skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
for (i = 0; i < N; i++)

Odd example to use. It's always annoying to re-type the same thing over and over. But I recently went through a mountain of my Java code and replaced:

for (Object obj : list)

with

int size=list.size();
for (int index=0;index<size;index++)

I'm definitely very long suffering! It took a few hours but what you get with abstractions is a loss of control over implementation. When you use the tighter loop, the compiler turns everything (roughly) into this:

Iterator it=list.iterator(); //Which calls new ListItr();
for (it.hasNext())
{
Object next=it.next();

The abstraction has to do that because it doesn't know whether the list (really, the java.util.Collection) is a LinkedList or an ArrayList or a Set. If your loop itself is in a tight loop, it isn't hard to call it millions and millions of times during program execution--which makes millions and millions of unnecessary allocations and method calls. There is a loss of performance which, at the end of the day, is more important than how much you enjoy your job.

Of course, other languages would allow you to specify an implementation for a given abstraction.
SlapVid featured in Boston Globe
Reinventing HOTorNOT, Part II
The replacements were for performance reasons, and it took a few hours to do. Sounds like it might been more productive to replace only the occurrences the profiler told you were causing problems...
Boston Startup Housing
I think the co-working office space loft in Central Sq is a great idea (http://coworking.pbwiki.com/CoworkingBoston), but many of us cannot afford to pay for both housing and office space.

I wanted to see if any startup founders would be interested in renting a house or large apartment together, for both living and working out of that space. I'm posting this here because I'd like to have other entrepreneurial techies as roommates.

The ideal place would be located in the vicinity of Cambridge/Somerville or Allston/Brighton and cost not much over $500 per room monthly, with lease starting Sept 1 (or even better if no lease).

We are two guys, ages 25 & 28, working on a web startup. Anyone have space to offer or want to join us in this search?
Sounds like a case for macros.
The points made are mostly quite sensible, which is why it's funny that the site itself looks a little jumpy...
thanks a lot!

Iphone is an awesome device - for sure. a lot of our american users are already using it. but the iphone is released in a country where people have computer access almost everywhere. compare that to South Africa which has 5 times as many mobile internet users as computer internet users. the landscape is very different

Gustaf, heysan
The Virtues of a Second Screen
Jobs does often end up being in the position where he can sell some pretty awesome products, but he's also adept at finding reasons to find things awesome in the first place. If he'd sold OSX by dryly listing its features, you might think "ah, UNIX, yeah, probably good idea, failed before with AUX, though". But when Jobs described OSX to people, they came away thinking "wow, this is a major leap in operating systems design." Part of this is pure charisma and great delivery. Another part of it is just a knack for picking up on genuinely great aspects of a product that others might not think to highlight.
"Common Lisp in particular seems to be a LFSP where many of its leading practitioners only know Lisp."

The hardcorest Lisp hacker I know wrote the chapter on C++ in the UNIX Haters Handbook. He also wrote a C to Lisp compiler for the Symbolics Lisp Machines. (And he works as a C++ programmer right now. :-))

UNIX Haters Handbook, published in the early 90s: http://research.microsoft.com/~daniel/uhh-download.html
Sadly, no:

