skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They guy has a point here. I think facebook wasn't the greatest example, but in general, people are in danger of ossifying as they age.

I'm in my mid-30s now, and I know some people who are, or at least were, really good programmers. But I was amazed recently when they didn't really know what Ruby on Rails was, or django, or AJAX. I'm not trying to play buzzword bingo here, and I certainly don't think people need to know these things in detail, or agree that they're good tools. But it is very alarming that they draw a blank. These aren't obscure technologies - if you haven't even heard of them, you clearly aren't paying attention.

I suppose the 30+ set could get insular enough that nobody brings these things up.. whereas it's nearly impossible not to learn about them if you hang with a younger crowd.

That said, I had a professor in college who was over 70. He could write programs on the whiteboard that would compile without a single syntax error - it was bizarre. He was unbelievably up-to-date. And it wasn't out of some kind of old man and the sea stubbornness, it was just deep in his personality to keep reading, hacking, knowing what's up.

You can't tell who has a drinking problem in college, because everyone drinks too much - you have to wait and see who's still overdoing it 10 years later. By the same token, maybe you can't tell who the true hackers are until they've considered and rejected the opportunity to fade away...
Additionally, the generational gap might simply mean that 30 year olds won't write the next 100%-high-school-adoption-rate app in the same way a 22 year-old probably won't write the next parenting/401k management/funeral home-related application. If you turn 30 don't give up on writing good software.

What might be a more important metric is the willingness of a certain demographic to adopt a well-written piece of software in large numbers. Will these high-schoolers grow up and be 30 year-olds flocking to new applications in droves or is there something about being young that makes you do exactly what your friends are doing?
How ironic that it's the VP of Marketing that kicked them out.
Publicity is publicity. If it's effective, what constitutes 'cheap' publicity?
People give journalists such a bad rap... but no one asks any other profession to write definitively about lots of different subjects, often with only 24 hours to do it. Given the constraints, journalists do a pretty good job most of the time.

However, it is exactly this that makes general purpose journalism and newspapers a dying breed - as a big paper, you can't afford 1000 domain experts you might only use a few times a year. But bloggers are just this - domain experts who can distribute their content widely enough to be just popular enough.
Zenters - a question if you are around - did you ever end up hiring a non-founder employee?
Are the match ups randomized? Simply reloading the page should give you a fresh pairing to vote on.
Almost every comment on that guy's blog features somebody kissing his ass. "Great post, blah, blah". Why do people do that? If you have something intelligent to add, that's compliment enough.
The famous books are not good for beginners.

This one is very good for beginners:
http://www.cse.buffalo.edu/pub/WWW/faculty/shapiro/Commonlisp/
In fact, that one is the one that finaly teached me Lisp.
Ok, all these age articles have convinced me. I'm going to be 25 instead of 31, as that may well be the ideal age to start a startup.
So suggest yubrew how such giant company like Google is, should generate income and provide all its services (very good services imho) for free in the same time.
Making money on domain names: dirty business or brilliant strategy? | Venture Itch
YouTube coming to iPhone
I wonder how well videos are going to stream over EDGE?
You're totally on point with what I'm saying. It's about the fact that when you get older the crowd you run in is worrying about mortgage payments, spouses and kids. You don't have the time or curiosity to engage new stuff and share it with your friends like you used to.

And yes, there is probably SOME GUY out there that does. It's a trend, not an absolute rule.
I think as a gen-x'er we grew up in a time period (the dot com era) where much of our careers was defined by a major generational/technological change that provided us a great deal of opportunity. For that, we are aware of how these shifts can create great opportunities, but now we're becoming aware of where they can be liabilities as well. (now that we're the old guys)
My implication was that nearly all (99%) of their multi-billion dollar revenues and profits come from advertising, and that there is still plenty of room to innovate in the realm of contextual and behavioral advertising.

Google's massive revenues are due to innovations with online advertising, not with providing good web services. And this will most likely not change.
Darn it! Why did you have to post that? It was his password until he saw your post and changed it.

