skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It is possible to live in multiple frames at once. Difficult, and very stressful, but possible.

When I was first asked to co-found my startup, I immediately became very unhappy at work. It was just too much cognitive dissonance. Once I had a startup (which had been my life's goal all along), why waste 8 hours a day working for somebody else, where I'm so much less productive?

Over time, I adjusted. I just saw work as having one set of rules and expectations, and startup as having another set of rules and expectations. So I gave up trying to introduce more productive technologies at work, because it wasn't going to happen anyway. And I adjusted my expectations for productivity downwards, because hey, my boss doesn't know that you can do better than JavaEE levels anyway.

End result: I'm much happier at work, which is perceived as being more productive because most people judge based on attitude instead of results. And then I go home and do everything my boss tells me not to on my startup. Only downside is that my startup may launch before my project at work does, which renders moot one of my main reasons for keeping the day job.

It's similar to switching keyboard layouts. When you first learn Dvorak, you will forget how to touch-type on Qwerty. But if you keep typing on Qwerty, eventually they'll start separating in your mind. For a long time, I would automatically type Qwerty whenever I saw a Gnome desktop and Dvorak when I saw Windows. Then it further refined itself into typing Qwerty whenever I saw Netbeans and Dvorak whenever I saw AIM. Now I'm basically fluent in both layouts, and can consciously switch between the two of them.

Also, I suspect every startup founder will have to undergo another frame shift eventually: shifting from the general startup culture to YOUR startup culture. Right now, most of us are internalizing the values of Startupping, News.YC, Ruby on Rails or Python, and various entrepreneurial blogs. Eventually that'll have to shift to the cultural values of the particular startup that you found. Any past or present YCombinator founders around to comment on this?
For calls that don't need to know about more state than their arguments, we just use an ordinary url with arguments. Otherwise we make a closure and store it in a hash table in memory, and make the url be x?fnid= where the argument is the hash key. When an http request comes in, we call the corresponding closure. Sometimes what to do next after following a link generated by the closure (e.g. what to do after logging in when you're not logged in and you submit a link through the bookmarklet) is part of the state of the closure; in that case it's a bit like a continuation.

We keep only the most recently generated 20,000 closures. When you click on a link that says it has expired, that means either it has been purged from the closure table, or that we've restarted the server.
CastTV raises $3.1 million for video search
There are 3037 registered users, and we now get around 3500 unique IPs per day.
Has anyone here worked with an offshore dev team as part of a startup or software project? I'd love to hear some first-hand accounts.
Finally, they've been in development for a while.

I'm not quite sure on the exact purpose of the site yet. Perhaps it'll surface once it gains momentum.
True. Link baiting is pretty hard though. I don't perceive linkbait as a derogatory term, on the contrary.

PG's "Microsoft is Dead" essay is the epitome of great linkbait. =)
Possibility of news.yc chatroom or IRC channel?
Seeing as there are many people who come and visit news.yc who have great insight and beliefs, I think it'd be great for users to have a venue where they can chat in real time and share said opinions. If people are new, have questions, or just want to help out others trying to make it, having a news.yc chat room could be a fantastic resource. Upvote, and be heard!!!
I think flex will be the perfect platform for mobile devices where the offline/online is needed more.
Depends on a lot of factors, but your pagerank can be a huge deal for many sites still. People deep searching into your content, when they didn't even know they were looking for you, is huge ... if that applies to you anyway.
IMHO, outsourcing to Bangalore was never a good idea anyway. The best talent in India tends to come to the US.
Great idea! I vote for IRC.
I'm now in #news.yc on EFnet.

http://www.efnet.org/?module=servers
Isn't there a risk, that someone can (accidentally or not) enter hash-code of someone else's "closure"?
You gave yourself too much leeway in the insert, "(and I mean really program)." Whoever fits that clarificaiton, is smart.

