skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I like how you can start using it right away and save your work later.
Google Maps Now Show Data in 2.5D
Lemonade stand. 3rd or 4th grade. Not many people walk by in my neighbourhood so it was a loooooong wait before we sold anything :(
Have you seen the function list?
http://www.php.net/quickref.php

It's a nightmare. How about some organization? How about a hierarchy? How about some terseness?
PHP is pragmatic and pretty fast, but everything, everything, everything, beyond the "HTML template language" bits, are bolted on with whatever tools were handy at the moment. I'd be stunned if more than a couple hours of design work went into the object system, the type system (where == and === are used for evil rather than good), or even the standard library function names.

It has some strengths: Big library (not as big or as high quality as CPAN, so if library support is what you need, go for Perl), a lot of example code (but it's mostly horrible quality...even good examples are pretty bad in spots), and really easy deployment. So, if you're building an Open Source project that you want a lot of people to use, it's a great choice--PHP is available on every hosting server on the planet. Or, if you need a "blank-plus-this-widget" you can probably find the "blank" already written in PHP and then build your "widget" on top.

But, if you're starting from scratch, why commit yourself to working with a shoddy language for the months or years it'll take to finish? There are good imperative languages out there for web app development: Ruby and Python, in particular. Though the frameworks craze for these languages are partly to bridge the gap that they have with PHP (they're all missing a "view" layer for the web, because PHP is a reasonably powerful, if ugly, template system), and a lot of the other crap just makes things ugly...they get built for one particular application and then stretched for general-purpose use, and in the stretching they get a bit misshapen and hard to fit into any specific task.

Anyway, Ruby and Python are pretty and reasonably consistent languages that are nice to work with. PHP is neither. Perl...well, it ain't necessarily pretty, but CPAN is hard to beat when you just want to get the job done...and you can treat it as a functional language pretty effectively, which is all the rage around these parts (and you'll probably want to after you see the bolted on object system).
Well, mostly just that PHP has been extended far beyond the simple templating language it was designed as.

My language of choice (ruby or haskell, take your pick) was designed for more general tasks, and so is simpler to write the more general web apps people are building now. I would still like to use PHP as my template language, though.

PHP is still very fast when it comes to templating, but it's not very fast at all when doing any sort of number crunching. Ruby suffers here, too, which is why I'm trying to use haskell for my current project.
Are you sure the Ruby on Rails craze is over?

I didn't get that memo.
30 was just the number they invited for the Winter batch. It's not their standard cutoff number.
Akamai Bags P2P Tech Provider RedSwoosh for $15 Million
I saved up and bought a CD burner ($800) when they first came out(grade 7) and started making mix CDs. At the time it was an untapped market because people only had mixed tapes, not CDs!! I had prepackaged Hip Hop, Rock, Alternative, etc. CDs and believe it or not, I charged $20 per CD. It turned into a pretty successful business just at school but then about 1-2 years later when prices came down on burners, the market became comodotized and I had to get out!

I'm now 21 and run a successful web-based start up based in Calgary. Curve Dental, check me out at curvedental.com or
http://www.curvedental.com/docs/resources/april07_matt_calgaryinc-2.pdf
I often find myself defending PHP. It seems to be very unpopular lately, at least by some very vocal individuals on the web. I like PHP, and here's why:

It runs everywhere, has lots of libraries, and most of my friends know it.

That, for me, is huge. It's enough for me to forgive, tolerate, and even enjoy programming in the language.

Anyway, here's what I don't like:

The lack of a decent module system.

The lack of closures.

The weird reference semantics of objects in PHP4. PHP5 is way better in this regard, but now I have to worry about whether my code will still run on PHP4, and whether or not I will need it to.

The clumsy templating syntax. Short tags help, but I'm supposed to feel guilty if I use them.

The need to use unreliable third-party software to get bytecode precompilation, causing me to worry about the performance costs of modularity. (!)

Magic quotes. And the fact that I may need to undo them depending on the whims of system administrators.

Arrays. I wish dictionaries and lists were separate concepts like they are in Python and many other languages I want to interoperate with.

The name. I hate when I have to explain what PHP stands for. I feel like enough of a geek as it is.
Thanks for the notes. I was caught up in traffic and missed the first couple.

The best part was Paul imitating a giant cockroach riding atop an imaginary muzzled VC like a horse, furiously cracking a whip. Definitely one of those "had to be there" moments.
In 2nd grade ... attempting to outdo the local brownie troop by selling girl scout cookie knockoffs. Damn thin mints! You ruined my business!!
If you think that's bad, you should try C sometime.
I started selling collectibles from my desk in 4th grade during recess and other down periods.

Continued it until 6th grade, when the school principal shut it down.

