skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is typical. You, as well as Paul Graham, have gotten stuck in a certain programming model, based on your experience. You have both lost the flexibility of youth.

So, don't try to use pseudo arguments to say that object orientation is bad. It's not bad, it's very good. Defend your style, but don't do it by attacking our style. It's not politics here.
On the subject of morality, I suggest Bernard Gert's "Common Morality: Deciding What to Do."

http://www.amazon.com/Common-Morality-Deciding-What-Do/dp/0195314212/
There is, indeed, no such thing as inherent value, but people nonetheless tend to think in terms of inherent value. This is important to realize when you decide on marketing and pricing schemes. For instance, restaurants are more likely to offer a discount on quiet days than charge a surcharge on busy days, and they make those sorts of decisions for a reason (restaurants can be a very competitive business, after all.)

David Friedman wrote a neat paper about the psychology of inherent prices and some related topics:

http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/econ_and_evol_psych/economics_and_evol_psych.html
Google world domination in 2050
OCaml is an object oriented language, yet people who do real work in OCaml (and yes, there are such people, and their work is very real) appear to rarely use the object oriented features at all. The reason seems to be that the combination of a fancy module system with the standard trappings of higher-order, typed functional programming (algebraic data types, pattern matching, and the like) solves most of the same problems as OO in ways that OCaml users find easier to use.
You say that type mismatch errors are orthogonal to testing. This may be the case in languages like Java, which has a strong but not very expressive type system. In strongly typed functional programming languages like ML and Haskell, though, you can, with a bit of good design, capture a lot of information about what you want your program to do in the type system, to be checked automatically. Take, for example, the comment on this page by somebody who says that the only testing s/he does is XHTML validation. With strongly typed functional programming, it is possible, and not really even all that hard, to write an embedded combinator library for XHTML such that programs that generate improper XHTML don't type check in the first place.
The problem is with redirects. For some reason, early versions of Safari (pre 2) don't follow our redirects.

The simplest reproduction of the problem is:

http://news.ycombinator.com/safaritest

which redirects to apple.com in other browsers but generates an error in early versions of Safari.

I'd be very grateful if any Safari expert out there could tell me what's going wrong.
Digg is in the top 100.

Unless you think your personal blog is going to be more popular than Wikipedia, it's just not going to happen.
Fred Wilson: The Age Question (Why younger founders have an advantage)
Well, it makes sense from a marketing perspective (i.e. you can tell people who are interested "all you need is a laptop, plus the camera we'll send you", etc.).

But have you defined a minimum spec for that computer?

I'm just wondering if someone wanted to go the Gumstix route instead of a laptop, would it be possible?
It's Official: The Crash of the U.S. Economy has begun
what I've noticed throughout my career in the computer industry is this: it takes open minds to blaze trails (age is irrelevant). Ones ability to adapt and evolve to newer mediums. So many times I hear how painful the computer is to use from those over 36 years of age.
If you are anywhere in the EU you can probably start a British limited company, even if helpful government officials say you should register with the local overpriced companies registry. In The Netherlands there are several law firms that specialize in this, and they charge about EUR 500. I imagine lawyers in other EU countries have figured out the same trick by now. One thing to keep in mind is that you may expose your company to being sued in the UK, but you probably should be avoiding getting sued anyway.
Reddit needs to figure out how to create more subreddits without having to overcome critical mass every single time. I'm sure I'm kicking in an open door here, and I believe I read that they were working on it already, but I haven't seen a real solution so far. The recommendations system theoretically makes it feasible for all articles to go on one big reddit even with a large and diverse user base, but in practice, they're still suffering from a situation where new subreddits are hard to get off the ground while the main page has to be shared by different subcommunities with different interests.
Maybe some stats (similar to those co-founder stats) tell they have some advantages, but as Donna wrote age is irrelevant.
Google power 'less than thought' as eBay starts boycott
It looks strikingly like Weebly (down to an identical color scheme and blogging features), but it does seem to come at the problem from a slightly different angle.
In the US, more 18-24 year-olds start businesses than 35-44 year-olds
Here's something interesting http://farrukh.wordpress.com/2006/05/28/does-age-matter-in-advertising-agencies/
"The need for "intellectual curiosity" is being stressed."
link: http://www.cribornament.com/
For a company that values merit, it seems strange that it would help students to cheat.
Why is it that Silicon Valley types keep saying that intellectual curiosity is as or more important than IQ, but virtually zero research has ever been done on IC whereas there are hundreds of books on IQ?

