skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We are working on it right now. I took a brief detour to write about what we are up to which is now finished, so back to programming.

Right now we have a very "geeky" looking UI with the excitement of a slide rule with a pocket protector - it is strictly functional. If you understand the system, which the current users do, it works well. But if you're in for the first time, you would have a hard time knowing what to do without someone walking you through it. The goal of the redesign is so that anyone just looking at the screen will know exactly what the options are and how to work with the system without any tutorial.

I'm vanishing into a fit of interface redesign for the next 2 weeks, at which point we'll have screen shots and let people in to play with the tools - the context focusing and ActionStreams are especially cool. We're calling it our UI launch, and with feedback from that, we'll role into our full beta launch. We are getting excited about it after a good 7 months of hard programming + a few years of research, which explains my too often mentioning it here (which I'll try to refrain from to avoid being considered a spammer, which is not my intention).
Evaluating Startup Business Ideas, An Exercise
Provides some questions and categories of what to consider when evaluating a new business idea for success.
Directing Digg
Kevin Rose, founder of Digg.com, talks about why it's good that the site is out of control.
The words are too separated, both physically and stylistically. They sound and read good next to each other, and I feel they'd work better if they were more together in both senses.

The shape of the blue Stream word suggests 'wave' rather than stream. The exaggerate bending also feels kinda cheap, like "hey, look what I can do with my new Amiga" (OK, showing my age here). I think you really want this word straight.

You may want to take a look at the antialiasing in both words; I'm no expert, but it looks kinda fishy to me, esp. since you're advertising focus.

A minor one: I think you got the kerning wrong in F o c. They are a bit too far from each other- at least the F is.

The red dot could work if you somehow harmonize its color with the 'Stream' color. Three unrelated colors is maybe too much in a logo, esp. a mostly text based one.

HTH.
Rent-A-Troll
This sort of post shows how doomed some managers are.

I think the question "how do I motivate programmers" comes up when the business model is "think up an idea for software, write functional specs, hire programmers, have them code it." If you're going to take this approach, then I suppose "motivating" your programmers will be important to you.

But this is like asking your tennis coach how to generate more power when hitting the ball late off your heels. If you insist on hitting the ball this way, there are a few techniques that can help you make the best of a bad situation. But the player who gets to the ball early is going to beat you 9 times in 10.
I think you can get a better effect by showing an overall focused logo on a blurry background, for contrast. Putting the blurriness right into your logo is more of a double edged sword.
1. The iphone doesn't have GPS

2. The existing loopt software is j2me, which the iphone conspicuously doesn't support.

3. Loopt does have a website, not sure how well it works on n iphone, but since the iphone is basically acting like a small computer (no gps, has a mouse) it seems like the proper channel to the service.
Talend raises $3.5M in second round
San Francisco Business Times - 10:01 AM PDT Monday, July 16, 2007 Software company Talend raised $3.5 million in its second round of venture funding. via San Francisco Business Times
For a quick, simple app that's primarily used to create, edit and display lists, sure. There are a lot of apps that fit that model. For something more complicated, probably not. I'd certainly consider Ruby, but Rails seems like it would be more of a burden than a help.

Note that I've only used Rails to make a couple quick, simple apps that are primarily used to create, edit nad display lists. When I had the opportunity to use it for something more complicated, I went with CL/TBNL/CL-WHO/CLSQL and never looked back.
I remember the amiga - a nice machine. But yes, I think it was more like "look what I can do with Photoshop" the I being me. We also got feedback from some bigger business friends that it needed to be more "serious" as the application was for serious business. Your comments are excellent, Thanks for the feedback! :)
I think BlackBerry users would beg to differ. I've seen some people typing pretty darn fast on those things, and I wouldn't have thought it possible. It's all about habituation.
I've heard some people propose that it will be 3-dimensional. Apparently some government agencies have created their own Intranets in 3D claiming it makes it easier to find stuff (not sure if I believe this or not...). If it's true, though, then I wouldn't be surprised to see it on the consumer web in the near to medium-term future.
5am would be great: I produce best when I'm not interrupted, before/after clients & co-workers are around. :)
The whole application started because we needed a tool to help my firm implement Lean Management to gain the kind of tranformation that Toyota and many others had achieved, and there were none out there. With Architecture and most service companies, a vast amount of information needs to be organized in the right way to really be lean, so analog methods really don't work well. We tried it first with binders and post-it-notes and white boards but it slowed us down.

