skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Google Reader: Share Your Favorite Articles via Blog Widget
How will you monetize it?
What is the ideal co-founding team structure?
The http://www.dojotoolkit.org JS toolkit has a pretty good charting library, and the developers are quite responsive.
I would upmod this but I'd be afraid even more non-hacker friends would bug me.

To be honest -- I'd be scared of any incredibly bright individual (even who went to b-school or majored in art history) who was not willing to get their hands dirty with at least a little code.

If you're building the next Google, okay, they probably can't help much.

But if you're building your average CRUDish webapp, you don't need that many CS rocket scientists to get er done.
Hmm... that assumes the Java/C++/Python technique of methods belonging to objects. The CLOS (from Lisp) technique is to define the methods independent of the objects. That is, in C++ you might say

class Bicycle {

// data fields

void fix (void) {
...
}

}

b = Bicycle();
b.fix();

In Lisp, you would say:

(defclass Bicycle ...)

(defmethod fix ((bike Bicycle)) (...))

(fix b)

So now, for the sheep/shepherd example, you no longer need to decide which class the method belongs to. You simply define a shepherd and sheep class and then...

(defmethod sheer ((sheep Sheep) (shep Shepherd))...)

I guess what I'm trying to say is that OO doesn't necessarily suck for the given reasons. The examples that the author gives are a good case why the C++ version of OO sucks, but OO in general is much more interesting.

That's not to say that everything has a good OO solution. I am definitely in agreement with pg that OO is hardly necessary for the vast majority of problems, and that it typically leads to spaghetti code.

I recently wrote a small Lisp interpreter in C for a Programming Languages class. I found it quite interesting that after defining S-expressions and a few operations on them (cons, car, cdr, ...), I didn't really need any other data structures. One simple, powerful data structure makes all that other object cruft unnecessary.
Is my first post. Yes at the moment I am working on 2 different business plans.
One has to do with recycling ink cartridges. I have found by the research I have done that there is quite an interesting and virgin market for that here in Spain.
The second is a company which has been working for 2 years but I am remodeling the system of production. This one is about Selling school planners.
I think the meta data one is freebase ?
Quite right. Thanks for noticing. Fixed.
Yep, those were the horrible horrible days. I loved my Amiga. Really, really loved my Amiga. But programming today is so much better than programming back then. And everything that was good about the Amiga community is great about the Linux, Ruby, Python, Perl, etc. communities today.

Amiga E and C with DICE were both hard slogs for me (my high school had BASIC classes and an AP Pascal class, still taught on Apple IIe computers--but I took them for the easy A rather than actually learning anything...from day one I knew more about software development than the instructor). ARexx was easier to grasp for someone who cut his teeth on writing games for the Color 64 BBS system (in BASIC). I also did a little 6510 assembly, but that was really unpleasant after the initial coolness factor wore off (and I embody one of Larry Wall's three virtues: Laziness, so the coolness wore off just about immediately). But, compared to Perl, Python, Ruby, Lisp, Scheme, etc. plus the resources available to everyone on the Internet, I'm kinda sad to think back on how much time I wasted slogging through poorly written books about poorly written compilers. If only I'd known to seek out K&R early on. (I knew enough to want the Amiga 3000UX when it came out, but I wasn't quite sure why!). What was a nerdy kid in the suburbs in the poor southeast to do?
Could you clarify how that relates to the parent? (The parent was wrong on at least two counts, but not due to bogus elitism that I could detect.)
I was wondering about this too. How must people divide the shares, and if you have more than 2 people how to avoid the pitfalls of bickering, politics etc. How to basically elect the Asshole ? ( Elects himself? :))
Strategy decay in the world of TV production - "The cost of making a one-hour drama episode has tripled in the past 15 year"
the most successful web businesses will be those that enhance one's "real" life.

This is why I think mobile has such great potential. A platform that the user carries around with her all day that has rich sensors such as camera, microphone and NFC. It's perfect! (apart from the small screen but thats a small price to pay for such access to an user)
Great post! I am also buying this guys book! There is a very good book about "luck" but it´s in spanish ("la buena suerte") and I don´t find any english version.
Luck only passes through one door, but only we have the key to open it!
You two should join forces.
JavaFX Mobile versus the iPhone (Sun reshaping from enterprise to personal and consumer technology)
I agree with you!

