skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Very true when he says there is a lesson to be learned from starting a company for $12k and a few weeks.

Let this be a challenge. What can you start with the same constraints?
The technology of OLPC's hundred dollar laptop
I don't see how it breaks any design rules: the UI is essentially the same (and completely functional) without JS. Admittedly, I don't really see a compelling reason why you'd need JS to add that link bar, but the redesigned Google page hardly "requires" Javascript.
wow. sounds like something those guys in Bangalore can do (or hopefully, Manila)
'... If the company did well I believe this person would join. But i would not expect him to leave his job in uncertainty. ...'

If this is the case I'd repay money and take the person on as an early employee but not a co-founder. This is okay. You know the person. But the fact is they did not think the idea, concept or work compelling enough to quit. Also don't be fooled into thinking early investment is some sort of ownership.

'... I think the ejector button would be too strong ...'

That was meant to be a joke
Start compiling Gentoo. When it's done, you'll be ready for it.
Almost none are remotely capable of this.
I don't see why copyright should extend past the life of the creator.
Entering iPhone Era: Marking Time in Mobile (Time for a new bubble)
At my day job, Java is the official sanctioned platform, everything else is considered "ad-hoc", a prototype. As one who prefers Django+Python, I kind of wish it would die sometimes... I can imagine this is a common industry trend among mid-to-large-size companies.

That's why I've been interested in Scala lately. I could see advantages to opening up your platform to enterprise drones. Scala might be a way to do it without becoming an enterprise drone in the process :)

Despite the hype and UML-wielding enterprise architects standing around it, Java-the-platform is still interesting. mailinator was done in Java (see http://mailinator.blogspot.com/2007/01/architecture-of-mailinator.html ), and handles tremendous amounts of spam on cheap hardware. And there's RabbitMQ, the Java-compatible message bus written in Erlang. Java doesn't have to suck...
'... How did Facebook grow so big suddenly? ...'

It didn't. It's been bubbling along for a long time (Facebook launched in February of 2004 ~ http://www.facebook.com/press.php ) Facebook is also doing a lot of things right, namely Connect, Connnect, Connect. The mantra of the new, post multi-tasking adoption of the always connected. For example:

- choosing a demographic (gen z) that values communication as an opportunity

- attaching themselves to organisations that are already wired and communicating (schools & universities)

- choice of technology (open) ~ http://developers.facebook.com/opensource.php

- continuous innovation ~ http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=2207522130

- enabling ~ http://www.cit.cornell.edu/policy/memos/facebook.html

- and finally, making something that people want and the best tool to do this at the same time!

Of course the story on Facebook is still being written. Zuckerberg is really taking the long term view for Fb with a $USD12M dollar funding (and the service shows this money well spent with lots of details covered, api, reliability, etc ~ http://tinyurl.com/2ug3p8 ) When the market cools and users wane (a'la Friendster) will the reported $USD1B offered by Yahoo! and rejected, be seen in hindsight as a good idea?
I think he seems very bitter in his post. Also I think he wrong when he says why would it matter that its wordpress. He makes an analogy between oracle and mysql as well. I think it does , technical proficiency matters, if he is going to outsource his programming I see this not being successful.
I don't think many people want this startup to succeed. After all, who wants a service that spreads rumors?
Nobody can reach 1,000 points; it just can't be done
Thrift: scalable cross-language services implementation (pdf 84Kb)
(I'm kidding, and I know Sam Odio in real life)

I've looked at the leaderboard over the past three months, and I just do not think that any one single person will ever have 1,000 karma points. In fact, between 1950 and 2005, nobody has even come close to 1,000 points on YC News. If it was possible, somebody would have done it by now.
Top 50 Logo Design Tutorials | E Logo Design
There's a guy, known as "bug-fixer", who has over 2000 points: http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pg
Having a cofounder isn't some unreasonable requirement. It's entirely for your benefit.
"... define data types and service interfaces in a simple definition file. Taking that file as input, the compiler generates code that can be used to easily build RPC clients and servers ..." ~ http://developers.facebook.com/thrift

Core facebook code for mobile, notes, search, posts and platform.
MIT just started a entrepreneurship focused curriculum as a specialization within their MBA program.

Babson (also in the Boston area) is also rumored to have a very strong entrepreneurship focused program.
FAA switch to linux & google apps
I didn't mean to detract from your original point. I think you're right, it's good to have good libraries. I was just pointing out that there are some advantages to the way Java normally works. Anyway, as Java's such a popular language, you can get away with copying other people's 100 lines if you really need to. A quick Google search turned up an image scaler outright.

