skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My First Game Changing Deal
Auctomatic cofounder Harjeet eats dinner
I'm amazed by the recent trend of my twitters being picked up on News.YC

This really isn't that interesting
Full text of War and Peace--a good lunchtime read.
Twitter is _the_ effing stupidest thing I've ever seen in my life. Pollution be its name. Just prevent any submissions from it.

I'm submitting war and peace in hopes of providing more substantial off-topic linkage:

http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=26094
There have a few non-US teams in the program. If you stay where you are, you are missing the main benefit of Y Combinator.
Honestly, these tips are not very good. One advises you to work on the startup in your spare time. Something tells me that is not the secret to success.
Fund-raising advice from Dharmesh Shah
Peeking Inside The Blackbox Of Venture Capital
The Photobucket Sale and Fotolog
Architects vs. Builders
Not by choice though..just if we don't get a visa.
That's a lot of text.
10 reasons why every Web 2.0 developer should attend Virtual Goods Summit
Yet, system administration is still tied to the shell and the old
toolset, despite the astounding advantages of moving to a modern
high-level language.

This is where I stopped reading. Python's great, but the shell and the
old toolset is still more useful for many sys. admin. tasks because
the tasks are one off things and each command is typically more
higher-level still than Python, e.g. join(1) and comm(1).
Tech camp for kids: Get the right fit
Advertisers put more value on visitors closer to home
F8 and that Telegraph road
Summary: says that harnessing the power of crowds is great, but you can't do without a small (maybe one) group of quality control arbiters at the core. Compare Linux (Linus only lets good stuff in) with Wikipedia (anything gets in, hope it gets improved later).
Term Sheet Hacks: Get a Great Deal
'Web 2.0' Crowd A Small Minority
Norvig on the Google AI
Maybe Google is priming itself for an aquisition by the DoJ.

There's gotta be some kind of technological solution to the problem of data centralization and privacy, without sacrificing usability.

Maybe desktop software will make a comeback as a solution. Javascript is already a client-side technology. Gmail could run entirely in Javascript 7.0, fetching and sending data in encrypted form from the GoogleDrive, and decrypting it entirely on the user's computer, with a user-supplied key.
Virtual Brilliance, Virtual Idiocy
Artificial General Intelligence: Now Is the Time
Why are you surprised that someone would choose Perl to build the ultimate sysadmin-oriented application? It's the obvious choice for anyone making this decision without regard to what's trendy.
The /threads page doesn't show recent comments. I replied to an old comment of mine on the Feature Requests thread to add more information. That new comment should then have appear at the top of my /threads page, possibly with the other one above it as context. It didn't appear at all, presumably because the parent wasn't displayed. This is wrong. It's a problem that there's no pageing on /threads so I can't view all my posts, but at least the recent ones should be visible.
Plazes CEO and Founder Exposed by Own Tools
Putting the Fun in Functional: Applying game mechanics to software
Why Europe Needs to Seed the Growth of its New Stars by Saul Klein
Top 5 Under the Radar companies
Sounds like a funding proposal. He makes a lot of strong claims regarding his own abilities.

Fun quote from McCarthy: "My own opinion is that the computers of 30 years ago were fast enough [for AI] if only we knew how to program them."
Spyjax - Your browser history is not private!
interesting comparison
Sometimes I really think Gates starts to miss the point. These screens and projections everywhere used to be the next big thing since the sixties, they remind me of those "the house of tomorrow" cartoons.

I saw an interview with him on tv, where he was asked about important technologies to expect in the future. He started talking about advertising and content, how in the future they will be targeted to every individual, instead of broadcasting the same thing on tv. He was describing something that google and everyone else has been doing for the last 5-6 years.
The tech behind Google's Street View
Marketing new SW product and public relationships stuff
Hi Everybody.

I plan to run new product and I need to do PR support for my new starting company and for my product on market. Unfortunately I don't have any experience with PR stuff.
But I know it is very important issue and I must to figure out how can I do that PR stuff?

I need any start point for that. For example please recommend me good books about PR in the Internet or web-site.

If you had real experience with place on market new on-demand software product I would be really happy to have several advices from you.

Thanks in advance.
I think you make a lot of very valid points and credit to you for dealing with them candidly.

IMHO I dont think there is a right/wrong answer to taking VC money/raising funding in general. I think the absolute wrong answer is raising VC for the sake of it and not having your eyes open as to the consequences.

Otherwise it really comes down to your own circumstances - if you want to go for a massive hit then VC is a great option. If you want to build something slowly then self-fund. If that's not financially possible or you want to scale faster than you expected, raise angel. Either way, make sure it's your decision - that's what really counts.
By game mechanics what they really mean is exploiting people's need for social status. Every bullet point was related to zero-sum social status, and no other aspects of gaming were mentioned.

