skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think the key to making this work without censorship is ruthless downmoderation of low quality, uninterrsting, and annoying discussions. I am often hesitant to downmod but this is the tool that we have to shape the culture. If enough of us who care about having nondogmatic discussions start downmodding the situation might take care of itself.
Is it because the media files come from consumers who've already ripped their media into mp3s and upload the songs themselves?

MP3.com bought a bunch of CDs and went to town ripping them, sans license arrangements with the studios.
So this is kind of like Orb only your music gets uploaded to a central server instead of streamed from your home PC?

The UI is incredible.
Don't get all uppity - they did own up:

"Skype said that whilst their peer-to-peer network has an inbuilt ability to self-heal, the event 'revealed a previously unseen software bug within the network resource allocation algorithm which prevented the self-healing function from working quickly.'"

They were just explaining why it failed now, and not when the bug was introduced years ago.
Saving the Internet with hate: a technical solution to the social problem
Yahoo's Flash Developer Center (charts, menus, auto completion, etc)
Starting-Up and staying in Boston
The HackerNews MeetUp last night was lots of fun. Thanks to everyone who made it!

I asked someone in the current YC batch how many in the current YC companies are staying in Boston.

To his knowledge: none!

That is a big surprise. What does it mean for those of us that like the town and would love to stay?
The Secrets of Serial [Entrepreneurs'] Success
Dave Chestnut's seedcamp application (funny)
Armstrong's book is the single best source for documentation about Erlang I have found so far. I consider it a must read for anyone who is going to be looking into using Erlang. I had a beta copy of it about two months before it was published and it helped me tremendously by simplifying some of the design patterns I had constructed myself.

Also, if I had to complain about Erlang at all the documentation is the one thing I would complain about. I find so many useful features by reading the source code (which also makes my own code better by reading other peoples code) that are not documented that I often wonder who is choosing what to document and what not to.

For instance, the to_lower() function to make a string lower case is in the http_util module, instead of the string module. Took me six months to find it and I had written my own in the mean time, theirs is much more efficient, but all but undocumented.
YES - this is my favorite new dev meme. So incredibly true it's painful.
That might be because the others did a cut and paste from my blog. I know Mike Arrington did...I told him he could. He felt bad because he couldn't make it to the demo day after earlier confirming he would be there.

Y Combinator had more companies (19) and more variety. I wish I could have written more about specific Y Combinator companies, but we were asked by Paul not to write about them unless they were already launched. Many of them were further along than the TechStars companies.

The good news is I saw several good teams at both Y Combinator and TechStars. Some significant winners will emerge.
It's the same with other things that you're passionate about. Your mind gets used to thinking about it and you don't even notice that it consumes all of your attention.

I'm sure your wife has something that she's very into but you just don't get/understand/grok.
It might be worth digging into exactly what metrics RAND used to define healthy. For example, if I have a bad knee towards the end of my life, if I have European style care I get put in a queue with a small but significant probability I will die before I get the treatment. In the US of A I get it immediately at great expense regardless of how long I will actually use it.

I don't know if knee pain made their metrics, but if not it would be a significant expense with zero gain. The article mentions a negligible effect on survivability but even small changes can muck up results when death is involved. For example, if two countries have exactly the same care but one elects not to expensively treat a terminal disease. Those who are treated in the first country may die anyway and if they don't will probably live out their longer lives at a reduced health status. Since they were equal otherwise, the first will have lower health relative to the second even though they have spent more, an apparent scandal.

One solution would be to set health status for the prematurely dead to be as though they were very sickly but alive. But how sickly, and how long do these un-dead individuals get to stick around? You're fudging either way, so I'm suspicious of what they actually did.

Maybe I should go find the article... or get back to work... /emote is acting conflicted
This initiative is fronted by Zed Shaw, of Mongrel fame.

