skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It doesn't seem to support closures.

User>(defun accgen (x)
(lambda (y)
(incf x y)))

ACCGEN
User>(setf foo (accgen 5))

<Interpreted Lisp Function>
User>(funcall foo 5)

NaN
User>(let ((bar "bar"))
(defun qux ()
(print bar)))

QUX
User>(qux)

null
User>
Speech Animation in Paintings
One aspect that bothers me about the educational system is the educational system's education for educator's. Educational "theories" seem to follow fads that wax and wane in popularity every decade or so. (Reminiscent of the latest "Quality System" fad: the nuts and bolts remain the same but they are arranged differently.) One would think that educational techniques would converge over time rather than bouncing around. An educational degree strikes me as largely a waste more suited to a minor.
I interned for the company that provided Accoona's search engine software. This same software has been deployed successfully in many enterprise environments, is based on solid IR theory and research, and had powered a large web search engine in the late 90's.

However, any company trying to use it to compete with Google/Yahoo/MSN today, has 0 chance of succeeding. It's like trying to use Lucene to compete with Google. While these IR systems are solid and great for special purpose deployments, they provide little means of dealing with spamdexing, and all the other things a full web search engine needs in modern times.

It was obvious to me two years ago that Accoona was founded to capitalize on the search engine craze of the time as opposed to delivering a competitive product. I'd stay really far away from their stock if they ever go IPO.
First Life?

ZING!
Hypothetically, what if the competition has a good model and is as smart & nimble as you are?

I feel like this would be like an job interviewer asking "what are your worst qualities?" Few honest answers would benefit you.
Loss of sleep is cumulative. After 3 days, you might think you're getting by fine on 4 hours of sleep per night, but it's catching up to you. You start saying things that don't make sense, or pausing inexplicably during conversations. You start zoning out when reading, and make decisions based on habit rather than logic. Small inconveniences start making you angry, and complex problems are baffling. Organization becomes impossible. Your muscles are weak and uncoordinated, you bump into things like you're drunk. You'll begin to stop caring, you'll stop enjoying things. Over time, it just gets worse and worse, until you actually start hallucinating.

Adrenaline can get you through some difficult situations, but in the long run health problems will catch up to you.
Is that just for Feedjit or is there other stuff on there too?
Reason's for public education:

1. An educated citizenry is critical for a functioning democracy.

2. An educated citizenry is critical to the economy of a nation.
My bad. Its an article on one enterpreneur. The owner of "Second Glass" a wine magazine
if by Lisp you mean Scheme, perhaps http://magic.xmog.com suits you. It's lacking documentation, but it's promising at least.
I disagree with him on this article. Aside from the fact that business cards should fit their intended purpose, which he didn't even address, all of those have flaws. The one he likes, I hate the most.

A business that sells boats or boat rides should target older customers with bigger fonts.
How the Wikipedia Scanner Works
I liked the part where he talks about "Folding Languages" because I very recently understood the "tree-of-closures compiler" technique to do exactly that: write code that writes code... I used to think macros were the most powerful and only way to do that, but now I know closures is where it's at.
Hackers and Painters indeed! This is surreal.
Indeed. If I understand the post correctly, the news was that they put a memory chip up for sale on eBay.
We are using a slightly modified version of sbcl. Because of the large number of persistent connections we have to handle, we can run into issues with FD numbers and the default serve-event implementation. We have swapped in our own epoll-based serve-event to get around this. Otherwise, sbcl has worked very well for us.

Most of the sbcl hackers hang out in #lisp on irc.freenode.net, so the level of help available around the clock is amazing. There have been a couple times when we were pulling our hair out, got into the #lisp channel, and had a solution in a matter of minutes. Highly recommended, and a very smart group of people.
I like the top-left one, but the rest are definitely crap. Also, I disagree on the phone number; I think email is far more important. If I want to get into contact with you, I want to just email you and wait for a reply, instead of calling every half hour or so and hoping you're available, especially if you operate in another time zone.
Condense Your Day With the Life-Hacking FAQK
Ahh, entrepreneur grandstanding.