The thing is that if you want to get into the game of exploiting people's need for social status, you have some pretty strong established competitors: school, church, the military, computer games, etc.

I saw a talk by a Microsoft guy, and I know the MS open source lab is working on discovering ways to get people to contribute more to their software. I am pretty sure that my working model of this phenomenon hits more of the salient points than theirs, but it is kind of scary nonetheless.
But completely worth reading.
This seems like a panacea for tailored advertising or big brother ~ you decided. Ok, so I join/register for a web 2.0 web site (or any web site) and of course I give them my name, address, email, etc. and for fun let's say they grab my browser history. Now they could gather information about me by doing a Google search and of course every time I revisit the site they could re-gather my browser history ~ put all that info into an ever growing database and now you have the ability to tailor advertisements. Come to think of it maybe I should start a site that does this ~ anyone want to help :)
Java faster than C
SBCL Lisp, Ruby, Io, PHP, Python, Lua, Java, Perl, Applescript, TCL, ELisp, Javascript, OCaml, Ghostscript, and C Fractal Benchmark
Impressive, SBCL (Common Lisp) is at the top of the heap :), tying with C for top speed. We've been experiencing incredible speed with SBCL on our streamfocus.com app.
It's nice to see SBCL Common Lisp tying for top speed honors with C :)

http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=26136
Amp'd Mobile (loopt competitor) burns $360 million, declares bankruptcy
That's my experience with Java as well. Also, Java is much faster tan C++. C++ is slower than C.

Here's an interesting link: http://kano.net/javabench/

"JVM startup time was included in these results. That means even with JVM startup time, Java is still faster than C++ in many of these tests."
That's been my experience too, for heavy numeric computation. Hotspot can optimize the hell out of plain Java SE.

Something to keep in mind though: architectural considerations matter a whole lot more than the particular programming language you use to implement them. If you keep your programs simple and use tools like Java NIO when appropriate, you can write really fast code in Java. If you pile on framework after framework, of course it's going to be slow, because it's doing a whole lot more work.

It's very easy to write a screamingly-fast Java backend and then lose all your speed gains by sticking it behind Hibernate, JSF, and a half-dozen JavaScript libraries.
references are the key to hiring. not the "official" ones. Backdoor or referrals are the best.
http://genotropic-orgs.blogspot.com/
Framework Performance Tests RoR, Django, CodeIgniter, etc.
5 Reasons you need a Contact Page
Mercury News laying off about quarter of newsroom?
Hey Founders: Shut Up! - Speak less, listen more, and other lessons founders can learn from journalists
I don't think Amp'd counts as a competitor to loopt. Amp'd is an MNVO that's doing a lot more than just providing a single mobile phone technology. Burning through that sort of money is relatively easy when you're paying through the nose to be on someone else's network and you're doing national advertisement campaigns.

As Techcrunch notes, it "probably sits more as a telco failure than a strict Web 2.0 one"
I disagree. It's not obvious to me at all. Which is why I asked for their reasons.
Re: "AI Manhattan Project"

The Manhattan project involved almost no research (1). It was an engineering project whose constraints were manpower and money. The research was a somewhat more low-budget affair, viz, szilard daydreaming around London, Fermi working in a 3rd rate Italian lab.

(1) One of the few actual innovations was the explosive lens. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explosive_lens
Misleading at best, see the comments section.
What else should I add to Study Stickies?  Is it good enough for more significant promotion (e.g., on StumbleUpon)?
See:

http://studystickies.com/

http://studystickies.com/#in%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fvideo.google.com%2Fvideoplay%3Fdocid%3D-8246463980976635143

http://studystickies.com/#in%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Freports-archive.adm.cs.cmu.edu%2Fanon%2F2005%2FCMU-CS-05-193.pdf

http://studystickies.com/#sql%20by%3Aamichail

http://studystickies.com/#computer%20science

http://studystickies.com/#by%3Aamichail

http://studystickies.com/#in%3A0071350047

http://studystickies.com/#in%3A0070527660

http://studystickies.com/#psychology

BTW, the flash demo is a bit outdated but might be worth watching anyway.
BTW, how should I promote it? Pay for advertising on StumbleUpon?
Dude, if you are not willing to take advice, you will not progress. Your software is too complicated! You say it allows one take notes. Well, how in heavens name does one do that? I do not see a button or link.

This is why a lot of these ycomb reject startups are failing. Their software has obvious flaws and when it is pointed out, they do not work on fixing it.

Your site is fatally flawed. If you wish, mail me at maximusklein at gmail dot com for further discussion. If you don't wish to, start fixing it by explaining to me (and hundreds of other dumbasses like me), what the hell a "resource" is.
A "resource" is the artifact to which you would like to attach sticky notes. It may be a book, video, online document, etc.