By the way, I think it's kind of unfair for you to link to the interface definitions rather than some implementation for Java. java.awt.Image is probably just as inscrutable, but at least it does something.

edit: While I'm at it, one point that I didn't quite make clear, but should be noted is that Image in Java is used all over the place, so its interface is going to be pretty much targeted at not missing any possible use case. If you're interested in a narrow-scoped pixel image application, why not use some Java image processing library? Sun's got one: http://java.sun.com/javase/technologies/desktop/media/jai/
You probably don't realize it, but that's a rather patronizing attitude. Not everyone works the same, and we don't all need co-founders to "to cheer [us] up when things go wrong."
It's always fun to see projects I was involved in being used in huge deployments. Squid, in this case. Too bad the mention was merely to explain that they use it but it's not fast enough!
It doesn't have to discriminate between an "in" or a "with" -- I'll do that. When I type "beer", and it gives me no results instead of everything with "beer" in it, it's broken.

When I type in the FULL title and it gives me zero results, it's broken. The first upcoming event is "Block party", and neither that, nor "block", nor "party" yield results.

I don't want "in" party or "with" party, I want everything that says "party".

> I understand that users are used to using a search query by typing a keyword and relevant results come up

Yes, so if your site doesn't work that way, guess what's broken? Hint: It's not the users.

Including "with" or "in" as an extra feature is one thing, but requiring it just makes it look like your site's broken.
lol, I think this one applies IF 1) you know their address 2) the address is within driving distance and 3) having an "assault" on your criminal record is just another notch in the belt. :)
that site sure EXCRETES confidence out of every orifice :)
Custom search engines with google co-op
How Rails made me a better programmer
Why? Bloglines outsourced quite a few things. Digg outsourced quite a bit of its early development...didn't seem to hurt it much. MySpace was outsourced development early on, too.

That's not to say I particularly like Truemors...the spamminess of it pretty much makes it worthless to my eyes, but it's not spammy because it was outsourced, but because of specific implementation decisions.
Permanent Record: Community Rules!
Better with two if both are dedicated. Otherwise the second is a negative. You need a second to keep you motivated and moving when things on your plate slow down or get painful. A second that sits most of the process out is not part of that equation.

If you need their investment, negotiate based on it as an early investment rather than as a partnership (a partner gets lots of sweat equity and a pittance based on some small amount of cash invested--equity bought with cash is usually much smaller and on less favorable terms in the sense that small sums do not bring seats on the board, etc.). But you probably don't need that money. Buy back their share (if you've already incorporated and issued shares), and call it a friendship rather than a business partnership. You do not want to deal with these questions down the road when the company has assets.
Stone-Age Programming and the Death Of The IDE
1. Construct straw man built from edlin

2. Call it modern vim/emacs+bash and knock it down in a blog post

3. Profit!

With apologies to all recovering Slashdotters.
Similarly, automatic garbage collection is a lot friendlier than C++ memory management.

With C for close-to-the-metal stuff and to optimize bottlenecks, Python for high level, and ctypes to glue both, I find no niche left for C++.
I could probably clone a lot of the YC'dlings.

I thought it would be amusing to go down the list one-by-one and make open-source clones of 'em, specifically made to scale using EC2 and S3 auto-magically.
I dunno if I buy this theory. It's always risky to build a product that only survives at the behest of another company. Microsoft killed at least as many application providers as they acquired, and while Facebook doesn't seem Microsoft caliber evil, we don't have any particular evidence that they aren't. They don't even have a motto proclaiming their aversion to evil.

That's not to say it won't happen...but I suspect it'll be even odds for quite some time that Facebook will develop their own version of the most profitable niches (already happened with classifieds, apparently, which was announced just days before another product from another company that did the same thing). I don't follow Facebook very closely, so I don't know any details, but if you build a company based on Facebook, the only liquidity option is "sell to Facebook". I don't like those odds.

In other words, if you want to work for Facebook, just get a job with Facebook. There's still tons of upside on their stock, so if you get options, you will likely be rich in a four years when they vest.
OK, I'll relax.

Yes, the Java imageio API is painful. I used it to create a function to get image dimensions, but having experienced the pain once I just used a shell script for resizing.

If you're still struggling with multiple-image uploads, one approach is to have the user make a zip file; not so hard today, as you can right-click a set of files in your file browser. Also see

http://img.ourdoings.com/windows.html

Windows XP also has a web publishing wizard that actually works well once you figure out how to use it. Feel free to reverse-engineer the ourdoings.com implementation of it.