Lisp is a language. A language is a tool. If you can use a tool to build great things, you are good. Perhaps your tool is not for the weak-minded, but wielding a tool is not enough to say anything. A three section staff requires godly dexterity, but is inferior to the longsword in combat. The latter is easier to pick up and thrash around, but way more difficult to master.

I feel like saying this because anybody who programs is likely to be able to pick up a new language and play around with it; the premises are the same. Anybody who speaks can likely pick up a new language and make sentences. You might find, say, the subject-object-verb ordering particularly intersting and conclude anyone who speaks Japanese is smart -- but it's more about practice and application.

If you decompile your mind it's probably half spaghetti code. If you decompile Feynman it'd probably be strangely productive infinite loops of sorts.
Why I Started A Startup?
One could avoid that problem by keeping track of the owner of each closure and ensuring the user is properly authenticated before calling the closure.
Personally, I don't have the time for a chat room. From my perspective building a chat room would put me at a disadvantage because I would lose out on discussions taking place in the chat room (discussion which would normally be taking place in thread comments).

I believe that YNews is supposed to be a place to quickly catch up on the latest thoughts in the start-up community. It should serve the interests of the busy start-uper and minimize the amount of time needed to get informed -- a chat room does not do this.

Additionally, chat room discussions are disorganized and difficult to properly archive. They represent a step back from threaded discussions; however, chat rooms offer real-time communication. That's their sole advantage.

I think if that's what we as a community want, we should propose some features to accomplish those goals without losing the advantages of threaded, archived discussion. How about features like thread subscriptions, reply alerts, the ability to reply to a child comment via text message, thread organization tools (some distinction between link threads and discussion threads), etc... There's no need to cannibalize the existing community system when better alternatives exist.
here's a more interesting example:

http://google.com"style="display:block;background-image:url(http://www.google.com/intl/en_ALL/images/logo.gif);height:110px;width:276px;font-size:0.000001px"
"Personally, I don't have the time for a chat room."

I don't really either. But I lurk anyway, because then I'm caught-up on all the discussions and can jump in when I'm taking a break from coding.

Personally, I like chatrooms because they're much better for networking. I'm much more inclined to visit the startup of someone I converse with (as opposed to comment with), I'm more likely to make introductions for them, recommend them for jobs, etc. Basically, I could consider someone that I spend a fair amount of time chatting with a "friend", while someone who I only talk to on message boards is a "professional acquaintance".

This is mostly because of everything you dislike about chatrooms: they're disorganized, they tend to veer off-topic, they devolve into social chitchat, they're spontaneous, and they take up lots of time. You don't really know a person until you see how they behave spontaneously, when they aren't thinking out their response. Hell, I probably seem significantly less intelligent in chats than on here. But it's that vulnerability that makes me trust folks I chat with real-time more than folks I discuss with on a message board.

BTW, I'm also in #news.yc on EFnet, along with Jey. Kinda quiet there at the moment (I think we're both working on startups), but that's just because it hasn't reached critical mass.
I don't think it's knowing Lisp in particular that's valuable, but understanding different paradigms.

Lisp's paradigm is sufficiently different from the normal imperative languages, e.g. C or Python, that grokking Lisp means you understand more than one paradigm. It's this that's valuable, not knowledge of Lisp itself.

You often find that coders who know multiple paradigms will write interpreters for little languages in the implementation language available to them in order to better represent the problem, rather than attempting a dumb implementation in the bare implementation language.

There used to be a good book by Sam Kamin, Programming Languages: An Interpreter-Based Approach. It examines cut-down versions of different languages, e.g. Lisp and Prolog, implementing an interpreter for each of them in an imperative language to help explain how they work. Norman Ramsey was working on an update but I don't know if it's been published yet. Some universities seem to have access to a pre-release: http://www.cs.uml.edu/~dimock/courses/languages/Spring2005/mainpage.html (Disclaimer: I provided review comments to Ramsey for a couple of chapters back in 2002.)