My first "adult" business was a web design consultancy I started freshman year of college.

My first "startup" was a company that ran a network of drop-shipping sites hosted on their own virtual domains with unique templates, etc. We never really got it fully off the ground before founder issues blew it apart.

Currently have tagsrc.com running, though the first widget is still buggy. Trying to find time around work to do more.
This is fairly well-trod territory:

http://www.google.com/search?q=why+php+sucks

A good resource for comparing languages is the shootout:

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4sandbox/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=all

Most people just refer to the overall scores, but what's more interesting is seeing the same program done in different languages.

This one is pretty straightforward:

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4sandbox/benchmark.php?test=nbody&lang=php&id=0

Compare to the same thing in Python, Ruby, Scheme, Common Lisp, and Haskell:

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4sandbox/benchmark.php?test=nbody&lang=python&id=0

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4sandbox/benchmark.php?test=nbody&lang=ruby

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4sandbox/benchmark.php?test=nbody&lang=chicken&id=3

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4sandbox/benchmark.php?test=nbody&lang=sbcl

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4sandbox/benchmark.php?test=nbody&lang=ghc
So what is the ass-wipe algorithm mentioned in the article? It is not patented, or is it?
I paid my caffeine bills in high school by doing computer-repair housecalls. I got a decent amount of business at $20/hr.
This is fairly accurate as on-the-fly notes from a talk go, but certainly nothing like a transcription. There's a lot missing and a few things that have been misunderstood.
There are comments links in the feed (view source on it) but for some reason they get ignored by feed readers. If anyone has a better suggestion, include it in this thread.
As I said, rich is subjective. My last job paid just shy of your quoted salary and I would not consider that to be rich. Very well off, yes, but not rich. Rich, to me, is what you have behind you in your savings and investments, not what you have to look forward to in salary and the like.

I agree with everything else that you said though.
ChoiceStream Raises $25.79 Million For Personalized Recommendation Service
Actually one thing I would look for is something like the WARF program at university of wisconsin.

I think what you want from a University is a place that help you with your invention. If you have an idea they can help you get a patent (Unlike Andrews) and then you as the inventor can share some of the profit. Not all Universities do that and this is the one thing I would emphasize from a University. This can also help you establish a better record for jobs or startups.

http://www.warf.org/about/index.jsp?cid=26
A friend at work and I pooled our resources and borrowed $6K from a bank to purchase a PC AT in 1982. It had a 30 MB hard drive and amber screen. We created the first PC based finite element analysis program. We had to write it in FORTH because that was the only language that could address a full megabyte of memory.
A University should provide support in nurturing the invention process or providing patent and invention support.
On paper you're close to rich, in the sense that your stock in the company is worth a lot. But it's illiquid, and most of it may not legally be yours yet because of vesting. On the other hand, after a series A round you'll be able to pay yourself a decent salary-- maybe 1/2 or 2/3 of market rate, which will probably be a great improvement.

In a startup you generally want to make your salary as low as possible. You're not going to get rich from salary but from the company scoring, so why take money out of it?
YOU WROTE: "When I did my app, I really liked the last question which was to tell about something 'surprising' or 'amusing' that you had discovered. So I asked if they had had many good answers to that one. Paul said that there were some really good ones, but that inexplicably many had left that question blank! Then he chuckled and said "Actually, there was a guy who submitted this wonderful algorithm for wiping his ass.""

My co-founder and I answered the question as follows. "timach notes that time is expanding between The Big Bang and The Advent of Human Consciousness. These are the opposite poles of existence. This means that the mathematical model of physical time using the complete ordered field of real numbers is a misleading metaphor. What is great about mathematics is that it is a tinkertoy of metaphor, and thus offers unlimited possibilities for new metaphors. Rigor is the window through which intuition shines.

erdos2 discovered an enumeration formula for a class of combinatorial objects (the "almost-injective" functions) with the following decomposition: the formula is a sum of two terms, the first of which has a closed form representation as fixed sum of generalized hypergeometric functions and which is asymptotically significant; the second is provably not representable in closed form (hence there is no closed form enumeration formula for the almost injective functions), and asymptotically negligible. Moreover, the significant term is asymptotically equivalent to a simpler hypergeometric function, from which a limit probability distribution for the almost injective functions can be derived."

I wonder if these responses are far less memorable than a high quality ass wiping algorithm.
When I was six I wanted a remote controlled truck. It was bright blue and in the Sears catalog. I wanted it real bad but my parents told me they wouldn't buy it for me. I had to buy it myself. It was a hundred dollars. That much money to me seemed insane.

