skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Fair enough Ben. The register to vote is so that people just can't vote up an article (their own) over and over again.

The email address isn't checked to be valid. I just ask for one so that if it is ever needed (email lost info, close accounts etc) I can use it.
It is probably not the one you are thinking of, but ArmchairGM has a similar story - created in early 2006, sold for $2 (to Wikia, Jimbo Wales' wiki startup) in December of that year.

veritas, You might want to take a look at ArmcharGM(.com), they are probably one of your bigger competitors.
The Reddit reaction to wanting to learn Lisp: it's not just the Lispers that are unsympathetic
Summary: Many redditors feel that the OP wasn't trying to learn Lisp, he was thinking in C++ and trying to learn how to structure his C++ thoughts in Common Lisp.

This was taken badly by the Lispers, who presume that the OP was not genuinely seeking to learn Lisp.

(This is just my summary of what I read, not my own feelings about the subject).
Thanks for the insight paul. Will take a look.
Indeed... I guess it was inevitable that the community would eventually get some spammers, but a down arrow would be nice. Better yet, just some system to report spam. If you look at this guy's profile, he has been a user for 17 hours, has 15 submissions, all low quality and spam, although some more obvious than others.

Clearly this is one of the more spammy ones, unless news.YC has a large demographic of unemployed nurses that I did not know about.
Wild Facebook Application Ideas Group (I've added some of my ideas, add ideas that you do not plan to pursue)
Sounds like you got all the keywords in there ;D
How To Ask Questions The Smart Way

http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

I didn't read the whole transcript, but the above advice is a nearly foolproof formula for getting good answers.
I have to say, I'm not that sympathetic. If you are using open source software, you can't expect free support, and you definitely can't expect immediate free support. Plus, it actually looks like you got each of your questions answered within an hour, which is pretty impressive actually.
Since you said "web applications", and not just web in general, I will assume you know some HTML.

Although I am not a huge fan of PHP, I think it is probably the best language to begin with for a few reasons:

- Tonnes of resources for learning - the language is not difficult to start with, and there are plenty of tutorials and books aimed at beginners.

- For a web language, it is pretty much as powerful as you need it to be.

- It is probably the most common web-based programming language.

- You can find a server to host your site for very cheap, and download the software to set up your own development server for free.

- PHP is taken seriously as a language, and powers some of the largest sites on the internet (Digg, Facebook, Wikipedia)

The downsides are that it does not encourage good coding practices and it is easy to write an insecure script, but this is true in any language or framework until you know what you are doing.
37Signals Profiled In Time Magazine
The Pmarca Guide to Big Companies, Part 1: Turnaround!
And in fact the first ever social network, FOAF, was pretty much exactly what he describes. It's basically just a microformat that can be used to describe a person, and then anyone can make their own client to do what they wish with that data. And I think there were maybe twelve or so people who ever used it.

And then Mark Zuckerberg came along and said, "Hey, if I take this microformat thing and turn it into a unified experience, this social networking thing might actually take off."
It's looking good now but i'm using Firefox on Ubuntu.. Earlier I was looking at it in Firefox on a PC running Windows...

I'll look at it again tomorrow from my windows machine at work and get back to you.
I just noticed that although I said you can treat input as a stream, the way you consume the input in the example doesn't reflect that. If you have a primitive (get-input) function like the one I assume above, you can wrap it in a more functional interface like this:

(define (new-input)

(cons 'input (get-input)))

(define (input? x)

(and (pair? x)

(eq (car x) 'input)))

(define (input-val input)

(cdr input))

(define (current-input input)

(if (input? input)

(input-val input)

(car input)))

(define (future-input input)

(if (input? input)

(new-input)

(cdr input)))

...

(define (run-game initial-world input)

(define (run-step world input)

...

(run-step (update-world world (current-input input))

(future-input input)))

(run-step initial-world input))

(run-game (make-initial-world) (new-input))

Now you can just pass a list as the input, to test stuff or to run a demo. Note that current-input behaves much like car; you can call it as many times as you want and you get the same result (this is called referential transparency). You can wrap your random number generator and other stuff in a similar way.

This can be further refactored so you can get out a stream of worlds too, so you can compare it to pre-recorded or hand authored test data. For practical purposes, you'll normally be testing smaller parts of your system; the same principle works for those.
The problem is that the "constraints" are controlled by one company. Its not an open standard others can share.

History has shown this is bad and stunts innovation (think MSFT)
Why, thanks! I myself reinforced some concepts while writing it, since I have more of a Python background. I like the idea of writing a tutorial about this, but I'd rather experiment more first.
"a billion people live in absolute poverty"

They live in poverty because of a lack of capitalism, not because of capitalism. You might find this hard to believe but every poor country has a lack of capitalism. Check here: http://www.heritage.org/index/countries.cfm there's not a single contradiction.

