skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They also have a Foo Camp style conference, 10 points if you can guess its name before clicking through:

http://meetingsnet.com/strategy/process/meetings_toss/
Hahaha I have to admit I didn't guess it. With it being Disney though I should have been able to.
I actually have the opposite experience - I'm slower at 26 than I was at 19. Or so it seems, at least - perhaps I'm just taking on more ambitious projects (though if you believe tx, the desktop apps I did at 19 must be much harder than the webapps I'm doing now).

In my experience, raw speed starts out slow when you first learn a language/platform and quickly accelerates as you memorize & internalize the details of your platform. Every master programmer will tell you that the secret to high productivity is being able to keep the whole program in your head at once. I can program as fast as I type as long as I've got all the language syntax, API details, previously-written functions in my head. If I have to look anything up, it slows me down significantly.

But it only takes me about a month or two to reach that level of fluency. After that, it's downhill as new knowledge crowds out working knowledge you need for your day-to-day programming.

I found that my Java productivity took a major hit after I learned Lisp, for instance. Why? Because I kept wanting to use closures every time I had my IDE auto-generate a new Runnable. Because I kept wanting to use closures every time I created a new private class that was only used in one place. Because I kept wishing I had CLOS accessors every time I had my IDE autogenerate getters and setters. I think I spent far more time angsting over how much Java sucked than actually programming Java.

The real benefits of experience seems to be in knowing when not to program something. At my first job, I spent a week rolling my own encryption algorithm for passwords (why oh why did the experienced programmers I was working with not tell me this was a bad idea when I asked?). Now, I'd just reach for a SHA-1 library and one-way hash the passwords instead of trying to bake a reversible algorithm myself. I spent a long time typing up getters and setters for my classes then - now I'd autogenerate them with my IDE, or rearrange my methods so they aren't necessary at all. If I were in a position to use Lisp, I'd use it instead of worrying about how much Java sucked (okay, I use Python for my startup, but the point stands - no Java).
Do schools kill creativity?
Its new name is one of the best-kept secrets on the web, because it's a fairly recent rebrand of Max Media Manager, which itself was a fork of phpAdsNew, etc. This is very well-done PR, but I'm not sure there's an actual story there.

Still, I went with RevSense because it has per-day units. It seems pretty worthwhile.
I can't watch the video right now, but the answer is no. Seating students in a grid of small desks and forbidding them from speaking or doing anything other than what they're told does not kill creativity. It merely maims it.

My kids go to a school that nurtures creativity, but such schools are hard to come by.
With a bit of froth forming in the VC market again its no surprise they are using some alternative tactics to land deals. When the situation is right, I think it makes sense to modestly reward the entrepreneur at the funding milestone, especially if they may happen to need to money.

Sometimes it feels like the VC dollar is made out to be so such a huge blessing to the entrep that they should be forever indebted. This puts the VC on this high pedastool when in fact both VC and entrep should be on the same footing, each brings value to the relationship so its a partnership.

I don't think this comment came out as Ron intended.
Well, that list of ideas is pretty surreal. Saying that, I have personally really liked Django. The biggest thing going for it is the ease with which you can get started and make something fairly impressive (I find RoR, in comparison, more intimidating and more magical). Also, the source is very readable (always a plus when you start pushing the limits of your framework).

Something like dynamically generating content on a per user basis is a breeze with Django, they have fantastic user and session support straight out of the box. The public site design would also be doable, but probably a lot of work to keep it from being a security disaster.

Your AI and Spiders could be separate Python processes, so that would be doable. The Online CAD/drawing stuff I don't have anything on, but you could probably integrate a flash or ajax library to do it without too much trouble. Also Django scales easily with great built in caching support.

Feel free to email me any questions.

Also, all the things you want can be done in any framework, its just that it'll be far more painful in some than others. I'd focus on looking at frameworks with preexisting libraries or modules you can use to create your functionality instead of having to build it all from scratch.
A very insightful and stimulating talk.
Move to San Francisco.
I'd say the scenario is highly dependent on the founders and what they're made of.

This money can go towards a "want" or a "need." Addressing a "want" could create new distractions for the founding team. Addressing a "need" could very well put aside existing distractions (i.e. immediate financial future).
I'm a web novice too so take my advice as such ..
My requirements are similar to yours, backend ANN's and frontend graph visualization.

I'd go with whatever you currently feel most comfortable with. Getting the first version out there in the fastest way possible will give you a chance to judge feasibility and traction.