The technical details are on the "design" page. I disagree with most of what he has to say, but it will be interesting to see what comes of this.
This reminds me of working with tenured research faculty. You start out immersing for two weeks, have a 20 minute conversation, then two more weeks end loop. This process repeats itself until you've certified yourself a genius or dropped out (in finance that usually means to a consulting or worse a teaching gig) at which point other people immerse themselves thinking about your 20 minutes of wisdom.

Ed Prescott (Nobel in econ) had an office down the hall from me, and he was famous for saying things like "aggregate balance sheets matter" and much smarter people than I would spend a week trying to parse just what he meant.
Top 8 Blogs Censored in China
In other news, Microsoft announces a new peer-to-peer telephone network!
How does the PLaneT plugin system for PLT Scheme seem to you?
Maybe we should start calling these services as "Web Desktop" instead of WebOS.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_desktop
Congrats on launching your site! Now my thoughts...

1. You have no content and presumably just launched, but yet the browsing experience was obnoxiously slow. Why?

And

2. I don't get it. Why are you using user submitted news for geographical locations? What value does this offer over going to the website for a local paper? Why would you rely on user submitted news for something that could seemingly easily be aggregated?

I'd like to strongly echo what the other two posters said - why do I want to use this site? I clicked around, and really couldn't get much of a feel for where you're adding value.
Sorry, I haven't much looked into Lisp past my first month foray into it, and that was just CL. Between my day job and our startup, simply no time left.

I promise to check it out someday though! Plugin systems are the most important parts of platforms.
"Facebook lets you send messages direct to email addresses"

I'm sorry but... I can't be the only one that laughed while reading this, right?
StreetBee Acquires JamJunky; Rebrands as GetYourGrooveOn
Facebook messaging gets some new juice
The Onion and Mark Zuckerberg...What could they possible come up with?
Does anyone use any of these services? I've always thought it was best to let the underlying real operating system take care of windowing and let each URL be one application.
HackrTrackr Now Allows For International Users
Based upon all the requests for international users I've added that capability, so feel free to sign up. I've also altered the interface based upon some other suggestions.
I think this is by far the funniest comment/response that I have seen on news.yc to date.
Is this a rhetorical question? The answer seems obvious...
Wow. He must have been the worst startup employee ever. 13 half finished projects? At a startup this is worth exactly nothing.
Vanderbilt U. develops new bionic arm powered by miniature rocket motor
What? That all startups must move to the Valley?

I find that hard to believe.
I have same feeling. Youos is wonderful but I always feel it waste too much screen space. On the other hand current browser is not very suitable for running multiple web apps also. Maybe we need a better container...
That's cool - that's why I said a short sentence describing the site would be great. I didn't know whether the content was supposed to be user-submitted, or aggregated, or local to the UK, etc.
That pisses me off, but I suppose it is inevitable.

Browsers identify themselves as a courtesy, so that designers can ensure code renders properly. Treating that like a security feature is like breaking house rules.
Of course, there are lots of Boston area startups beyond the few YC funds. And most of those doing YC don't have Boston roots, so they might not have much reason to stay.

To the larger point, Boston needs a stronger and more vibrant community of hackers, esp. for those interested in the web.

And I'm bummed I missed the meetup last night...
What we need is the desktop as the container...

But really, what we are talking about is just a resurgence of thin clients. And why not? They make sense. No updating software, all your files are there for you whereever you go and today we have the bandwidth to handle it (we do vid downloads without batting an eyelid!).

Especially with Google's gears coming along, it will mean we can do everything offline. It's getting close to CMS your home dir and apps.

When I was in high school (15 years ago or so) I said the perfect computer app would be one where you didn't know it was there and just used it to do what ever you wanted, like in TNG. This is getting close!
This is exactly what I've seen so far. I've lived in enough "bad areas" in my life that my quota is all used up. I want to live somewhere relatively safe. I also want to keep my "personal burn rate" low. Oakland is totally out. I'm not sure anywhere in the city qualifies. My current plan is to either commute a long way or give in and pay a lot in rent.

Anyone have suggestions of safe areas that aren't overly expensive or too far away?
That's a good point. It would be interesting to know how many from the current group were from the area. Also knowing how many are actually moving to the Valley vs. moving back to where they're based.