To add a note, you first need to add a resource. Then you can click "Add Sticky" under the resource to add a sticky for that resource.
a few more iterations and you'll end up with optimusprime
amichail; you need to redesign the user interface. start by using font size 12 across the whole site, then add margin between all the blocks. and consider something else beside yellow.
Check out websites like technorati and wordpress.com
I agree with the others re the design. After loading your page it takes a while to work out what the site is actually about. The mass of text is quite confusing, and I think you need to better explain the relationship between "resource" and "sticky".
Interested to see you use GWT for this, I know it can be difficult to make anything look good with it. Making the whole site javascript seems to make browsing quite slow, cant you speed it up a bit somehow?
just a few thoughts, good luck!
C++ slower than C? Isn't that the same thing? Most of the time when I hear "C++ is slow" it usually means someone ran into slow STL+compiler combination. And according to my knowledge GCC is the worst performing compiler out there when it comes to optimizations. BY FAR. Intel and MSVC++ 7.1 eat it for breakfast, even with microsoft's profile-guided optimization turned off.

And by the way, why is it always Java guys who's playing with these benchmarks? Looks like an "inferiority syndrome" to me, C++ hackers just don't seem to care. Do you know why? Because good (performance-minded) C++ programmer has very good idea what kind of assembly instructions his code will turn to. This is why performance-critical code is still written in C++.
IF you, can get PAST the random. Punctuation.
To put it in a nicer way, what's a resource? People work better with analogy to something they already know. For example "stickies" conveys something that can be stuck onto something else. Maybe that something else is a "stickable"? Or you could drop the generic word, and just mention the specific things you can stick to, like images, webpages, and videos.

In general, your site is daunting to a new user. Most of the things are not labeled in a way that a person unfamiliar with your terminology and layout conventions could jump right in and start using it. One thing to concentrate on is the names of actions. I see that I can import stickies, but I have no clue why I would want to. Where would they come from in the first place?

A FAQ/Help page would help out some, but it's really confusing from the outset, moreso than it should be for what I think (?) is a relatively simply idea.
Cat.tv
The Ebb and Flow of Social Networking
It looks like you're using AJAX to load in content when I click links. That's a really weird way to implement your site. People are fine seeing pages load, especially when there's all new content coming in. Why reimplement what the browser already does?
I don't understand your point. The client gets data from a servlet using RPC. Could you elaborate?
The import currently supports the XML format used by the export.

This allows you to make backups using export and in case of data loss on the server import your stickies back in.

It also allows you to write a utility to import stickies from some other format.

In the future, I may provide a heuristic import that works with plain text.
No, C++ is not slower than C. Both C and C++ are effectively macro assembler languages, and if you know what the 'macro' expands to, you can gauge the performance. You could implement everything that's in C++ using just pure C and get the same effect, but I surely do not want to manually lay out my vtables nor do I want to replace my C++ templates with C preprocessor macros. :-)

It should also be no surprise that Java, with its runtime dynamic optimization, is able to more strongly optimize code based on runtime performance characteristics than compile time optimizations performed by traditional C and C++ compilers. This is just a guess, but it's also possible that the Java JIT compiler is able to more aggressively optimize the generated code by having more insight into pointer aliasing, whereas you'd need to do whole program compilation to get the same effect with C++. (Plug: LLVM can do whole program compilation. http://www.llvm.org )

As tx said in a sibling post: Because good (performance-minded) C++ programmer has very good idea what kind of assembly instructions his code will turn to. This is why performance-critical code is still written in C++.
Kopelman on Valuation Inflation
Yes, C++ is unquestionably slower than C when you use it to the full potential and when you program the C++ way! A lot of people still program in C++ using the C style. I've used C++ for 7 yeas and have plenty of experience with it and I've seen its slowness in many instances. Main thing to avoid with C++ is virtual methods. Once you understand how they're implemented, you will understand why (hint: vtables).
All the academic AI researchers are focusing on boring narrow AI problems, and nobody has the balls to really tackle the big problem[s] of Artificial General Intelligence. The AI field promised a lot in its early days, and failed to deliver, so now everyone just plays it safe -- it has become taboo within the AI field to even discuss "human-level AI". Some people think it's not possible, but the meat computer mounted on top of your torso is an existence proof that it is possible to build an intelligent system out of matter.