"Getting Things Done" is a great productivity breakthrough as well, and when combined with lean, is really impressive - which is what we are doing. Lean helps provide the framework for what to do and how to do it, while GTD helps you actually get it done.

One of the enhancements to GTD that we've got is that rather than think about the next action you need to make, we provide a way to think about the next stream of actions which can can be templated for future use - it has been a great boost for us.
It was only a matter of time before maddox hit ycnews.
Friendster will also sit tight, until the next firesale.

The big advantage of not selling seems to be: If you sell, you have to stop playing the CEO game. Success isn't something you can luck into every time you make a copycat website: Usually they don't take off in a big way.

If you cashed out, you'd have cash, but you would stop being a mighty-famous bigshot.
Nope; this is where the author comes from (quite literally):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jef_Raskin
Survive the digg effect with Amazon Web Services
Excellent, I will be coming to Japan in a couple months, hacking from a location in the mountains.
The iPhone Web Irony
For contrast:

http://www.supermemo.com/articles/polyphasic.htm

http://www.supermemo.com/articles/sleep.htm

My uninformed take on this:

If you will be depriving yourself of sleep anyway, polyphasic sleep may be worth a try. In this case watch your diet: eat more vegetables and avoid hard to digest foods. It's bad enough that you're abusing your body in one way, and there is a correlation between your diet and your need for sleep. [Edit: I HAVEN'T EVER DONE POLYPHASIC SLEEP SO DON'T TAKE THIS AS ENDORSEMENT.]

What I do when I want to squeeze myself is

- Avoid caffeine.

- Crank until I'm pretty sure I'll fall asleep as soon as I go horizontal.

- Sleep without an alarm clock. If I haven't gone wildly out of sync, chances are I'll wake up refreshed without oversleeping.

- Take a 20m-ish afternoon nap iff I feel drowsy at that time.

And two things I don't do but I'm sure I should:

- Do at least 15m exercise early in the morning.

- Eat light, varied foods with plenty of vegetables.

YMMV!
Wait a minute, I was hired as a consultant... and I did take the blame! Yup, pretty sure that project failed.
When Everybody's Responsibility Becomes Nobody's Responsibility
I suggest that "those folks" don't have a clue, at least if their quoted response is any indication. Git is plainly "suited for large projects" (if the kernel qualifies as large), and I'm mystified as to why they think the "database" is unreliable in comparison with other VC systems (Git places a pretty strong emphasis on guaranteeing that exactly the same content that was put into the system can be subsequently retrieved).
Mine goes more like:
Wake up 7:30am - 8:30am (Hangover dependent)
Get to work:9:30am
Read and Post to YCombo Startup: 9:45 :)
Read useless Blogs: 10:00
Work: 11:00 - 12:00pm
Was it that bad? I had my reservations.
Apparently Boost Mobile is a Nextel subsidiary, and now that Sprint owns Nextel, it explains why Sprint/Nextel is the next logical carrier. This also makes you wonder if AT&T or TMobile would ever support it.
"when I was in 7th grade, I was primarily interested in making millions of dollars"

really??
Good introduction.

I've been using S3 to host media files for the last several months, on a small scale, and have found it to be reliable and surprisingly inexpensive.

The simple setup, and ability to forward subdomains to S3 buckets, is a great combination.
Exploring Design: Outstanding Start Pages
Internet Phone Company Halts Operations
when can i get this? been waiting for a while for this announcement...
Sorry I was not clear about it but if you are a good programmer in today's market there is no reason for you to be working on something that you do not enjoy working on. To quote PG for once
. "If it is possible to make yourself into a great hacker, the way to do it may be to make the following deal with yourself: you never have to work on boring projects (unless your family will starve otherwise), and in return, you'll never allow yourself to do a half-assed job. All the great hackers I know seem to have made that deal, though perhaps none of them had any choice in the matter."
i kind of agree... i wouldnt trade my Nokia E61 for an iphone
Svn sucks. Ever tried some more "advanced" stuff like merge? Svn managed to bungle up something as basic as merge.