You probably aren't going to write a photo sharing web site if you considered it and haven't started yet. You kind of have to be obsessed with it to work through all the details. Since you haven't started you aren't obsessed, and probably wouldn't enjoy it.
New book: "My Startup Life"
Yet time is limited, and there are other things a programmer should learn besides programming languages.
They're from South Dakota.

http://electricpulp.com/
Go for it! Competition is _always_ good! It forces people and companies to up their game. Customers are the ones who win in the end.

I was actually thinking of implementing something like Scribd (it's very simple with Adobe Flashpaper) but don't wanna get sued and deal with DMCA/lawyers. Scribd's full of pirated stuff... they must be getting a ton of DMCA takedowns.
Anything designed by a committee sucks :(. What do they say "camel's a racehorse designed by a committee"...

Java, unfortunately, is full of these crappy APIs because it went through multiple committees.
Tech Talk: Linus Torvalds on git
Just to nitpick, any language that allows functions 'allows' functional programming to some extent. More seriously, any language with higher order functions, lexical scoping, and closures can be considered appropriate for functional programming.

You probably meant languages that are biased primarily towards functional programming, as opposed to others where FP is not the dominant paradigm. You have to specify that much if you are going to include the Lisps but leave Python out.
What do you use to optimize a bottleneck in Ruby or Python? (After you have profiled, exhausted the higher level optimizations, and all that.)
Well, most languages use C for their FFI so you're almost stuck with that. You can still use D, since it can call C functions transparently. Though, if I were designing a high-level language and wanted it to be able to call a fast lower-level one, I might choose Forth or OCaml. Once it matures a bit, I might change my answer to Fortress.
Well, if you have a big company where the main asset is some copyrighted material and the creator suddenly dies, that company might suddenly lose a lot of revenue possibly affecting the life of a large number of people. (Of course, you might say, that's business and it just means that another large number of people now have a new business opportunity.)

I think the current life+70 years is wrong, but I think the expiry should be predictable some time in advance. Like X years from the time of creation.
Lately people in the valley -- and on this list -- have been talking about how successful entrepreneurs are more likely to be young (say, in their 20's).

This article and its sources would appear to flatly contradict that thought, except that I think the article is defining "startup" as any new business. Whereas we're talking tech.

So maybe younger people do better in tech businesses but not in general? Why would that be? More in touch with new technology? More willing to ignore conventions in applying it? At the same time, suffering from less legal, financial and market acumen.

------------

According to Challenger, start-ups in the first quarter were dominated by experienced workers over 40. Of those starting their own firms, 88 percent were over 40. That was up from 78 percent in the previous quarter.

It makes sense that these seasoned veterans might be more jaded about the corporate employment experience and are therefore more likely to turn to self-employment. In many respects, these individuals are also better suited than their younger counterparts for entrepreneurship, since they have a deeper foundation in business operations and probably have built a larger network of professional contacts who are critical in drumming up customers, says Mr. Challenger.

New start-ups will most likely be dominated by older, more experienced veterans of corporate America for the foreseeable future as baby boomers leave the traditional workforce and start their own firms, he says.

Evidence that this is already occurring can be found in unpublished government data revealed by Challenger, which show that those 55 to 64 and older represent one of the fastest growing groups of self-employed workers.

Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that the number of Americans 55 to 64 categorized as self-employed in non-agricultural industries increased 33 percent from 1,439,000 in 2000 to 1,919,000 in 2006. The number of self-employed 65 and older grew 19 percent from 659,000 to 781,000 during the same period.

The largest number of self-employed workers consists of boomers 45 to 54 years old, who accounted for more than 2.7 million or 25 percent of the nations 10.9 million self-employed in 2006.
The Architect
A look at Zoho Notebook
That's the diff between Scribd and any potential competitors. They have laughed in the face of danger and fear. Many people find that hard to do.

You should go ahead and implement :D Laugh at the lawyers!
Stanford does a lot of this, as the article mentioned, but there's a bit of tunnel vision in the entrepreneurship resources throughout the university. For example, it's virtually all geared toward starting ventures which will require a great deal of Venture Capital. There's a tremendous amount of emphasis on developing presentations to give to VCs. Those skills are useful, but they're emphasized at the expense of other critical topics like knowing your customer, recruiting talented employees, or being able to execute.
'... Comcate, went on to become the leading provider of software that enables citizens to communicate with their local governments ...' (Stephen Silberman, Education (and Misadventures) of a Next-Generation Leader and Mensch ~ http://tinyurl.com/2ju3nl )

So someone has turned govWorks ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Startup.com ) into a profitable company.
Washington Post: Online, GOP Is Playing Catch-Up
Thats a great title for a blog post :)
That's a nice-sounding rumor, but I don't think its true. :-) Sounds like something you should post on Truemors.

