skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm going for the most obvious answer: USA is a single large market, over 5 times the population of UK. Most understand English and it is also geographically large, so there's lots of room for local competition.

You have a much greater chance of success. 20% of the US market equals 100% of the UK market... Even if you don't "win", you have a decent chance of at least breaking even.
I guess this will cause ANOTHER Reddit rewrite.
We all make mistakes.
Throw away his two weeks of work, and negotiate the deadline. It's not your fault that your boss went out and hired someone entirely incompetent without even consulting you.

If the deadline is a must, just work with the awful crap he has to get to the deadline, and scrap the crap immediately after the deadline.
looks like so 1999. come on this is 2007.
and the name is like a hit train got over it ...g(j)ot it?
I'm starting to suspect that both these companies are run by a bunch of 12-year-olds.
Because EVAL is an atomic bomb, and there's no need to use it when a garrote would more elegantly perform the task at hand.
I would probably make Wikipedia a front end to a Subversion repository. Then I would get all the data handling for free.

I would of course add caching, to limit the number of reads to the Subversion server.
I made this http://defcraft.org/hacks/pycmds/pii.py to help define "commands" in the interactive interpreter. Commands like "ls" and "h os".

"ls" is a simple command -- invokes the Unix command "ls -l". A more complicated one: "h os" -- run help on the os module (just like "help(os)"). This is kinda tricky because "h os" is actually a syntax error in Python. When interactive, I catch syntax errors and see if they are user defined commands, in which case I execute the desired command. This works for Python 2.5, but shouldn't be too hard to port to Python 3.0.

I briefly looked at IPython, but that seemed to complicated for my needs.

(Also, http://defcraft.org/hacks/pycmds/strftime_helper.py uses the above file to help the user with strftime spec usage. I can never remember all the special characters.)
If only it was as fast as Ruby.
The article's statements on the problems with SOA don't accurately reflect reality. For example, "SOA requires you to do a whole load of up-front design and specification that's very difficult to change after." This is not a problem with SOA, rather than a symptom of poor change management, which can occur in any code base whether you are using SOA or not. Similarly, his "strange loops" issue is really an issue of poor dependency management/mapping. You can easily write a program that exhibits the same problems.

One valid issue with SOA is data consistency. Dealing with data consistency across services is a real problem, and this may contribute to extra development time. But by no means does this indicate that SOA is the opposite of agile. There are agile development benefits in SOA, and I don't feel that the drawbacks outweigh these benefits.
"Getting Real" has the answer to that: https://gettingreal.37signals.com/

In short, having fewer features is often the best feature.
Facebookers bring HSBC to its knees
It depends on their terms of service.

Seriously, though, we wrote ours ourselves, but we did heavily use info we gleaned from other peoples' ToS. If you're just a generic web 2.0 site you can probably get away with using someone else's generic ToS, but if you're doing anything slightly different, you'll have to tailor it anyway.

FWIW, for microPledge we ended up with http://micropledge.com/conditions -- we got a lawyer friend to look over it briefly, and he gave us a few good pointers.
Nice article, except the Columbus reference.
Why do you care about the bloat of the JVM? Memory is cheap.

The Java libraries are rather extensive. I would rather have too much than too little.

Static typing is a big win, particularly if you don't have to declare everything (Scala has local type inference).

Sure, there are lots of bright people using Python. But Scala is a better language and has bright users also.

If you are unfamiliar with Scala, take a look at this:

http://www.scala-lang.org/docu/files/ScalaByExample.pdf
Cool. Let me know if you ever want any feedback or anything like that. Im always down for brainshares.
I disagree... users love seeing new features. If they don't work so well, they don't care. Most likely they'll enjoy them and feel privileged they are getting to use them before they are really ready. They'll see the potential. They'll start imagining what it'll be like once it's finished.
If it's a cool, innovative feature they haven't seen before, they'll see it as proof you're a cool place to be. Even if half of it doesn't work.

