skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My personal favorite is the story of the Lycos founder in "Founders at Work". The guy just got a call from a VC, saying "we will give you money if you run a company with this great search technology we bought".
Please help keep all these stories at: http://startupflames.com/
Yeah ha ha "simple" in every sense of the word. You can toss in another "simple" app by the name of Flickr.
Why You Don't Want to Code for a Government Department
Nokia announces Ovi - music, maps, games, and mobile social networking in one
Nokia continues push as a mobile content company, with ambitions to compete with Apple and Google.

More coverage here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08...
Clownco: NBC, News Corp. name joint video venture "Hulu"
I enjoy reading about the early days of Netscape:

http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nscpdorm.html
Yes, I trust the beautiful one more, and I also consider her more intelligent. Not consciously of course, but it's definitely there. It is a somewhat disturbing fact that most people do this, although many won't admit it. See Robert Cialdini's book "Influence - the Psychology of Persuasion".

I don't know whether or if this translates to design though.
Review of Project Management Tools for Startups
Recently here at LearnItFirst.com due to our growth, I had to decide on a few things: (1) project management software, (2) help desk software, and (3) knowledge base management software. I wanted to post my notes/thoughts on the project management software here so that it can hopefully save someone else some time in the future.
Scheme wants to be Common Lisp.
Ok.. let's say the person falls in the middle of all your described ranges. Less than 10 engineers, not a phd, not a high school kid, but experience is specific to what they are working on.

Obviously, that person wouldn't fall in the middle of your options range (12% is really high).
I think this guy also just has weird ideas about what's ugly. I don't think plentyoffish is ugly. It's not gorgeous, but it's far from ugly.

There is definitely a point when certain kinds of beauty become uninviting to certain kinds of people. It's like room with furniture so fancy that one feels uncomfortable, like an intruder, just by sitting on it. But I don't really think his argument conveyed how that happens with websites.
If you've never read how Kenneth Cole (shoe/fashion company) started out by launching a movie production company, it's a great story: http://www.kennethcole.com/scripts/aboutus/ourstory.asp
"It's kind of embarrassing to see your own clunky prose and ugly photos stuck in the middle of a beautifully designed page."

Good point, but one could argue that ugly people post their photos on POF not because the site is ugly, but because there are lots of ugly people on POF and therefore the standards are just lower.
Ruby on Rails on NetBeans 6
NewCo finally gets a name: Hulu
Byte serving from PHP
Hulu: News Corp's YouTube Rival Gets a Name
Epiphyte: http://zgp.org/pipermail/linux-elitists/1999-December/000074...
Express Dot Net
New site for developer based on a new ideas. Developer and user can modify and change site content. Any One can join the site and start writing it's own papers then sends them to the site administrator.
Developers can include ads or donation with their content.
Very Fast growing site :more than 6000 hit in 3 month
From the Netbeans page at http://www.netbeans.org/community/releases/60/

"Ruby Debugger. Single-step or run through Ruby code, set breakpoints, look at local variables, navigate the call stack, switch threads, and evaluate expressions by just hovering the mouse over the variable in the Editor. There is also support for the "fast debug" extension."
a tenth of a percent .001 to a quarter of a percent .0025 at best.
Yeah I see your points. I just wanted to point out that ".net" is different than asp.net and IIS. Those are part of the complete default stack and are typical bottlenecks. In a way they're designed to achive easy development/deployment over performance.

asp.net out-of-the-box will not work for a massively concurrent public facing app. However, neither will php, rails, django, any of the java frameworks. "re-invent the wheel" might be an overstatement for what you need to do, but no matter what...you're going to do some serious tweaking since every app has different needs
God I hope not.
"I embraced OS X as soon as it was available and have never looked back. So a lot of In the Beginning...was the Command Line is now obsolete. I keep meaning to update it, but if I'm honest with myself, I have to say this is unlikely."
About time. I hope it isn't another decade before R7RS.

A lot of people are complaining because R6 is so much bigger than R5. While a clean, tiny spec is a beautiful thing, it is empirically not a recipe for being able to get real work done without compromising portability. If you care about minimalism more than you care about that kind of portability, R5RS isn't going anywhere. This isn't Windows; there's no end-of-life schedule that's going to force you to upgrade.

My gripe about R6RS is that it doesn't go far enough: any sufficiently large project is still going to require non-portable extensions. But it's a leap in the right direction and we've been waiting long enough. As long as we'll eventually see an R7RS, I'm glad this revision was ratified.
It can be lucrative, however...

One of my coworkers once worked for a company that sold software to the government. Their software didn't work - at all. It didn't run. However, this being the government and the company being staffed with excellent salespeople, they didn't find that out until they'd already forked over their million dollars or so. They just ate the cost and never used the software.

