skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
And what did you do this weekend?

I'd love to hear about something like this if it happens in NYC. Why is NYC not more of a startup hub?
I like Scala a lot (I spend most of my spare time coding in it), I know he used bad Java style, and I still think Java got pwned.

Complaining about the code appearance is like Java/C++ people who complain about the parentheses in Lisp.

Trivial examples are all you can fit in a screencast. You have to be respectful of people's time. If, e.g., you show Java people the code for the Scala compiler, when it was being bootstrapped in Java, and the > 2x LOC reduction when they were able to rewrite it in Scala to make the language self-hosting, Java programmers still wouldn't care, even though that's an example where the code bases are > 10K LOC.
This is the most obscure piece of Python code I could write to do the same thing :

def birthday(people=23):
import random
days = 365
sample_size = 1000
return reduce(lambda x, y : x + y, (len(s) != len(set(s)) for s in (map(lambda x: random.choice(range(x)), (days, )*people) for i in range(sample_size))))

I am sure someone can beat it ;) let me know http://www.3kwa.com/Logbook/20070708

How do I get the code to indent properly?
Organise it.
Arc is supposed to be a LFSP. Smart people adjust their user model to the tools they have available (right?), so it's at least consistent with Arc's design principles.

It's not the choice I would've made - I tend to agree with you that "explicit is better than implicit". But languages all have to make certain assumptions about who their users are (same with UIs, really), and this design decision is consistent with Arc's previously-stated design philosophy.
It's not about the format, it's about what being in someone's OPML file means. It means that someone finds the information from a specific site to be so useful that they want to receive every update from the site so they can at least take a glance at it. Votes on specific links are a far less valuable indicator of reputation. No one wants to see everything that's submitted to Scribd; a few things just happen to get voted to the top of social networking sites because they're funny or interesting. That doesn't say anything meaningful about Scribd's reputation.

Google has a huge advantage in this area since they collect which items from an RSS feed people actually read on Google Reader. They know that even though I subscribe to the del.icio.us/popular and digg RSS feeds, I rarely read any of the items, whereas I read almost everything from dive into mark or Jeremy Zawodny's blog.

As far as the output is concerned, it doesn't have to be traditional "output" at all. It can be an increased PageRank for a site, or a Firefox extension that shows a reputation meter for every site you visit.

The format isn't important, but the things people subscribe to are very important.
It's not really a procedural vs. functional distinction - I'm fluent in Haskell and had the same initial reaction as cwarren. Rather, Arc is "weakly typed". The same bit of program data can be interpreted as different types depending upon the context where it's used. (This is distinct from strong-but-dynamic-typing like in Scheme or Python, where you have to explicitly convert between types.) It joins the club of Perl, PHP, and assembly in this regard.

I mentioned elsewhere on this thread that I think this is the right design decision given Arc's design principles, but that those design principles are flawed. In my experience, bugs resulting from implicit coercions are rare, but they're also really difficult to track down. That was a major reason I switched from PHP to Python.
In the eternal words of the Geico Caveman.."What?"
Feedback Requested: Superlatives, a Facebook App - How can we make this better?
Who's Most Likely To Burn in Hell? Get Arrested for Streaking? We'd like your opinion on how Superlatives could be a better app and any other suggestions you may have. Thanks guys.
MIT "CADR LispMachine" main console font
From the initial login message you sent me, it looks like you signed on to the mail server using www.devgrow.com, but your reverse dns is just devgrow.com. You might want to make it so they match exactly. Also, have you run it through the latest spamassassin filters? Those aren't always too useful, but sometimes they catch things you may have missed. Finally, have you tried it without the exclamation marks? You currently have one in the subject and two in the message.
The Definition of Excellent Customer Service
To Those About to Hack
Competition For Scribd
Richard Feynman was an amazing individual, a true mentor who inspired us all. Thanks for submitting this article, it is an excellent read.
Four Pownce Invites
First come first served, etc. etc.

(honestly not really sure if this thing is worth playing with, but I've got 'em if you want 'em)
One thing that bugs me about SlapVid is that it doesn't seem that they have much external pressure to succeed...

"Humphrey thinks of the MBA program he is now in as sort of a backup plan in case SlapVid does not take off at the end of the summer."

"Three out of four of the founders of SlapVid are getting financial help from their parents."

I think needing money, and knowing the consequences are having to get a "real job" are often factors that can help contribute to success.
More than anything, I think this is about all the money in the baby boom generation--gen y's parents. It isn't so much that most of our peers are deciding between

a) startup

b) 'real' job

but that there's another obvious option:

c) wait around for something better (possibly doing zilch in the meantime)

If mom and dad's basement is available indefinitely and you have no family obligations (wife, kids), there may not be any pressure to do much of anything. Personally, I can't imagine not having some kind of small business, but I think those of us who are actively entreprenurial are vastly outnumbered by those who actively mooch.
The format of the output is somewhat less important, although I just seem to think RSS feeds are a inherently superior way to get content than a list of links.