The minor differences between current popular languages and frameworks will the least of the problems in getting the app up and running (and honestly inspite of all the wars they don't matter all that much)

As for me I'm using ROR/C++/Javascript.
Part II of the Margin Manifesto
For some reason, every time I think of public schools these days the first thing that comes to mind are all those learned helplessness studies that have been done on animals.
Is the development of automated tests a waste of time for a startup?
I always go back and forth on this one. It always feels great when the tests catch an introduced bug, but it is really worth the time you could be spending on testing out new features with users?

I wonder if the solution is to be careful to write very simple, well designed code.
These folks are trying something similar but it doesn't seem to have much traction
http://www.buildv1.com/about
It also depends on the size of your team and the quality of engineers and code. Having tests is usually a plus, but they don't always have to be a high priority.
New Features At Google Analytics
This site is very well designed and a great idea. Good work!
In regards to ajax applications, is idempotence an important consideration? I use ajax/GETs to change server state, does this really matter?

inklesspen's objections to GETs changing server state seem to be based on web-accelerators following links. If web accelerators do not parse js, then inklesspen's objections are not relevant. Am I correct?
FaceBook guys really know some top-notch PR folks. I have never seen a web site API being launched with so much drama.

A platform? Can I build an application on this platform that runs on it's own domain name and takes over 100% of browser real estate? (I am not being sarcastic, I am asking since I haven't spent much time drilling into it)
Paul Buchheit: The dogmatic programmer - when software becomes religion
Without automatic testing dynamic languages are not very productive because they do not catch type mismatch errors during compilation time (there isn't one). With statically typed languages you get a lot of tiny issues taken care of once you hit magic "compile" button and compiler does some basic sanity checks.

Without solid unit tests backing you, activities like removing "obsolete" methods or renaming classes/modules turn into nightmare with duck typed languages.
"is pretty surreal. . ." --tell me about it =) Frankly, I think it's too many features. We've a prioritized development schedule based on user input, and I expect that we'll find that the site becomes what we want/need at around 1/3-1/2 of these features.

That's good to hear, about Django, given the prominence of user/session support in our plans. Public site design is frankly a secondary concern: I think a template system will be more than enough. But, I figured I'd throw it out there.

We've already rolled a simple CAD/drawing app via the element, and I expect that to be more than sufficient.

Thanks a bunch for your input! I'll be sure to be in contact as we proceed.
Different people like doing things different ways. Some ways are better and more secure. If you do it the expedient way you take a risk.

Anyway, I don't really have a point. I prefer doing things right over doing things quickly (whether or not I'm writing missile guidance software). Maybe that makes me a crappy programmer, but my results are always higher quality.

Suppose you're in the chair building business. You really want your profits, so you hack together a quick design. You sit in it, and hey, it holds up. It's even sorta comfy! So you build and sell them, and the customers generally like the chair too. But after a year, they break, so they have to come back and buy another chair. (Hey, this is sounding like a good idea, maybe I'm in the wrong business.)

Does this abstraction hold with software? Possibly. Shipping desktop software is a lot like shipping a chair, except upgrades are free. The web takes that and ups the speed of updates by a factor of, say, a hundred. So now we have the tantalizing possibility of shipping half-working software and 'fixing things as they become a problem'.

That might be a good mantra to follow, or it might not.. Only you can decide. I fight for quality over speed. Yeah, we only have 70-some-odd years of solid craftsmanship left, but taking an extra few days to design something that works better won't cause you grief and will save you headaches.

Shawn
If you have humans writing code for you, tests are an imperative. Without tests, one seemingly small code error can wipe out a smatter of user-created data accidentally. Sure, it's worse case, but it could also mean lights out for your startup. You have to decide if it's worth the risk.
We didn't write tests for our last startup and we never had too many problems with bugs.

We do write tests for this one and we don't have too many problems with bugs.

Tests take almost as much time to develop as the features do. I just wonder if it is worth the time and if other people with startups write automated tests.
I actually complete disagree with sillydude. Even though automated tests may make the team be a bit slower while developing, the suite sure as hell makes the code the team produces more reliable. So, while the speed of development is very important, so is quality of the product you get out there, even when it's something simple. The more small, simple bugs you can get out of the way before launch, the better. So, automated tests are, at least in my opinion, high priority.
According to Alexa, iLike has lost 70% of their Web site traffic since launching on Facebook
I recently read about partnerup.com but can't join - apparently because I live outside the U.S.
Chime.TV: A Prettier Way to Watch YouTube
First sentence, "Do believe that...", should be "Do you believe that..." - unless you deliberately wrote it like this to catch out people who believe there's only one way to write things ;-)

Nice post btw.
Writing tests is just part of programming, whether it's for a startup or any other project.
I'd say try to plan for how much you will need to scale your code, and also how many others will be working on your code.