Would that article make any more sense if it was about olympic athletes?

"I don't sleep, I train. How can I go to sleep when there's so much training to do? While my competitors are asleep and resting, I'm getting in an extra lap around the track. I'll sleep after I get a gold medal."
What's that huge spike in April from?
Loss vs. Gain
I have a two year old, and I'm not sure I like the subversive influence of Thomas the Train. It's teaching him that being useful and reliable is the most important thing an engine can be.

The engines all wait for Sir Topam Hat to show up at the station with a task for them. Once, Thomas the Train didn't like the task, and started to object...

"Really useful engines don't argue," says Sir Topam Hat.

So Thomas goes off and does the task.

Personally, I agree that really useful engines don't argue. Why would they bother bringing this dude around to their point of view, when they have so many other options in life?

Anyway, I think a lot of these stories date back to a time when the US economy really needed a lot of strong arms and backs that didn't argue. Try to manage programmers like that now :)

Actually, try to have that career now as a hacker. You may get to limp along with a task list for a while, but no way are you getting anywhere with that approach. It's not just about startups - I doubt you'd even get hired for anything remotely promising. Won't work, not a chance. The last thing I want to give my kid is a set of values that will make it impossible to thrive in a modern economy.
I think we agree, but I didn't anticipate such a fast reply while I was brainstorming and editing my posts.
I can't count the number of times I stayed up late chasing a bug, only to have it be something so simple that I would've caught it in 20 minutes or less if I'd just gotten a normal amount of sleep and looked at it the next morning.

You just get slower and slower as you stay up, until you're sitting there staring at the screen for 5 minutes before you remember what you're doing.

Any lack of sleep at all will also cost you in productivity the next day. By having discipline to let it be, you can spend 20 minutes on it the next day instead of hours on it tonight and messing up your productivity all day tomorrow.
I wasn't considering the specific examples Seth used in terms of business type. I just meant in general, for the type of people I deal with, I'd rather have an email address. Obviously, in certain industries or for certain types of people, I'd expect a cell phone number to be the most important thing.

BTW, the top two examples appear to be for security companies, not boat / fishing companies.
There is no "non-business" side
Top 10 reasons why your startup needs a Board of Advisors
Web 2.0 Continues Its Streak With VCs
Source code for the Action Script 3 Lisp Interpreter.
He has released the source code of the interpreter: http://www.solve-et-coagula.com/?p=9.
"I'm a startup Founder, and I don't sleep, I build. If I stop now, there will be someone else to replace me -- maybe you."

He forgot to add, "But if I destroy your productivity by convincing you to go sleep-deprived, then I'll be safe."
iPhone Installer.app Beta (easy way to install 3rd party iPhone apps)
That's the first time I've looked at ActionScript code. Javascript has such an elegant object system - they should have kept it.
If he was really that stingy and focused with his time he wouldn't have even wasted any to write that post. Anyone who has done non-trivial development knows that it is a marathon, not a sprint. Sleep is essential.
> I own three volumnes of TACP and have very rarely used them. They look good and give instant programmer cred when you utter their titles, but they just haven't proven that useful to me.

Much of TAoCP is simply worth reading straight-through. I don't use it as a reference all that often either, but when I do, it has never let me down.
Ask pg.news.yc: How do acquisition prices get settled?
For instance, PG, how did Viaweb and Yahoo agree on a sale price? Arbitration by investment bankers, the board, etc? What is the process? How can you trust the negotiators to work in your best interest?
I was writing about sleep as a metaphor for motivation and commitment. I should have been more literal.

Thanks for informing me that sleep is important.
Anyone know of any great consumer electronics startups in the Bay Area?
A lot fewer than I pulled while in college.
I have a great idea, but I can't tell you - Primer in entrepreneurship
As long as they don't do the survey at the wrong time (http://www.encyclopediadramatica.com/index.php/The_Great_Hab...).
In Defense of Bubbles...
... or why you can't always trust newspapers
With all the references to "extra hours" it was inevitable that readers would take the sleep part literally.