My parents both made crafts and went to craft shows to sell their wares. I asked if I could sell stuff too and they were overjoyed. I made little fluffy things out of Fun Fur: little snake with googly eyes that rose up when you petted it and tufts glued to the end of pencils to look like those little troll dolls. Each one was priced at a dollar and my mom subsidized my venture by buying all the materials. I had to sell a hundred of them to buy my truck. I was an ADD kid so I couldn't even count that high without getting distracted.

Time rolled on and slowly over the course of a dozen or so craft sales my pile of cash grew and grew until I had enough. Just for me my parents made the three hour long (round trip)journey into the city. I was so excited. I had worked so hard and now I was getting what I wanted.

Life rarely works out as planned unfortunately. The truck also required one of those fancy batteries that wasn't included. The kind that cost another $40. My parents didn't come to my rescue. They just told me I'd have to work harder to afford the new cost. On the way back I was in tears, my heart broken. My mother then told me that I shouldn't be sad, and to remember the smiles of the people I sold my stuff to. Money was just a way to say thank you, but the real reward was in making other people happy.
Rolling Stone Says They'll Launch Social Network
Let's settle the VC debate once and for all:

If you can generate enough revenue on day one to keep your product development alive and not starve, and grow that revenue at the same pace as your expenditures, then you don't need VC.

If you need to spend significant upfront R+D costs to generate any revenue, and you don't have rich parents, you need VC.

As for generating 95% of your revenue from consulting... that's fine. But it doesn't scale. To make twice as much you need twice as many people.
Is there a robot in your future?
They looked at my demo. I still got rejected thought.
A better question is how many demos they looked at that still got rejected.
PHP is ugly.

Really, I could go on a rant about speed and security, but it's just ugly. I do most of my coding in Python now days which spoils me. I look at php and it's a nasty mashup of code, data, and structure all rubbed into one nasty little steaming pile. Python is pretty and that's why I like it. It's easy to read, easy to understand, and does not explode into a visual cacophony like I've seen most php projects do.

I'd use php for a small simple one off thing because it is stupidly simple to get a page working with no fuss. I also have no issue using php products like Wordpress or PHPBB. My first web startup I wrote in php and it was a pain to maintain after a while. Anything large I'll stay away.

Just because it's ugly and I have to stare at it.
How Writewith got started
How VC's make money
VC's make money, even if you don't. Their fee structure is much like hedge funds: They make 2% of all assets committed PER YEAR (how much is actually invested) and 20% of any monetized gains, as they close.

That 2% is a lot of money, and makes a lot of self interest around investing a lot of money as soon as possible after the fund has been raised. I'd even go as far as to say that most VC funds only make money off the 2%.

So remember that when you are talking to them. They make money even when you and the LP's don't.
Investopedia Acquired by Forbes
Microsoft: First dead, then dropped
Even more "traditional media" companies are discovering value in popular web destinations -- many with no obvious big-money making schemes, but has untapped potential. I found this one interesting because Investopedia is one of those sites that has always been around which I've found incredibly useful (I used it to teach myself about investing sometime in high school), but never thought it to be an acquisition target.
Closing a VC round is meant to HELP your company take off, not settle. There's a very good reason why it's often referred to as "runway."

The number one motivating factor for startups and the reason why they're able to operate more efficiently than larger competitors boils down to one thing: desperation. Having limited resources makes you desperate and hungry. Besides, living in a cramped apartment and eating ramen is a good reminder of what you get when you don't win (and having a roof over your head ain't too bad).

Paying yourselves $300K when you guys probably don't have revenue is a great way to mislead your investors, create politics amongst employees, and, most of all, make you complacent.

Now, (mis)using investors' money to live the life isn't unheard of. I once interned at a company that basically lost hundreds of millions of dollars every year and addressed this by systematic studio closures and layoffs. The company's misfortunes resulted from poor oversight by the management team and had almost nothing to do with those being laid off (they all went on the be headhunted by competing firms). Following suit, every year, product-producing employees were let go while executives maintained their $400K salaries. The management team basically did whatever they could to keep the company alive while they drew as much salary as possible. Interestingly enough, this behavior actually began when they got funded in the late 1980s.
FreshBooks For Web Invoices & More
Counterfeiting checks and legal tender. On newsprint. In pencil. I figured I'd bootstap into enough cash to buy proper pens and paper.
I briefly poked around. It's an online app for managing your small business invoices and time-sheets; it's free for up to 3 clients.
There was one other one where we invested as angels in the series A round. Ordinarily we wouldn't invest that late, but these guys seemed exceptionally smart and driven.
C's libraries aren't terribly well-organized, but, for me at least, the standard ones all fit in one brainful so it's not really a problem.
Yeah, I don't really understand this. My first language was C, and all these C-like languages look quite similar in syntax. I never thought these were "pretty," but they don't really stroke an emotional component in me.
I sneaked into our HS principle's office after school was over one day and printed out a fake school ID saying I was a senior on the school's own printer. This allowed me to take my car off campus during lunch. I'd then come back with several bags of Chinese takeout and sell it for a good profit. :-)
I find Mountain View a good fit. Close enough to investors. Far enough away from anything resembling real night-life (because I'm here to work...really, really, work). I'll move to the city when I don't want to work anymore. I'm sure the city works for some startups, but I don't think it would work for me.
Googles Blogger Now Writes In Hindi
Have you checked out Code Igniter? It is a php framework that implements the MVC design pattern. Forcing the seperation of the different layers makes things much "prettier" in my opinion.