(I have this long list of books that should have been written, but haven't been.)
C++ has a healthy relationship with OO.

"The aim of the C++ class concept is to provide the programmer with a tool for creating new types that can be used as as conveniently as the built-in types. [...] A type is a concrete representation of a concept. For example, the C++ built-in type float [...]"
--Stroustrup

This emphasis on concrete types is how I use and think about objects. If it doesn't cleanly act like a concrete type, I prefer to write a library that provides the data structures and related functions separately to the user. I hate how languages like Java shoehorn EVERYTHING into objects. It's very useful to keep the distinction between what cleanly forms a type and what doesn't.
It's not a security thing, simply a housekeeping thing. It is more readable and understandable if an object only exposes the methods that it's user needs. It's about reducing complexity.

I think in Java you actually can access the private methods of an object via Reflection, if you absolutely want to.
Some good ideas. I did start a list of the Feature Request thread, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18085 , perhaps you could add them under there?

Ideally, the whole DB of posts and users would be available in some other format than scraping HTML that allowed for easy incremental updates allowing those of us interested to produce their own stats or other tools, e.g. search.
OK Y Combinator, I've been working on my online startup for 4 months.. comments?
_FBML strips out some features of HTML, such as Javascript_

What exactly can it do, then?

I'm just completely baffled by facebook. Can somebody explain the appeal of it to me? Now, myspace I always considered lamentable crap, but the appeal was fairly straightforward...it gave people an easy way to build their own websites (which tended to be wildly, err, creative) and a way to connect them to those of their friends. Myspace had a zany, fun, creative...howsoever crappy...appeal to it.

But facebook pages have this sedative-like uniformity that I just can't wrap my head around. Why are the kids going to this? The whole thing feels dull.

The facebook api--can anybody link to a good example of how this works? I'm not sure what kind of 'applications' you can make with stripped-down javascript-free html, but what do I know?

Well, what I know is this: The whole appeal for developers is mathematical. It's just a goldrush--and like any goldrush the profits GO TO THE FIRST ONES WHO ARRIVE. The demand/supply curve is all on the demand side because there are so few facebook "apps" at the moment. Once saturation hits, the old web with its old freedoms will be the only real player again.
in Boston, thanks for the referral... I'll shoot him an email now...
Addictive as hell Flash Defense Game! Been playing for 3+ hours straight lol..
Feds Cut Power, Phone, Internet of Couple Who Won't Report To Prison
TruthEra Conspiracy Discussion Forums Unveiled.... :)
I think the title is a bit misleading: the essay argues that documentation is more important than code. Comments are only part of that.

The prototypical one-line comment immediately before a line of code is often superfluous---a sign of a missing function, or the need for introducing a more descriptive variable binding. In contrast, more extensive documentation comments, operating at a higher level of abstraction than the one-liners, do fill an essential role by providing motivation and context.

Whether documentation is "more important" than code is debatable, but surely many pieces of nice code suffer for lack of decent documentation.
Problem solved. The source of the trouble is that early versions of Safari insist on a blank line after the Location header in a redirect. Thanks to Trevor Blackwell for proposing this.

In the latest release, everything seems to work, at least in Safari 1.3.
I'd still worry more about an ad hoc group of founders than one that had been friends for a while, but if I had to choose between an ad hoc group with a kickass project and a group of established friends with nothing, I'd probably choose the first.

