skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They've traded their independence and have become a sharecropper. :( They're now on Facebook's mercy. Facebook giveth; facebook taketh away?! Their investors should be worried.
prototype/scriptaculous as part of Rails.
This is a great presentation, full of common sense and so true. Thanks for posting the link.

Creativity in education worked for me. In my school, creativity was considered as a value and now I am referred as a creative and inventive programmer.

I warmly recommend looking the video, at least for the funny jokes,...
"Ticketmaster says that it is merely bending to the will of the marketplace--because some people are willing to pay more for good seats--and that it is trying to usurp the role of the scalpers and ticket brokers. But the company is really just angling to be the biggest and baddest scalper of them all."

I don't see what the problem with scalping is. The scalper pays for the ticket, and then provides the very useful service of making the ticket available at the last minute. The scalper also takes on a risk that no one will want the ticket,

I can see that the band/venue/ticketing agency wouldn't like it as they don't get a piece of the action. But that doesn't make it immoral.

If tickets are auctioned online by the ticket seller then presumably the band and venue will make more money which will lead to more tours/albums/better venues etc.

Auctioning would probably work both ways too in that worse seats would be available for less than they currently are now.
Lets not forget about quality of unit tests. I've seen people writing completely idiotic tests that really do not prevent them from anything (like calling methods and making sure they do not throw exceptions). Such "unit testing" is your time well wasted indeed. Another example is to go too low or too high, i.e. being unable to find a proper balance between unit/integration.

IMO proper unit testing is a skill and takes some time to acquire. Currently I am thinking about good interview questions for our candidates that help us find out how well people understand the reasons and goals of good UT.

Moreover, there are some areas of development that are notoriously hard to unit-test (with good results): Win32 UI is a good example, and even in those cases it's possible to write little, but highly effective UT-code (for instance if you have a unit-test-friendly design in place, like mediator pattern when you can "drive" your UI actions by sending commands to it).
Fantastic UI. I wouldn't use it for a "real" app, but for fun stuff, it's awesome and fun to play with.

Best of luck!
I find it really counterproductive whenever people bring the following arguments to the table (during discussions):

"I don't use it" or "Facebook does not use it". So? What does that prove? Who taught you gentleman, to use such useless arguments in a debate. It sounds like "I do not believe unit tests are useful because I do not use them". Your logic is reversed.

BTW Einstein did not unit test either.
Buxfer features as one of the promising social money startups in Wall Street Journal
Hint: Click "View" in your browser menu, and the click "Page Source". Right at the top there's a list of libraries. ;-)

Looks like Prototype plus several of Prototype extensions, plus some other random stuff--probably a few custom libs given the filenames.
Mootools! Definitely mootools - it's like stripped down, modified, cleaned and polished prototype. With a bit of work it can integrate with Rails nicely (using a Minus-mor), and the best part is that it encourages you to remove all the bloat from your own javascript classes, resulting in a lot cleaner code. I haven't used JQuery, but I'm hearing a lot of good things about it too, either way, prototype+scriptaculaus is just too fat for me right now (I've had pages where a "Document Size" query yielded a result of 105 K - 100K javascript + 4K html + 1K images ... that's just too much)
Remember, you're talking about a magazine that misspelled "YouTube" on the cover of their last "Person of the Year" issue.
Yup, there certainly isn't anything wrong with doing things the "right" way. It only gets to be a problem when people think that there is only one "right" way and that everyone must follow it.
Many people at news.yc with interesting thoughts have no contact data in their profile. It's a pity.
Sure, I understand you can have real reason for this.
Paul Buchheit: Seth Godin on 'Vibe'
"Now it's something that I watch for when visiting startups -- my guess is that upbeat and energetic companies will outperform the ones that feel oppressive and hopeless."

I've mostly only seen the vibe just implode (or at best only slightly diminish) when a startup gets acquired. Granted my experience is VERY limited.

I find it hard to imagine that many startups get acquired and it REALLY IMPROVES THEIR VIBE! ;) But maybe I'm wrong, any counter-examples to that scenario?
[cartoon] How Variable Width Could Save Your Relationship
It's the integration with your friends network and newsfeed that makes it so powerful.
Would you exchange 4 million new users in one month for decline in Alexa ranking? Hell yeah!

iLike traffic actually shares the same exponential growth since all contents in their facebook app are served from their servers. Facebok does not host your app.
Damon Dash: After MySpace sold for $580 million, we said, damn, we gotta get us some of that.
My unit tests are mostly related to the core logic. The only UI testing I do is automated XHTML validation of pages generated for a test set.
If you're funding it, then you can simply hire someone. Of course, at that point, you might have yourself a bit of a principal-agent problem, so giving them some equity is likely to be a good idea. You're still going to have some issues with the fact that an employee is going to follow orders more than a co-founder, which has some negatives associated with it (sometimes, it's good to say "no, that's dumb!", and that's harder to do as an employee).