Where Lisp is useful, is that just about any paradigm and his dog can be implemented in Lisp.
If social interaction is really your goal then let's organize a meet-up. I'm located in Boston, right across the Charles from all the Y guys, and would love to get to know some of the YNews posters.

It's a frustration of mine when people propose technological solutions to social problems. Facebook, twitter, et al. are absolutely horrible substitutes for real human interaction. Real-life interaction can be intimidating for some but are a very real necessity. We're built to read body language and receive a strong, low-level, satisfaction from doing so.

How does this sound? I'd love to see this forum act as a networking spring-board; maybe YCombinator Cambridge would be so kind as to provide space for a meet-up?
Better to use the permalink:

http://blog.compete.com/2007/04/23/myspace-tom-is-not-my-friend/
First of this is not about Hacking or web2.0. This is about why I decided to have a startup. You don't have to read.But if you do, thanks for your time.

For a long time I thought I wanted to have my own business. I starter with Import-export. That did not last a year and left me with more debt than what I make in 9 months. I am still paying for that matter fact. Then I thought I had a gift for seeing what will be a hot in technology. I remember talking to friends about web based word processors, mobile voip and niche social networks before this things were what they are today. But soon after I realized that most people thought of it too, but like me they did not do anything about it. I found myself running left and right, getting with developers and working on cool projects, only to abandon them and getting into something bigger. I am a Dreamer. I dream of products in the day and gather people to implement them by the evening. And that is it. After it is done I keep fwding the launch. I realized that I was not a business man.

So why starting a startup?
Well I think I want to be a Teacher, or a role model. I would like to build a successful startup, but I would love to sit on the other side of the table and listen someone who has nothing more than an idea and $1.75 to pay the bus fair to come talk about their idea. I think I would love to sit down in the coffee shop and get so excited about his/her idea that I can yell "You are a FUCKING Genius KId". I think I would love to tell her/her to call someone who had something similar and get with him/her to build their startup.I think I would love to be woken up by the same entrepreneurs at 3 AM, just because the servers are down and they are freaking out as users in Russia are assaulting them with emails. I think I would love to help him/her calm down and find a solution to the problem. I think I would love to relax sometime in my beach-side coffee shop and laugh with them about how 3 years ago they had only an idea, a passion and $1.75, and today the only think that worries them is "how the HELL are they going to keep 1, 2, 3 millions users happy?"

But before doing all that, I think I need to be in the same situation the kid is. I must start with nothing and build something. I must really be tired and know that the only thing that is keeping me up is Passion. I must be nervous at launch and wait for the first 1000 registered users. I would be a fool if i was to give advices to someone if I don't know how they feel at the time. The problem may be different, but the feeling is the same.

Maybe you feel like me. Maybe you like to THINK and CREATE, but adore to SHARE. Maybe instead of sharing features like WEB2.0 standard, you want to share your experience and help someone else become successful. Maybe you just want to smile and tell the entrepreneur. "You got yourself, myself and my wife's money into a HELL of A MESS, Now ROLL UP your sleeves and let's FIX THIS THING"

That's why I am starting a STARTUP.
That sounds like a good idea. I'd love to see more meetup posts here, but the problem is, they have only local appeal and so usually don't get voted up.

I'm also in Boston, or rather one of the Boston suburbs. I'm pretty sure there are other Boston folks around. So if somebody could propose a time and a space...
I noticed that the amazon stock price seems to have taken a jump of ~25% four days ago, what was that all about - was it related to the buzz around S3 and ECx?
Anyone in the Atlanta area? Alternatively I will be in the CA bay area in july..
"Be the change you want to see in the world" --Ghandi
Sorry, but what's the connection to Startup News?
The code explicitly protects against that.
Not to mention Flex/Flash's ability to scale to screen size is much more flexible than laying out pages via XHTML/CSS
Mozy Online Backup: Free. Automatic. Secure.
I wouldn't say that anybody who programs is likely to be able to pick up a new language easily. Anybody who has been exposed to most of the common ways of thinking about programming (functional, logic, the various subsets of OO, imperative) can probably pick up a language that uses any of those pretty easily (it's basically just syntax from there). Similarly, someone who knows both Chinese and English can probably pick up French pretty easily, because their tools for thinking about languages are expanded enough that picking up another one doesn't involve significant restructuring.