I'm sure there will be another meetup, but maybe not before Oct 18th :)
how many burritos will be in attendance?
I honestly was a poor student for most of my elementary school and high school education. In University I graduated near the top of my class (pats hand on back). Ironically, I think that high school above all taught me that I wanted to do a start-up. And even more ironically, I learned most of my math and English from my parents. School however was essential in teaching me empathy, social interaction, and I met most of my friends there.
My reasoning for it not being fishy is that it's part of Community Next so it's not just some random event. Noah Kagan/Andrew Chen have been planning this for a long time, flying out top 100 FaceBook devs etc. > http://flickr.com/search/?q=communitynext&z=t&s=int
Hahaha...

Amen.
Valleywag: Bow down and Worship Xobni's Party Throwing Skills
There's no such thing as bad press.
1. Privacy (and don't tell me it is overrated, it's not)
2. Reliability (yes, I do understand my hard drive can fail, but my OS doesn't delete my e-mail just as GMail did)
3. And the fact that I have to go online to fetch my file
Idea of the Week
"But nobody ever talks about a "Wall Street Operating System" or a "Small Business Operating System" do they?"

Microsoft Small Business Server? - http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/sbs (I know, I'm missing the point...)

I do agree that it's a web desktop, not a complete OS, but his reasoning seems a little off...
I'm not sure about old stuff. I think rehashing old topics can be very interesting. You often learn something new about them. Reddit has never been strictly "news", even in its heyday.

Politics and religion are special, they're just such huge topics and they're so personal to people. There's a reason people don't discuss these topics in business much. They're big distractions from the many things we all have in common.

I hope there's a ban on purely political and/or religious topics. This isn't censorship: 1) It's not done by the government. 2) The purpose is maintain focus, not suppress ideas.
Facebook are directly trying to squash my app:

http://apps.facebook.com/webmail/

It's exactly what you hoped for and what Facebook haven't yet managed to deliver :-)
InfoQ: Erlang's Mnesia - a distributed DBMS for highly scalable apps
In other words, it's a huge weakness in their design that is just waiting to be exploited.
Or use my app:

http://apps.facebook.com/webmail/

Which Facebook are clearly trying to squash :-(
The God Box? Bold Name.
> This is clearly how the real big-shots "get things done".

And then he cites a movie as evidence? I think he's seriously confused about how great stuff is usually completed. I think most big-shots that you'd want to emulate do the immersion thing.
Walled gardens are great, but walls keep people out as well as keeping people in.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000052.html
hey vi por lo del hacktrackr que eres de chihuahua, de pura casualidad no estas estudiando en mty? pq si es asi me gustaria platicar contigo y escuchar tu opinion en relacion a un proyecto, escribo por aca pq no sale tu mail, el mio es mariorz(arroba)gmail.com saludos!
What programming language should I start with?
Oh no! a non-programmer on the hacker news! But I figure you guys know?

I want to learn programming, maybe not to be a full-fledged hacker, but to be able to understand the concepts and be able to talk about this stuff more with programmers so I can work in tech?

I hear python and ruby are good to learn on, but what would you guys do or are there any good books you'd read?
Growing online communities: Haskell IRC channel reaches 400 users
www.hacketyhack.net is an integrated environment for learning ruby, the hardest part of learning ruby is setting up ruby on a web server.
PG: Can you please add the hacktrakr link with the other (jobs | leaders) links on the top of the page. I see many benefits to this:

1. That way, even if this link is not on the first page, visitors to Hacker news have an idea of where the end-users are coming from

2. There are more off line Hacker news meet-ups

3. Since, YC has no plans of starting programs outside of the US, the # of visitors from various countries would be a good sign for YC clones

Thanks,
Ruby or Python? I'm getting mixed signals!
Do want to learn Web programming? PHP is probably the easiest programming language to learn for server-side web programming. I've read several books on PHP and looked over a bunch, and a lot are pretty good, but one of the best is this one: http://www.amazon.com/PHP-MySQL-Development-Developers-Libra...
Pick language X. Buy Learning X from O'Reilly, e.g.
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/learnperl4/

