad it is in LA now :)
Living it up with a Live Programming Language [pdf with movies]
They reopened the 2007 numbers - they had closed it for a few weeks, but I think a lawsuit got them to reopen. I'm hoping to get mine in the next month or two.
I am not a developer but here is what Tabblo's founder has to say about Django. Tabblo was acquired by HP 9 months after launch.http://theonda.org/articles/2007/07/02/now-with-django-power...
The language that best solves the problem and that scales.
Apple's keynote from the special Mac event (iWork'08, iLife'08, new iMacs) and inimitable Steve
You can go read a lot of economical studies trying to answer this one question: why can not Canadians achieve the same level of entrepreneurial productivity as the US.

Canada is welcoming as a direct result of limited demand.

The good news is that US is changing the requirements.
Jeff Bezos restarts Amazon's shopping spree
>The good news is that US is changing the requirements.

May be in 10 years or maybe not. Thats fast for a government! But I didn't want to wait for 8 years - remember.
Intense Debate Soups Up Your Blog Comments
Damn. My knee-jerk, support-news.ycers reaction is that it would have been nice if Disqus got out first.

I'm guessing they are pretty busy by their conspicuous absence around here. You still alive Daniel? The alpha linked off your blog the other day looked pretty cool.
Why Mathematica does not use Lisp
See Red vs. Blue if you're deciding on Ruby/Rails vs. Python/Django

http://jng.imagine27.com/articles/2007/07/12/red-vs-blue
Multi-Tasking: Why projects take so long and still go late
The tech space 'leaders' are starting to look more and more like the blood sucking snakes in the record business.
jQuery in 15 minutes
As a Finn, the only example of a powerful international brand I could directly come up with was Nokia. Others would probably remember the Japanese and German cars. Interestingly, there isn't a single Canadian brand in BusinessWeek's top 100: http://bwnt.businessweek.com/interactive_reports/top_brands/...

But the way you talk about the reality of the US economy sure paints a grim picture. I can only hope the country finds its place again in the new world order.
I've got lots of ideas on some cool ways to do keyframing and animation for non-animators... anticipating the next product.
Discussion: Are there any good developers in all of Philadelphia?
We're a funded startup in the Philadelphia region (InviteMedia.com) looking to recruit some top talent and can't seem to find anything. Has anyone had any success in this area or are we doomed?
We use Ruby on Rails with a lot of JavaScript for Ajax-y thingies. So far there's only 2 of us, but looks like here in NYC there's more than a few RoR devs.
PFFT!!!

This silly thing couldn't even calculate this, something that Google calc does perfectly:

http://www.google.com/search?q=the+answer+to+life%2C+the+uni...
IT staffs challenged by tech-savvy employees, "consumerization" of IT
Amazon invests in social music site Amie Street
LiMo mobile Linux platform to reach market by 2008
Awesome! I think there's a bug--can anyone else confirm that the bar chart doesn't seem to work in shared spreadsheets:
http://my.instacalc.com/calc/1c58eb08760043bfb67924cb5fa1684...
Google Docs API Released
Clipmarks Acquired by Forbes
Cake Financial to Launch Free Investors Network
Wikinvest Is a Wikipedia for Stock Junkies
congratulations! waiting for mine, it is an insane journey!!

I dont understand the green card system, if you run a company, you want the best to stay, and not make their life hard. the existing process makes it harder for those better performers for the USA company.
Nice site, though it doesn't work on some of the bandwidth calculations I often do via Google calculator. (eg: "(1TB / 100Mbps) in days")

For the curious, there's a GPL project, 'qalculate', which could be used as the basis for similar calculator services.
I'll second that. Congrats to Rob and Devin and whoever else is on the team!
Python (pylons) + JavaScript + Flash, and loving it!

I used to use PHP, but once I tasted Python I couldn't go back.
CakePHP + Scriptaculous. CakePHP was easy to learn, however the documentation is not complete, you'll have to read the code for advanced features.
I've found that I had to gradually replace large parts of web.py as my webapp evolved. For instance:

I had to drop the built-in DB library once I needed to connect to multiple databases. Global DB connections = bad. I suspect that if I'd kept using it, I would've had problems with transactions too.

