skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not a bad article, bit light on Rails though.

INTERESTING QUOTES: '... although there is no reason why fastcgi couldnt be used ...' ~ except it's slower! ~ http://superjared.com/entry/quick-django-benching. '... here is no equivalent of a model-specific SQL refresh  something that could drop a specific models tables and regenerate the needed SQL automatically ...' ~ true, recognised & being corrected ~ http://www2.jeffcroft.com/blog/2006/jul/20/top-ten-things-suck-about-django.

SOME POINTS: Two things come to mind that are not mentioned. The first is hosts. What is the comparison between hosts? The second is how mature the language is. If I want to use python and I need a particular module that does 'fo '. it is probably out there somewhere (though it may be alpha or beta it will most likely out of date) unless you want to re-invent the wheel. I can't say the same for Rails. Ruby is just a younger language with less code mass.

QUESTIONS TO ASK: In the end what really matters is how good the idea & business is. There are plenty of Rail based companies I can think of making a go of it. The same applies to Python based companies. If you accept that technology is an amplifier of ideas, will using Rails or Django alone make a better choice? Is the difference between them compelling enough to make a difference? One area that could tip in Rails favour is "susinctness". But Django with it's python code base has more tools to choose from.
I'm rusty on my Python, but I'd have to guess that no, Python's dynamic features don't get you the kind of power that Pascal's talking about. The key thing to realize is that any particular feature that your language has doesn't necessarily matter. For example, Python may happend to have a built-in way of doing

(with-input-file (in "myfile.txt")
(do-something in))

In Python, this might look like

withInputFile in "myfile.txt":
doSomething(in)

(hey, I told you I was rusty on my Python...especially my totally made up Python!)

So maybe the feature came built-in to Python, in which case you're lucky--Guido happened to decide to implement this feature. But what if he hadn't? Well, just write your own abstraction. Obviously, Python can open files and do stuff with the file's contents. So it seems logical that you should be able to create an abstraction which saves you from writing the same boilerplate that you do every time you open an input file. Unfortunately, there are some abstractions that *you just can't write* in most languages (including Python). This file open example is a good one. Here's another example, in the form of a programming challenge:

In Python, create an abstraction called "debugExpr" that consumes an expression E, and then does two things:
1) prints "Expression E = V", where E is the given expression, and V is the value E evaluates to.
2) returns the value V.

For example,

%python% 6 * debugExpr(2+3)

Expression 2+3 = 5

30

I'm betting you can't implement debugExpr in Python. So assuming Guido didn't extend the language to implement this feature, you're pretty much SOL. It's a shame because debugExpr, I think, is pretty darn useful. It means that you can take any expression in your code and "inspect it", without worrying about adjusting the structure of your program, and without affecting its semantics. Without debugExpr, I'd have to change my example code to be something like this to get the same result:

print "Expression 2+3 ="

tmp = 2+3

print tmp

6 * tmp

YUCK!
Better display of source code in comments
Something like a "code" tag that you can put around sections of your comment, and within these tags, the formatting will be left alone. This is supposed to be a technical news site after all, so I think this should be pretty high-priority. Thanks!
Reasons You Should Never Get a Job
+1 for Ruby for Rails, one of the best programming books I've read in a while.
A social network for geeks? (Shuzak)
I submitted to pose a question: Is there a demand for a geek-specific social network? I understand niche networks, but I don't know if this could be a viable community in itself. I understand geeks -- I AM a geek. But if I wanted to join a social network, a complete network full of all types of people is what I would be looking for.

Nonetheless, it's interesting to explore. Other than catering to a specific audience, I cannot see any "hooks" that differentiate them for other offerings.

Another note: there is a very Reddit-like look about it...
Going Back to the Brick Yard
It's not easy. It might not be a fairy tale, but tantamount to the American dream. Not everyone makes it. But that simple fact makes the journey an absolute thrill.