Get features out often. Of course make sure they don't break anything else, or reduce the users experience, but users love to see a site evolving and changing with them on board.
(The following is an exercise in critical thinking, only shows one side of the issue, and does not reflect my opinion either way.)

Tall people don't earn "high" wages, they earn "higher" wages (only about $500 a year more according to recent studies.) And if the person is tall, and their kids are tall, $500 a year is likely not enough to cover the extra costs of food. If there should be a change, it should be that the government should pass a law that tall people should be paid at least $5,000 a year more, to cover bigger, non-entry level, non-Toyota or Honda sedans and SUV's, worse gas mileage, greater car expenses, and the price of size XL-Tall and 2XL-Tall clothing from specialty stores since regular stores don't carry tall sizes.

Why don't articles write about that? Everybody wants to point out that tall people earn $500 a year more, on average, but not the fact that shorter people come out on top. That extra $1 a day does not cover the extra food for one person, let alone a family, nor does it cover the greater car, specialty clothing, gas, car repair, car insurance, and other expenses whatsoever for even one tall person, nor their family.

A tall person may also use shampoo and soap much faster, and need to use more water in the shower.

If anything, the status quo encourages more short people to reproduce.

And, if taller people actually are "smarter" or more productive (for whatever reason, be it confidence or something else) then they're _really_ getting the short end of the stick by having to survive with $4,500 less yearly taxable income.

(I like to think from both sides of the issue, and I haven't seen that side addressed any time the issue has been brought up.)
We use Pagety, but we built it, so it's normal we really like it! ;)
The ground-breakingly new PayPal logo
Except that for many people outside the club, what he says won't be true, since many people outside the club aren't actually that smart, and, worse, aren't actually working in a market where there is obviously something to be had.
kinda lame if you ask me, wonder what prompted them to change their well recognized logo for a boring rendition like this>
A search on amazon.com for 'ruby on rails' yielded 48 books, a search for Django comes up wuth 3 unpublished books.

The stats above, made the decision for me.
new social networking site launched enzilla.com like facebook, myspace and bebo!
Nah, they'll rewrite it in Erlang next. ;-)
>manager have lots of connections?

I was talking more industry connections. Nobody gives a damn about your schooling once you've done it, to be honest. If your manager however sits on some boards, or is influential in the people that he knows and interacts with, it may be in your best interests to not burn this bridge.

>Is this industry leading and highly visible?

Then you may want to be able to say that you completed it, even if it means you have a couple of shite weeks, otherwise, you can use it as an answer to one of those wacky "worst experience" interview questions.

From what you're saying, I'd strongly lean towards option 2 or 3. Being in the workforce for a few years now, I can't emphasize enough how much it hurts you to burn bridges, no matter how much you're in the right. These people come back to haunt you in peculiar ways.

Good luck. Just remember you have a lot more to lose in this situation by walking away than you have to gain, from what I can gather.
I disagree on copyright part. Two reasons: 1) You are not selling the agreement 2) It is impossible to find out from where or whose agreement (most of them are generic). Moreover, who the heck reads those!!!
I am tempted to write in my ToS - that the users hereby agree to sell their soul for using my website :)

I agree on finding a legit free source.
"No battle plan survives contact with the enemy" -- Helmuth von Moltke the Elder
I'm not sure why they think "assload of processes + proxy" is so good either, but deploying an assload of mongrels behind the "pound" load balancer is damn easy. Plus, pound is light-weight, fast, and designed to be small so that it can be easily security audited.

All you have to do is install pound, edit the pound config file to tell it how many mongrels you have and what port range they live at (easy), do a "gem install mongrel_cluster", then a "mongrel_rails cluster::configure" and a "mongrel_rails cluster::start".

I know this sounds like a lot of steps, but if you've ever built and configured apache from source you know this is cake in comparison.
"Actually SQL sucks and hence all wrappers suck too. "

Amen.
If I had that much money, I'd never buy a sports team. I'd found a town. That's the luxury I dream about. Probably just as well I can't have it though; it would be a huge time sink.
A lot of people have a strong dislike of Aaron. I've certainly had unpleasant experiences.
Considering the competition, that's quite a statement.
Find your favorite things with a GPS-enabled phone
My favourite stat is:

"A third of South Korean students send over 100 SMS messages a day"

That'll give you an idea of how much more Asian countries use SMS than European ones. Also Japan tends to be a special case as they use different protocols. There mobile email is popular whilst SMS is non existant.