Paul Graham usually runs his essays by a few people before he publishes them. You might want to start doing the same with your writing.
Could be wrong but I think you can still use the prototype syntax if you want.
TV News 2.0
Distributed Media and Comments
> It dabbles in a mess of pseudoscience

Given that this was an invited address given this year to the American Psychological Association, that seems a bold claim to make.
Firms, investors tend to prosper with founders at the helm
Good article on Usatoday
I believe it's from people reloading to see who got accepted to the SFP.
Only So Many Ways to Do Something Right
Thats incredible. Imagine the banner ad implications too
Not quite. The news is that Auctomatic has decided to run a Powerseller business -- the auction selling the RAM is just the first of many.
How can you trust the negotiators to work in your best interest? Make their cut percentage-based.
I wonder if it was meant to be a parody?
I don't mean to imply that I think all the points the article makes are bogus because there are some insightful things that are said, especially near the conclusion.

I do think the format is extremely poor, granted that it's an opening speech, and not a real paper. My only concern is that when people just see the abbreviated version (like what we have here), it can breed as much haywire logic as something blatantly false.

Also, in my shameless defense, here is a (not/credible) blurb about the value of psychology, which is a separate topic.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychology#Controversy_as_a_sci...
Thanks, I'll try this first.
Three Things to Unlearn from School
Two More Things to Unlearn from School
Not necessarily. Getting 1% more for you means 1% more for them, which means they may have a bias towards a low price that guarantees a deal.

Instead, you could try a larger commission of any sale price above X, where X is your low estimate of what your company is worth.

Edit: On the other hand, this tilts their incentive towards pursuing low-probability, high-payout situations. If someone is working with ten different companies, and they all compensate with this structure, getting one good sale and ignoring the other nine might be the most rewarding option. On the other hand, if there are nine companies with the "percentage of sale price" structure and one with "higher percentage of price-minus-threshold," compensation, the latter will get all the attention. So this boils down to a brutal, Darwinian struggle to pay your sales guy the right way. At some point, structuring compensation might waste more time and effort than just selling the company yourself.
At least they're trying things.
A Fear of Foreign Investments
It's funny, people tend to read the articles differently.

There's a thread in my comments where people pretty much get it, and then another in the forums where people seem to understand it.

It's good to see the different perspectives.
Personally I'm glad that these funds exist. It's much better than the alternative, foreign owned US dollars being sold. Instead, everyone just ends up owning a little part of America. $2.5 trillion doesn't seem like that much, how fast do you think sovereign wealth funds will grow over the next decade or two?
I noticed if you come to a site using Feejit (sp?) via google, you're search term is included in the coming from URL. Does this present any kind of privacy issues? I remember AOL got in a lot of trouble for releasing search queries from their users.
If you manage your time and life right, you shouldn't have to be sleep-deprived. Of course, that means you have to schedule your priorities, and some things won't make it as part of your life. I've gotten my Bachelor's and Master's, and I never had to pull an all-nighter beyond my first semester. I don't anticipate any all-nighters in the PhD program either.

One of the founders of the consulting firm that I worked for talked about never working past 6 or 7 PM. He never ate out, and spent that time working. You can always work more in your day without sacrificing your sleep and/or health.

At the same time, if we could all survive on less sleep, it'd be nice.
An off-label prescription for Modafinil will let you skip as much sleep as you want and remain productive. You just have to start worrying about the cumulative health effects of minimal sleep. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modafinil
Esther Dyson, Guy Kawasaki and Yossi Vardi Join TechCrunch20 Expert Panel
Would you mind expanding a bit on keep-alive settings? In what cases would you want to set it to a low value?