I had to replace some of the request dispatching when I wanted to add code that triggers on every request (eg. logging, transactions, custom session management, "who's online?", traffic analytics).

I had to drop the Cheetah integration to add internationalization support - Cheetah supports the _ function, but only in precompiled templates.

I had to drop Cheetah entirely as the templates got a little more complicated and I wanted to factor some bits out. Web.py patches the Cheetah #include directive to do what you'd expect: include a file at compile-time (which is the same as runtime under web.py). With precompiled templates, however, it includes it at runtime, which means the included file can't have any #defs. Big pain.

It's not a bad framework to start out with, but you will end up needing to ditch nearly all of it by the time you've handled everything a typical webapp needs. If I were to do it over again, I'd probably start with Pylons. I'd consider Django, but I'm not sure you can swap out Django components the way you can with Pylons.
Perl with Catalyst, DBIx::Class, and Template Toolkit. All the actual every-day code is really simple because all three are designed for extensibility. I just write little plugins that abstract away the repetitive stuff. I also write lots of long-lived systems daemons. They do all the asynchronous tasks in a super efficient way. Not enough people use this technique in my experience.
Can someone please tell me why everyone is so anti-php these days. I'm been working on my web project this summer in php, and it seems like every self proclaimed web 2.0 site is choosing either python or ruby.

I feel like I'm on the wrong side of the road, and php is web 1.0. I wonder though, do users care what language the site is made in? And has usuability and quality of a site become determined by programming language?
>Are we ready for an off-topic site yet?

As if we don't kill enough time here?
Not really. Information I can give you would likely be a lot more vague (and less accurate?) than what you can research on your own. I guess I'll try anyway.

Toronto is the largest, and the financial center, but you can't really draw a parallel to New York, it's a lot slower-paced - San Francisco actually reminded me a lot of downtown Toronto. You can easily find graduates from the top two computer science/computer engineering schools in Canada.

Ottawa had a very active tech industry before the dotcom bust, but not much after. I'm not sure today. Terribly boring city to live in, though.

Montreal would be a good choice for French speakers. There are a number of large video game studios in Montreal, I can't tell you much about start-ups there (beyond, say, http://montrealtechwatch.com/2007/07/22/poll-of-the-week-4-m... ). Culturally, a very strong city, there's always something fun going on.

Vancouver is probably the closest to San Francisco in geography and climate, I didn't know it had a strong start-up scene before I read the article on montrealtechwatch.com. It's relatively small though, not sure how easy it is to find talent (on the other hand, it's close to Seattle).

Calgary and Edmonton are booming and have a lot of oil money floating around, but skilled workers are at a premium.
That's a great link, thanks. Go Finland for placing so high on the list. Also note that there isn't a single Chinese brand on the list -- the Chinese government really, really wants to get some international brand names out there. They wanted to make Lenovo into a true international brand but that hasn't worked.

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200507/fallows
This is a really good piece of speculative fiction about the election of 2016... obviously it won't all come true, but American travel infrastructure assumes that every family owns one or more cars. At this point, it's clear that personal transportation is just unsustainable. $6/gallon gasoline is going to hit the average (poor) American very hard. Mobility is going to be severely reduced, especially as public transportation starts getting cut.
The confusion is that Google has two businesses that are integrated. They have products that are advertising supported and they have an advertising platform available to others.

Google could kill their open AdSense product completely and still make billions dollars selling ads on their products.
The Bubble Bubble continues to expand.

The argument this time seems to be that the entire industry will crash once it becomes clear that a large site like Facebook can't hold on to its ad revenue for more than a few years, because the fickle users can (and supposedly will) migrate to other sites.

I don't understand. If Facebook's users all left the site tomorrow, it would obviously be bad for Facebook, but the rest of the industry would break out the champagne. Users who leave Facebook don't abandon the Web and join the Amish - they go someplace else online, and the ad revenue goes right along with them. Friendster's collapse was a bad omen for Friendster shareholders, but it doesn't seem to have had any terrible effect on the rest of the social networking industry, which grew even faster once it absorbed all of Friendster's former users.