The INPUT on the other hand is extremely important. Take a look at Reddit... you have to manually up/down vote articles to make the recommendation system go. Not only is that tedious, but I don't believe people actually have a good grasp of the content they are looking for.

RSS feeds, on the other hand, are much more relevant. And getting a list of someone's feeds requires no work on their part to describe to you their interests.

Even better, online readers/aggregators such as Google Reader have an even more extreme advantage in being able to tell what you read and how often you read it (as the other poster pointed out) more accurately than your OPML file. It's a gold mine for anyone trying to build content recommendation systems.

Take a look at Reddit... it's become a collective RSS feed aggregator plus stupid pictures of cats. If the recommendation engine worked, it would be a GOOD collective RSS feed aggregator. I believe you can get there by working with RSS feeds and actual reading statistics as inputs rather than manual link clicking.
If there's a way of uploading an OPML file on your site, I'm not seeing it.

Most people who are fanatic about RSS aren't going to be able to manually input the URL to each of their feeds due to the sheer number of feeds they subscribe to.
Good comment. A recent article from businessweek talked about the 10 top employers favoured by new grads. Three of them were fed. agencies, one established accounting firm, google, etc. New grads crave job security, comfortable lifestyles, cars, houses and growing bank accounts. After racking up large student loans you can't blame them. And this would be a major impediment to them starting a business in general.

I think this article refers to maybe 0.05% of new grads.
Looks like I was a little mixed up on the context here. I'd be deleting this comment if I still could. Safe to ignore it.
Ah yes, graduate school - the snooze button on the clock-radio of life.
Web 2.0 entrepreneurs are living a chiched life
Interesting article that I found from TechCrunch comments. There are a lot of people who are becoming "Entrepreneurs" because it's hip, not because they are actually cut out for it or because they have any real business ideas.
"5. Spend 50% of your time coding, 25% going to networking events/love fests like Startup Weekend, and the remainder of the 25% of your time blogging/lifecasting the whole experience"

LOL.
Exactly. Even better, your RSS feed reader/aggregator does it for you.

EVEN better yet, your feed reader can assign weights to the feeds based on how often you actually read the content.
I smell bullshit. Note from the article:

> Companies are having a hard time recruiting and retaining young talent, and as a result are accommodating what would have once been considered extreme demands. ....so many younger workers have gained the advantage when it comes to negotiating the terms of a new job.

and

> Today, however, economists and sociologists see such homecomings as a rational response to exorbitant housing prices in big cities, and entry-level wages that do not cover living expenses.

So which is it? Employers can't find employees, or the labor market is so oversaturated in big cities that entry level positions don't pay living wages?

My guess is that every company only wants to hire "the top 5% of graduates." So competition for the perceived best (ivy league, specialized skills) grows while Joe State and Cathy Community go chill with the folks and work at Walmart.

EDIT: how do you make block quotes?
http://paulgraham.com/siliconvalley.html
Curiously, westin2, I notice you submitted this comment from the same IP address as the submitter, jalexa2, and that your accounts were created 2 minutes apart.

Still more remarkable, I notice two other users (also created at the same time) upvoting the article from that same IP address. Must be getting crowded in front of that computer.
Very creative. Unfortunately you're limited to solid colors and can't yet map an image to a polygon's surface using this method.
This is probably the right middle ground between the verbose, and not too expressive, Java implementation and the rather cryptic K/J version.
Welcome to the world of helicopter parents.

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

http://www.usatoday.com/money/economy/employment/2007-04-23-...
Perhaps CSS3's image border property would allow that? (I don't know how widespread browser support is for that yet)

http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-background/#the-border-image
UGC doesn't have to mean chaos-- Threadless selectively ignores votes for a better experience
It was a RANT on a personal blog. It's there to vent his frustration, not make a vapid Digg-bait tidbit.

And FogBugz does suck.
Now, that is funny! It takes real audacity to write a post trashing YC and then using news.yc to promote the post. (I am assuming the implications of pg's comment are true of course).

Why is this guy so angry, anyway? Anyone know?
good stuff in the comments there...
The title is misleading. The post explains that EC2+S3 does not provide a good solution for relational databases -- but it's not supposed to (this is a common misconception).

The author makes a good point but never discusses one of the bigger issues surrounding EC2 database instances -- network latency. The architecture of EC2 is such that multiple EC2 instances are not guaranteed to be on the same local network, meaning that you might end up with a database server in Boston and your Apache server in Seattle. This gets really inefficient if your back-end code relies on multiple DB queries.