If you really care about the poor I challenge you to take a few hours to read this PDF just to hear the other side of the argument: http://www.mises.org/books/conquest.pdf

Feel free to email me at lockster 4T gmail d0t com if you feel like a friendly debate ;)
According to Comscore, 40% of MySpace users are over 35 and 33% of Facebook users are over 35. The numbers for people aged 18-24 on facebook is only 1% higher than the 35+ demographic.

A large number of 18-24 year olds makes sense because Facebook started out as a way for students to network, and the site's features remain optimized for people still in school.

Regarding curiosity and learning by trial and error - most people are not naturally curious. In 1994, many 42 year old people didn't understand why you would need a web page. However, neither did most 22 year olds.
You probably don't need to. I think it was an error on my part in the CSS file. In either case, let me know if it recurs or there's another bug. Thanks for the input :)
That's a great observation, and I think more people should upmod your comment.
You need a tagline like, "Show Some Balls"
Somebody else here.
I do hate Java because it's unnecesarily complex. That is, I hate J2EE and all the f@#$%@#%g stuff I must do to simply pass a variable from one form to another. It's like having chains hanging from my body and trying to run.
I hate that language and the stuff Java-only-heads do with it.
I do, however, love the JVM.
Articles like this are polically motivated. I would simply point out that Silicon Valley's most critical, most formative years were in the age of "traditional America", that is so despised today.
Heh, interesting perspective. Looks like we've come full circle.
I don't use the computer all the day in the same position. That is, sometimes I'm close to the screen, and sometimes I'm far from it.

So, when I'm close to the screen I prefer Windows fonts. They look sharper and Apple ones look blurry.

When I'm far from the screen suddenly everything changes. Apple fonts look so much better, while Windows fonts look thin and weak.

So with enough distance Apple fonts will always win. It all depends on how you use your computer.
The first of Yahoo's new purchases - Rivals for $100 million
Javascript.

Beyond that, what language(s) you should learn depend on what you already know, what sort of application you're planning to write, what sort of deployment options you need and what sort of tools you want to use in developing your app.

The last point is one of the most important; the framework you use for your web app matters more than the language. Personally, I like Common Lisp with TBNL, CL-WHO and CLSQL - the combination originally used to develop reddit.
How about a skip button?
How are you going to keep your users from using IE6?
Good lord. What a way to start a silly thread.

Pick an Open Source application you find useful and would enjoy enhancing, and learn whatever language it is written in. If you're new to the field (you haven't mentioned whether you're a proficient developer in other areas, or if you really mean "new to development"). In either case, you don't have to knowledge at this point to determine the "best" language for your goals, so start with the one that will be the most fun and productive for you today. That means starting with an existing application.

In the end, they're all pretty similar, and the skills you learn with PHP, or Perl, or Python, or Ruby, or Java will serve you well when you begin to learn how you think about development problems and find the language that suits that way of thinking.
"... in some way after the acquisition you became a "worker" for Google with much less freedom ..."

In some ways post - acquisition isn't, 'job-done'. It makes more sense to see the task through integration in the new company. It is still your baby and I'll bet anyone working on it would see it that way. At the same time It would make sense also to give yourself a cut-off date working for soft-co.
This is pretty good. I found it pretty funny and witty to relate sales techniques to what strippers do.
Thanks a lot for the compliment re: shiftd.com!

NYTLabs.com is the site for the R+D group at the NYTimes. We're going to start to profile some of the projects that we are working on at nytlabs.com....

-Michael Young (NYTimes R+D)
"... The smart money is saying this is a build, not a buy. ..." ~ TC, April 17, 2007 ~ http://tinyurl.com/yo99gh

So if you make things that other want, did zenter purposefully make it's product to fill the gap in google office? If so it's a risky (ballsy) strategy to compete head to head with google if they have announced their intentions. What I want to know is what happened in the following 2 months?

Was zenter X times better than the internal version?
good idea - I will add that tomorrow
PDP11 assembler running on an emulator
Wow, that is truly great PR.
The point of open source software is to act as an alternative to the proprietary stuff out there. Therefore, you can and should expect free support. It's in the best interests of the project to have more people use it.
It worked, didn't it? :-) I'm sure I'll be banned forever or get infinitely bad karma for this. :-)

Update: Okay, I think I'm gonna change the title now. Had my fun, and it was just mucking up The System. :-) Title was "News.YC easter egg: double-click the upvote arrow", so of course people tried it, and it simply upvoted my post and gave me lots of karma.

Update 2: In fact, why not delete the whole thing while I'm going strong. I repent in mirthful dust and ashes.
"Maybe" is one option too many
There is a distinction between making the laws and gaming them.

There's a lot of small-government rhetoric out there about minimizing legislation. The analogous point to about minimizing litigation is also plausible.