As your code gets larger, and as you start to have others working on it (who could break it), unit tests become more important. If you dont foresee either of these happening, then the time investment for tests may not be worth it..
Oops, fixed :)

thanks
Shouldn't you be backing this kind of data up? You can't guarantee that tests will catch this anyway.
Oh sure, blame Arc.
That is a pretty conformist thing to say
Is there evidence that time spent writing tests improves the quality of the code over time spent reading the code and trying to make sure it is simple and straightforward?
If you've got good coverage, you'll have a great chance that they will. You've got to actively monitor your coverage though.

As far as backups go, a backup is only as good as it's age. If a startup is struggling to decide if they've got the resources for writing tests, they probably don't have the resources for maintaining a real-time database mirror either. You can argue that you should always back up before you roll out a code update, but the real world's not always like that.
I'm currently with RoR and while I love Ruby language I feel that RoR, while being super-productive for basic things, forces me to dig deep into its own (not very readable) source code to figure out non-trivial things that are not mentioned anywhere in the documentation.

And looking at Rails code, I find that often DHH overuses Ruby dynamism without practical benefits. Look at Rails::Initializer class and how it starts the application and handles configuration: lots of dynamism and supposed flexibility, but yet there is no simple way to access the active instance of Configuration object from arbitrary place in your Rails application, which is (to me) seems like a first thing anyone would expect from configuration.

Another example is suppressing previously rendered output (in ActionView). "Official" documentation does not mention those methods, I found them (yet again) by drilling through Rails code.

Finally, I am not impressed with Rails session support. With a framework so powerful and "magical" I still need to manually deal with cookies and session data, because there is very weak control over session expiration mechanism in Rails.

Having said all that, I still enjoy developing with RoR w-w-a-a-a-ay more than Microsoft's "WinForms on the web" approach in .NET, and Ruby is really fun.
When you've got 30,000 lines of code, you don't always have time to go back through and read all the code to make sure that the particular change you're making doesn't have drastic effects somewhere.

Writing good tests means you don't have to find and read the 200 relevant lines of code.
Can anyone explain why I can't register as Ludwig van Beethoven on Facebook? Who decides that John Smith is more "legitimate" than LvanB?
A startup to download demos, trailers and even full version of games
Co-founders wanted for TicketMaster killer.
This guy Christian Perry is a good friend of mine, and I'm sure he'd be pretty cool to work with. Zaptix also has a lot of potential, I've bought tickets on there and it was very easy.
I'd also like to vouch for Christian. He has friends every where, and I'm happy to be counted among them. Christian is best known for running the largest web 2.0 schmooze fests in San Francisco, and has been very successful in getting clients for Zaptix over the past two years as a single founder.
Think of unit-testing as a tool and not a dogma.

Proper unit-testing roughly doubles the amount of time it takes me to write a "unit" of code. This is a high cost so I do not have 100% unit-test coverage.

Over time I have developed an intuition about whether I NEED a unit-test for a particular unit. When I think I need tests I write them.

Typically I'm correct about whether the units need tests but when I make a mistake (as evidenced by bugs in the code I didn't unit-test) I go back and write the tests.

This "middle way" works well for me.
That sounds reasonable
Good luck. I'd love if it worked out. Ticketmaster probably has contracts with individual locations that bands play at, though.
This is Bryan, of the YC-backed startup Pairwise. I highly recommend this opportunity.

Christian is my roommate, so I have some insider info about ZapTix.com that I figured I should share here.

Christian is non-technical, which is why he's looking for a technical co-founder. But the sales and marketing skills that he brings to the table are immense and vital for this business.

The current site was built by an offshore team, which for better or worse, is not working out very well for him nor handling his upward growth. Based on suggestions from myself and his technical friends, he's now looking for a technical co-founder to join his team.

If I know one thing about Christian, it's that he's a hardworking entrepreneur who also maintains an admirable work-life balance. He's also a people guy. Within a month of moving to SF, he started the most popular tech event in the city - SFbeta, along with well-paying sponsors! He's well liked by all that know him and would be a great person with which to work.

I also know first-hand that the company is currently profitable, with several big-name clients, and imho has a ton of room to grow. If I weren't already tied to my current project, I would work with him.
I concur with all this stuff Bryan is saying.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ticketmaster has some info on the industry, contracts, etc

For all intents and purposes, ZapTix is working on growing outside of ticketmaster's monopoly, targeting the untapped but very willing niche of school and university theaters.
Indeed -- fewer than 10% of colleges work with TicketMaster, or for that matter, any ticketing service at all.
I was expecting robot taxis to do that one day. However, I was told that people just love their cars too much and would never get rid of them. Maybe they are right - and maybe people drive alone all the time because they like to be alone?
For some reason, I really like the philosophy of "Don't write unit tests until right before you launch, then maintain them". Good observation.
10 most and least friendly countries to small business
If one is using Postgres as the DB it is not really necessary to set up a real-time database mirror to have a very robust error recovery strategy. (I can't speak about MySQL but there is probably a similar feature.)