As for startup potential, look at twitter for a start. They added the ability to make one-to-one private text messages into a one-to-many public broadcast network. Theres plenty of other possible permutations left to try.
10 WWE Superstars Suspended - TvByDemand | Forums | WWE
MySpace did it: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3775
I would use Scheme. It's a good general-purpose language, suitable for about anything. You can whip up prototypes quickly and whatever you write ends up being pretty succinct.

Another option would be to just use WikiMedia's code.
>I'd install and setup CakePHP to run off the public_html folder of my domain name in apache in my web host or server.

That's awesome. No seriously it is. It answered his question in such a concise yet thoughtful way.

I hope he gets what you're saying though.
Please don't feed the troll.

If you want to start a language war, why don't you just make a new post rather than hijacking this one? In a post about Python 3000 I was expecting debate about Py3 vs Py2, not about Python in general vs other languages.
Nice!

We use similar technic with hpy - you type in Hebrew Python http://nirs.freeshell.org/code/hpy/ , then each line is translated to Python and executed.

How do create more fancy links here?
Best of all, they're going to make it open. Nokia have a great track record with helping developers so it should be good.
The thing that I admire the most about this is how small a change Py3K really is, considering it's the first major compatibility breaking release AFAIK. The change from 1.x to 2.x version numbers was for historical and cosmetic reasons: if you wrote a module in Python 1.5 there's a very good chance you can run it in Python 2.5 with only trivial modifications at worst (e.g., one of your identifiers has become a keyword). This is a testament to the excellent taste of the Python designers, and to their rare mix of restraint and practicality.
JP Google (Google's emerging cloud of data services is the banking system of the information age)
I'm a Gaucho too, graduated in 03.

I believe that the game is largely called "Beer Pong" on the west coast, but on the east coast it is called Beirut.

I also believe it is much more popular on the east coast.
Anecdotally, I've heard that the local Home Depot has started grouping funnels, plastic tubes, and valves next to each other because they're sick of people asking.
Maybe tall people earn more because they need more...
Take it from the point from which you left it. Tell your manager that it would take more time trying to fix it tan to scrap these changes. If he says no, why waste your time doing something you hate doing?!
Succinctness == Power 
I can see parallels between this and mathematical notations. After all, the notations allow a form of higher-level abstractions in which people can think about the problem in their heads during walks or having a shower...
I presume that were part of the motivations behind some of the higher-level languages like FP, ML, and to a limited extent, Prolog. But I see that most of these langs were geared to a special problem domain.
What I would like to see is probably a set of langs that allows a programmer to think about / attack a problem from different angles.
This, seems to me anyway, is much more valuable.
I expect Matt will have more personal bad experiences, but the most well-publicized one goes approximately as follows:

- Aaron applies to YC, starts Infogami with a co-founder who drops out (presumably because of Aaron's special interpersonal sparkles).

- Aaron launches Infogami, with a promise of a new feature every day.

- Aaron complains for a long time about how he doesn't have a co-founder, and then merges with Reddit.

- Aaron abandons Infogami (pissing off all its users, including me), and then proceeds not to do anything at Reddit, to the chagrin of the Reddits, who just effectively gave him a bunch of their stock. Aaron nevertheless has time for nauseatingly many melodramatic blog entries.

- Reddit gets bought, and Aaron gets an equal share of the spoils.

- Aaron cries in the bathroom (literally), and then quits Wired, the acquiring company, by just not showing up to work. (And posts a suicidal blog entry, and proceeds to delete it.)

- Aaron does an interview in which he claims to have been part of Reddit from the beginning, pissing absolutely everyone off.
Interviewee opens for private beta
We went ahead with it anyway. And in all fairness to pg and for the benefit of knowledge of everyone in this forum, ClutterMe isn't the idea that we originally applied with.