The thing is, we rarely see ad hoc groups with kickass projects. I think this is because such groups are less likely to build good things.
I'd also love to see the stats. As ralph mentioned elsewhere, having an API for accessing the entirety of the stats would be great. But something else like a weekly dumping of the posts table from your db would be great too.
Five Enterprise 2.0 Startups To Watch
Microsoft CEO calls Google complaint 'baseless'
IBM: Like the Web, virtual worlds will be become business friendly
My first thought is that it is exceedingly similar to Twitter. What features do you have to distinguish yourself (other than no 140 character limit)?

I personally really prefer sites that keep their header/introduction comments really minimal (I think twitter.com does a reasonable job of this). Overall at the moment your site reminds me of a visually modified php forum.

I keep seeing smart people using php to create their web apps, and I still don't understand why. Creating this app in Django or Rails would take days instead of months, and would likely more flexible to boot. I continue to wonder if I am missing something. Perhaps you are using a php framework and I am sufficiently uneducated about php to notice.

Honestly though, its great that you're out there building something, and I hope things go well for you. Simplify, simplify, simplify the visual components and distinguish, distinguish from Twitter (and from a forum), and you will be on the way to making something people want to use.
Building a Django Middleware for Google Analytics
i have no idea in what planet you live in, my website statistics show 99.56% of my visitors (150,000 a month) are using windows 0.38% macintosh and the rest 0.06% linux. you want to be an apple resseller thats fine, but pleaese stay away from this bulshit. yes we are all waiting for microsoft to fall (20 years we are waiting). we all know that linux is nice (pain in the ass but nice) and apple has a great os (only graphic artists, and journalists uses it these days).

nobody is afraid of them accept their customers but then they are far too strong for any other os
Glad you liked my article. I've really enjoyed using Django, and have a handful of other Django articles on my site. I started blogging seriously in the past several weeks and its been a real education (taking criticism, writing for an audience, interacting with social bookmarking communities). I'd love to hear any feedback, constructive or otherwise.
Don't assume that everyone who uses PHP don't use a framework. Anyone who uses a PHP framework can get similar development speed as someone who uses Django/Rails.

There's a reason why smart people uses PHP instead of Rails: Most notably it's proven to scale (Yahoo, Facebook). I have personally tried Rails and love it to bits. But the performance issue is not worth it. In the end, i wrote my own stripped down Rails-like framework in PHP in 1 week and migrated the app in a few days. Performance boost was very noticeable. (Avg page loading time dropped from 1.5 secs to 0.3s)

And to those anti-PHP fascists, yes it's possible to write neat PHP code. There is no scattered SQL in my app since i follow Rails' MVC structure. And since I code "functionally" and don't use PHP OO features, so its half-baked object system doesn't bother me.

I don't mean pure functional. I mean i use lots of functions instead of object methods. I don't like mixing data with functions.
Any past Y Combinator foreign applicants got into the program but can't get a US visa?
I explicitly stated in my post that I was unsure if he was using a php framework. I try to avoid unfounded assumptions, although I certainly make them.

Scaling can be overemphasized: it doesn't matter if it scales well if it doesn't work. Beyond that, Rails and Django both have sites getting hit with huge quantities of requests. Beyond that, many of the issues with scaling are database issues, not framework issues. As such you will have those same database issues regardless of the framework you chose.

I see scaling well on a Django site as being simpler than scaling well on php. Django has a potent caching system that is easy to activate (the creators of Django also created memcached, so the integration is exceptionally well done, but you can also cache to files, a database, etc), and it can be configured to cache at the level of granularity required (specific db queries, entire pages, components of pages, only for users who are not logged it, etc).

I have no doubt there are reasons to be using php over rails or django, but I don't think that scaling is one of them.