I admire your efforts. I can't say much for your product at this point since I could not locate a proper demonstration on your site. If you think you have something good going (and is a proper competitor to the offerings from the two companies you mentioned), you should keep it going. At this point in its development, I hope you have been able to convince others of its worthiness in concept and execution.

Good luck.
This page is for the community of entrepreneurs -- or more specifically, hackers with startup ambitions.

That said, there are many who are interested in the topic (me included) as demonstrated by the comments.

Relax and upmod the submissions that you like. News is only as relevant as the community decides. :)
It makes you register to even see anything. What were they thinking?
Ha! A true testament to the efficiency of both frameworks.
That was one of my initial reactions when I came across the site.

Clicking one of their navigational buttons will open you up to the rest of the site. Still, there isn't anything engaging about it, though it definitely demonstrates how Reddit-like the design is!

Having mandatory registration would just be... well, something, something, nail, coffin.
Without going into the detail of the article (I wouldn't want to spoil it for you!): a lot.

But you know how it is. A single proof of insecurity is all you really need.
Startups vs. The Big Guys: The Power Of Caring For Customers
Ycombinator, the inside scoop
The article reminds me of Paul Graham's "The Hardest Lessons..." presentation done at Startup School 06 (I viewed that here: http://startupschool.infogami.com/) about making users happy.

Users may be accustomed to getting their requests and opinions thrown into a pile of ignored requests. And this is where a startup can really shine.
Using Safari can slow your system down as much as 76% vs Firefox
Why Valley Vcs are Like the Mob
Giveth before you taketh
Software for Virtual Teams -- A set of tools to replace the traditional office
A site that does 61,000 page views/day is by no means "high traffic", especially if you're distributing that load over 4 machines. Somewhat interesting post, but this is still a pretty limited demonstration of rails scalability.
3D visualisation of blog posts by Twingly
The Art of Creating a Community
a marketplace?
nice. so who's who? I'm an outsider, I only recognize pg and some others...
Prepopulation is what I wanted too. If someone could update the submit page so that it accepts something like ?url=site.com&title=foobar in the url it would be great.

At least now its easy to drag and drop from the page the url and title. Any one know a way to get prepopulation to work?
Oooo, a new shiny update with RSS. Thank you!
Is that table in sections? If its all one piece then transporting it between coasts must be a pain.
I'd quite like something like this for my mobile http://people.interaction-ivrea.it/s.blyth/mysocialfabric/design.html

As for answering the actual question, everything is done on my mobile phone, business cards and facebook. Everyone I know well (close friends, housemates etc) are on my mobile. All my aquaintances from university I keep touch with on facebook. Facebook reminds me of birthdays and tells me what their up to in my news feed. Finally I keep all my business contacts in piles of business cards on my desk. One pile for archive, one for people I need to contact soon and one for people I'm awaiting response from. I can even easily tag people by writing metadata on the back of the card.
Definitely a valid opinion but I think it's a submission that many of the readers here will enjoy. Remember that this forum caters to a largely technical audience, and an audience that enjoys hearing about different ways of developing their products.
I'm interested in solving the contact management problem. My mac/mobile address book isn't flexible enough and wont tell me how I know these people but CRM is too heavy a solution.

http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=1457
Interesting. I wonder if he's working on Arc with Paul and if any of his ideas are making it in there.
Thanks. I'll go back an re-read it carefully then. I admit that I stopped once I realised how old the article was.
A Roadmap for an Entrepreneurial Economy
One Laptop Per Child: Hackers Wanted
A terrific presentation, and great opportunities for Python hackers (there are probably great hardware hacks, too, but I'm a software guy, primarily).