We'd like to thank you for your patience in my spamming of this forum. I will keep you updated on our progress.

~Mark
Sheesh.. Emotions are running hot in this thread.
I think thats a great reason for the Reddit guys to be pissed off at him - I just didn't realize anyone on this forum has had personal interactions with him.
"Deadline is in about a week."

Impossible to do a re-write and he'll shift the blame to you.
Next they'll be opening locations closer to colleges.
I'm not much into macros yet, but while syntax-case is a R6RS feature, I thought there is a portable implementation that runs on top of R5RS? At least Chicken 2.6 provides that, and its implementor is viscerally against R6RS.
That should possible with a higher-order-function (and a lambda), too.
> Two reasons: 1) You are not selling the agreement 2) It is impossible to find out from where or whose agreement (most of them are generic). Moreover, who the heck reads those!!!

How does selling it, whether it can be found that you copied it, or whether people read them affect that it's a copyright violation? It's a copyright violation if you publish it as your own, irrespective of whether people read it or find out that you plagiarized it.
Apple Shows What's Possible with Web 2.0 and Photos (Skip to 32 minutes)
Watch the synde comments while Erlang fans are around :-)
I am thinking of selling my domain name ShareCircle.Com
So I have this great domain name but I don't believe I am going to use it so I have been contemplating that there is some Web 2.0 startup out there that could really use it.

What do you think it is worth?
Ah, yes, I'll wait here while you go convince a few shared hosting providers to let you do that to their servers.
That only saves you one quote and one lambda for each clause, right?

(define (string-case= my-string . clauses)
(cond ((null? clauses) 'whatever)
((string-member? my-string (caar clauses))
((cadar clauses)))
(else (apply string-case=
my-string
(cdr clauses)))))

Where string-member? is trivial to define as a procedure too.

Then you use it like

(string-case=
('("hello" "world")
(lambda () (print "match"))))

I myself wouldn't use a macro for this little gain.

[Edit: I had completely misunderstood the macro.]
Me too. I already have the style of architecture all planned out in my head.
Entrepreneurship Class at Cal: What It Takes to Startup
This beta is amusing - while he talk about perfectionism, he is releasing a beta with severe XSS issues.
So when did the meaning of hacker change from someone who breaks in to computer systems, either as a white hat or black hat, to basically a programmer?

Was I mistaken all throughout my youth?
We went ahead with it anyway. And in all fairness to pg and for the benefit of knowledge of everyone in this forum, ClutterMe isn't the idea that we originally applied with.

We'd like to thank you for your patience in my spamming of this forum. I will keep you updated on our progress.

~Mark
You only think I'm joking. http://spez.name/ ;-)

(Disclaimer: I have no inside information about Reddit or its future plans. I really wouldn't be terribly surprised if they did rewrite it in Erlang, though.)
Whatever someone is willing to pay you for it. I'll start the bidding at $20.
brilliant article.
The pipe is useless without the water. The water is useless without the pipe. So perhaps if energy or water were made into a currency, it would need to include delivery or pickup at certain defined locations.
Ohh but how your perception will change when you see his site achieve a state of perfection:)

Hah, anyway I myself do enjoy webpy and wouldn't mind giving something back to it, but if I were him I'd probably rather do a startup.
What is a day in the life of bugbear like?
Just want to know what post-liquidity life is like.
jey: thats a valid point. I totally agree with your argument as it being a copyright violation too.
Agreed, so what if his startup fails and he doesn't release a feature per day as he promised? That's what startups (usually) do. They fail. Shouldn't hold that against him personally.

As far as the reddit guys go, there's a reason you're not supposed to do a startup with your closest friends. Aren't you supposed to hate your partner to some degree by the end? I know I did... But I understand that to be normal so I just relax and don't let that anger bother me outside of work.
LOL ... If they did I might actually go there ... forget that I might try to get a job there ... no forget that too ... I'll just make my Erlang project good enough to buy his :-)
"... Why doesn't he focus on web.py and promoting it? ..."