However, if you take someone who programs in Basic, and try to teach them Lisp, it will take them a long time, because there are lots of new concepts to learn. Similarly, if you take an English speaker and try to teach them Chinese, there will be a lot of stuff to learn, and it will take a long time.
I wonder if they are using S3?
Don't ever let anyone tell you that something is too competitive
Audrey Tang's talk about Perl 6 (Google Video)
Scaling lisp web apps
Hi,

Does anyone have any idea on scaling high traffic sites in Common Lisp? Does any existing server or framework store session objects on disk? So far I couldn't find a CL client for memcached, are there any other ways to handle caching?
If access to the closures are session-specific, you'll have to hijack the session to do that.
How would you design the AOL or Yahoo Homepage?
"I tried to learn Chinese and it was super hard! Anyone who can speak Chinese must be smart!"
"in that case it's a bit like a continuation."

Doesn't MzScheme (assuming it's what Arc is built on) have first-class continuation already?
I can see how being in your boxers doing your laundry when some guy comes in with a video camera strapped to his head, broadcasting to the world, would be a bit disconcerting.
I actually went directly from Basic to Lisp. The hardest thing for me was conceptualizing recursion. Once that was out of the way, progress came easily.
My impression is that the Lisp development community is fairly small, and there's a serious lack of available software -- e.g. check Freshmeat. It looks like a lot of it ends up being DIY. I'm not sure how much start-up secrecy plays into that, where once you've done the work to implement something in Lisp, you don't want to immediately share that with everyone else.
We are moving to using an Apache server with modlisp http://www.fractalconcept.com/asp/G2a5/sdataQIbvOFvsMNhMDM==/sdataQuvY9x3g$ecX with the lisp side sending html to Apache. We're using and very happy with the Allegroserve html macro, and are currently using Aserve's webactions for session control only. We're worried about the scalability of webaction's session, so our current plan is to write a new session control module ourselves. If there are any other Lispers planning to scale their webapplication who need sessions, maybe we could band together and create an opensource web session solution?
Dan Ingalls working on a new web application platform for Sun
This is the spirit of my post. I feel Lisp stretches the way most programmers think. You have to have determination, intelligence and a knack for understanding different concepts to really get it. Moving from one OO language to another doesn't quite require the same effort/understanding.
The article isn't the clearest, but Flair seems likely to be a Smalltalk-like platform implemented in Javascript (and vice versa). Does this mean that client-side Java is now officially dead? Also, what will Flair's display engine be - does Sun have something that can compete with WPF or PDF?

(Via programming.reddit , courtesy of Reddit user crmaki .)
I'm using 'perception' in the broader sense -- a person may _perceive_ that startups are too risky, that politician X is dishonest, that God is acting in their life, etc.

However, even simpler perceptions can be affected by our environment. For example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asch_conformity_experiments
"a high proportion (32%) conformed to the erroneous majority view of the others in the room when there were at least three confederates present, even when the majority said that two lines different in length by several inches were the same length"
Why would you want to compare it to java? Ye gods man, java/c/c++/c# aren't exactly the kind of languages I'd want a new language to compare with.

Python, Ruby, Haskell98, ocaml, etc. Consider those your languages that set the bar right now. Java is 'the new' C.
Are you sure your motives were entirely pay-by-the-minute? Aren't you proud of what you built? Pride is intrinsic motivation. Joy of programming is intrinsic motivation. Beating the other guy is intrinsic motivation.

'If I write five more lines I get another dollar' is extrinsic motivation
"Lisp's paradigm is sufficiently different from the normal imperative languages, e.g. C or Python, that grokking Lisp means you understand more than one paradigm. It's this that's valuable, not knowledge of Lisp itself."