And don't let that talk about "all the action is in Cambridge or Silicon Valley" get you down -- NYC has plenty of great things brewing!
It can't cost that much. Just buy two tables, one for each coast.
Jobs in academia seem to have some advantages, particularly with respect to freedom. But that really depends on where you end up: http://www.lambdassociates.org/blog/decline.htm. Moreover, your views about what constitutes interesting research in computing may differ from those of the majority: http://weblog.fortnow.com/2006/07/science-and-art-of-computation.html.
The mysocialfabric idea is interesting, the only problem I see with it is that there is a significant barrier towards adding somebody as a contact (you have to configure an avatar for them - what if you have never met them in person and don't know what they look like?) and I don't see how it scales (what does the screen look like when you have 200 contacts) especially on a mobile. Thanks for the answer, thats an interesting way to do it.
Give New Idea To Snap And Win 2500$
I think I remember Paul saying that the architect who worked on the Boston YC office also designed the table. I'd had a fair amount of wine that evening though, and this was a year or so back, so I could be completely confused ;-)
So, where's the scoop? This doesn't tell us any juicy secrets...
Kiwi Ingenuity helps a TV station broadcast.
Don't forget to build an infrastructure for customer service!
This is a poorly written article by someone who has used each framework for only a few days. Not worth reading or even thinking about.
Uh-ok, I hope pg doesn't hear that!
So Google doesn't buy YouTube without VCs?

That's what I'd say if I were a VC!
We need more models of successful companies done without VC funding.

At too many startup conferences I've been to, the message (explicit or implied) was "you need VC funding".

I'm sure it's not always true.
Make urls in comments clickable, ie. automatically wrap markup around them, or let us type the markup ourselves.
It seems to me that these are separate pursuits. I suppose that if the community is smart, they will pick reasonable programming articles as well, and the two can overlap harmlessly; my worry is that smart programming communities if not given an explicit focus (e.g. Lisp, Haskell) quickly deteriorate into non-smart programming communities (witness programming reddit). This may be true for startup news communities as well, but I haven't witnessed it yet.
Interesting idea and in research we do it when we have authorization from users to do so. There are tools out there to do this (glance, ethnio, etc), but nothing as classy as what goggle is coming up with..

http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2006/06/interactive-tv-conference-and-best.html#links

"We showed how to sample the ambient sound emitted from a TV and automatically determine what is being watched from a small signature of the sound -- all with complete privacy and minuscule effort."

A little ambient evesdropping eh? Now thats tasty!
re-invent the ad and toss that word out, Alot of what you are saying is basically creating more engaging experiences for the user while benefiting a brand agenda. That could be just as simple as delivering on the promise.

Web wise people are wickedly in tune when someone is selling to them or preaching to them. Just like in real life, ya know a car salesmen when ya meet'm.

Remove the ads, just make better experiences.
Product advice from jwz
Getting Your Software Into the Big-Box Retail Stores
Undercover marketing
Any startups doing something compelling with undercover marketing?
Do you find mzscheme plays well with pthreads, or have you another concurrency approach?
None of these examples demonstrate something that can't be done procedurally. He never actually answers the question "What is the point of macros?"
You CAN do it procedurally; in fact, you can do it in Brainfuck, since Brainfuck is Turing-complete. The point is, macros let you stop repetitively writing the same boilerplate code, and let you get down to the point.
Link to full document is here...
http://www.kauffman.org/pdf/Entrepreneurial_Roadmap_web.pdf
Thoughts on Simplicity: Yahoo! vs Google design over the years
There are some open tickets for the Sugar environment (OLPC's desktop environment running on top Fedora). I admire their human interface approach, as to make an introduction to computing more intuitive and natural. However, even without prior experience with computers, I would think a child could easily pick up a standard OS-interface. Anybody else have any thoughts on that?
wow, that's the most insane negative feedback system I've ever seen
A holocaust comparison turns up everywhere these days...
Brutal reality of startup life
Job satisfaction level hits new low, especially among younger workers
This may be attributed to how many new grads simply do not know exactly what they want to do. Many are eager just to get started on any career path to begin earning income. This is the type of grind many of us have learned to try to avoid.
Best Adobe Apollo Demos
We know that they congregate in nicely lit rooms with a damn impressive table.
Market Analysis: Web 2.0 is dead, Long Live Web 2.0
Top 10 States for Entrepreneurs -- The list may be surprising
I am currently building my web application using Flex2 and I plan to port it for the apollo platform as soon as it is released. Is there other big advantages other than the online/offline mode, local file system access, clipboard support? And they still didnt announce the release date? I guess the correct support for AJAX in their runtime renderer is holding them back..