Even if it turns out that individual sites like Facebook are fads, lasting for a few years before burning out, there's no reason the industry can't adapt. Clothing styles turn over just as quickly as Web fads, but fashion designers still manage to stay in business for decades. You just have to operate at a higher level. The Facebook or YouTube of the future could be a company with half a dozen brands, rolling out (or buying out) a new brand every few years to please the latest group of teenagers. Like a TV network, or Procter and Gamble, or the Pepsi Corporation (which owns Pizza Hut and Taco Bell and a substantial piece of your local high school cafeteria.)

The real limit to the growth of ad-based sites is the number of users and their available attention - you can only show so many ads to someone in their lifetime. One could argue that the industry is funding, or is about to fund, many more ad-based companies than the ecosystem can support at the moment. But even that would not constitute a "bubble". It's just the business cycle. These companies aren't fantasies or fakes - they're just competitors, getting ready to fight for a share of some very real ad dollars.
To answer your question, the only thing users care about is what your site does and if it does it well. The only people who care are the other people who are developing websites as well.

Basically I see the PHP backlash coming out of many painful personal experiences that hit the limitations/drawbacks of PHP. I've maintained a large social networking site written by someone else and I can tell you it was a stinking pile of spaghetti.

I think the power comes from using a framework like RoR of Django that abstracts aways common parts of web development. Plus I see it as a way to keep from reinventing the wheel which leads to simpler code. And we all love simple code.

Anyway, just my thoughts on the matter.
If you need to incorporate, YC won't hold it against you. It's less risky for them to invest in companies with customers anyways.

But make sure you do it as a Delaware Class C Corporation, because otherwise YC will want you to convert and that's much more expensive than than doing it from a scratch. So don't incorporate as an LLC from your state, even if it might be cheaper.
I feel you, i really feel you. I have been sitting on 3 implemented ideas, one of which is really good. Working on a 4th idea. Hoping that once the green card gets through, I can break out, start a company and hit the road. on reading this discussion here and this one here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40253, I did what I could, I blogged about it :)

Here it is: http://crunchnot.blogspot.com/2007/08/capitalism-and-road-to...
I dont know about UK citizens, maybe there is an agreement by UK and USA but citizens from india cannot start a company or work on anything else other than the visa they are assigned.
Capitalism and the road to a green card for a legal immigrant
An instance of the 11 plus year road to obtaining the ever-so-valued green card. What do you businessmen think?
Common Lisp, but my project is a poor representation of "the majority of startups" because it's not a web app or a social networking tool. It also doesn't qualify as a startup yet, but that's the goal.
Hey guys, this is Kalid from instacalc. Thanks for the link -- please send any feedback/bug reports to kalid@instacalc.com and have fun playing around with it.

I'm actually in YC this summer on another project with some friends, we'll let you know when it's launched :)
Or perhaps a device that will change human transportation forever! Oh wait...
MySpace has justified it's $600M valuation, which you might have claimed was unjustifiably inflated, no?

What makes you think Facebook can't justify a few multiples of MySpace given its trajectory?
Cool, I look forward to it.

Instacalc is one hell of a "thing you built" for getting into YC.
Creative thinking hacks - Scott Berkun
We're using C#/ASP.NET (which though rare across startups, has worked out well for us so far).
What's the deal with counting users?
That's a pretty hardcore story.
http://my.instacalc.com/calc/92299353cf9840adbe298cad39c46b7...

are you aware that you're getting spammed?

why don't have rel=nofollow in place for links?
I was able to spook it, but we do tons of back of the envelope calculations at my office all the time and I plan on making this my homepage at work.
Here is what I have learned from 2 years of questing for the One True Language:

there is no one true language and you should focus on accomplishing specific goals and getting stuff shipped instead.
go go black hat SEO

Nice catch
7 Reasons Why The Best Internet Marketers Are Bloggers
If, like me, one of your self-proclaimed titles is an "internet marketer", then you've probably asked yourself at some point, "Why would I want to blog anyway?"
http://brl.codesimply.net/

Reason: I'm doing a database-driven web application, and I designed this language exactly for that purpose.
Here is an important question. Did you apply for the green card lottery or did you get on some other premises, and what were those?
Are you saying anything different from what the linked slashdot comment is saying? It sounds like you're responding to the news.yc title only.
A must read for all entrepreneurs.  Let's get past the "no"
I was ineligible for the Green Card lottery since I'm British.