irb(main):001:0> (1..10).max
=> 10
irb(main):002:0> (1...10).max
=> 9

Ruby suffers from a bit of Perl-syndrome, and relies too much on magic syntax and "conventions" created by library authors. It's a nice language and all, but I still prefer Python over Ruby since Python is a simple, clean and elegant language with just a small number of elegant concepts.
I am a big believer in 2 screens as well. I have a flat panel plugged into my laptop, and keep my project management http://www.streamfocus.com constantly on it while I work so I can easily move between working on the laptop and knowing what to work on on the lcd. :)
Then by your measure, is Perl the most-LFSP language out there? I think Perl reads like line noise. High-density syntax with clear, simple concepts is a desirable feature in a language. Assigning some function to every possible permutation of symbols (a la Perl) is just stupid. Ruby falls into the "just stupid" bin in this case.
Using Photosynth as a tour guide
Appears to be fixed. Thanks.
I can't help but love this one:
"Lisp looks like a car, but with enough tweaking you can turn it into a pretty effective airplane or submarine." :)
I had this great idea to create a website where the content is covered with hairsprayed MBA's telling my users things they don't care about. But I think I'm going to "dump it." Thanks Forbes!
Weebly.com Ranks as one of Time's 50 Best Websites of the Year
Bah. A 30" is vastly superior to two screens. Think about it: with two screens, the valuable screen real-estate right in front of you, where you want the most important things, is instead occupied by 3 inches of BLACK PLASTIC.
This article is great for filtering applications for Y Combinator.
Startup Weekend failed, but lessons learned
I solve that just by having one centered and the other to the side. Soon I'm getting a third screen. You can get 4-5 22" LCDs for the price of one 30".
Linux cellphone: OpenMoko Neo 1973 and Advanced dev kit finally for sale
We just did a major redo of the http://www.streamfocus.com website whose revisions just went online about 5 minutes ago. Finally, all css, no tables, and more content :)
Saul Klein launches Seedcamp - European Y Combinator (video)
I'd be careful with pure research languages like ocaml. It has some advanced features (polymorphic variants, functors, camlp4, etc. ) that even smart people have a hard time understanding, because they are probably the subject of someone's phd thesis. Also, LFSP's can be quirky: in Ocaml, for instance, native integers are only 31 bits (using 32 bits requires the Int32 module, which requires its own set of operations to use. Don't you love static type checking?)

Bugs in LFSP compilers probably appear much more often compared to LFM compilers.
Apple Embraces Web 2.0, But Some in Enterprise Fearful
NYT: News spreads so fast online that it blurs together with prediction
I'll answer my own question:

http://www.slideshare.net/Blaine/scaling-twitter

cache, partition, denormalize.
Jeff Han on a Better Interface (vid)
For most of the article, I kept thinking, why hasn't he tried SWIG (http://www.swig.org). Keep the needs-to-be-fast stuff in C/C++ (hopefully with a well designed API), and code the fun, flexible, interactive stuff in the LFSP of your choice (sorry apparently not all LFSP supported).
PostgreSQL publishes first real benchmark (as fast or faster than MySQL, almost as fast as Oracle)
YouTube For Video Recipes
vote these guys up on time.com. this is a great group of peers for Weebly
yeah! way to go, guys!
This may be apocryphal, but I've heard that the reason Galileo invented the telescope wasn't to look at the stars, but rather to look into the future. Supposedly he'd stand in the St. Mark's Sq. Bell Tower watching for foreign ships, and then use this information to arbitrage commodities.
Why is it posted here?
Best Credit Card Processing? (recurring payments)
iPhoneDevCamp Wraps Up (Heysan stands out)
There was an excellent discussion on the subject two months ago and I bookmarked it. Unfortunately it reports "Invalid Operator" error when I try to use that bookmark now.

We're looking to hook up a credit card processing to our app. As cheaply and secure as possible :) We're running a subscription-based service therefore a solid recurring billing is a must-have.

Suggestions? Feedback on whoever you're using?
Thanks!
Is anyone else confused by the premise of startup weekend? It sounds like a fun idea, but the whole concept seems a little silly to me.
I thought Heysan was the photo sharing/presentation app, no?
Not again!!! Cant believe that they[cnn/Time] are still using the same old buggy lame system they implemented for finding the "Influential People list" [http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27475 ] It was an easily hackable one and it still is. Weebly is #1 on the list now, and once again [honestly, i am embarrassed to say this ], i am responsible :(

For the "influential people list", what pg said became true ["Even if it wasn't hackable, it would still produce garbage results" ]. The final list had nothing to do with the "democratically" voted list(hacked list).

The developers who worked on this particular voting system should be ashamed of themselves. They should have implemented atleast a basic IP check.
The seas around Venice are all shoals with just a few approaches. And the air is pretty hazy. I think small boats would bring news of approaching ships before anyone could see them from St Mark's.