Socrates:
"knows more the one that knows that dosen´t know anything, that the one that thinks that knows"
You could be right - I used to see more information about them than they currently reveal, but it seems familiar. Many thanks!
FusionCharts is good, well documented, and damn cheap (but not free). They do offer a fully functional trial version-- it just has a big "demo" label on resulting flash graphs.

We use it for http://www.rescuetime.com....
Here's the chart gallery for FusionCharts: http://www.fusioncharts.com/Gallery.asp?gMenuItemId=3
CenterNetworks: Need a domain name? These guys say they can help!
Any team or successful team? The simple answer would be "smart" and "get things done". But look beneath and there's a whole lot of things to look for ...

'... if you have more than 2 people how to avoid the pitfalls of bickering, politics etc ... to basically (NOT) elect (AN) A$@hole ?'

Unfortunately you cannot change human nature. Successful traits can have negative outcomes. There's a term for a successful attitude. It's called "the mongrel factor" and it applies to top athletes as well as entrepreneurs. No hurdle is going to get in the way of success at personal and interpersonal cost. It's could almost be classed psychopathic.

It can be pretty divisive. These same qualities within a group that can propel a company forward from idea to prototype to commercialisation can be internalised if a perceived stumbling block within the team.

within each team there will be a leader (see alpha geeks ~ http://tinyurl.com/155i) and there will be followers. It's how this power arrangement plays out that causes much friction. Understanding these basic parameters I'd be looking for individuals with

- competance

- hard work

- drive, enthusiasm

- humility

- good sense of humour

- ability to be flexible

- lack of contempt, arrogance and ego

Think Woz not Jobs, Herman not Tuzman, hmm I'd have to think about Gates and Steve. The dilemma with this approach though is would there be an Apple without Jobs, a Microsoft without Gates, a JumpTV without Tuzman?

Have to think about listing successful startup teams to emulate beyond delicious, reddit et.,al. Could not find this in 'Hardest Lessons' ~ http://www.paulgraham.com/startuplessons.html

But you can find personal traits you need to avoid in 5, 6, 16, 17 in "18 Mistakes" ~ http://www.paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html
Eric Raymond answered this question a while back:

http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html

It's not a quick process. It takes time to learn enough to do anything interesting with programming. A lot of time and dedication.
Any one got examples of good myspace pages for web apps/ sites?
So a lot of web apps/ sites have a myspace. I've not seen any really good ones that really use the profile to pull people into the site content and so on.
Microsft Wants to Build, Not Buy, Software
So, basically, they're saying the opposite of what everyone else is...
Where are the web-based web-development IDEs?
I don't think there are any web based IDEs for python/Ruby or even HTML/CSS. Is there a technical reason these don't exist or that desktop IDEs are preferable?
wikiyou? it's still a stealth company but sounds promising.
Web 2.0: So easy a 14 year old could do it
A glimpse into the minds of the kids behind the persistent spamming on news.yc. (Please don't post their url here, though.)
Netflix is the first example that springs to mind. They're not purely a web app, but they're the only thing I'm paying for besides 37signals.

I might pay one of these domain-name-brainstorming sites that are popping up, not sure yet. Buxfer.com also looks intriguing, not sure if they charge yet.
Furthermore, the question in the back of my mind would be - what's he (non-techie) contributing?

Unless of course, he brought in a lot of users/investors.
As much as I think SwellJoe has nailed the answer to this question, I can't help but think I disagree with the premise. If you've never coded before, I would suggest that you ask yourself a very difficult question - how do you know that you want to become a great hacker?

Now, I don't consider myself a great hacker (I honestly don't know how good I am, and I question anyone that would tell you otherwise), but I do believe I know a bit about how I learned and can offer some advice.