Linux kernel is a huge project and Git handles it better than anything.
This isn't just about politics. If hired human comment
spammers become prevalent, it could change the way
comment forums work.
TED | Talks | Will Wright: Toys that make worlds
Paul Kedrosky: Online Video Explodes Some More
Rails' Ridiculous Restrictions, a Rant
Just a note, Kos himself got paid $3K a month by the Howard Dean campaign for at least 4 months, along with getting a bunch of other goodies. Recently JetBlue sponsored some kind of Kos event. (See http://www.slate.com/id/2112314 - published in 2005 as a source on Kos.)
fring mobile voip - make free mobile calls and IM
The Startup Game: Why a major angel investor is backing online games
The word "troll" actually goes way back. The artform is actually a bit more dignified than people think now. The first "troll" was supposedly Jonathon Swift with his "Modest Proposal" pamphlet (the title was posthumous by several hundred years, of course). The basic idea was: You start off by being reasonable, getting people to believe you, and then become more and more extreme until the point of ridiculousness.

Now, troll means: Someone who goes and makes obvious, inflammatory statements trying to start arguments.

Often, "Troll" as used means: Someone who disagrees with the general consensus. That's a dangerous definition.

Kos seems to think that a paid political agitator (another old trade) is also a "troll" when on the internet. Not so.
some of that stuff has been fixed in the 1.5 years since this was written...
If the iPhone doesn't have GPS, the carriers should be all over Loopt, because it's one of the few things they can offer that Apple+ATT can't.
Using human computation games to promote your startup
Man - Being a nightowl myself, I have a very hard time waking up really early - I usually go to sleep around 2am (I have colleagues overseas) and set my alarm clock to 7:30, getting out of bed at 8am, clean up/eat etc. and am out the the door by 9:30 - I would love to get up earlier but it is almost impossible given that I must (on most occasions) be up past 12am
Justin.tv on a larger scale in the UK: helmet-cams to be deployed for police.
There are some interesting notes about when and how the cameras can be turned on.

As a general note, having done work in automated surveillance, most people are too upset of the level of UK surveillance. The current system is not automated, meaning that humans need to watch the 4 million feeds. But expert humans miss 95% of events after 20 minutes from a single feed. Imagine how that decays for many cameras per operator.

I would love all public officials to wear these cameras. They would need to be on all the time, outside private spaces or security clearance requirements.
There are some interesting notes about when and how the cameras can be turned on.

As a general note, having done work in automated surveillance, most people are too upset of the level of UK surveillance. The current system is not automated, meaning that humans need to watch the 4 million feeds. But expert humans miss 95% of events after 20 minutes from a single feed. Imagine how that decays for many cameras per operator.

I would love all public officials to wear these cameras. They would need to be on all the time, outside private spaces or security clearance requirements. It should be internet accessible and searchable, with auto-tagging tools for date, gps location, and eventually content.
completely _unusable_, not usually...
That's hilarious, thanks for the much-needed comic relief. :)
You might want to check up on (pending) human computation patents before trying this out though.
I went into "Get New Applications" and searched for loopt and didn't find anything. I think the WSJ's announcement is only saying that Sprint will be offering Loopt soon, not that it's available for download right now.
If video is exploding then why can't I get my self made music videos viewed!!!??? Maybe because I need to make them more like this... (Warning: Maybe NSFW)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dq6o_NT-IU
DHH responds in the commments:
http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?joel.3.309321....
is your facebook app increasing?
These Flash interfaces are awesome. Anyone here got any advice on starting to learn Flash to design these kinds of interfaces?
Google Introduces Hosted Site Search for Small Businesses
The hacking needed within OpenMoko the startup
What I meant by that is the fact that more and more people realize that SQL back-end is not always what they want, I built an RSS search engine without one, for example.