Apparently Galileo did demonstrate his telescope from the top of St Mark's, showing some Venetian senators that with it they could see the sails of distant ships. For that information to be valuable, though, it would have to be the first news to be had of them, and that seems unlikely.
Cybersource. They have a small business section: http://www.cybersource.com/products_and_services/small_busin...

I have used them very successfully in the past. They have an API in various languages that is really easy to implement. For recurring billing, store the card encrypted and bill whenever.
Heysan's an IM app that used a slideshow to lure Myspace users.
Earlier comments on OpenMoko sales here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33163

Longer article here: http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS7355980470.html

And a view to the community here:
http://www.openmoko.org/
You could also try looking up the cached version of the thread on Google.
They learned a lesson indeed: "Development is hard. This is all that will matter."
Do we admit that smart people aren't infinitely smart? With LFSPs, I often get the feeling I'm too stupid for a language, but in many ways it's better than often feeling the language is too stupid for me.

Who cares whether you got 31 or 32 bits? The different operator names are because Ocaml doesn't have operator overloading. For statically type-checked and "overloaded" operators and functions, see type classes in Haskell.
A higher-order method 'iterate' on containers would also do, and it would be more idiomatic in the languages i know.
What makes the iPhone UI so compelling? The UI difference
This is the most accurate language comparison I've seen on the Internet.
Python does the same thing with range:

>>> range(1,10)
[1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]

Leaving out the starting value starts at zero:

>>> range(10)
[0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]

Which is like dotimes:

[1]> (dotimes (i 10) (format t "~d" i))
0123456789
NIL

There's an implied "less than the supplied high value" in all cases.
I think they were trying to combine two ideas, "startups are cool" and "bring a bunch of people together." But not all combinations of good ideas are themselves good ideas. This was a particularly bad combination, because one of the defining qualities of startups is that they're small.
> The Java platform was selected

/Nuff
That is so darn sneaky.
Cool, I actually just tried it on my iPhone. I need to play around a bit more but this is good.
The Rise of Antiforensics
Which is why I don't get the whole "charisma" or "reality distortion field" claims. He's just this guy, you know?
We use CyberSource too. It's pretty good (on a relative basis).

The big gotcha for us is that the reporting API (to get data on existing subscriptions/transactions) leaves a lot to be desired.
I've used Authorize.net in the past - worked great.
I guess I'm one of the few people who has tried two screens and not found a benefit... maybe it's because I run so few applications - just Emacs and Firefox most of the time. I did try a two screen setup for a couple of weeks, with Emacs on one, and Firefox on the other. It just didn't do anything for me. I'm either working in Emacs, or I'm looking at the results in Firefox. I don't find I need to do both at the same time.

Perhaps I'm doing it wrong?
Facebook: "going IPO!"
The article would be better if it included links to the MySQL and Oracle benchmark results.
http://www.spec.org/jAppServer2004/results/jAppServer2004.ht...
Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

- Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Amazon S3 persistent Ruby objects
Interesting.. I wonder how it will turn out.
About time Postgres gets some more attention. I actively discourage my clients from using MySQL in favor of Postgres.
If they had split the 70 into 30 teams of 2 to 3 people, and each team tried to build their own prototype over the weekend, some interesting results would have been produced. Put the prototypes online, and have the participants select the best one through a vote.

That would bring a bunch of people together without violating the "small startup" principle. Also, completion between the teams would help with motivation.
sigh - expressing one's individuality by splattering brand logos all over one's profile? Perhaps some teenagers will actually fall for it.

Fun application: calculate a profile's "individuality" (ie how many people in the world have tattoed themselves with the same brands as you).
10 Habits of Highly Effective Founding
How to Gracefully Take a Site Down For Maintenance?
YouTube and others are putting up a nice looking message page while they are doing a release or maintenance. I'm wondering what's the best way of redirecting all requests to this "Sorry we're temporarily down" page.

Would you modify the VirtualHost entry in Apache's httpd.conf?

Would you change the DNS entry?

Any other ideas?