Follow your natural curiosity, step by step. That's it. If you have questions, answer them. If you wonder how is done, try to build it or create it yourself and find out - if you can't do it yet, pick off a smaller piece of the problem you're interested in. If there's some assertion in a field that you disagree with, try to prove it wrong, because either you'll learn that you're wrong (likely) or you'll contribute something to the field (unlikely, but possible). Either way you win.

But the key here is, just follow your curiosity wherever it goes. It won't necessarily be towards becoming a hacker. If you find yourself delaying code that you know needs to be written in your plan to become a hacker by slacking off and reading up on organic chemistry all day, then that's not actually slacking off - that's telling you something.

I don't think there are many people on this planet that can truly be great at more than one thing. Feynman was, for instance, but I don't think I've ever met anyone in person. If you find yourself trying to become a hacker as a 'day job' but you do rocket science for fun, well, I'm sorry, but chances are you'd make a great rocket scientist but a lousy hacker and you're going against your own nature to try to become what you aren't.

But the key thing about simply following your curiosity is that you'll end up finding something that you are good at, you enjoy, and if you're at all smart you'll eventually become world class at it. If you are right about wanting to be a hacker, you will get there! You may have to have a day job while you figure out what you really want to become, but there are worse things.

Sorry, I'm ranting a bit... but I hope this helps.
I agree - it is reminiscent of the dot-com bubble. Everybody wants 'in' on the youtube billions.
10 Attributes of Really Lazy People
Great list of details to check before giving a presentation
How To Build An Open Source, Distributed Google Clone
I wonder if discarded phones from the West make it to the Developing Country's second hand markets?

Also how about our discarded computers?
O'Reily's Safari book thing.
ads in specific windows? what else?
Cloning is an Unethical but Rewarding business.
11) Don't be a snob:

"I dont mean to sound condescending here, but the sad fact of the matter is that compared to you, most people are pretty dumb (look at how many people vote Republican ;-) and they care about dumb things. (I just heard about a new clothing store in Pasadena that has lines around the block. A clothing store!) If you cater only to people who care about the things that you care about then your customer base will be pretty small."
Motorola to Announce iPhone Competitor
I guess PG didn't entrust his admin duties to anyone while he's on vacation. I expected this to be killed a while ago.
I'm sorry, I read the title very quickly and misread it. My opinion on the actual question is that I generally like it when the log in is the email address and there is a separate display name. This way the username is easy to remember, but the email address remains private.
I think he kills stuff that's wildly off-topic. This is still about making webapps, which is a stone's throw from making a business (well, maybe only if you've got a good arm). I'd say this is about as on-topic as, say, much of the Lisp-related stuff that is posted here. And my 2 cents is that this shouldn't be killed.
If your making your clients install software, why not just make your clients install a specific broswer ?
Yeah I make orthodontic software and just finished a prototype 3d scanner (structured light style thing for those in the know). That sort of my day job, although I own a 1/3 of the business. I really want to do some web2.0 ideas I've got on the side - which is really the main reason I come to news.yc
this one was an oldie but goodie back on techcrunch a few months ago.

http://www.myspace.com/eyalgever

for gizmoz.com
Google News Personalization: Scalable Online Collaborative Filtering
Powerset and Natural Language Search Talk by Barney Pell (Powerset, Founder and CEO)
.. and it's very funny to boot
You're fine with information being given to thieves and murderers but not to a company that wants to improve your experience so you'll voluntarily give it more money?
Interesting iPod Mashup... Literally
1 - Dating sites with targeted communities such as religious peers.

2 - Premium news sites. You see a lot of these with financial sites such as theflyonthewall.com, briefing.com etc.

3 - Quality tutorial sites. lynda.com

4 - I started paying up for an ad free experience and premium features for email.before gmail took off.

5 - Job listings on craigslist.

6 - Membership sites. Too many to list.
The sad part is that for hollywood cheap means reality and game shows. They've just about abandoned the idea of inexpensive scripted content.