2nd thing I had in mind was recent trend to use as little as possible of raw SQL, using language-native constructs instead.
Took me a while to realize the rant wasn't by Joel.
Virtualmin - YC startup in Venturebeat
Web 2.0: Rate And Find Companies Related To Your Job!
most of the names i was getting were already taken
Well, it seems that SL is getting a hughe hype right now. I'm a bit skeptical about 3D metaverses, but I'm not really a good oracle ;)
yes! but the system is still being tested.
Notice how DB-centric that guy is. That is exactly why I disguise SQL-servers and prefer to keep everything (well... as much as possible) written in one language (Ruby) and this is precisely what Rails is good at.

DB performs two very-very boring actions: it only stores and retreives data for you. Definitely not the most exciting things a software hacker dreams of. One very smart guy once called all databases "toilets where we keep our @#it, I prefer less primitive activities".

Rails tries as much as possible to relief a programmer from this repetitive #@it-taking exercise.
I know I'm chiming in very late here. The original post asked if it is "bad if I don't want to work at a C++/Java startup."

Of course not. This thread has turned it around a bit - phrasing the question as if you wanted to work for a C++/Java startup (or at least if you felt neutral about it).

I'm not surprised that's what's being discussed, because those are the more interesting questions. But if you feel in your gut that you don't want to work in C++ or Java, then for god's sake man, don't do it. You'll be really unhappy, and I'm sure you'll have other opportunities.
OT: yeah, but have you ever passed a really, really large one?

For a few seconds there, you think you're about to meet your maker.
I've heard some pretty heavy hitters are jumping into web-based MMORPGs big time.

Expect to see some YC apps this fall based around games. Speaking of which, are there any YC game startups? (can't remember offhand)
ok - here's one.

just like with _any_ other language, if you are not careful you can end up writing some sloppy RoR code.

especially once you get into the 50-100+ migrations apps - your first few might suck unless you have some good guidance on how to do the more advanced things.

as a corollary - I just joined a RoR startup and by the end of my first day I had already closed out 2-3 feature/bug tickets, mostly because the code was clean & well-structured. in some heavier environments I remember it taking a few days just to get your system setup & figuring out how to navigate / compile / etc. all the code.
Will the "Business Version" Iphone have GPS? With their "buddy buddy" relationship with Google you'd think this would be a must.
I think you could use some fiber in your diet (am I supposed to include some sort of programming metaphor?).
If the Nokia E70 were a person. It would be Chuck Norris.
Having a bit of reserves in the bank before applying / getting into YC seems like it'd be a major help.

Although it appears that many YC startups haven't had any trouble getting angel funding after their initial funding runs out. Just traditionally it can take many months to raise funding (while being distracted from making the product better), no?
Ugh, these are horrible from a user interface standpoint. Sure they look great (and are an interesting experiment) but how will the average person use them? Does the use of these fancy flash pages create value for your website? Only if it's a particularly creative website e.g. bands.
This is old. Switchtower is now Capistrano and reaching a version 2.0
Typical Maddox, but i kinda agree with "Holds your phone hostage to Apple for new software updates because Apple won't allow everyone to develop applications for it"
I've been using this for months. Great peice of software
Here's a French game that I think is ripe for duplication and scaling.

http://rms.miniville.fr/
You play by posting your link and your city gets bigger when other people visit it.
I like how the "voice of truth" also claims to be a pirate and have balls the size of beanbags.

No sarcasm about the voice of truth, though: only Maddox writes obnoxiously enough to be heard over every other idiot nerd fanboy blog.
Real world Rails, Part 3: Optimizing ActiveRecord
Nitro or Ramaze, as the APIs settle down and the docs beef up.
You're funny jcwentz
Three-dimensional navigation, for many tasks, involves questionable ergonomics.
A good troll is a work of art.

Ideally, the troll should offer up one post, which triggers various factions into a never-ending debate of the trivial and/or unresolvable.
First read stuff by Tufte and Tognazzini and Cooper first.