The technique should ideally be easy to turn on and off.
New site aims to become Wikipedia for web startups
I'm buying, unless they drastically under-price the offering.
Another boring, unsexy app going for nice money. Actually I had a lot of clients (lawfirms mostly) using these guys when I was doing Microsoft-based consulting. It's a good thing to put in front of Exchange.
6 Tips to Recovering From a Typo in Your Printed Sales Letter or Brochure
I've used cybersource in past, but not for subscription. Do you guys save the credit card info on your servers for subscription, or does cybersource save it for you?
It's obviously silly, but does it really sound like fun? My takeaway from this writeup is that these poor folks forgot to have fun.

I really loved the part where the heroic manager talks the Rails programmers out of embarking on an entertaining game of competitive hacking in order to keep the entire, gigantic 70-person team focused on... waiting around. Imagine the consequences if he had failed!
Have a backup directory ready to go, and modify the DocumentRoot on your virtual host.

If your home page doesn't involve dynamic content (and even if it does, but you aren't touching those parts of it), keep your home page up.

If you aren't taking down your DB, keep the user sign-up up.

When someone tries to log-in, then display the message.

Keep your roll-out window to under 30 mins if at all possible (rolling out features in smaller batches makes this easier).
Before I even read the title or realized the point of the article, I noticed they used the word "envelops" instead of envelopes in the introduction... What irony. :)
For smaller sites, I would just redirect everyone but my own IP address over to a maint.html page.

I wrote up how I did it with .htaccess here:
http://www.answermysearches.com/htaccess-block-everyone-exce...
Whatever you do, don't try redirecting using DNS. Many DNS servers don't properly respect TTLs and this will cause you endless pain.
Underprice? Buy high, sell low?

:)
The way they did it I think 2-3 is too low. They have too many support types: lawyers, designers, business, public relations, etc. I think they'd have needed to have teams be 7-10 to fit that many types into a startup. Which is too many for a startup... so I think that retrying without the deadweight of support roles might help (not that lawyers/designers/business/public relations people arn't great, but its hard to perform their roles before there is a product in existance).
If only they'd have a mob of framework elitists to save them from such perils. ;)
I am using PayPal's PayFlowPro. They were acquired by PayPal from Verisign, I believe. It has an XML API and a url string type of API. The API contains a very convenient methodology for handling subscription payments, which is why we use them. I was not really into storing credit card information, so the recurring payment is very handy. Very good reporting API as well.
Big, Big Round of Funding For Ning
Best of May/June 2007
Why do you need to take the site down to do maintenance? Even if moving physically from one server to another you should be able to migrate with almost zero downtime.
I'd be interested. I'm living in Cambridge now, and am working for a startup. Shoot me an email: patfitz06 aaat gmail
If they underprice the offering, the price will go up a LOT during public trading on the first day, hence, high actual price for everyday investors and a big payout for the IBankers.

So what I'm saying is, if I can get in at a reasonable valuation, I'm in. If not, I might wait it out til the hype wears down a bit.
Entrepreneur in Residence, the cushy garage alternative
Three Basic Steps for Any Startup Venture
Screenshots of microPledge ("helps software get made and developers get paid")
70 days and 2 people would work much better than 2 days and 70 people.
Techcrunch starts Crunchbase.com - a database of startups
Agreed. Though I should point out that Jobs is partially responsible for that advantage.

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2005/01/the_myth_of_...
Ethics and investing: Is exercising your stock options unethical?
Should people defer exercising options while the government is doing very disagreeable things?
"I trust this computer." Yeah right.
One man's irony is another man's prize :-) The question is...can you find the second one? The person who finds the second one first wins a prize.
OK, I see what you mean now -- I assumed this was a typo.

I'm still not sure that I agree. I don't think that recent history has shown that the opening price (i.e. the first price at which the public can buy shares) is any higher if the ibankers significantly underprice the stock. In essence, all that should matter to you is that opening price. If it is too high, then you shouldn't buy.

If the stock is underpriced, then it is true that there will be less capital that goes into the business so the valuation you use to decide whether to make the investment would have to take that into account. Given the way that I'm guessing that Facebook will be valued, I have to think that any possible loss due to underpricing will be vanishingly small compared to the overall market cap of the company.