On the bright side, new distribution channels will make it so that non-broad-appeal shows like firefly, arrested development, etc will be capable of profitability.
Code code code, blog, blog, blog, call, call, call, give, give, give, and hopefully sometimes later cash, cash, cash
Well, perfect except for the handset manufacturers and carriers you have to deal with.
The Contractor's Note (The Hacker's Answer to Artie Fufkin)
Some questions:

- For the sorts of queries he mentions in the talk, can't you just use Google's wildcard queries to get similar results?

- Can you use a more social web 2.0 approach to address difficult and/or natural language queries? If so how?

- What if you allowed the system to get back to you later with answers (possibly several hours later)? Is a social approach more feasible then?
borland, sorry Codegear has delphi for php ~ http://www.codegear.com/products/delphi/php
Live Journal, Wordpress.com...
Facebook to Offer Free Classifieds
I love how their "teen" site basically consists of celebrity porn.

...oh wait. That's what most teen sites are. At least they know their market. ;-)
Facebook Marketplace - Facebook to Launch Classifieds
Ah. What window manager are you using, and are you tweaking it in any particular way?
Great Flash charts: http://www.maani.us/xml_charts/

GD::Graph is great and quite sophisticated:
http://search.cpan.org/~bwarfield/GDGraph-1.44/Graph.pm

Chart::Strip is neat:
http://search.cpan.org/~jaw/Chart-Strip-1.05/Strip.pm

RRDTool is amazingly powerful for time-lapse data:
http://oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool/
not too surprising, but very smart move. they have such a strong position that competing with facebook is just as unfun competing with google.
No, not at all, quite the opposite. I've used many CRT and LCD monitors in the past and this is by far the nicest to look at. The only caveat (and I presume this is what you're getting at since you mentioned vertical orientation) is that when ClearType or similar is turned on it turns the whole thing into an awful mess since the orientation of the subpixels is different (unless your OS can handle two monitors having different settings). Internet explorer, for example, is totally unusable (well, more than usual) on the right hand monitor.
much better than those "vote up if #{condition}" submissions.
Trying... to... resist.. arguing pointless stuff...

It's hopeless: First, you're clearly not alone in thinking it should not be killed. This is social site and you could make a good argument that that is plenty of reason to leave it up. Regardless...

I've had show dead on since I signed up and have sorta noted what gets killed. Humorous images most always get killed. Especially if they start to climb up the homepage.

Now for the superfluous nitpicking that I encourage everyone to ignore:

Image of bag of chocolates w/ sql on it both about making webapps and as pertinent as prose about programming languages? I'm lost on the webapps part and I don't buy the Lisp part. I'm not saying it does not have it's place. It's funny and funny's good; you could even argue it's an interesting commentary on technical industry at large if you chose to. But any lessons you might glean from that image are limited to something like don't blow it so hard that you look like one of the most incompetent people on the planet. I think we're all way past that. At least I could theoretically use Lisp knowledge in my startup if I wanted too. Further learning about Lisp is not going to hurt my programming ability, which as a hacker is pretty central to any startup I'm involved in.
I'm not really sure why you think that web development is the only form of software development that writes distributed software. This seems like a bogus assumption.

I've worked on two large projects that are distributed and not web based.
i got a laugh out of it
What's the benefit of such a thing?
Choose your Partners Wisely
The simplest answer is that many people believe the "free market wage" is not always the apropriate wage.

Anyhow your defining the free market wage, as the wage the get paid if the have no legal help in there negotations. And then your defining the appropriate wage as the free market wage.

So you are basically stating that by definition the appropriate wage for people to be paid is the wage they could negotiate if they have no laws to help them negotitate.

Basically your conclusion is the axiom you start with.
OpenGL + Python + Cached Streaming Data

web - handhend - desktop - web

jobs@churchillnavigation.com
Torque, Torque Advance, and now apparently Torque X.
http://www.garagegames.com

"Mature packages for interactive 3D over the web"

They are general purpose game building frameworks. I am currently working with it in MMO form, all implementation code in Python. It is a mature package for interactive 3D over the web if I ever saw one.