(Yes, you missed my joke, but it was only mildly humorous anyway.)
I had a blog before the name was invented (diary on diaryland). Right now I am doing some Scripting for Second Life.

I really don't feel as if I have lost the taste for learning new things.
Instigate And Incubate Your Company Culture Early
Yeah... something Larry and Sergey want is better than something that joe schmoe wants:-)

Congratulations are in order, in any case!
Why Amazon's EC2 isn't yet a platform for "normal" web applications
YC.news idea - category/tab for "our sites/startups"
Thought crossed my mind: a lot of people have sites or startups they would like to publicize once or twice. Perhaps that could get its own category? You could have a karma-cutoff to keep out spammers.

Perhaps this would also make the site feel that much more 'inclusive' of those who aren't in the YC program (and may have no intentions of attempting to participate), which was a request a while back.

Just a random idea.
I actually think keeping such postings in the main section will work better, because it pressures posters to publicize in a manner and frequency that news.yc readers will like.

If you accompany each update of, for example, squeezed books, with a learning from the last time you posted, then people will vote it up.

I posted here asking for feedback with my site twice, fifteen days apart, and nobody questioned whether I should do this. I think news.yc is inclusive as is.
Something I've noticed is you get better at learning as you age. That is, learning is itself a skill, and you get more efficient with it.

There is always an opportunity cost to everything you do, so you can never get all the benefits while avoiding all of the drawbacks; but having been around a while, you get a sense of what's really good and what's not. So you don't need to mess around with every new "technology" and learn from those mistakes, when you can be selective, mess around with better ones, and learn even more valuable lessons.

One of the biggest barriers to learning is psychological resistance. Learning to overcome that is a skill that improves with practice as well. So even assuming our brains aren't as spongy anymore, we learn how to direct them better and can still get as good or better results than when we were less selective and soaked up information indiscriminately.
Friends of my age are all having children right now. That way I learned about the existence of pages like http://lilypie.com/ which seems to cater for parents. What if something like that is the next killer-app? Older people would be more likely to create an application like that, I would think. Why should the "teen apps" be the only ones that are interesting?
Of course you could do something else more productive with that same amount of time, which would be even more useful.
Rails Production Server Setup and Deployment on Ubuntu/Debian
Why not do it both ways - in the main area and then have a startup site area, maybe using a tag. I think the convenience of having all the new startup sites in one area for people to explore would be great. Generically, having some kind of tags for categories here would be a great advance, such as "VC's" "Angels" "Programming" "UI" "Startups" etc etc.
I wouldn't want to see a lot of updates. Much more than one a month I think I would find irritating, especially as more people join the site. A "hey, I am publishing this" notice is cool, perhaps something else for major accomplishments or news, but beyond that I wouldn't want to have a lot of "hey, I just added RSS for comments!" type of announcements.

One of the things about having a tab is that the launch announcements would stick around there a little bit longer.
Reasonable idea, but I'm killing this; it belongs in feature requests.

(You expect people to post their startups on a separate page, when you won't use the one for feature requests?)
WMD: my Wysiwym Markdown editor
_eventually got bored with the whole thing_

You know, I practically missed the whole internet for a similar reason. When I was a kid, I screwed around with 1200 baud modems (ATX? ATH? I forget) until I managed to LOG ON to local BBSes. Oh, yeah! You could set that sucker to xModem down a game and have the world's 573rd best tetris clone in just 17 hours (unless your mom picked up the phone--eventually I trained her to ask first.)

Well, it got pretty damn boring. Eventually, I gave up, and when people started talking about AOL, email, etc, I was like "whatever, dude." I didn't actually have an ISP account until...2001 maybe?
The iPhone isn't going to support flash?
FanState.com Launches: YCNews thoughts?
Link: http://www.fanstate.com

Its a digg like website for football (soccer) news that I launched yesterday. It allows you to gain points (like Digg/Reddit) and then wager those points on matches being played.