Question 2. As a web developer, should I be worried that I don't know as much as you about scaling a web app? What will I do when my web app makes it big?
Unless it was intentionally stupid, they are trying. I have to disagree with Doostang.com. I've heard a lot of good things, and the other sites are the beginnings to good ideas. Usually, 2 or 3 sites have to start in a certain direction, before another one gets it just right.

For Doostang, LinkedIn is a forerunner to better sites, or it's the successor to Monster, HotJobs, and the like.
This is romantic exaggeration. I would never advise founders to sleep less than they need, except in brief emergencies. Sleeping 8 hours a day leaves you 16 to work, and that should be more than enough.
It'd be really funny if their success as a company comes from selling on eBay and their software is an afterthought.
http://blog.auctomatic.com/?p=49
I know that the prototype syntax is available in as2, but I think it was removed in as3. I agree that the prototype syntax is more elegant, but I really believe Adobe was trying to appeal to Java and .NET developers.
Advertising is one model for web startups and the monetization of Web 2.0 apps., but there indeed others:

subscriptions for premium services
subscriptions for access
selling to web giant, like Google, etc.
advertising through alliances and referrals, beyond simple adsense

I'll ask the community to add more.
"Don't use big type for the address and contact info. The #1 way we can tell if a business card is cheesy is with a glance at the type size."

bad advice. small type strains the eyes.

The vistaprint cards are free + $6 shipping.
But there is their logo saying "free cards at Vistaprint" on the back. Is that a Very Bad Thing? I wonder.
The Character Traits for an Entrepreneur
I know there's much written about being a great leader and how-to posts on starting a company, but I'm more interested in those innate characteristics of a startup founder. Founders at Work had many great interviews, but I'm looking for the synthesis here of all the successful webpreneurs.
I just met him at Bar Camp - cool guy
In fact, he's currently recruiting for his new startup in LA.
I im'd him to see if he was interested in talking about it on the site formerly known as "Startup News"
Actually with its current name, John would probably be more inclined to post
Clustered Social Networks Lead to Company Innovation
Networks of networks might be a better solution for the average web user, rather than one monster catch-all social networking website. This is the opportunity that social network aggregators can exploit.
Story of a boston start-up social network+gaming and a little on how the VC round came together.
The stock illustration of the guy in the tie and the rah rah marketing tone of the site don't lead us to expect metaphors. You gotta warn us before throwing us a curve like that.
The Digestion Phase: How We Got Here And Where We Are Going Next
> There's a thread in my comments where people pretty much get it, and then another in the forums where people seem to understand it.

They didn't get the article with "(How many all-nighters do you pull a month?)" appended to the title.
i really liked the article, it sets a good tone for the idea that the more you can push yourself the farther down field you get. I remember a quote from somewhere, I think it was in the Godfather,
"you have to be willing to do what the others wont."

and that is what I got from the article
paul - that pretty much ties into an earlier thread a few days ago talking about why admins edit the titles.
http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/startups/team.html

Search for "Qualities that I find absolutely necessary:"
I'm all in favor of having founders run the company, but their 4x number not very meaningful. The company doing badly can be a cause of founders leaving, not just as result.
Good book, it should be in everyone's library but it won't help you learn about hacking.
"but I think it was removed in as3"

Wrong. I was curious so i tested it (i've been experimenting with Flex 2). The following code outputs "blah blah":

var foo:Function = function() {}

foo.prototype.someMethod = function() { trace("blah blah"); }

new foo().someMethod();