Are there other people that are developping using Flex around here? I know that the developer networks/resources for Flex as yet to take off. Mainly because it's free only since July 06.
Text Enrichment Software -- Better writing through technology
The non-link-jacked version:
http://www.conference-board.org/utilities/pressDetail.cfm?press_ID=2582

I have a hypothesis on the bit about age group satisfaction. The demographic swell of the baby boomers are having difficulty advancing to their ambitions. The pre-boomers and the leading edge of the boomers snapped up the choice positions.
F-22 stealth's computers crash at the int'l date line
Apollo has always been a curiosity for me. The things I'm seeing looks very cool but I also wonder about the psychological acceptability (ease of integration). The runtime is a small download, but it's still another runtime outside of the browser.

The potential of developing Flex applications, among others, in this type of environment is attractive, and I truly want to be convinced. But I need to see more before that happens.
Does anyone have any thoughts of the list?

I'd have thought that California would be placed higher than spot 5.

From the article:

"The rankings are not a guide to the best states to start a new business, nor are they the best states to move a business toat least not in the traditional sense of weighing where to find cheap labor and low taxes, says Rob Atkinson, president of the ITIF and lead author of the study. "But if you're an entrepreneur trying to do something new, something that's based on new kinds of products or services, and you want to be globally linked and need highly skilled workers and IT infrastructure, this is a much more accurate tool for that," says Atkinson."

---

So I'm interested to see exactly what parameters went into determining the best places for "an entrepreneur trying to do something new."
Is "Open Source" Now Completely Meaningless?
Funny Google Typo
Social Recommendation Search - Users deciding the search results!
Well, did you notice most of the top ten list had things like- Ranked No. 50 in the "Entrepreneurial Activity" indicator. Obviously they weighed that indicator very lightly or else ignored it altogether. As for me, I think that in a free (enough) market the entrepreneurial activity indicator would be the most accurate of all. I think this article was to help state and civic governments feel good about themselves. Even the indicators like Venture Funding available and IT force don't mean much in the context of startups, in my opinion. Not if the IT force are all government workers (like in Virginia) or the VC firm has a small portfolio of enormous brick-and-mortar businesses (dunno if that's true in one of those).

Possibly insightful initial data. Bad algorithm IMO for the conclusion.
So you're claiming that the ideological foundation of the holocaust was not the Buck v. Bell case and the American eugenics movement? If so, please share what you know that mainstream historians don't.
I can't seem to find a link for follow-up discussions, which is a big part of why I go on reddit.
A startup's best friend? Failure
When posting this I managed to create a state where the title was displayed as "A startup's best friend? FailureA startup's best friend? Failure" but if I clicked on edit in the form it was only "A startup's best friend? Failure". I am not sure how to reproduce.
I am looking for a partner too. However, I already have a product that is close to beta. Looking for investors, partners, customers.
See my thread. "Have you experienced the customer-investor-team conundrum?"
http://juwo.com
Study: firms whose managers have more social relationships with peers at other software start-ups have a better chance of surviving external shocks
Have you taken a look at the Croquet Project?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croquet_project

http://www.croquetconsortium.org/index.php/Main_Page

There are some videos of Alan Kay demonstrating an early version of it.
I thought the first comment was pretty funny. "What about some enemy hacking into the software and uploading a virus? ... To me, this sounds like a case of too much technology and too little common sense...."