Learn Flash second
OK, I am buying the Little Schemer today
You've addressed most of the issues. One thing of note is that having to be able to undo everything is not really that easy for certain types of apps. Take submitting this reply form to the news.yc forum, for example.
Yeah. Btw, I accidentally downgraded your grandparent post, so I upped this parent one.
This goes to show it's an issue. The source is a very smart guy, but I too was confused about the "large project" comment. I work in robotics, whose systems can get very, very large.

And perhaps by large, he means many different projects in a company. I don't know enough about Git to say.
I have programmed a little D, and although you will be stuck in the imperative/object-oriented mindframe as with C++, D is quite useable. The overall design is coherent, and anyone with a basic understanding of C++ should be able to pick it up very quickly. It even has some lambdaness.
Quick introduction to git internals for people who are not scared by words like Directed Acyc. Graph
Code Critique as an Interview Tool
The 'delete' option is an undo. The 'edit' option is a less drastic way to correct your actions. Neither of them seems difficult to implement.

The fact that they are only available for a short time is a design decision. If your point is that sometimes it doesn't make sense, design wise, to provide undo, then I agree.
"in a text editor I would be able to cut text in a discarded branch"

To copy text, even.
congrats guys. looks like you're poised for success.
Great piece by venture beat, the one liner that started off the piece was perfect. Throwing in the Webmin bit will definitely garner a few phone calls from Sand Hill. Much success to Joe and Jamie!
Web censorship is failing, says Chinese official
Microsoft researchers unveil Fone+, MPTrain mobile applications - Engadget
thanks.

got a story? reach me at ereldon@gmail.com.

if you've emailed and haven't heard back, could you do so again?
I've had a lot of interviews and never had to do a code critique. Microsoft's had me write some simple reverse strings type things but never critique code. It would think it would work great. Being able to turn some junk into something elegant and functional is a way better skill (for an employer wanting experienced programmers) than knowing the terms and names of methodologies you learn in school.
Prerollr Launches Dead Simple Video Advertising Product
Common Lisp: Want to output PDF files? (example of a Sudoku generator)
Joel on Vesting
5 Lessons Learned from Working with AIR
Apple's decision not to include GPS may be indicative of phones relying more and more on wifi and 2G/3G networks for "cloud" based approaches to location and mapping.

I can't think of many problems that require GPS.
Google Alerts -- Are you using it to monitor mentions of your startup yet?
I've found Google Alerts to be invaluable in monitoring mentions of the projects I work on. If you're not using it yet you probably should be.
> I can't think of many problems that require GPS.

It's extremely valuable in all sorts of applications. Google maps + GPS would be amazingly useful and would severely damage Garmin's market. I would use it for mapping my bike paths and "geomarking" great restaurants.
For some reason this article sounds fishy to me. I can't put my finger on it exactly, though this paragraph caught my attention:

quoting from the article:

> Using AWS isn't for the faint of heart. You need to have a very good understanding of Unix, you need to be able to install a Java runtime environment on your local computer in order to use the Amazon command line tools and you need to do a good amount of reading in order to get things initially setup.

Reading this carefully, it just doesn't add up. Installing a JVM is a null operation on os x and solaris, virtually painless on windows, a minor and rapidly shrinking annoyance on linux, and for now indeed a pretty major step on freeBSD. In other words, in the vast majority of circumstances, it's simple. Hardly "not for the faint of heart". The other point, the ability to manage unix, is something you pretty much need -anyway- if you're going to go with the only reasonable alternative (host your own or use virtual dedicated hosting). I guess you could theorize that managing a windows box is easier for certain individuals, but unless you're using ASP on IIS, windows isn't really easier to maintain. This sentence almost seems like its designed to convince the casual reader using a rhetoric trick.

The other thing I don't really get about S3/EC2, though probably I just misunderstand the amazon services, is this:

When your userbase is small, you don't need it - it's just needless complication. If your userbase grows, in almost all cases, you'll want to be able to tell a potential suitor that your website isn't intricately bound with a service operated by the competition.

Did I miss something?