But... life's tough - everyone has obstacles of one kind or another, so why not just wade in and get started?
Employees act dry and "professional" and it's a miserable way to live. It's a spiral of doom that causes the best people to leave and biggest losers to dig in their heels.

The "Amateurs" section of "What Business can Learn from Open Source" is probably my favorite thing PG has written.

http://www.paulgraham.com/opensource.html
"How is it not related to the compile-time name resolution and type checking?"

Please re-read, carefully. I said that compiled and strongly typed are two orthogonal language characteristics, and that each of those characteristics solves one set of problems (while introducing some of its own).

I specifically said exactly what you've said about compiled languages identifying missing methods. But it's not because it is a strongly typed language, it's because it is compiled.

What's so bad about having a little clarity in our use of terms and concepts?
JQuery the one and only.
Makes sense. None of my nontechie friends realise that facebook apps exist outside of facebook. For example they think Twitter is some kind of useless clone of facebook status. I've yet to see a great facebook app that ads value to facebook.
All Transactions are based on Trust, part 2 - Why del.icio.us works better than reddit
Oh dear god no!

I love xkcd but posting it here is bad juju. Reddit started to decline when people started to submit comics & funny pictures so please help us keep news.yc focused on startups, please?
10 Things I Hate About Facebook
easyMobile comes back with free mobile calls, says Stelios
I once talked to a TicketMaster recruiter at a job fair. When he realized I was getting a little bored, he told me that besides the positions they were advertising, they also needed somebody who could help them speed up their main database system, which, if I recall correctly, was written in MACRO-32 and ran on a VAX until they moved it to Linux boxen running a proprietary emulator. If you search around the web for "ticketmaster vax" you can maybe find out how far they have gotten with their project to scrap the VAXen.
It appears that the deleted post disappears but the child posts don't. That's fine, but the navigation's broken. I can see your post which is a child of the now deleted one, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27969 , and if I follow the parent link I get "no such item", fair enough, but the rest of the furniture should still be there so I can go to the delete post's parent. Otherwise, I can't find out what initial thread this was all attached to. Or can only root posts be deleted? If so, that needs to be clearer.

Really, I don't think delete should delete everything. The username, date, and parent at least should still all be present.
I'd assumed the email address I entered on my profile was public. It was only on logging out to check just now I realised it wasn't. Perhaps I'm not alone. I've now copied it into the free text as well.
I decided. Since you're not LvanB on here I assumed that your were faking.
What are the significant savings that mean it's worth misusing GET? Is REST really that hard? _RESTful Web Services_, http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/9780596529260/
"The implication is, in my view, quite clear -- the Facebook Platform is primarily for use by either big companies, or venture-backed startups with the funding and capability to handle the slightly insane scale requirements. Individual developers are going to have a very hard time taking advantage of it in useful ways."

I wonder if anyone hosting providers will step up and offer a Facebook level service to budding application developers.
Intel readies massive multicore processors
Alpha alert: OpenOffice.org for Mac
E-mail address in profile is a big secret for me also :) This is probably question for PG.
Google Gives Up on Competing With eBay's Big Boston Party
EBay slashes Google ads, escalating rift. Analyst: 'The two companies have been on a collision course for a long time'
I think you must be thinking of a different kind of school. The results for my kids have been clearly better than at a regular school, and they are clearly enjoying creativity, not being overly pressured.
Thanks for the reminder, I didn't even realize there were profiles on news.yc!
Yeah, maybe I'll leave the navigational structure at least.
The exception to this article's premise would be subreddits, like programming. Niche groups like programming.reddit or del.icio.us do feel like they have a higher signal-to-noise ratio. I've gotten some great links from programming.reddit, or here, for example.

Main reddit is where I go when I'm bored and procrastinating.
On ourdoings.com I've only ever had one error that could wipe out user-created data, and it would not have been caught by unit testing.

On the other hand, if I knew of a great tool for automated page tests I would use it. I don't think creation of such tests should be hard.
The 3D Real/Virtual World Hybrid: How Far Away?
That iPhone Is Missing a Keyboard
Yes and no. Launching quickly can be an advantage. Bugs or slowness can be a disadvantage. Often times people don't have time to revisit a site. They check it out once, and if they don't like it they never come back. It's important not to overmarket your site.
"For years, eBay has been Google's biggest U.S. advertiser"

Wow... seems odd that they didn't set up their own ad network earlier. I just don't see the lock-in for on-line ads - switching costs are low, and network effects are not really a factor.
TorrentSpy ruling a 'weapon of mass discovery' (a computer server's RAM must be turned over in a lawsuit)
It would not have been nice to publish everone's email addr on the web for spam crawlers to find. But if you want to put an email addr (or anything else) in your profile, you can.
I agree with Seth and Paul. Vibe is very important. We've taken a lot of trouble to ensure a happy vibe at YC. Partly it was to distinguish ourselves from others in the startup funding business. VCs' offices tend to be quite grim, even when they're expensively done. But the main reason was simply that we ourselves spend a lot of time at YC. We want it to be a happy place because we want to be happy ourselves.