This was exactly my point... grokking Lisp is a hallmark of intelligence. I don't think there is any other programming language that rises to this level.
Has anybody tried PCLinuxOS? That's what I just installed on my laptop and I love it!
I like the idea of IRC. You don't have to continuously chat there, you could just sit IDLE in there and chime in whenever.

I'm a huge Gamer and because of IRC, I got to know a lot of good gamers. So lets do a Y Comb IRC. It's a good way to get to know people, especially if you're not in the Boston Area. You really have nothing to lose as you will always have the Y Comb threads to read. For those who aren't interested, you don't need to join IRC..purely optional.

So lets pick a channel..jey's channel?
Except no one is a native speaker of a programming language.

The more valid comparison might be "Anyone who can speak Latin must be smart," and that is probably not far wrong.
Frames are, of course, just an abstraction, not actual discrete entities. Another way of understanding it is to think of your frame as a linear combination of other frames. If two or more heavily weighted frames are in conflict, as they were in your case, then there's going to be some stress.

From your description, it sounds as though you actually switched frames at work from that of an idealist trying to do the best possible job, to that of a cynic who just plays along with a system you don't respect. This new frame is more compatible with your startup frame, since it understands that stupidity of large organizations creates opportunities for startups to succeed.
Maybe, anybody who knows how to use a dictionary to translate one word to another is smart.

Because if you simply "know" a language, it means nothing unless you quantify some experience behind that simple awareness of the language syntax.

A lot of people say they "know", when they mean "know about."
Correct, unless the closure explicitly removes itself when executed, of course.
It does, and so does Arc, but I don't think we've needed them in anything we've written so far. News.YC is a pretty simple application.
"When I was in Architecture school, all of my professors tried to convince us students that there were no new ideas, everything had been done. That nothing great was created/designed/invented by individuals, it was all thanks to groups. That the heroic in architecture was impossible and undesirable. That Wright's Falling water was banal, just a bunch of concrete plates stacked up above each other. All of this foolishness was washed away when I worked for Paul Rudolph in NYC who single handedly was designing some of the most beautiful and heroic buildings I had ever seen. The experience saved my world view of what is possible."

Have you read The Fountainhead by any chance? :)
Probably, if only for the same kind of reasons that tends to be true of Python or Ruby: http://paulgraham.com/pypar.html
Kyro - what you're saying makes a lot of sense, but you're working under different assumptions than I. Sppose you chose random groupings from the set of all YC funded founders, and give them a random idea from set of all initial ideas, the resulting companies might be different, but the ratio of successes will stay the same. (Assume everyone is equally good friends, etc.)

The launched YC companies all built the company, including all the "atmosphere, communities, ease of use, value, services, etc." in three months or so. Again, any random pairing of YC funded founders could have done this. For example, I don't think any random pair of founders could run a successful MEMS foundry, which requires specific knowledge.

So, now, I read the question as what's different about the founders and not, the company.
I write Lisp/Scheme for living, but I'm not sure I can make such a bold statement (esp. how Lisp compares to other functional/logical languages---they do require different paradigm).

But I can tell one thing from my experience: All competent Lisp programmers I know are also pretty good at C, C++, Java, or even Assembly. Even if they don't initially, they quickly become good. So, in empirical sense, using Lisp as one filtering factor can work. (But be aware: The fact that they can write good Java code doesn't mean they want to do so).
Current MozyPro pricing for business accounts:
Licenses:	$3.95 each per month
Storage:	$0.50 / GB per month
is that a subtle kick in the ass? :)
Why Skype is NOT Web 2.0
Who are the target users for this site?
There is AllegroCache for storing objects, which is supposed to be nice (though, I've never used it):

http://www.franz.com/products/allegrocache/

I don't know how much it costs, either.
I'd remove about half the stuff on it.
Dammit... should be working now.

Thanks for pointing that out!