Built using Ruby on Rails. Thoughts?
It's not that the "teen" apps are the ones that matter. Don't take Facebook / Myspace so literally. It's pointing to the fact that major opportunities are being created that are obvious to one generation and almost oblivous from another.
the people at Yahoo! must have smoked quite some pot...

they paid 2 billion dollars for geocities back when money had no value, and they are ready to throw away as much as 11 billion for MySpace - which, btw, is getting and will get hammered by Facebook.
haha.. 300 baud modem on a c64 (brown, not grey) running color64 and DMbbs, baby. Oh how great it was to be 10 years old.
Pretty ironic considering just about everyone here is a programmer, and it's run by someone famous for being a programmer and who is a language designer.
10 Sales and Marketing Tips I learned from Strippers
None of these "assets" that are supposedly lost after 30 are a function of age. Yes, there is likely a correlation.

However, even if there is a trend to be observed, the information is only useful to someone trying to select from a group of candidates, and then only if the selector is unable to distinguish between candidates on the basis of the desired characteristics. The trend is of no use to the candidates.

Thinking that you have an advantage simply because you are young is foolhardy. Lamenting that you are at a disadvantage because you are over 30 most likely reveals your lack of fortitude. You either are (and intelligent curious dedicated &rest important-attributes) or you are not.
quick impression: font letter spacing is a bit too much.
"it's crazy that for something this simple there are so many different ideas on how it should be done."

Reminds me of the bike shed story (http://bikeshed.com/) ;)
Another factor can be that the previous generation doesn't see what's such a big deal about a groundbreaking technology. A lot of the folks 10 years older than me had trouble seeing what was so revolutionary about HTML and a browser (you're requesting a file and displaying it through a markup language? OK... and how is this different?) Personally, it took me a long time to grasp why blogging offered so much more than just maintaining a personal website (that said, RSS did seem very cool from the get-go). Facebook was hard to distinguish from earlier (may I call them 1.0?) applications that were "basically a bunch of web pages linked together" (a bunch of these went down with the first dot-com bubble).

So another risk is too much awareness - rather than being technically clueless, the older crowd goes too far in the other direction.

A handful of genes separates a human fom a sea cumcumber (ok, maybe a little more than a handful)... uhh, how is this different from using DNA to make more DNA? ;)
Sure, and I have asked myself that question before: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22696

But in theory it works both ways - older generations might see business opportunities the younger ones are missing. I know I wish I had thought more about certain things when I was younger...

And since society seems to be aging, the advantage might actually be on the side of the older generation.
A startup that dramatically improves live music experience
Okay.. I'll fiddle with it :) Thanks
New to Web Applications, which language should I start with?
Watch Supernova 2007 Live and help Justin.tv  (digg link)
Is there a reason you are not displaying the logged in user's login name? I think people tend to expect that.
Hi- What page, Paul?

We shouldn't have to Google for this page?:

"feature requests" site:news.ycombinator.com
yields:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363

PS. Feature request: "search"? :) It seems a few people agree: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363
You mean at the very top?

Edit: I see. I'll change it so that instead of "Logged In" it displays the username
"It came to me in a dream."

But seriously...it did come to me while I was sleeping:

The subconscious mind is phenomenally powerful. It is best harnessed, for some people, through meditation or sleep.

Frankly, I was amazed the URL(s) were still available.

(Truncated spelling of core concepts is all.)
One might as well equivalently say that younger people are missing out on life (relationships, kids, etc.) by being preoccupied with their online networks.

I think both observations are missing the point that younger and older people have different experiences, and neither is inherently better.

There's nothing stopping adults from getting into the younger scene en masse except a lack of interest. They just have different things they like to do which are no more or less valid.
It's times like these when I want to build a website that tracks predictions and promises. Everything from some engineer ranting to a politicians campaign promises. Rank the top promises made in one place, then rank the top promises proved right / wrong due to events or some time limit imposed. Not a business idea so much as a fun website to run.
preferably at the top where it says 'Logged In!'