I had some ideas about translating open-source bugtrackers to legislation: http://reddit.com/info/79lo/comments#c7awp
No problem. If you're using Google, you can't expect to get your results in 0.13 seconds. If you're playing a free game, you can't expect it to be fun. If you're in News.YC, you can't expect to interact with smart people, like yourself. If you use software, you can't expect things to work.

With that said, I wasn't expecting free support, nor immediate free support, and the answers I received were extremely helpful. There are wonderful, nice, and extraordinarily talented people on #lisp who are more intelligent than I could ever hope to become in my wildest dreams. However, there's a good deal of elitism, too. Statements like "There is no Lisp community, this is just an IRC channel" just reinforce that. You end up not being attached to the place you live in. You don't even feel like you live there; you just happen to be there. It's kind of like working at a company where you don't own any of the software you write (in the sense of, this is my module; if it breaks, I'm responsible, and its design choices are my call). If you think of your car as a hunk of metal, you're far less likely to oil its engine regularly.

I'm contrasting the Lisp experience with the Ruby and Python experience. In the Lisp world, things aren't obvious. It's not the programming language that's at fault, it's the interfaces. Things can make a great deal of sense when designed a certain way but require several steps and much thought. Or things can be simpler and require little thinking so people can focus their thoughts on what matters to them: creating the systems they want to create. Top that off with a community that might throw malicious code at a newbie or throw a patient response and you have a tough situation. It's the difference between a website's creators feeling they're doing users a favor by letting them visit versus feeling proud that they're making people happy.

Things don't need to be this way, and I'm confident that there will be changes for the better. Those wonderful, intelligent souls I referred to earlier will help turn the tide. Secretly, everyone wants to be perceived as a nice person, and building a community in which you can improve the life of just one person is a fabulous experience.
'... , FOAF, was pretty much exactly what he describes. ...'

This is one area I've been looking at carefully ever since I created a flickr account and had a b@gger of a time trying to find, add friends from flickr. But one thing I found trying FOAF ( http://xmlns.com/foaf/spec/ ) was some of the assumptions. Email for instance. Going through quite a few friends I noticed they all removed 'specific' email accounts replacing them with either web forms or generic accounts.

Aside from this the spec is pretty good & has been around since Y2K. As for most social network sites (roach motels) it is not in their interests to allow leakage. I haven't checked if Fb allows you access to friends (yep, found perl WWW::Facebook::API::Friends using facebook.friends.areFriends) ... so while you can extract information using the API Fb does not markup the client side.

Maybe the approach is to create a FRIEND PROXY SITE that abstracts your social network above social sites? Something that ...

- allows you to login

- allows friends to login

- add various social sites that you frequent

Transparently ....

- use api's (where possible) on sites to extract friend data

- create master list of friends (noting url + relationships etc)

- updates this list at regular periods

- pay to export all friends & associated relationships

Simple idea of allowing network of friends to be linked & captured. Now is there are real demand for this? (I doubt most users frequent more than 2-3 sites.) But if you have to re-enter 5xfriends to 50xfriends & associated details maybe this is viable.

This is a flaw in the microformat crowd. It assumes the markup exists in each site. The plus side is it's easy to implement. It only takes Facebook.
Opera Software boss hangs on to control
:))) fcuk!
'... It worked, didn't it? :-) ...'

wrong crowd to try this kind of (social) hack :)
What a bunch of horsepoop.

Being nearly 50, having ridden the first communication wave called BULLETIN BOARD SYSTEMS, the second wave called HTTP (the internet existed long before the graphic web), and the third wave called CELL PHONES, I learned that "INHERENTLY GETTING IT" doesn't matter for squat.

The only true form of "GETTING IT" that matters can be summed up in three words and it applies across all generations, fads, and follies.

Follow the money.

That's it. Thats all there is too it. Give me a bleeding edge wave of any sort, comprised of a significant member class, young or old, and the only metric that matters is who makes the money.

The rest of this crap about how some group "GETS IT" inherently, is mental masturbation. The only person who truly "GETS IT" is the old fart VC who cashes the biggest checks while getting the young and the dumb to paint the fence. Praise be unto him, Samuel Clemens was right.

As I grew older, and discarded the arrogance of youth, I changed my focus. The metric that matters most in terms of inherently "GETTING IT", is determined strictly by your position in the cash flow. I don't need a myspace reddit delicious facebook account to get that!

I need a dumb kid willing to take up front money for an idea so that they can feverishly burn through a few years of their life, and in the end get their well deserved and fully diluted 2% return.

Give me that please, with sugar on top. The youthful are there to be exploited. Period. They beg for it with their arrogance. I for one am more than happy to oblige them. Why would I care about what they inherently GET?

I don't.