The kicker was that the project was classified, and so the government agency couldn't tell anyone that the program didn't work. Not even other government agencies. So this company went right ahead selling the same software-that-didn't-work to multiple government agencies.

Your tax dollars at work.
The question might be, "Was R6RS ratified simply because a change is needed or because R6RS is the correct solution?"

On the comments, one of the very first complaints is that R6RS's library system is still inadequate. That seems like a grave sign for any programming language. As far as I can tell, all popular languages have a well-defined library system and popular frameworks have a well-defined plugin system, so needless hassles in terms of crafting those will only dampen popularity.
hmmm... how about a logarithmic mean? This comes out to 0.5% (log10).
In other words, worrying more about someone else executing the idea better than someone else simply knowing the idea, right?
How exactly would one go about getting in touch with a hedge fund guy without an introduction? It seems like it would be even more fruitless than just sending a business plan to a VC.
> The class policy is such that if you say anything offensive or untoward you automatically fail the class without warning or chance for appeal. [...] if I, say, link to that JWZ post about sex or the Wikipedia article about DeCSS then potentially I don't have healthcare anymore.

Make sure you remember to sing the praises of the Professor and salute Great Leader Chairman Mao at least once per blog post! Actually, hmm, this would be a great way to poke fun at their policy. Don't say anything actually untoward, but I would just praise the infinite wisdom of the school, the class and the professor in a ridiculous over-the-top manner in your posts. Maybe even a throw in a straight-faced comparison to the wondrous insights of Chairman Mao at a place where it almost looks like it makes sense.

/at least I'm not Godwining the thread
Miners unearth world's biggest diamond
This has been taken care of. Simply create your forum again and it should work. If it doesn't let me know.
Hey Sergey, Yandex Kicks Google Butt In Russia
Oops, looks like a few got out.
Now in its second decade, blogging has radically changed publishing
"If you are really hard-core about performance, you can write HTTP handlers that override parts or whole of the default handlers. Thus, you can maintain state on the server side completely if you wish to (dealing also with the concomitant issues to scale the site)"

Why should a programmer have to write special handlers just to save session state on the server side? Other platforms (Java, PHP, etc.) does that stuff for you in the background.
I'm simply using PHP for now. I just wanted to get something done and I think its the fastest for small projects like this is. If the site continues to grow I will probably rebuild it in ROR or Python, whichever one seems more interesting that week. As for how long it took I would say I have a total of 12 - 16 in the project. I didn't bother doing a design, because I didn't think anyone would use it so I designed on the fly with just solid color divs. I did take 5 minutes to do the logo though. The majority of the time went into reading through the Google Maps API documentation. Any other questions just let me know.
Patent Owner Sues the Internet
Actually I thought about that already. I'm going to be altering the code to center and zoom in on your location based upon your location once you log in, but I'll be sure to add a button too. I'll take care of the listing twice.
How to Negotiate a Flexible Work Schedule
The boss will worry that if she lets you telecommute, she'll have to let everyone work from home, and that she'll have trouble evaluating your productivity and performance. Head off her concerns with a well-written proposal that spells out exactly how the arrangement you're proposing will work and how your performance will be measured.
Is college worth the cost?
Facebook app displays MySpace profiles (oops)
Please add a wiki. news.yc has become a "community" and we need a way to store stuff longer-term.

Or, if someone else sets up a wiki, could a link be added to it on the navigation bar?
The guy made a million dollars. You know, I had an idea like that once. A long time ago.

It was a "Jump to Conclusions" mat. You see, it would be this mat that you would put on the floor, and it would have different conclusions written on it that you could jump to.
Or rather, a minority of the Scheme implementors want it to be.
I think they should hold out to R5.98RS personally, fix a few more of the things that people complain about and perhaps hit 75 YES votes. There's obviously still room for improvement.
If you care about minimalism more than you care about that kind of portability, R5RS isn't going anywhere.

If you care about that kind of portability more than you care about excellent design and the consensus (as opposed to majority) that has made Scheme what it is, then Common Lisp isn't going anywhere.
New Application Engagement Metrics from Facebook
R6RS is already better than ANSI CL.
Speaking of votes, isn't this classic "design by committee"?
Or rather, it is still better. Just give them time.

I'll stick with R5RS+SRFIs+Snow for portability.
Well played dottertrotter, thank you. Myself and a number of others have duplicate location entries. One where you determined my location by IP and one by zipcode. The zipcode one is right. How can I delete the IP one? It seems many others have the same problem...
There is an interesting group of ideas around intelligence, education, credentialism, and signaling.

Getting a degree is a sign that you are smart enough to get a degree. Getting one from a good school is that much better. The biggest loss if you learned the exact same material on your own outside a university is that others aren't signaled that you've received that education.

If you build something good, it doesn't matter where you are. People know you're smart from what you've done.