It looks like something that could be fun. Most soccer/football news sites suck pretty bad. The use your 'karma' to 'bet' on fixtures is pretty clever. But to be fun it will need a community.
Yea I know. I'm going to try and slowly ramp up the website. Thanks for your input and participation. Great find on the St. Paul video. Hope you keep coming back.
Web 2.0: Free Desktop Environment
I added some tags when I submitted an article. But they sort of disappeared which was confusing. Will they eventually be displayed elsewhere along with the article? Will I be able to search by tag?

http://www.fanstate.com/tag/MLS maybe?

How do I make a bet?

I also think you shouldn't track 'karma' and 'points'. It is too confusing for a 'harmless bit of fun' website. Let the people bet their real karma. Why not? If they lose it they will be driven to participate more. You could display subtotals of how much karma was gained/lost due to site activity and how much was gained via skillful betting. That way someone with a lot of activity but a bad betting record could have a total like [r7000 (8 488 -480)] maybe colour-coded or something. I think if you want to make a distinction a single total with subtotals makes more sense. If people aren't betting their actual karma I don't think they'll take the bets seriously.

Just some ideas.
Follow the master: http://texy.info/en/syntax
At some point, no matter what else you do, you'll end up needing either flash or javascript: Flash/AJAX are the only current solutions for creating highly interactive websites. Javascript is a relatively friendly language, so I would start with it.

You will also need another language for dealing with the backend of the website, I personally would avoid PHP, I don't enjoy writing in it compared to other existing choices. That said, it is almost certainly the most widely used technology (calling it the Java of the web wouldn't be an entirely unfounded comparison). Personally I have really loved the Django framework, which is done in Python. I am fairly biased though, so take that with a grain of salt.

The real advice I'd give about the backend language/framework you start using is to use the one you'll enjoy using the most. Later on you'll end up learning a number of other frameworks anyway, so you might as well chose the one you want to work in, especially because you'll be spending a lot of time teething on it. After you learn one, picking up others will be much easier (most web frameworks use the same model-view-controller design).
"...allows you to gain points (like Digg/Reddit) and then wager those points on matches being played."

That's a really nice idea! Good luck with it.
Video interview with Jason Calacanis of Mahalo.com - the human powered search engine
I'll take the karma/points thing into consideration. I actually thought it would be clearer this way since I had only karma at first.

The tags do disappear (like Digg I believe), but they are used for the search function. So when you do search (upper right corner) you search by tags. Also, the tags come into play when finding the 3 similar articles for each link.

But the tags themselves are hidden away to reduce the clutter.

To make a bet, there needs to be a live match going on. There are no live matches right now so there's nothing to bet. Come September when the seasons start up there will be matches. Basically you follow the "Fixtures" link the navigation and you'll see a list of matches. Then you can go view a fixtures details and there will be a simple form you can use to submit your bets.

Edit: http://www.fanstate.com/main/search?query=YOURQUERY is the search function Better to just use the form.
It's at the bottom of the home page along with the RSS feed.
YC.news idea - category/tab for "our sites/startups"

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29606
US immigrants fuel tech boom
The 10 Second Rule: How to Write for Diagonal Readers
Mitch Kapor: virtual worlds are like a drug experience
You may want to consider adding the rest of the MLS season.

1) it is during the downtime of the EPL and other European leagues so it gives you year-round content so users don't drift away.

2) you can have some fixtures to test your site with right now while you are trying to get some activity going and iron out the usability and the bugs

anyway, good luck
Every domain is a business
Best story of the month
Wow... I had the exact same idea (even the terms you used for some of it) and was gonna start implementing as soon as I'm done with my current project.