Finally, writing your own framework is the antithesis of doing something that scales well: your company and your programmers also have to scale along with your software.
It's hard to say exactly why, but the picture in this article looks like one from The Onion.
I disagree. A language without OO can allow code to be organised in an intelligent way by providing a module system. See Standard ML as (what I consider to be) a good example of this.
Joel doesn't really examine any of the down sides to sticking with the MS font renderer. It might cause problems with Safari internals, since various DOM components and style attributes will depend on font sizes and spacing. It might add to the annoyance of web development, since Safari on Windows wouldn't do the same thing as Safari on Mac. However, I suspect they had to work around tons of similar issues, anyway.
> inklesspen's objections to GETs changing server state seem to be based on web-accelerators following links. If web accelerators do not parse js, then inklesspen's objections are not relevant. Am I correct?

No. GETs are defined to be safe by the HTTP specification. Web accelerators are only talked about so much because the problems GWA caused were so widely talked about. In reality, anything that see the URI can conceivably cause problems.

By abusing GETs in the way that you are, you're essentially gambling that no software is going to see and follow your links automatically. Right now, software like that might not exist. But you never know what fancy Firefox extension, UserJS script or proxy magic somebody could release tomorrow.

When it's so easy to use HTTP properly, is it really worth taking that kind of risk?
YouTube launches web-based video editor (written by Adobe)
OO programming may be older than you think. I was in my early twenties when I first encountered it. At first (for about a year) I even believed in it. So whether I'm right or wrong to dislike it, it's not simply because I'm old.
The issue with Rails for me wasn't the database bottleneck. It was the ActiveRecord. It was using far too much memory and was taking up the bulk of the page loading time. After i migrated the app to my php framework, I downgraded to from a 2GBz 1GB RAM server to a 2GHz 512MB RAM server and i still get a performance boost. Running the rails app on the 512MB server was painfully slow.

Writing your own framework is a good compromise if it can give you that performance boost that the other frameworks can't give you. I've tried the other PHP frameworks and the best page loading time i got was 0.9s.
I really hope that as a community we can keep things a bit more positive than that. Is that something you would say to this person face to face?

I didn't find the application particularly compelling, and wouldn't hesitate to say that, but it's possible to be direct without being mean.
Web 2.0: The Global Pet Community
Some Buyers Grow Web-Weary, and Online Sales Lag - "Has online retailing entered the Dot Calm era?"
Nice hyping.
In my spirit of hiding behind one-off quotes:

"I invented the term Object-Oriented, and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind." - Alan Kay
One problem is that a CS degree does not encourage students to be creative thinkers at the application level. The focus is mostly on implementation issues.

So younger entrepreneurs without a CS degree might have an advantage in that regard.

The solution IMO is to make CS degrees more balanced, encouraging more creative application-level thinking.
The Digg influx seems to have hurt Reddit quality. Yahoo! started out as a human-edited collection of links; looks like there's a good reason to return to that model.
> The companies that split

List?
"It is more readable and understandable if an object only exposes the methods that it's user needs."

This sort of encapsulation is not specific to OO. You can hide data and methods within modules without using classes. In C++ terms you use anonymous namespaces. In C, perl, python(?) and other languages a leading underscore or "static" declaration conveys encapsulation, which is good enough as far as I'm concerned.
I would say "creative" and "degree" are mutually exclusive.

There is no cookie-cutter approach that will yield originality.
The biggest advantage is enthusiasm. When I was younger I was excited about everything in the world of computers.

If I combined my experience and knowledge now with my enthusiasm from back then, I'd be an industry titan.

Nothing's really that interesting anymore, and when virtual reality gets good I'm locking myself in a room with my virtual girlfriend and staying there.
Familarity with social networks and the latest Internet fads is definitely an advantage for people considering consumer-oriented Internet startups, but those aren't all the startups out there. Heck, consumer-oriented, "Web 2.0", advertising-dependent startups are a minority of all the technology startups out there, let alone startups in general. (I often find the focus on consumer-oriented startups to be perplexing: IMHO, most of the cool startup ideas, and most of the money to be made, doesn't lie in the consumer sphere.)