That's one difference between starting a company when you're rich and when you're poor. You won't put up with unpleasant stuff when you're rich. Often that's a disadvantage, but I think it turned out to be an advantage for YC.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tlbtlbtlb/434812635/in/set-72157600027668946/
Yahoo photos begins closing down
with the new f8 platform, are you required to "host" your app with facebook in order to integrate with friends and news feed?

conceivably one could still require the user to go off-site to get the full benefit of the app, and still take advantage of facebook friendslist/newsfeed features.
I think ensuring good vibe is a corollary to the "A people hire A people" argument... if you take the time to hire people who share your positive attitude, then hopefully the organizational culture will reflect that.
I think the ads on Google search results pages were more important than AdSense, a few advertisers have said the conversion rates are much higher on the search results than on AdSense pages. But I wouldn't put it past eBay to start an AdSense competitor.
You could also make it visible only to logged-in users, or users with karma > n...
How much equity should you give a co-founder?
... or simple form for logged-in users sending your message as an e-mail to particular member :)
Where will I get my human remains ( http://www.flickr.com/photos/merlin/55319283/in/set-1207345/ ) now?

"San Jose's eBay cut its advertising Monday shortly after Google unveiled plans for a party in Boston to hawk its online payment service, Google Checkout. Attendees of eBay's user conference, eBay Live, which starts today, were all invited for free drinks, food and massages."

This is a little nutty. It's an increasingly bad business strategy to take total control over a small market rather than some control over a big one.
So no more "Find Existential Philosophy on EBay!" at the top of my search results? Whatever will I do!?
really?! I would be shocked if they dont have at least automated testing on their most critical systems. Whats the source of that info?
If he's really a cofounder, meaning you haven't even incorporated yet, and he has the same qualifications and is going to work as hard as the other founders, you should give him pretty close to the same amount of stock.

So that's actually an easy question. The harder question is how much stock to give to your early hires.
"In any case, eBay Live is frequently a stage for drama, and not just with Google. Alibaba, an eBay rival in China, found out the hard way at eBay Live last year in Las Vegas.

It had rented a restaurant in the hotel where eBay Live was holding a party.

An eBay executive who found out tried unsuccessfully to rent the restaurant from under Alibaba, according to an Alibaba executive and a hotel employee present during the animated discussion. The eBay executive eventually forced Alibaba to remove all of its signs."

So let me get this straight... EBay executives are a bunch of insecure bullying assholes? That, and they just gave up 188.3 million clicks from Google? Note, however that searching Google for "used Playstation 3" still gives me tons of appropriate results - including from other auctions.
If you only count the initial development time as "development," writing tests will increase your development time. If you take a longer view, and consider maintenance and later development, having a good test suite makes it easier to find bugs and makes it possible to add features and improve code with confidence that you aren't breaking code that relies on your test suite.
There's no evidence that reading the code and trying to make sure it is simple and straightforward improves the quality code, for that matter.

The quality of the code is a combination of the quality of the programmers and the quality of the processes they use to produce the code. If you have really good programmers, they can use a shoddy process (write, compile, ship) and still produce reasonable quality code; if you have average programmers with a good process (write test, write code, compile, fix warnings, compile, run test suite, fix errors, compile, run test suite, ship), you can produce good code.

What I've found is that whether a test will be useful or not depends on the nature of the code. If I'm writing logic code or building a domain-specific language, an automated test suite means the difference between getting it right quickly and taking a long time to get it hopefully probably mostly right.

Readability is only one aspect of code quality, and code that does something complex and convoluted will never be simple and straightforward. For that matter, complex, convoluted, and correct is preferable to simple, straightforward, and wrong, and that's the sort of thing that a test suite will tell you.
I've thought of adding messaging within news.yc. Would people use that?
I have my email there! But unfortunately I have no interesting thoughts, sorry.
Your experience on Google is no worse, but if eBay doesn't come back, Google's losing on the order of billions since they aren't selling high-priced ads at large volume to eBay.
That's the reason why you are here
c.f. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zawinski%27s_Law
Well, I've been talking to a couple business people about various startup stuff.

One major thing I've noticed is that business people who don't have hacking experience do not have any experience to judge what's simple and what's hard. If you're in a startup mode where you're trying to leverage the least amount of work for the most profit, this is the kiss of death.