I guess you saved me some work :-)

I wish you a lot of success. I would love to see the site grow and become a great place for soccer fans to get their news. You can count me in as a member. I'll join soon.
Ah yea! I'll definitely do that. Thanks.
Thanks, and I'm glad to have you on board. If you have any ideas, drop me a line.
Advertise? You should partner with them. Their hurricane service is terrible.
Nursing Jobs
Sudoku Puzzle Daily
Scheme has kind of a different culture from Common Lisp. Most of the material is oriented towards students in order to teach the timeless stuff in computer science.

I learned C before I learned any functional languages and I regret it to this day. It took me _years_ to undo the damage. I really dug myself into a hole, too, by learning all about pointers and low-level stuff like that before I ever knew what Python, Ruby, etc. were.
First observation, I'm logging in from a laptop with a small screen (15") and I have to scroll left-right. It would have been nice if it fits into the page (like news.yc).
Designing for the iPhone is a refreshing experience - (37signals)
I just do theory (inspired by Weird Al Yankovic's 'White & Nerdy')
Rails or Flex
wow very cool video
Partner with them? They should crush them.
Huh really? I'm logged in from a macbook (13 in) and it fits fine. Its also a fluid layout so it should resize automatically. I'll take a look and see what's causing it. Anyone else having this problem?

Edit: alrite... I've deployed a fix to the CSS. It should fit the screen now. Can you try it out and get back to me?
Would immediately storing data and sessions to S3 be problematic?

Is it a better idea to use an external machine as a load balancer and an automatic EC2 instance manager?

Is it reasonable to try to build a traditional functional web application in this asynchronous paradigm?
@ Tichy - I really like your point about a younger generation missing out on an older trend. Perhaps we're just used to seeing more opportunities creep up from the younger generation than vice versa.

Point well made.
I heard a story about some guy who started a sports website six months ago, and then sold it for thirty million dollars three months ago. Not sure of the details, but it seems like there's money to be made.
The five worst things to say to a potential investor
1. We have no competition

2. Our financial projections are (and/or valuation is) conservative

3. We know more about (software / search / media) than (Microsoft / Google / Fox )

4. This will be our last round of funding

5. If we only get 1% of the market, then we will all be rich
Jessica Livingston, Founders at Work author and YC partner, launches her new blog powered by Weebly
Java :-)
New Jersey = Russia, Illinois = Mexico, Iowa = Venezuela
So cool! I've been playing on the site and I'm impressed. Who's your ideal customer? How do you plan on making money?
What do you know already?
No Flash support on the iPhone.

Its a very closed box for developers. Apple is shooting themselves in the foot IMHO.

The LG Prada (iPhone clone) supports Flash lite 2.1. In fact, the entire UI is built on it.
here is nice interview by wayne:
http://pioneerit.blogspot.com/2007/04/my-innoview-with-wayne-crosby.html
Okay... today's MLS match between KC and Columbus has been added. Feel free to sign up/login and place your wagers :).

Edit: Too late lol. The game's started already. Check tomorrow when there's another match.
well that was so intriguing I had to check out his article - it's a good idea he has - I never thought about my family as being the most important collaboration I have going, but it's true. And collaboration software fits. I signed up for the tracksuit site, I want to see how that wiki works out.
They are unsurprisingly arrogant.
It's like he cut and pasted out of Guy Kawasaki's book, and then used a computer program to add randomly generated sentences in between the main points.
myTV Video Sharing launches: Your Thoughts?
I would take a look at BallHype.com. It seems like it's well-designed and well-executed, but hasn't taken off just yet. It would be good to understand what happened - whether they were too broad in focus, or whether there is something about the digg model that doesn't quite resonate for sports fans. As a side note, I would not require registration to vote, and I would not require a valid email address. It don't feel like I should have to send you my email address to say that an article is good or bad.
I actually have this app on Facebook, it's pretty damn cool
this is a great example of why a down arrow would be nice.
Great work. Keep it up. Someone should buy these guys quickly. I see you guys are using S3. There's no doubt that you have a ton of info. The trick is not to overwhelm the user with that info but at the same time have it easy for them to access it and interpret it if they wanted.