There are millions of people paying for a credential that means less as more people get it. Companies treat college degrees as a sign that you're not a total failure.

It would be nice if there were better tests for ability. They work for things like the SAT II, but I can't imagine an accurate test for post-graduate ability besides a review of what you've made.

But companies are lazy. They don't have the time or money to really look at the quality of most candidates, so they use signaling tools as filters.
it is highly possible you may get the idea first but an experienced larger company will almost always execute better than you.

No easy answers.

BTW ideas are worthless only if you dont want to allocate a value to them.

http://juwo-works.blogspot.com/2007/05/ideas-are-worthless-w...
"Why netbeans' rails support is so creamingly good"
Wow... this is a great description of what's happening inside a good programmer. It may even be good enough to help non-programmers understand what's happening and therefore what to do about it. This should be on the short-list of reading for managers and others who are responsible for the software development working environment.

On a seperate tangent, Paul referred to some mental techniques (e.g. 'black box', 'solve a subset) and I can think of others (e.g. hold this portion 'constant' and change a different portion).

What if we had a catalog of those mental techniques - would that be interesting? Usefull? Who would use it?

Thirdly - my experience of loading the whole program in my head extends beyond programming - when I've participated in the business side, along with programming, then the scope of what I consider becomes larger (and involves some new elements) but the underlying approach and way of thinking about problems/solutions appears to be the same. Have other folks had a similar experience?
This divisive thread is distressing to me. As someone who struggles every year or two to preserve Scheme as a development language inside a medium-size company, I think it works much better to view CL and Scheme as a family of languages used in both industry and academia. Squabbling between the camps makes both look smaller. In reality, you can often draw on CL people to do Scheme work and vice-versa.
Only topped by the government paying (accidentally, to their marginal credit) for half million dollar washers: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08...
Private, no. (Northwestern and NYU are up to $48K a year just in tuition. Are you kidding me?)

Public, especially an in-state school if your state is fortunate enough have a quality one, definitely yes.

College: still the best four years of your life. (Then again, I've yet to live the four years one would experience after selling a startup for big money. Maybe we could get input from pg or that Broadcom guy who built the underground party den)
There are certainly good ideas in CL that can help Scheme. Many of the differences are a matter of taste. For those who like small languages, R4RS isn't going away.
Yes it is. I believe that the best investment you can ever make is in yourself. Colledge cost me $40K and I have made more than $160K in 2 years after Colledge working. I have made an 33% ((40/120) * 100) on my investment in myself and its still growing. The growth of my investment in myself is infinite and way bigger than any other investment.
This article includes one of the most misleading statistics concerning higher education: "People with bachelor's degrees... still earn an average of about $1.2M more than high school graduates over a 40-year career". Yes, there is a correlation between higher education and higher salaries -- no, this does not imply causation!

There are many confounding factors: People who are more intelligent, have parent(s) who pursued higher education, have parents with higher income, or are white are both more likely to receive a bachelor's degree AND on average earn more than other people with the same amount of education. (In the past, being male was a predictor for both higher education and higher earnings, but this is not a significant factor for people born after 1980.)

In addition, the statistic ignores the fact that pursuing higher education shortens one's career -- people who spend 4-5 years in college on average work for 2-3 years less than those who started their careers immediately after high school. As a result, comparing "40-year careers" is bogus -- the only reasonable comparison is between the total careers of individuals, including the time when one person is at college while the other is working.

Finally, even if the statistic were computed correctly and reflected causation, it would be misleading: Different careers are not influenced equally by education. Generally speaking, people don't finish their education before they start thinking about what career the will pursue; someone who was planning on becoming a plumber isn't likely to suddenly decide that he wants to become a brain surgeon just because he finds that he has a bachelor's degree.

Decide what you want to do (either as a single career, or more likely thinking of a number of careers which seem interesting), and look at what qualifications are needed for those. And never forget what Benjamin Disraeli said: "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics".
This isn't even a squabble between the two camps. It's an intra-camp squabble :-)
Wow. Good for her and all that, but I think skipping out on school is a mistake, whatever she's earning.
You do know that a lot of people going to private schools aren't paying full-price, right?

Need based financial aid grants are often available (ie not loans) and sometimes they are substantial. I've known people who have paid less for a private school than they would have at a state school.
i posted something on this a couple hours ago... this is the only way anyone should work on RoR
People should be apprenticed at 13, and should enter professions at about 18. Only jobs requiring memorization of a large body of prior work (medicine or science) need more than that.
Finding funding in Phoenix,AZ
Does anyone have any suggestions or recommendations in regards to finding funding in phoenix AZ?
Yes, I saw you posted the screencast: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47886

I'm going to watch that later and then give it a trial run. Did you try it already?
Cool. I wish the editor could be modified to act like Vim. I'd switch to it in a heartbeat.
Let me propose the radical idea that a college education is not solely justified by it's monetary value.
For me, college was absolutely worth the cost. Focusing on more than just the money, I met dozens of current and potential business clients. My side work as a freelance web developer has come mostly through people that I met in college.