I don't think it matters that much what you start with unless you have something in particular in mind you want to do, in which case, no matter what it is, choose Perl :)
Personally I think Python is easier to learn than Ruby; it takes a while to wrap one's newbish head around blocks, which are fundamental in Ruby.
Try this: http://poignantguide.net/
Investors to Web Start-Ups: Where's the Advertising?
PHP is awful.
A more permanent solution might be to have a "Community Wiki" link that goes to a site we can all add to. Useful third party stuff like this could be listed there.
Preferred: Python. clean, elegant, pure, simple, easy.

Just fine: Ruby. good, but less simple and elegant than Python.

Good if you want to deeply understand the principles of being a programmer but don't care about being very practical at the start: Lisp (yes, Lisp can be practical, but it's trouble for a newbie)

Avoid: Perl, PHP, BASIC variants. These cause brain damage.
Don't forget that .pdf's of popular books are available from your favorite neighborhood torrent search.
Python is the easiest to learn.

You can also try Lisp, but I don't have much experience with it. Lots of video lectures here:
http://swiss.csail.mit.edu/classes/6.001/abelson-sussman-lec...

The argument is that there are things you can do in certain languages that you can't do with others. This is important because you're taught to think in the capabilities of the language, meaning you won't even know what you're missing in a less powerful language.
If you want to get stuff done, Python.

If you want to understand how the computer works, Assembly.
I don't think learning programming is the best choice, because it's too easy to get caught up in the details of learning syntax, api, etc. I suggest working with a programmer on real projects and learning how to communicate between each other. If you're not a programmer by nature, which takes A LOT of practice to get good. You'll only become annoying since your suggestions will be uninformed. Learn to give creative suggestions at a level of abstraction, without stepping on a programmer's toes.
dotter, It's great that you were able to so quickly improve HackrTrackr. The last time I looked at it, it was a little unpolished. It's all quality now. Great work!
Common Lisp was designed by committee, and it shows. If Lisp is to become popular, it needs a good, opinionated dialect or three. Arc will probably be one of them. Otter may be another. It would certainly be nice if there were more libraries, but most of the things the author complains about seem to be non-problems:

>database access

Is there a problem with clsql (http://clsql.b9.com/)?

>sockets

Most Lisps (all modern ones?) support sockets. There are libraries to provide a common interface - a quick Google search got me usocket (http://www.cliki.net/usocket)

>threads

Ok, your options are a little more limited here, but CMUCL and SBCL support threads on x86 Linux, as do Lispworks and Allegro if you want to spend money. I suspect this isn't a big problem for most people writing web apps.

>POSIX

I think this is a weak point - CL was developed at a time when there was no clear OS of the future, so it was intended to be OS-agnostic. Today's (and probably tomorrow's) world has Windows, Unix and not much else.

>a portable FFI

CFFI and UFFI both work on all the popular Lisps. What's the problem?
Dare I say Java? Seriously though, Java is a good programming language to start with. You get used to C style syntax, but don't have to much with memory management and architectural differences. Plus you can use Eclipse, a great IDE, for free!
Can't miss these two, they're damn funny:

Part 1) http://www.flickr.com/photos/86921622@N00/1162778055/in/set-...

Part 2) http://www.flickr.com/photos/86921622@N00/1163633584/in/set-...

I've been a Xobni-skeptic since I saw the ads for product managers/QA people, office, etc. They appear to be doing a lot of obviously wrong stuff. I know they're smart and I do wish them luck, but it looks to me as if they're mostly interested in enjoying the funded startup ride.
It might be awful but it works well and is easy to learn.
come on, let's not get in the habit of modding someone down because we disagree with them.
Side note to staunch, I was in Tokyo a couple months ago!
Here are the languages that have big communities: Perl, Python, Ruby, PHP, Javascript, C#/VB.NET and Java.