("Rumor" without the British/NZ 'u' does look funny.)
The Market Function of Piracy - Mises Institute
True, it's just that if you want those features of C++ you're better off jumping up to something modern: Python/C#/Java. Those languages (perhaps even Java) feel well-designed and friendly instead of like a hacked-on OOP addition to C.

I'm aware that C++ is not just a hack, but compared to modern designed-from-scratch languages, it does feel like one a lot of the time.
Idea to Discuss and Evaluate
Why is twitter popular?
Is there something I'm missing here?

It seems like there is nothing there that is not already a feature in another site/service.
Are any one intrested?
The "cool factor" is there.

One possible problem: The person has at least three things to work with now, your scanning device, the paper, and the computer. It would be really nice to have it interface directly with the mobile device.
... is twitter popular?
Is it? I've never used it. Nobody I know has either.
I thought I'd add some nuance to this.

The problem with 'over-abstraction' is not too much abstraction per se, any more than the problem with 'oversimplification' is excess of simplicity, or the problem with 'overgeneralization' is too much generality.

Abstraction, simplicity and generality are, in themselves, desirable properties in a design, since they reduce the bulk of design concepts we have to fit in our heads. You can't have too much of these.

You can, of course, make things worse for yourself by neglecting other design goals while striving for a particular one, or by stalling progress in your project by spending too much time in analysis paralysis.

The decision is not only between less or more abstraction, though. There are 'better' and 'worse' abstractions, as measured by their ability to show what is important for the client and hide the irrelevant. In Joel's examples of leaky abstractions, you can say 'too much' is being hidden. I'd rather say the wrong things are being hidden, or that it's done in the wrong place. You could conceivably hide 'more' irrelevant details while still letting every part of your program see what it needs.

To further complicate matters, the fitness of an abstraction for practical purposes depends on cultural factors. Some powerful abstractions only help if you've made the investment to learn and internalize a certain way of thinking about programming. On top of that, you may need to consider the skills and preferences of your audience.

In the example at hand, if Java needs 100 lines to perform an operation, while Python does away with 3, it's hard to argue that Java is being too abstract, or, indeed, more abstract at all. You can say it overindulges in 'abstractions'. But note that the end result burdens the user with lots of details that are irrelevant to them. That is exactly opposite to what abstraction is all about.
I understand spending a decent amount of time on YC news, but after a while, isn't there other work that needs doing, like building/running an actual startup instead of reading about others'?
The Python Imaging Library can handle all those.

http://www.pythonware.com/products/pil/
Current Status of World-wide Dating Site Industry -- Markus Frind
hi5 is inherently viral too. heck, i receive lots of invites through this
er. is twitter popular? No one except the techcrunchers are using it. None of my friends are using it
One of my favorite API's is Tcl's socket API. The simple case is really simple:

set sk [open news.ycombinator.com 80]

And you're in business. If you want to do more complex things, you can then operate on that socket, fiddling with all the options (blocking/non blocking, buffering, etc...).

The lesson is: make the obvious thing really easy, and give the user a means to access advanced functionality without requiring it.
Yes, as a disincentive to keep hitting the site, there should be a category 'biggest reloaders' or something... Unfortunately I have that problem myself.
It does indeed say "Lucky or Smart" in the title of the article, but that's not what the article is about. The entire piece is actually about what one should do after they experience luck--mainly, admit it, ride it, and keep their ego in check.

I'm used to ignoring article titles in most publications, as they are always sensationalized (as they should be). A big indicator of whether the title was likely written by an editor instead of the author themselves, or not, is how generic or cliche the title is.
Yeah, exactly. It's remarkable to me that people haven't done cooler things with the Facebook API thus far. So much interesting data there... so much potential for quantitative social network analysis.

This is where MySpace has failed -- they sacrificed data integrity for rapid growth. Facebook, on the other hand, was careful not to fall into this trap... connections on there still mean something. (They go so far as to discourage you from "friending" folks that you don't really know.)

It's a smart move on the part of Facebook to leverage this advantage, by cultivating a developer community around their data.
Michael Arrington: Silicon Valley Could Use A Downturn Right Now
Everybody is using myspace and facebook