It was an employment-based application. The startup I worked for in London got acquired in 2003 and we all got the chance to move to the Bay Area.
Thanks -- you can actually do the calculation above like this:

http://instacalc.com/?d=&c=KDFUQi8xTUIpIHNlY29uZHMgaW4gZ...

I'm not tracking the implicit unit conversion (1TB/ 100 Mbps)... yet :)
By hitting a nerve you presumably mean touching on some fundamental point that makes people uncomfortable. But not everyone who generates a lot of responses hits a nerve in that sense. Trolls pride themselves on causing huge fights from remarks with little more content than a bot might generate.

I'm not saying this was a deliberate troll. I'm sure it wasn't. But it had that in common with trolls.
Thanks for the info. Yeah, I was surprised how quickly the spammers found my little old site. Nofollow is a great suggestion. I may need to add captchas as well.
Um, it's a "feature" :)

I purposefully disabled charts on the embedded versions to save bandwidth (about 100kb of javascript), but I plan to add it in.
Let's assume that mySpace is making the $25M/month speculated. At a $600M, it would take 2 years of sustained $25M months to see a return.

At 100 million visitors, $25M translates to $4 a month per user in ad funds. $4, per user, per month, sustained for 24 months. Just to break even.

Those are insane prices at insane growth trajectories. You can call that justification of a valuation, but I call it unsustainable speculation.
I think it's dangerous to think that advertising dollars operate in a zero sum balloon sheltered from economic realities.

>The real limit to the growth of ad-based sites is the number of users and their available attention

Assuming the perceived value of an ad remains constant. Unfortunately, ad budgets change, and sometimes, ad spending does indeed pick up and go join the Amish.
most immigrants come here because their home country had a much lower standard of living - aside from the opportunity. So I am surprised that you took so much trouble; surely Britain has an equivalent standard of living?
Spock.com out of private beta
(disclaimer) I'm a webdev at Spock, but it's cool and we're open for business.
Demo Day's in two days. I'm a bit busy at the moment.
Maybe in a couple weeks when things settle down.
When people are connected to an idea, they tend to believe it to be true, even as evidence starts to mount otherwise.

When a definitive answer to this question comes, minds may change, but like most disputable theories (global warming, economic cycles, religion) without proof, people tend to react on their base instincts.

To those that have a lot to lose in me being right, it's a tough pill to swallow. I haven't given any real proof, rather a selection of observances that could point to a conclusion.

To those without any real vested interest, or (like me) looking from the standpoint of a potential future interest, the situation seems more tenuous.

It's nothing personal, just human nature.
Congress targets Smokers AGAIN - TvByDemand | Forums | News
I don't think so. I think you can come for a short time to the US with no problem. It's staying for years that's hard.
It has an equivalent standard of living - in some ways I still prefer it. It doesn't have anything like Silicon Valley though.
Lijit + Intense debate + madkast
I don't understand how each of them could survive on their own. Together as a suite of apps they are good, alone - hmmm ... I have my doubts ... what does everyone else think?
True, but we didn't have anything to do with this. They'd made instacalc before we funded them, and their YC startup is totally unrelated.
agreed, but lets kill it in a slightly more productive way!
Wow, I hope it will be useful for you! Let me know (kalid@instacalc.com) if there's any features you need.
Well if you think Murdoch made a mistake it's not surprising you think Facebook investors would be making the same one.

The people who believed Google would monetize their business in a huge way seemed to do alright. I don't think Murdoch regrets his decision. I do think people should be cautious but you're going way beyond saying just that.