So sure, if you're trying to start another MySpace or FB, it helps to be younger and more familiar with the latest technology trends. But there are countless startups for which that isn't relevant.
Computers were a big deal when I was in junior high. Learning assembly language was a status symbol.

Today students take computers for granted. Most students now can't program at all.
Business school doesn't teach students to come up with good business ideas. And writing classes only teach grammar and style, not what makes something insightful.

I suspect it's because these things are said to be functions of "intelligence" and "creativity."

They're not.

So why don't schools teach students how to have good ideas?

Most decisions about what to teach are presupposed by emergent systemic factors.

Take, for example, time_on_task. Our educational system is designed around the idea that achievement is a function of ToT.

Fortunately, this isn't a philosophical belief. It's an empirically testable claim. A claim that has, in fact, been tested again and again.

Unhappily, the results are pretty much what you'd expect. No correlation.

So how many credit hours does it take to teach someone how to write insightfully? Or have good business ideas? If you can't put a number on it, colleges essentially aren't allowed to teach it. By law, actually. (Think about how financial aid works, and the rules concerning whether or not you can be on your parent's health insurance.) PG himself has said that he basically won't fund you unless you've been in the classroom a certain number of hours -- the number required to graduate.

So how do you learn these skills?

The answers aren't really in any one book, but if you take a year off from college and sit in the local cafe reading every decent book on the subject ever written, you'll more or less figure it out.

Of course you'll lose many friends, your parents will hate you, you won't have health insurance, and everyone will generally think of you as a loser. But that's another issue entirely. :-)

edit: By "intelligence" and "creativity" I just mean things that can't be taught, not literally that success is zero percent innate.
Fake Steve Jobs: Microsoft drowning in complexity
Unschooling:public schools::Lisp:Java?
U.S. Internet defamation suit tests online anonymity
Waste your workday away with Facebook Platform apps
Any recommendations for an internet service to register an LLC? I'd google, but that kind of search tends to come back with diluted results.
Agreed, and besides, you can think of objects as tiny modules with isolated names spaces and an additional feature: you can have multiple instances of a module in one process, which isn't possible otherwise in C/C++.
If you're into educational theory, you might like Alfie Kohn's book No Contest: The Case Against Competition. It's a really good look at the systemic effects of competition. It touches on cheating among other things.

It's funny, these days I find myself mostly reading counter-intuitive stuff. I figure if it's intuitive, I'm probably smart enough to have figured it out already. This book (and his other book, Punished by Rewards) is a really good example of something that just diffs with your current knowledge.
If this app "takes off" on the world wide interweb, it'll be lucky if it has 10-20k users within a few months.

If it "takes off" in facebook-land, it'll be doing OK if it only has 50-100k users after a few months.
I can hardly wait to shake my fist and yell at kids to stay the heck off my lawn!
Moo.com - Social networks + Physical stuff = Sales?
I thought this was interesting; it's always nice to see startups selling something other than advertising.
Yes, the Screen Is Tiny, but the Plans Are Big
All hail your awesome hacking skills.
Today students take computers for granted.

You say that like it's a bad thing. But it's really a good thing, for both the general population and also for those select few who do know how to program.

(Also, I'd bet that the percentage of students who can program is a lot higher now than it was when you were in junior high.)
YouTube Mobile Site Launches
But consumer-oriented advertising-dependent web startups are quite a large fraction of the Nasdaq, based on Google alone.
One reason most schools don't teach how to have good ideas is that most teachers can't have good ideas themselves. How can you teach what you can't do yourself?

Plus it's probably just not that teachable. I think the most you can do is teach people where to look for good ideas: where to find cracks in conventional wisdom, what types of questions tend to produce fruitful answers, and so on.

BTW, YC doesn't care how much time people have spent in classrooms. The reason we like graduates is simply that they can't retreat to school if things get tough.