Here's a good but long video that discusses AGI and why it's feasible, aimed at a technical audience. Skip over the introductions at the beginning. Google Video: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-821191370462819511 Higher quality 1GB MPEG4: http://www.archive.org/details/FutureSalon_02_2006
Shorter video on "The Human Importance of the Intelligence Explosion": http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6114518772001796913 Eliezer Yudkowsky also has some interesting papers at http://yudkowsky.net

Help advance AGI, donate to the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence! http://www.singinst.org/challenge Feel free to email me if you're interested in chatting on these topics.
STL does have a few tarpits and once you know which classes to avid, it's smooth cruising. I recommend Scott Meyer's Effective C++ books if you want to learn how to avoid a lot of C++ performance black holes: http://www.aristeia.com/books_frames.html

Yes, the choice of a C++ compiler does make some difference in algo heavy functions/methods but the art of writing high performance C++ programs has a lot more to do with overall design (which is sometimes C++ specific) and your programming style. I left C++ programming but if that's your cup of tea, look into Meyer's books. They're the best.

Java guys care because of Java's history: it was always slower than compiled languages and Java dev got a lot of crap for not having fast runtime. That's all history but there's still a ton of people out there who refuse to download Java-based programs because of 'slowness' myth.
As I have already stated in another thread, I think the idea of your app is good and I got it straight away. I agree with most people here though that you could do with a better design and layout of the site. I think you should invest some time in this, no matter how daunting it might seem now.

That said, as long as the site works, I think you should unleash it right now to the public. Don't wait to get it perfect. Release it and carry on working to improve it - using feedback you get from users. Prepare to be very busy though and I would suggest a comprehensive FAQs/Glossary section before you launch. If you don't add one then you might get swamped and not have time to get on with your improvements. Also, I think the yellow highlight is too bright across the top of the homepage.

Finally, to aid comprehension, I suggest that you replace the text in the yellow highlight with: "Take notes (stickies) from any resource including books (both printed and online), videos, podcasts, and more. Share your stickies or keep them private. Learn from others." or similar.

All the best.
Yeah, I always liked this one.

Are there really no other analyses like this out there?
What? Why doesn't the techcrunch summary say anything about a trainable filter?
No offense, but did you carefully read what Jay said? C and C++ is essentially same language, extended with OO+templates. And you can implement virtual method call in C as well.

I would even argue that C++ is faster than C because latest compiler optimization techniques and modern approach to templatized designs yield very impressive performance not typical for ligher-level languages.

The biggest issue with C++ (as a language) in my opinion is it's total lack of modules. In the end, everything needs to be included into every cpp file.

Speed is certainly not an issue. The only language that gets a chance of beating C/C++ is probably OCaml since it gives more information about your intentions to an optimizer/code generator.
A VC: The Free Music Business
Can You Hear Me Now? Thanks to technology, people have never been more connected--or more alienated
I disagree with you on a lot of points. First, I don't think AI has failed to deliver. There are a ton of things we can do now that we couldn't 30 years ago. Just to name a couple, how about simultaneous localization and mapping http://web.mit.edu/16.412j/www/html/readings/Eliazar+Parr-ijcai-03.pdf,
and face detection
http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/viola01robust.html.

I also disagree that AI researchers are working on boring narrow problems. There are plenty of researchers working on huge open problems like object recognition, speech recognition, reinforcement learning, etc. And they're making great progress too. I think the reason most AI researchers don't talk about making "human-level AI" is that this isn't really a quantifiable goal. There are plenty of things computers can do better than people already (would you want a computer with "human-level" addition and subtraction?). And for just about every specific useful task humans do better than computers, there are a few dozen AI researchers working on it. Why is that not a reasonable approach to the problem?
I never realised how much Ghostscript (PS?) looks like Lisp.
I agree with tx. With C++ you can often avoid what would be virtual method calls in Java / if statements in C by using templates. This lets you effectively inline every function call. It'd be hard to do this in a clean way in C.
"Evan says:
Maybe it goes without saying, but I think it's reasonable to say that what people consider "basic everyday functions" have evolved enormously. For many people, "everyday functions" now includes: storing, finding, and sharing every peice of music I own, every photo I take, and every home video I shoot. Plus keeping in touch with all my friends, by multiple channels including voice chat, possibly simultaneously. While watching streaming video of last night's "Heroes" while downloading a few hundred Megs of files. "
What do you believe would be the obvious choice for a web-based application that administers everything on a UNIX system?

Keep in mind:

It runs as root.

Directly parses and edits every configuration file that is managed--this is not a "generate config files from a database plus templates" tool--it has to understand the configuration files and edit them cleanly. Strong regex support is vital.

It is internationalized to dozens of languages...it needs to support Unicode.

It has to be reasonably fast...it serves dozens of users simultaneously, often doing rather complicated tasks.

It needs to be a widely available and stable language--we support dozens of platforms (nearly all Linux distros, Mac OS X, the BSDs, and even Windows to some degree). All of them have different versions of Perl, Python, Ruby, PHP etc. and varying degrees of library support "out of the box". We need to know that whatever reasonably recent version exists will work fine now and in the future.