I think the prototype syntax was kept to maintain backwards compatibility.
Probably he is expressing his opinion. I think it may not work for everyone.
It's always pretty much the same kind of haggling you'd see in a bazaar. Usually both sides send signals in advance about the ballpark figure they'd consider. If these aren't too far apart, you haggle. That's usually stressful, because you can only haggle effectively if you are truly prepared to walk away from the deal if you don't get what you want. So deals are always about to fall through till the last moment.
This might work. Over the course of high school, I had to stay up to do a lot of easy, but time-intensive work. This is, of course, diametrically different from coding.
Video:Understanding usuabilty and the concept of social networks
I'm still no fan of facebook, but after watching this video lecture by Jared Spool I've gained a little more appreication for social networking as whole.
Thats cool, does it work with creating classes that way as well?
It usually is, for investment bankers. But that doesn't guarantee they'll work in your interest. Investment bankers selling a small co to Microsoft might sell it super cheap, in the hope of earning good will with Microsoft that could be cashed in later in much bigger deals.
Idea: A genetic testing service to allow parents to exchange newborns to reduce conflict 16 years later
The idea here is that parents would exchange their babies according to the results of genetic testing to reduce overall conflict with their children 16 years later.

For example, children who tend to take risks would be assigned to parents who also take risks as determined by similarities in their risk taking genetic profile.

To encourage women to have healthy babies, the algorithm would take into account the health of the baby so that babies of similar health are exchanged.
Sweet! Are you working on that?
>How can you trust the negotiators to work in your best interest?

Be one of the negotiators. Sounds stupid, but if you aren't at the table, you really aren't being represented, no matter how wonderful the high priced help is.
Great Idea, now all you have to do is convince someone to exchange their baby away.

As a parent, I can tell you that this will be harder than building a city on mars.
0, this would be completely unreliable give the non-genetic factors in personality.

1, it totally ignores that people care more for their own genetic offspring than for other kids.

2, people having kids aren't thinking about teenage conflict. People that do think long term think about relationships with adult children.
In Google Earth, a Service for Scanning the Heavens
Another hypothesis as to why companies do better with founders:

A company's culture is set by its founder(s). As long as a founder is in charge, the CEO is working with the corporate culture. When an outside manager is brought in, he usually ends up working against corporate culture.

In every company I've worked in, the culture was essentially a reflection of the founder's personality. If there are multiple founders, it reflects a weird amalgam of all the ones that are involved in the daily business. If an early employee tends to run things in the early days, the culture reflects them as much as the founders. Think Intel and Andy Grove, or 3M and William McKnight.

Companies tend to inherit both the best qualities and worst faults of their founders. However, their position in the marketplace usually reflects the best qualities. After all, nobody buys from a company for what it sucks at.

An outsider brings his own strengths and weaknesses to the company, but it's very unlikely that his strengths will line up with the culture and market that the company already has. Think John Sculley and Apple - great executive for cola, not so great for computers. The founder, instead, may have tons of liabilities, but at least he won't be fighting the corporate culture he himself has created.

There's some evidence to back this up, for instance:

1.) It echoes the findings in Good to Great: the turnaround process involves applying the "hedgehog principle" of asking yourself what the company is really passionate about, then getting the right people on the bus and the wrong people off the bus, and only then changing strategy. The hedgehog principle is essentially a question about culture: where does the culture of this organization fit into the overall economy. Then getting the right people on the bus and the wrong people off the bus consists of strengthening the positive aspects of the company culture and weakening the negative ones.

2.) In cases where an outside turnaround CEO has successfully turned around a company, they usually spend a significant amount of time acclimatizing themselves to the existing culture, and only start changing things after they already "fit in". Think Lou Gerstner and IBM. Even then, they often make decisions that mortgage the long-term health of the company by destroying the previous cultural values. Gerstner eliminated IBM's status as an R&D powerhouse, for example, while James McNerney nearly destroyed 3M's innovation culture with Six Sigma.

3.) Companies that survive the departure of their founders usually do so by institutionalizing their culture as a set of company values, bringing in fresh recruits out of college before they've been able to pick up a different corporate culture, and then promoting from within to put in place management who already understands the existing culture. Think GE.
Why would your second statement be true? Parents don't care as much about their adopted children?
Top 2 reasons you don't:

1. How many startups you admire have one?

2. Investors and board members should already be doing this.
Even 16 hours a day will burn you out after a while. I try to work 70 to 80 hours a week.