I can understand a philosophical reason not to invest if it is underpriced, but not a real economic one.

One other note -- if the IPO is underpriced, the payout goes not directly to the ibankers but rather to the people that get allocations. These are usually big customers like hedge funds or other people with an "in" with the ibankers (e.g. execs of other companies that might go public, although this stuff has slowed down). Obviously the expectation is that these people will benefit the bankers in the long run, but the payment is not direct.
iPhone Nano
Ning raises $44mm Series C Round-- "we achieved product/market fit"
The UI is very nice, well done. I'm not sure how big a market there is for pledges to build software, though. How about expanding the scope? Say I want to organize an event for Facebook Apps developers, but I need help with the expenses. I put up a pledge for, say, $200, and link to it from my blog. If enough people pledge and the cost is covered, then I'll setup the event. Otherwise, I'll know that there is not enough interest. And, of course, software can still be a category for those who need software built.
The original idea behind Ning was that they would give you these code snippets to build your own web 2.0 site. Then you could modify the code any way you wanted, and others could use your modifications. This was before they went the custom social network route.

$44M is a ridiculous amount of money, but there might be some potential if they want to get back to their original vision.
I second the thought that 44mm seems like a ridiculously large round of financing for what they are trying to do. How could they possibly justify raising that much? (I'm honestly very curious) They must have something big and different planned
Quantcast Now Offers Free Widget-Tracking Tools
"a bonus they receive as soon as [they] take the action"
Lisp closures as much as OOP as you'll need (?)
ehm...
The lack on Windows of quick keyboard shortcut access to multiple open buffers and virtual desktops make multiple monitors seem important. Navigating by alt-tab and with the mouse is just too slow. In the X11 world the other buffer/virtual desktop/screen of stuff you want to see is one or two key presses away.

I have never felt a big benefit from multiple monitors, or even especially big monitors. 95% of the time I'm working with text, and I can only comprehend one window of text at a time. As long as I can flit around between multiple buffers, tabs, or desktops without my hands leaving the keyboard I'm fine.
Well, in fact our system allows for non-software projects quite nicely. But we decided our first focus would be software, mainly because we didn't want to spread ourselves too thin too quickly.

Anyway, your FaceApps Developer Expo sounds like a sweet microPledge use case. Users can withdraw their pledges if a project doesn't finish on time (e.g., you don't get enough money for the event and decide to call it off).
They're targeting the most vapid of users with a concept designed for marketers first and users second. It may be profitable but it just seems so unbelievably boring.
Ruby guesses where you want to go and drives you there. It's right about 85% of the time, and when it's wrong, the drive is still quite pleasant.
Time's top 50 websites: How many do you know?
Weebly is ranked the highest, but how many of Time's top 50 are you familiar with?
http://www.time.com/time/specials/2007/article/0,28804,16334...
Was the API clear and easy to use? Did you have any trouble with documentation. I have used PayPal but in a more traditional sense, processing single payments. They provide a url where you can verify the buyer. Sometimes their service calls your cgi/script over and over with "complete" status but in fact it isn't. Are there any such quirks with PayFlowPro?
Nice first RoR app. =) Mine was much less slick.
I've run Linux forever and always enjoyed two monitors. I use WindowMaker and have have 7 workspaces (Main, Browsing, Communication, Development, Email, Shells, Misc.). Keyboard shortcuts for everything as I despise the mouse.

Most of the time I'm in "Development" and the left monitor is a fullscreen terminal with documentation/revision control/program output and the right is fullscreen gvim.

Nothing is more important to me than resolution though. I can't deal with anything less than 1600x1200 and almost always run 1920x1200 on everything (including laptop).
If they want to let 10,000 people create their own Facebooks that are 1/10,000th the size they need as much money as Facebook to pay for it. That's the best justification I can think of anyway.

I'm just scared he said "staff up" since that always seems to mean hiring the worst kind of people. Anyone know if he's still writing any code at all these days?
Matt Maroon: Advice for Would-Be Y Combinator Founders