The focus is there. I've been lurking the web.py mail list for a long time (Jan 19, 2006 ~ http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/88347878/ ) and there has been a steady progression of code since then. So in my view it is being promoted, worked on and improved.

"The programmers were in the corner doing what they were told.
That's one reason they were so easy to outsource. If a programmer
never really talks to the customer, never thinks, just solves little
puzzles, well that's a perfect candidate for something to offshore."
~ Founders at Work, Ch24, Philip Greenspun, P325, Livingston, 2007.

But instead of just promoting just another bit of technology, maybe it's better to do something with it. A lot of technology is commodity that can be replicated by some programmer in the corner. Build useful things with it, creating value is a lot harder to commoditise.
I don't think there is much point in telling him what would be more fulfilling to him.
Almost,

Success is paralyzing.
It is good that he chose an extreme though. Publicity tends to like extremes, regardless of which extreme it is.
Why? Perfectionists do that all the time.
Congrats knewjax, that's an awesome story to have dugg.
I only notice disagreement, but maybe I missed something.
..unless it isn't.

(points to all the billion dollar networking sites on the news)
For now, the users lose. Right now, iTunes is probably the best way to get TV shows online and legally (although ABC's free video player is pretty excellent), but it's hard to imagine that the $2 per show model will still be the dominant one a few years from now. It gets pricey quickly.
people seem to confuse adding features to additions in the interface. Most of the times users are either subconsciously frustrated by a problem or that there isn't a solution for it yet (i.e. why someone else hasn't solved it yet).

perfection??? I think most software sucks so much that it doesn't do anything useful. It would be better to try and get your product to do just one thing that is useful for one person.

Aiming for perfection is just an excuse for not building something useful.
Here's another alternative: http://www.ownterms.org/

creative commons too
What is a bugbear? I assume it is not http://images.google.com/images?q=bugbear
I think you have set a new record for deciding defeat the fastest:)
Someone here knows.
Startup has supposed game changing battery tech, 3 million from Kleiner Perkins
From the comments on that article, it sounds like they don't actually disclose what makes the battery work in the patent, which probably renders the patent worthless. Still, I'm hopeful because game changing energy technology might actually positively benefit all of our lives.

They got 3 million investment from Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers, as per http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/Story?id=3547157&page=2.
"... Nah, they'll rewrite it in Erlang next. ;-) ..."

Nah Lisp. Oops I forget they already have that language covered.
Homo longus raro sapiens, at si sapiens, sapientissimus.

Now I wish I could downvote myself..
What I find amusing is that, barring personal interactions, I put Matt and Aaron in the same category - they both have annoying and arrogant internet personas. The only difference is that I believe Aaron is a very talented programmer. The only thing I believe about Matt is that he is an above average poker player. On a personal level, both of them are irrelevant to me.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37112
I watched the demo video. Congrats on what looks to be an easy to use user interface. The kind of app you are making is the type where the ui pretty much makes or breaks the entire thing. You seem to have pulled off a fairly good one
Some interesting and useful things have to be done as companies rather than open-source projects.
Ive had to use Joomla in the past, and I agree with you. I hated it.

A CMS is good to get you kick started, after all who wants to build another boring login script? But if you are serious about your app, I think you have to roll your own. Simply because with any set of code provided for general use, it will never fit perfectly to your needs. And I think it is that extra bit of perfection, the 'icing on the cake' that makes your app special and stand out. It is much harder to accomplish that using someone else's code than writing your own specifically for your own purposes.

Cal Henderson in his excellent book 'Building Scalable Websites' mentions writing his own file transfer protocol for a middle-ware file storage system. His reason was that it was custom made for Flickr's needs and thus was faster than anything available.

A quote I heard somewhere about Catering Fake, when asked what tools she recommended to build a web app, she responded 'PHP' (in other words, she suggested using no tools, and to build your own).
uh, not that my above comment was to say that all CMSs are bad. What I meant, was that like everything else, they have a time and a place. I checked out Pagety and liked it