Subscribe to lots of blogs from each community. (Many of them have planet aggregators like "Planet Python" and "Planet Ruby".) Also visit local user groups, wherever your are.

Read/visit them for a while -- say a month or two. Whichever community makes you go, "wow, that's cool" -- join that community and learn the language. You can also interact with those communities via Google Groups.

Lots of people will say -- "that's easy" or "this is elegant" or "that language sucks". Feel free to ignore them.
The language doesn't matter that much. But read a good theory book on programming. I like "Code Complete" 2nd edition. You'll get all the info on how to be a good programmer.

Mainly, concentrate on learning the technology and not a programming language. Programming languages are just tools for a specific job. By technology I mean, web programming, server/client, application, embedded, etc. Each industry has it's own language and you have to know the technology to speak their language.

Best Option: Figure out what program you want to write and then find out which language you should write it in.

Objective-C and Cocoa are going to be your best bet for learning application programming, but you have to have a Mac. Otherwise, learn Java. It's somewhat simpler than C/C++ because of memory issues.

Microsoft stuff is not an option as it will teach you very very bad things.

If you want to be really hard-core, learn C++ and Assembly ( x86 architecture ). But to be even half-way decent at those will take a lot of time and a lot of reading on how to do it right.

Conclusion: Buy a Mac and learn Cocoa :)
Embedded Software Startups?
The embedded industry is generally 10-15 years behind everybody else. (yes, i'm generalizing) However, there are very few start ups that provide embedded software. I'm not talking about TiVo or Bug Labs here, because they provid the entire package. I'm talking about somebody writing a significant piece of software for the embedded industry. Not some Tetris-clone that goes on the cellphone and runs on Java, but something that will move the industry forward.

How often do we see this happen?

Have we seen this happen?

Why don't we see this happen more often?

And also, how many people here have worked for or work in the embedded industry?
XOBNI IS AMAZING AT GENERATING PRESS.

They have an article written about them in valleywag pre-launch. Way to go Matt, Adam and co. You guys are truly a cut above.
That was a good party. One of the things they discovered was that anywhere.fm is the perfect stereo for a party, if you put it up on a big monitor.
If you want to do things right, read SICP and learn Scheme. That's probably the fastest route for going from knowing nothing about programming to being a very good programmer. It's somewhat akin to learning to swim by jumping off the 10m platform, though, so don't get discouraged.
I didn't ask that question. But the point is your solution requires putting/keeping the government in charge of education, just like we have now. Once the power is given, all kinds of interests become involved and people like Albert Shanker participate in how kids are educated.

I'd prefer to let parents decide how best to educate their children. The entire system shouldn't be designed to accommodate the outlying parents you fear who don't care about their kids.
Eclipse is a great IDE once you get used to it, but I spent many days bewildered even though I was already fluent in Java when I first tried it.
Yes, but it'll teach you terrible habits.
I disagree with this. An OS is whatever apps run on, and you could write things that most of the next generation of web apps would run on. I believe Parakey was (and perhaps still is) intended to be such a platform.
If you want to learn to program then C. That's right learn C. C is the language that the operating system you're using is written in, not to mention several of these other programming languages (the main implementation of Python or Ruby, for example). Is this language easy? No. Is it right for newbies? Maybe, maybe not. If you want the least amount of abstraction and don't want a bunch of stuff in your way, learn C. It's a hair's breath from learning assembly, and you can get a free compiler for it on any operating system.

If you want to get stuff done quickly, learn Python or Ruby.
You sound so sure. You don't think if the enormous amounts of subsidies the government had spent on airports had instead been allowed to flow to alternative transportation modes or energy research, things might be different?
so once you find someone near you, how are you supposed to get in touch?
Just curious, but would anyone recommend Javascript?
Facebook Opens Email Up A Little; I Want More
Check this out: http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/top/how-to-install-apps-on-your-i...
It actually seems like it could work. I think I agree with it...too bad they only have a package for OS X at the moment.