I went to a community college paid for entirely by scholarships, so the cost to me as far as money goes was only that of the books. The largest cost to me, though, was the time invested in classes where I learned very little.

Back to money though, my pay jumped $2.75/hr at my day job as a direct result of getting my two associates degrees.
Yeah, I'm glad we haven't formalized that system in the US.
they didn't change it for the same reason that they didn't do nice design, IMO.

tagworld.com is really complex thing despite its simplicity from the outside. It has unique user base and handles around 1000 requests per minute. It uses around 20 web servers and 20 other servers for db, file storage, video/photo converting.

All code is written from scratch and .Net is great in maintaining the developement process. C# compiles and most errors get caught before deployment. In addition there is a buit in mechanism for validating dynamic pages, which also helps a lot. For some time we used to deploy the whole thing daily, with active users on the site.

.Net is more for the corporate world with lots of legacy code and outside apps. It just can't be done almost with any language except java.
They are really simple. Try comparing them to some enterprise solution if you had a chance to work on one.
People who spoke against .Net/C#. Please study it really deep first. Do not make fun of youself.
It's YouTube And MeTube, But Not ThemTube
Yeah, I guess I didn't really consider that -- based on how the question was phrased I was trying to consider the whole range of potential costs of college from the most outrageously high to free.
The venturehacks site has slightly higher numbers...

http://www.venturehacks.com/articles/option-pool-shuffle#mar...
Experience with Amazon Flexible Payment Service
Funny.... you use "he" and it's gender neutral. Use "she" and it is PC.
Just wanted to share (I know this topic is all time popular) about our experinece with Amazon FPS.

First of all, we charge a small subscription fee each month. This severely limited our abilities to cherry pick payment processors. Second, we did not want to deal with (store on our servers) sensitive data such as credit card numbers.

From a technical point of view FPS is a bit too complicated. Definitely more so than other gateways we looked at. That is because it's too generic: instead of 2 perties there are always 3. "Build your own PayPal!" is their idea. For people who aren't building their own paypal it is a bit annoying.

Secondly, your users must have Amazon accounts. That may be good and bad, depending on how you look at it. To us it was bad: we did not want people to see "Amazon" stuff during sign up process - we had some unpleasant experience with similar approach taken by PayPal.

But most importantly there is ZERO customer service. They have no phone support. None. If you try calling Amazon you won't find a single person who knows anything about FPS. And their "Technical Support" form WILL NOT return back to you within 24 hours. Basically it means that the system is not quite ready for production use: if your customers cards get rejected for no reason, you will need to solve that problem NOW.

Well.. that's about it. Just wanted to share, since I picked up FPS advice somewhere on this board. We're going with authorize.net although it's unclear how easy it is to work with them using Ruby.
yup... setting up debugging is a bitch though
Google Labeled An "Evil Goliath"
Facebook delivers ultimate humiliation to Google
This article builds an elaborate straw-man argument: it argues that "happiness" appears to correlate with the perception of upward mobility (according to one survey, anyway). This may well be true -- but it doesn't mean that income inequality makes people happy!

Moreover, it doesn't logically follow that taking steps to reduce income inequality would harm society's perception of upward mobility. Other than a weak assertion that focusing on inequality "legitimizes envy", the article does absolutely nothing to establish the link. It's taken as an article of faith that "redistributing income" (whatever that means) is bad for the motivation of the poor to become less poor.

Stated another way: "the richer I become, the more inspired poor people are to be like me. Therefore, you should make sure that I stay at least as rich as I am today."
very interesting. this changes things significantly.
I think you can use vim as the default editor if you want

http://externaleditor.netbeans.org/
Mitch Kapor speaks at YC dinner
I think he's talking about some CL bashing implicit in our discussion. My intention was not to diss CL, just to say that it represents a different design philosophy that is somehow antagonistic to what's been the tradition in Scheme. Portability, practicality and completeness over minimalism, beauty, and perfectionism (within reasonable limits; there are some practical compromises in Scheme too). Both approaches have their advantages and their (overlapping) audiences.

Now the RnRS name has been hijacked to refer to a totally different process, and by extension an attempt has been made to hijack the name Scheme for something that is a whole new Lisp dialect. I think the RnRS name has lost credibility, and I don't think the appropriation of the name Scheme will be successful. You'll hear the name Common Scheme a lot from now on.

So no, it's not the same camp anymore. Enjoy your PLT, Chez, Larceny, or Scheme48, and best of lucks.