Hmm.. there may be something to that.... hey thanks! :)
Ok, so I use the term "web" loosely there.. but things like Yahoo widgets are blurring the line between desktop and web so I am taking some liberty.
After watching the entire video, it sounds like the system they are building fundamentally operates at a linguistic level with no attempt to really model underlying concepts and relations in a human way. A questioner asked how their approach compares to CYC (The company trying to model all human common sense knowledge with bad epistemology and contradictions), and he explained that they aren't even trying to model concepts in that way, but rather finding relations through linguistic analysis. I think the way to think about what they're doing is a very advanced pattern matching approach with definite limitations. For example, you can't ask their system to find contradictions between what someone said as it doesn't "understand" contradiction, etc. He said there would be a 5 minute tutorial on the kind of questions you can and can't ask.

I think that there is the danger, and he mentions it as well, in people having too high expectations when using NL to query their system. They apparently have exclusive license to use PARC technology finally finished in 2003, so I'm sure that there will be some interesting results. The question is will it frustrate people by its limitations so much that they move away, or will it excite people about the possibilities of a system that could actually "understand" what the concepts mean that they are expressing. The latter would be great news for Organontech.
I've used both fvwm2 and metacity without any special tweaking. Had to abandon fvwm2 b/c for some bizarre reason it just won't display firefox in fedora core 5, and netscape 4 just wasn't cuttin' it anymore.
Ah. When I hear php or RoR I immediately think of hosted web apps. my bad.
I think we're actually pretty much in agreement, just with a slightly different conclusion. If a lot of these "funny image" posts started cropping up, that would not be good (and maybe that's reason enough to nix this puppy?), but I'd never seen anything like this bag of chocolates, and it got a chuckle out of me, so I gave it the upvote. Programming languages prose... definitely more pertinent.

You're right, the picture might not have to do webapps. I think I was imagining those square brackets were the result of some ASP gone astray, but I don't actually know what ASP looks like, so why would I assume that?

Now I'm going to downvote myself and go to bed.
12) Don't be delusional.
-- referring to #6 "a Lisper can run rings around a C programmer".

Now, before you flame me, I'm not attacking Lisp. I simply think that the framework and tools available to you are more important than the language you choose. A Lisper is going nowhere if he doesn't have good third-party tools and has to build everything from scratch.
The answer to your first question is no. For example if you wanted to search for "What did Al Gore say?", a google wild card search for "Al Gore said wildcard" (the markup won't let me put an asterisk) would not match things like "blah, said Al Gore" or "he said blah" where he is referring to Al Gore, or "Al Gore told someone blah". For the search engine to match those results, some level of parsing is needed.
The square brackets are SQL syntax; they let you reference column names containing 'funny' characters, in this case whitespace.

It's definitely not ASP. BTW, ASP doesn't really 'look' like anything, since it's just an environment for the actual languages (vbScript, ECMAScript, C#, whathaveyou) that drive the server side.

I wish I didn't know that.
I think they do have some modeling of underlying concepts. I think if I remember correctly they had a search where "politician" matched "mayor", so they at least have synonyms. I think they obviously would like to have understanding--it's just that NLP isn't there yet.
Hehehe...Good one. That's hilarious. ;-)

Seriously: Because we don't want to be evil. We're willing to not have rounded corners in some browsers, or have menus that don't get animation, or whatever...but we're not willing to prevent anyone (even folks who are blind or otherwise have accessibility problems) from using our product.
So now that the big guys are demonstrating that they can quickly recognize opportunities and take advantage of them, of how much value is it to stay "under the radar"?

How can a new startup bring unique value that facebook couldn't just duplicate with a few outsourced coders overnight?
I personally volunteer to mentor anyone who is desperate enough to take this path.
Death of the URL
heh. Was joking.

Still, I think that toying around with other's code in order to make it do something new is an excellent and fun way to learn a new language.

SwellJoe: Nice comment at the top of this page, most agreeable one here.
Bill Gross: The Gulfsream-owning-man behind Ad-Sponsored Search (Overture), Idealab, Compete.com, and Snap.com
It's not a real IDE (it uses an unenhanced textarea), but I whipped up this as a demo of Hecl. Basically, you can write Hecl scripts on a web page and then download a fully formed mobile application:

http://builder.hecl.org