However, EC2+S3 are great at what they're designed for -- providing SUPPLEMENTAL computing and storage resources. This is ideal for web applications which need to process file data in the background. Amazon appears to be working on a service which would be the database analog of S3. Only after that's released would we be able to judge Amazon as a complete app-hosting solution.
So then what is the answer to scaling relational databases? Getting rid of it and writing your own storage engine?
That crossed my mind but according to the CSS3 spec the border edges are supposed to be flat, and not diagonal (which is what makes this hack so efficient). This could end up being implementation-specific but ATM probably wouldn't provide the solution (it also doesn't yield a way to do perspective transforms on an image).
What are you doing? For most Internet startups, PostgreSQL will be fine. All you have to do is use indexes correctly and then keep their size under the memory allocated to postgres. That can really get you a long long way.
Openmoko starts to take orders
I have no idea. One of the interesting byproducts of YC is that it plays something like the role of a control in an experiment. As companies go, we're way on the benevolent end. As individuals, we're done financially. We're mainly doing this because it's a cool hack. And yet there are still some number of people who just hate us.

I think the conclusion is that there's a sort of background radiation of people who will hate you if you become sufficiently conspicuous, no matter what you do. This wasn't a big surprise to me. I learned it from Slashdot comments on my essays back in the day. But I think some of the other YC partners find it confusing. One of them was just asking me "why do these people hate us?" But there is no why; it's just randomness.
Agents of change always had their haters who didn't like the change. There is a clear shift in how Internet startups are created. They're starting smaller and moving faster. If you're following the news of Startup Weekend, it's an example of how fast products are being released these days. YC happened to be one of the leaders in this trend, and probably the most known, so you're the target of everyone who hates the change. They might not know you personally, but they don't like the change they're seeing and they blame it on you.

Admittedly, though. It was funny. How did he know I eat Ramen?!!
Actually from a standpoint of diagramming human intellectual output, both reddit and YC do poorly. Even so, I can't think of any simple mathematical processes that would be better. Systems dealing with human beings must take into account intangibles and not attempt to reduce human beings to machines. This is the fundamental flaw of the Turing project.
Looks pretty silly.
Exactly. Man I wish I had rich parents, even helping out $10k a year or so could go a long way when you're fresh out of school and expenses are still low.

An ex of mine got something like $25k cash for her college graduation present. Assuming she earned 10% or so on that for the next 40 years, she was already guaranteed to be a millionaire by retirement. Anything she did on her own was gravy.
Funny idea. I think it could catch on with the younger generation. For me ,personally, I wouldn't dare put this on my profile :) But I guess I'm not your target user.
Looks like someone hasn't read The Mythical Man-Month.
def birthday(people=23): import random days = 365 sample_size = 1000 return reduce(lambda x, y : x + y, (len(s) != len(set(s)) for s in (map(lambda x: random.choice(range(x)), (days, )*people) for i in range(sample_size))))

(two empty lines, then one space in front of every code line)
some misc stuff...

-Implement network-based functionality right now ("your networks", or actually "within <your network name>", should be one of the tabs at the top, between "your friends" and "across facebook")

-One of the links from the profile page, 'burn in hell' is broken (leads to http://apps.facebook.com/Superlative/)

-Your icons are both important and problematic. I think it's a good idea to have icons for each superlative, especially if they are as sweet as the "badass for life" one. However, but some of them are bad -- the "streaking" one looks like a turtle. I would say concentrate on fewer suggested superlatives with better icons. Make icons for very popular user-generated superlatives (should you be so lucky as to have that many users). Don't suggest any superlatives unless you have a icon for them (no more orange stars).

-Similarly, some of your suggested superlatives are (imho) lame (I'm looking at you, "Most Likely To Think Music is the Most Beautiful Thing in the World"). Grab some friends and ask them to pick the x superlatives that they would use most on the list. I actually think this is really important -- I think your target audience is under 22 and will bolt at the first sign of lameness.

-The "Make me the happiest person ever" superlative goes contrary to the aim of your app, afaict. It sounds explicitly designed for lovebirds, and each nomination will get exactly one vote. Ditch it. Nobody will install your app to make the equivalent of a wall post.

gl!
(edit: formatting.)
Asymmetric risk and the dangers of too high a valuation
Yeah, I was just wondering if there was a specific known story behind this that could be shared, purely for entertainment purposes. I guess there isn't.

I know this general behavior quite well. It has happened both to me personally and to my last company many times. It used to annoy me, but now I have a similar attitude to yours.

The most common scenario in my case was that I would find myself or my company attacked in some blog, often anonymously, as in this case. The attack would usually consist of describing some elaborate nefarious conspiracy theory. Of course, there was never any conspiracy and there was always a very simple and benevolent explanation. The people also never tried to contact us and ask us to investigate their issues, which presumably would have been easier than thinking up and then writing up and posting a conspiracy theory. The first thing I always did was what your reaction seems to have been--check the server logs. There are usually some great clues to what is really going on in there.
(Another) 20 usability tips for your blog
Current web style
Video, Social Networking Use Up
The general point of the article is spot on. I've heard that it's getting harder to retain top talent first hand from a lot of corporate recruiters.