Hackers have heard "I can't hack, but I have this brilliant idea..." a million times, and hackers realize that the idea is easy and the execution is hard -- so by making that kind of a pitch, you're offering to the hacker the proposition that you're going to do 1% of the work and take 50% of the credit. That just isn't an attractive deal.

And I do not agree with your statement in the the fourth paragraph: "But there are many others, beyond the realm of hackers, that have great ideas, possess creativity, and who can use his/her creativity to make something successful." Creativity is not sufficient, or you wouldn't be upset that no hacker will listen to your pitch.

Honestly, if you want hackers to take you seriously, if you are as brilliant and motivated as you claim, learn to program.
No. Email does a better job. I don't want to have yet another medium to check and use.
I'm a really good programmer. I want to implement my vision. I have several visions that I want to implement right now, as a matter of fact, and they're all vying for time with each other and with things like my day job and sleep.

If you want me to implement your vision, you can pay me (preferably more than my current employer does, with at least as much job security and at least a good quality of work-life balance), or you can convince me that your vision should be my vision, and is so much better than any of my visions that I need to start working on it at once.

Paying me is a heck of a lot easier.
No, a hacker would implement someone else's ideas if the ideas were interesting to implement and possible.

If a business guy has a vision that he shares with the hacker, the hacker will want to build it, though the hacker may want to build other things more and thus decline the partnership. The equity should be divided according to what each brings to the relationship; if all the business guy brings is the vision, he ought to be paid a flat fee for it, probably no more than $50, and thanked kindly. If he brings funding, it depends on how badly he needs the hacker.
Many dont list their email though. I guess it leaves the option to stay private but I suspect ppl often dont list it simply out of laziness or they forget.

Being a startup site, where people may be looking for contacts, co-founders, advice, etc, I think having a tool to get in touch with each other would be very useful. I vote yes do it, but KISS.
I am actually surprised at how little traffic del.icio.us gets, all things considered. I made it to #4 on the most popular list a few weeks ago, and it only got me 500 or so visitors. Compare that to Reddit, where being #4 would probably get you 15,000 pageviews.
From what I've seen so far, I don't really see a lot of interesting thought here. The things said here are interesting in comparison to the outside world, but once you read for a while, you realise that you're reading the same old shtick over and over again. That's MY interesting thought of the day ;)
Mochikit. The quiet framework in the back of the room.

http://www.mochikit.com
It's Robert. Trevor doesn't work on news.yc, I don't think.
I think it would be convenient, if there would be some sort of an inbox number next to your name. It doesn't even need to be complicated. A ping/pong kinda system is more than enough -- at least enough to develop a rapport, and then, if necessary, trade emails.

I a little more paranoid regarding privacy matters, but I am sure I'm not the only one.

A bit over a month ago i wrote a barebones PM util "addon" and submitted the link here. The feedback was generally good, while it was on the frontpage, then it whittled.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18437

(it still exists, and I think still works, unless you changed the login mech).

As for stats, around 16 messages in the first 48 hours of the submission. Perhaps they were mostly test posts, but I did receive a few messages and an offer to trade email. Unfortunately he didn't check back when I sent him it :P

Just thought you'd know.
Bandsintown is Looking for a developer to join the team
perhaps because we are all frogs in a well - and with PG the bullfrog? :)
Hi, We are looking for a developer who is interested in joining a startup in it's infancy stages. This means, no high paying salaries at this point, but instead a chance to get in at the ground floor with all the ups and downs of trying to build something independetly from the begining. If anyone coders feel they are looking for venture to join, go to http://www.dreamvex.com and tell us a little about yourself, your skills and what you are looking for in our contact form. Thanks,

and if you haven't checked out http://www.bandsintown.com yet have a look before contacting us!
Entrepreneurs: Don't Quit Your Day Job
I agree, especially when you're responsible for other people like wife or children.
or graphic/UI design. I think you would be a much more welcome addition if you were good at something hackers are usually weaker.
Point the Author link to a supplied website or the author's choosing instead of the profile, and problem solved.
I know her headline is just an attention grabber, but the entire writeup is just incredibly inapt.

You have to login? I think the whole point is that it's personal profiles with great access control. Users don't learn HTML and Javascript by adding apps? Are you kidding me?
His anecdote has nothing to do with entrepreneurs nor does it boil down down to "Keep your day job."

It's more like Everyone: don't be irresponsible.
then start one BEFORE you get married
If only they had put a USB slot on it and opened up the platform for development entirely. It would take off like nothing else. I mean, security? Okay.. Don't allow the developers to access the network. Past that, let them do everything to the damn device that they want to.

Doesn't Steve remember the Apple II? It was so successful because it was programmable and had expansion slots.
But what if you have already done the site, got 1000+ users, got some press etc.

Yeah. Ok. you haven't got incorporated yet, but based on the man hours spent, isn't it unfair to give the late-coming guy 50%?
Experimentation is the spice of life.