Seriously though, it seems they would have used a framework that wouldn't allow an error like that, especially if it was in just a few lines of code, to propagate to all of the systems. They definitely weren't using erlang (couldn't resist).
The release date is set to mid 2007 from what I can gather. June/July is probably when I'd expect it to hit the public. I don't really develop with Flex since I stick to web based apps. I also have few misgivings about installing Apollo and letting it mess around with my filesystem. They better have a robust security layer or else developers will shy away from it.
Thank you for your encouragement.
If you are interested, I can provide you with a demo link via email. However, I would need to know that you are not a competitor and would handle the material with integrity.
thanks,
Anil Philip
Here's why that defect occurred, FTA:

"Where old-economy giants once boasted of running 'zero-defects' operations, today's successful Internet businesses embrace defects as a way to get things right."

pg knows _exactly_ what he's doing ;)
Sounds like your kind of thing, amichail
Ah, see- Elfan just posted this: http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=1568
Exactly.
I think the algorithm needs some work. It could make sense mathematically, but it doesn't model things correctly.

Take Virginia, for example:

"Ranked No. 1 in the "Fastest-Growing Firms" indicator" and "Ranked No. 2 in the "High-Tech Jobs" indicator,"

and then

"Ranked No. 47 in the "Entrepreneurial Activity" indicator"

We have a lot of fast-growing firms, a lot of high tech jobs, but very few people are running startups here.

But if you think about it, what is it that makes a startup hub? A university campus? A high tech sector? PG says a lot about this, I think the conclusion is that they exist where you make them exist.
It's not a bug, it's a feature! :)
One complaint I have with Flex apps is that even with a minor increase in GUI complexity, it begins to lag like crazy. This is especially true with tables; scrolling through them is a pain. Btw, I experience this on a p4 3ghz 1gb ram running Flash 9 in both Linux and Windows. In comparison, most of the Ajax apps I use feel fairly smooth, but I guess from a developer's point of view, it's a compromise in maintainability.
nah- not unless the grads got put in the demographic of making around 13k a year. The majority of people in the dissatisfied pool are people who are barely making enough money to stay afloat and not enough money (and often not the right skills) to work their way out of the situation.
Seriosity To Fix Email Overload (or not)
Fair enough.
FYI - people generally run a bunch of mongrel instances on one machine and use apache to proxy and load balance requests to the mongrel instances. So he's talking about one machine.
Well actually Python does have an eval() that can be called on expressions in the form of strings. The problem is that any potential macro anything would be nowhere near as seamless as it in Lisp, since the parse tree isn't right there for everything. But with enough effort (and closing your eyes to avoid how horrible it would look), you could maybe make something.
Is there something I missed about the table?
"even higher", as though 61,000 page views in a day is high. That's an average of less than one page per second. 61000/24/60/60=.706

I've built embedded devices that served Perl CGI pages from an all-Perl web server far faster than that (while also doing the work it was designed to do...the Perl CGI was just the administrative UI).

I'm really quite hopeful that this isn't a good example of Rails scalability (because I've been playing with Rails of late with the intent to write my next project in it). I don't mind losing some performance and efficiency to improve coder efficiency, but there is a page load time at which your customers will get bored and leave...I don't want to find out what the load time is.
Yes I agree, scrolling through TileList in Flex is really slow and chunky too. Although, there are some workarounds you can code to make the interaction with them feel smoother. Ya, for developers, maintaining Flex apps is really easy because everything visual is a mxml component and can be abstracted from the rest of the code. It's easier to maintain and debug, at least compared to plain actionscript or javascript.
The Next Big Ad Medium: Podcasts
Yahoo Taps Its Inner Startup
adobe is going to make an online photo editor
ETel LaunchPad - many interesting new telephony apps featured
"Ajax, AdSense & Arrogance"... good one.
How does this compare to Google's 20% time for your own projects?
I wish I'd recorded the talk: the whole Sugar environment is done completely differently from the OS conventions we're used to now.

Paraphrasing (and I may misquote him slightly), he said that using Sugar doesn't involving starting up an application but rather with "what do I want to do", and everything is built around that.

It's a powerful idea, one that has potential to transcend this project into how we interact with future operating systems.

Also, the mesh networking idea (every laptop is a router, that can forward packets even in suspend mode) has potential in how wireless networks of the future will work.
Encrypting your hard drive in Ubuntu
Why great coders get paid far too little