http://www.codeigniter.com/
Apple:  Leopard delayed until October due to iPhone team developer poaching
Well that's a bummer. Was looking forward to it. But they say they'll give away a "feature-complete" beta at the developer's conference.
A full-text search facility for postings would be nice.
Yeah, I tried to make that clear at the beginning of the post. I guess not clear enough. I've added an update to my post including your comment. Yet another reason I prefer to podcast - way less work for me and much more accurate! I'll be sure to bring extra batteries with me next time, doh.
LMAO!

Reminded me of middle school where this one admin kept track of how many times you didn't have your school ID around your neck. The admin was my science teacher and saved everything in an Access db on a computer everyone used in his class. It was very enticing to just ... the db.
how much cooperation between YC groups is there? first thing that comes to mind is writewith + scribd.
I hate the censoring of comments on reddit & news.yc. It seems contrary to the entrepreneurial mindset.

If Steve Jobs got on a board like this in the '70s, and announced that he was going to start a company building PCs when mainframes were sexy, he probably would've been downvoted too.
'... which is nice because it means they give you actual technical information rather than burying you in incomprehensible marketing speak. ...'

Sometimes the message gets lost in the technical detail. Arstechnica usually does a good job of filtering the sig/noise giving you a nice summary at the expense of too much technical detail. But I do agree. If you look at the way most news sites work most of the time acting as second, third and sometimes fourth hand.

So what did you get out of idemix?
Please explain what's wrong with the decision to create Wasabi
Sorry to threadjack, but what does this mean:

"timach notes that time is expanding between The Big Bang and The Advent of Human Consciousness. These are the opposite poles of existence."

I don't understand what you're trying to say by "time is expanding". It also seems to me like a rather anthropocentric view of the universe to put human consciousness at one "pole of existence". We've only observed a thin slice of existence thus far. If you could explain this, maybe I'd understand your following assertion that "the mathematical model of physical time using the complete ordered field of real numbers is a misleading metaphor".

I don't understand erdos2's discovery either, but I'll chalk that up to my complete ignorance when it comes to math.
This is my first startup, so I don't know what I'm doing, but what has been successful for me before in my career is to try lots of things at once and see what works. I'm trying word of mouth, viral marketing, PR, google adwords, stumbleupon, and online ads on targeted sites. Of course, it would help if you visited us also at Wisdomology.com.
He's my cofounder and I don't understand what he is talking about either. As for what I am saying, the basic point is that only two interesting things have happened. One is The Big Bang, and the other is that we know it. All else is imaginary. The idea that "we've only observed a thin slice of existence" is falling prey to the metaphor to which I am objecting. There is no "existence" to slice up.
My point is that PHP's lack of namespace hierarchy is just like C. In fact, most of PHP's libraries are very close to the underlying C libraries. The lack of apparent organization is mainly due to the fact that PHP pulls all these different, independently-written libraries together. If you were writing C, it would look about the same, except that you'd have to go out and find all these libraries and put them together yourself.
'... I am one of those guys who dropped from college because I simply couldn't see myself sitting in class learning about Nostradamus and interpretive theater while I was thinking of the application I was building at home ...'

Being smart, determined and doing stuff is good. But learning in a formal (or informal setting) has a couple of objectives. The first and most important one is to teach you how to learn. The second some fundamental skills. The third though cannot be taught, how to think.

To me original thinking backed up by skill and determination matters just as much. But theres one other dimension that education measures. The ability to complete.

'... Unfortunately, to many employers require that piece of paper that says, "I know my stuff." ...'

And it also does not demonstrate you can think. In fact it's really the bare minimum requirement.
May be html encode the link so it isn't treated as a link and thus not ignored by the reader?
Another example of Brad Fitzpatrick showing what a hacker armed with Perl (and occasionally C) can do. He creates tools that obsolete expensive equipment in weekends.

Perlbal = Who needs a $200k "intelligent" hardware load balancer?

MogileFS = RAID my bank account? No thanks I'll use commodity disks on the cheap.

Memcached = A hundred DB servers? How about we just utilize the extra memory on the network and cache a lot, thanks.
Know your Known Unknowns