I think the only problem with the article is this part:

"Many young people want their own businesses. The barriers to starting an Internet business are low."

The barriers to starting a one-feature company are low, but the barriers to starting a REAL business are still relatively high. Unfortunately it seems like there are still people out there who don't realize this, but even then, they account for a minority among all young jobseekers.
My friend from Iphone sw: "I have no idea when this will be available."

sigh
High valuation == lower chances of an exit.
Are you arguing that an MBA program is not "a real job"? Sounds terrifyingly real to me. I'd work pretty hard to avoid that fate.

And I wouldn't be too quick to assume that "getting financial help from your parents" equates to being relaxed and unpressured. If you disappoint your angel investors, at least you don't have to hear about it at every Thanksgiving dinner for the rest of your life. :)
Steve Jobs' Greatest Presentation (five lessons for making an unforgettable pitch)
As a parent of young kids, this was the most terrifying part of the article, if this trend continues. You mean my kids will still be living in my house after college, and I'll be expected to go to job interviews and negotiations with them?
This is a great site, they do indeed sum up the current style in web design.
sgoraya at gmail.com

thx!
Abraham Lincolns: "Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe."

This post: "Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first seven bartering for the perfect tree."

Abe would have been my apprentice. The Woodsman can have Ben.
Google does have a recommendation ("You might also like") system for when you add a feed to your iGoogle page.
I guess since the point of most websites is to deliver content, style should really just make that easy, and not annoy people. But still...seems like websites are getting more uniform (especially the examples we see there).

Last website I made, I just copied an old .css file, made 5 minutes worth of changes, BANG, style. I'm pretty sure that's the industry standard process.
This company is really cool.. I respect their commitment in promoting the mobile phone as an open development platform. While the hardware may not be as sexy as the iPhone, I hope it still gains market share among hackers.

The GTA01 is the device on sale now, but the GTA02 is the version you want (WiFi, 3D graphics, etc) and it comes out in October.
The first time I read this post I couldn't quite understand it. What does it mean exactly? look for a master programmer to do the work for you instead of learning how to master the craft yourself?
You need to read the post linked to at the beginning first or it won't make any sense.
You're correct Paul. Just trying to get you to respond. Mission accomplished. Funny how you didn't actually address any of the comments in the post itself. I guess you consider it "mission accomplished" that people are hating on you because it implies you've been successful and you have. Seriously Paul, hats off to you. You've done a great job promoting what you think entrepreneurship is. I just happen to think you're misleading people and where better to bring up that discussion than on YC News where you and your little converts spend that 25% of your time that is dedicated to talking about entrepreneurship rather than doing it :)
What does it say about you that you spend your time whining and promoting this kind of stuff? I think somebody needs a huggie wuggie.
Sometimes CEOs give boring presentations on revolutionary products. More often they give boring presentations on boring products. Steve Jobs has a huge advantage when it comes time to show his work because he produces such earth-shattering stuff. His salesmanship is the the icing on the already-delicious cake.
I've written lots of reporting systems. I always keep things abstracted enough that supporting new visualization methods is painless. I'll be adding support for the iPhone as a simple plugin.
The United States of Technology?
kbeshay@gmail.com

thanks.
kyle.bolton at gmail
I've been following the Openmoko mailing list. While the hardware doesn't LOOK shiny/sexy like the iPhone, they're packing in lots of stuff, especially in the october release (as you mentioned), which will have the wifi that the people on the list have been clamoring for.

The devs on the list are pretty wary of making a good UI since that'll make or break the device as well. I expect some fairly pretty apps to be on the device.

They get new ideas they bounce around too. The latest was someone talking about making ripple effects on the screen when you touch it, as feedback and a coolness factor.
Spot on. If you don't have rich parents you have to go into debt to attend private school. You HAVE to take the real job when you graduate.

I chose to be Joe State (@ motoko). I graduated in the black and was free to start a startup. I'm thinking it was a good decision. That and studying engineering. Thanks Dad.
I didn't think this piece would be that popular. I had other submissions that were new emerging technologies, and this was the one that floated up top.
Hear, hear. You hire the apprentice, not their product. Transpose the profession to fishing and see what proverb comes to mind.

But you know what, life is not about fairy-tale contests and it's not about perfect products. Here's my story for you, the woodsman's nephew came into town and Abe, George, Ben and their buddy Thomas Jefferson all had to go home with their hands in their pockets. But the sun still rose the next day. The end.

To those about to hack, to experiment, to try and fail, I salute you. Get out there. Fail quickly and often in order that you may understand, adapt and improve. That's what really matters.