All you need to do is configure the Point In Time Recovery feature, write a little backup script (mine is 165 lines of Python), and then call it from cron.

With PITR as long as you have the last backup and the archived WAL files made since the last backup you can recover to the SECOND before your program puked all over the DB.
In regards to ajax applications, is idempotence an important consideration? I use ajax/GETs to change server state, does this really matter?

Whether you use ajax or not, remember that all GET requests are formed, ultimately, into a url string.

So all the usual GET limitations apply, and there will always be cases where you wouldn't want to use GET (e.g., the list of parameters is very long, or if the parameters contain non-ascii characters, etc.), regardless if ajax is involved.

If web accelerators do not parse js, then inklesspen's objections are not relevant. Am I correct?

Yes, you're correct.

Because most of the accelerators/bots/spiders/etc. out there right now do not have javascript engines, they simply cannot click on an ajax GET link.

But don't be surprised if that changes in the future: some bot authors probably know they're being foiled by their inability to execute scripts, so I wouldn't be shocked to see javascript-capable crawlers clicking ajax GET links eventually.
Christian is a great networker and plugged into the social web scene in SF.

--Justin.tv
http://www.jimdero.com/News2003/Sept14Ticketmaster.htm

the part about pearl jam is what should interest you. It talks about why it is so hard to move away from ticketmaster for an artist. And you can assume the same for a venue if they decided to host a non ticketmaster or livenation show. Those companies may in turn refuse to host future higher paying shows at that venue. Unethical but it has allegedly taken place. Just for reference, but I agree there needs to be a change.

I don't know much about college venues but that seems like a promising idea to focus on.
That's taking founders to extreme... but not as silly as it sounds. You have just described Sixaparts` Ben & Mena Trott. The key here was the complimentary skillsets & temperments. One writes codes, the other designs & communicates - a great combination.
Did Facebook Underestimate the Platform's Success?
This will not work because i) the web is too big ii) the web changes too quickly iii) it is gameable

This is a web 0.2 idea that died with Yahoo Directory.
xtian

The closest thing to a competitor that I know of (at least in the uni and arts market) is Paciolan; and after talking to them a bit about their architecture a few years ago - I don't think they pose much of a threat.

TicketMaster on the other hand... they're just scary (for many many reasons).
Research has shown [1] that unit testing actually cuts development time by 20%-30%, because in the long run you will spend less time debugging code or fixing code broken by other changes.

[1] - I don't have time to look-up the specific link right now, so you'll need to trust me on this one! :) But I'm sure one can google it. I remember reading it on an IEEE magazine years ago.
Don't click this: Why modal dialog boxes are evil
What we Are: A bunch of monkeys [YouTube]
Another huge side advantage of automated tests is that it becomes a live documentation of how to use your code (unit tests as "sample code")
This is not just an evil example -- you also get this problem when you're debugging a JavaScript loop with an alert() and you forget to increment i. :-)

But I notice that Opera handles it nicely. Each alert comes up with a tick box, "Stop executing scripts on this page." Simple and effective.
Yeah, there are other companies going after the college market, too, but so far none of them have made a major impact.
No difference? That's pretty impressive. I wish I was able to look at your process. Either your engineers are extremely smart and anal about their practicies or your domain is very simplistic (ta-da lists).

At my previous start up we had unit tests run on the entire system automatically after every check-in (with CruiseControl) and whenever someone broke a test suite, everybody got an email with name of the offender and diffs of his code against the trunk.

We also had a "beer rule" about violatros gettings drinks for everyone, to make the process a bit more exciting.
Jboss Seam introduced a very interesting concept to deal with sessions called "conversations": http://www.jboss.com/products/seam

Like sessions, conversation objects live across page requests, but die after a given action or event. A Conversation is a mid-ground between a session (long-lived) and a page request (short-lived).

Seam also offers good support for dealing with the session scope: All you need to do is to basically say "hold this object in the session scope" and Seam manages it for you. No cookies or manual session handling (unless you want to)
I think you are definitely catching on to what is going on. Microsoft is only hanging around because of the monopoly it has in its grip. As soon as Windows drops in usage (which, by the way, is happening) Microsoft will drop in ranks.
Good luck. I freaking hate TicketMaster. Aren't they supposed to be a legalized gang of mobsters?