In fact I hope that every one of them I meet has this particular chip on their shoulder because it makes it all the more easy to steal the fruit of their labor, which is what I "INHERENTLY GET".
Corefino.com - accounting for startups
Israeli communications startups are hot
Why every cat lols at lolcats
agreed. even warren buffet, arguably the best guy at this game, makes the same observation about trading.

very well put. I'd add accounting to that list as well, particularly something as burdensome as sarbanes oxley
That's true. One downside of having an anti-jerk culture here is that people are more trusting.
Kx systems has a database that is pretty popular in the financial circle
_Let users choose from five stars, and they nearly always pick three_

Amazon has the problem of bimodal distributions for their ratings...nearly every user either votes one star (and bitches, "If I could choose zero, I would") or five. They've actually started sending emails to people requesting reviews to fix this problem (to get the silent majority to vote.)
Wesabe Raises $4 Million Series A from Union Square Ventures and Mark Fletcher
So my experience from doing a startup.
It depends on the wife/girl.
- If they are confident and not risk adverse its OK. My gf practically told me to go get a life and challenge yourself or i'm going to dump you b/c you are clearly doing nothing in your current corporate job. She is still a student though, and there are no family considerations.
- other significant others in the team required more convincing, but most saw how 'serious' their loved one was about it and initially opposed it but eventually said ok.

this is really different from a kid/house situation though. i think there is a different level of responsibility if you have others depending on you for financial security. I think then its really a decision between you and your wife that you sit down and discuss. In geneneral though, you want to sell the story and back it up w/ action.
Make it work on the cell phone.
numbr: Auto expiring, free anonymous phone numbers for online safety.
I love this kind of startup. It's a single straight-forward hack that is unbelievably powerful.
Clicking on the names leads you to an ghost-town page.

Lack of any hint as to how I can vote for or against these folks leads me to think there's a good chance people I'd like to hear from will be drowned out by others who I've already heard enough from.

Lack of a web-based suggestion box makes me think the site is only going to harvest my email and spam me later.

The premise has potential, but the implementation is lacking.
Ruby on Rails EC2 "Appliance"
But what's their business model? Ads i presume?
Virtual Goods: the next big business model
There's a nice group called a comp.lang.lisp also accessible through google groups http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/topics if you have any newbie question ask it there and mention that you're newbie. There's a lot of people who will answer, sometimes even in a less than minute.

Slobodan Blazeski
I understand that it is in the best interests of an open source developer to give support for his software (assuming he wants people to use it), but he's in no way obligated to do so. Some people just develop software for fun and make it available to the public as an afterthought in the hopes like minded people will find it useful. I know with the personal projects I've released as open source, although I fixed bugs and responded to requests when I could, it was my goal to give prompt technical support.
Point taken. My morals caught up with my sense of humour and I took it down. Once might be funny, but I realised that if a lot of people did things like this, News.YC (which I really like) would be made useless.
Please update the link: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/06/more-sharing.html
Who also thinks Jessica is a cutey pie?
At this point it's really difficult to sift through the noise on the feature request thread.
Google Maps Local Reviews: 8 Big Losers (?)
How long does this typically last?
TV really is dead: no TV schedule on CNN homepage?
In Programming, One is the Loneliest Number
Is this an example of the worst web design ever? I would have thought the most obvious reason to visit CNN's homepage would be to find a schedule of upcoming tv "shows". But it is nowhere to be found. What's more, the TV-text is also switched off - is it just sheer arrogance, or does even CNN not belive in TV anymore?
wasn't this blindingly obvious?
eyeball time matters because people who have stuff to sell need people who wish to buy. search/email/maps... are just ways of making your net-billboard the first one people see. finally people are being 'paid' to receive advertising.
#And a preview button couldn't hurt.
The Prada costs more though, doesn't it?
Maybe the approach is to create a FRIEND PROXY SITE that abstracts your social network above social sites?

Really, that seems to miss the point. If all you want is to know who your friends are then you wouldn't need any website at all.
Yes, as a native English speaker I'd assume arTIFFia as the pronounciation.
I can't decide if it's better to be a decently attractive woman on the Internet because of the bonus charisma and attention (rule of everything a hot girl does is 100x more interesting than a man of equal talent)...

...or depressing, because you know that most everything you do is judged by that goddamn bio pic, and everyone first notices how flattering your outfit is (or isn't) before they even bother to consider the quality of your ideas... and that will never change... since that's just how people have been, will be, and always will be.

And God Help You if you ever get to be fat or ugly.
Then why even bother commenting on this thread? Great site btw although I had a bit of trouble navigating the site. Help docs should alleviate that...also it would be nice if the UI was cleaned up a bit for new users. I had no trouble using the map and checking out the world. But the rest of the site leaves me confused with so much information all over the place.
One could make a decent opera about the struggles between Jobs, Gates, IBM, and Intel.
Can you clarify why you think it's not worth installing the libraries?