skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To watch them in order, just use this playlist:

http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=5960E2DB224F8D33

You'll notice that all these videos together take about 7 hours to get through. Of course, they took much more time than that to create. This is one of the few instances where I feel the need to make a plug for the content creator since these videos are violating his copyright. If you use them, at least look at the other courses on their site and consider joining for a month ($30) at least. I'm not affiliated at all with these guys, but they're putting out great value and it'd be a shame to see a tiny company like this fail from folks ripping off their content and putting it on youtube. (Note that I feel very differently on this subject when it comes to some of the big media conglomerates!)

Actual link to this course: http://www.vtc.com/products/rubyonrails.htm
I think facebook are in it for the long haul, might even do an ipo and be almost google sized themselves
This is completely off topic, but I couldn't resist:
http://www.marion.ohio-state.edu/fac/schul/drp/dr.html

I've had the misfortune of trying Dr Becker and Dr Perky.

Maybe, as in soda, when it comes to early-stage funding you can't beat the original?
I don't think Google can afford a $6 billion buyout. They're on track to make maybe $16 billion this year. Microsoft is probably the only software company with a decent interest in the web and the pocketbook to pay for a highly valued site. And the aQuantive buy is the biggest they've ever done (and probably will ever do).
This is like the fifth Clay Shirkey article I've read over seven years or so, and they've all been rambling and uninteresting. I guess I'm too old to read any more.
They'll probably IPO, but there's no way they'll be Google-sized. Google is basically a money printing machine because the dominated the most monetizable activity on the internet: searching. People are looking for things to click on when they search, so if an ad comes up with something that's similar to what they're looking for, the click on it. On Facebook, people are looking for information about other people and generally zone out the ads, which is why they get such low clickthrough rates, as was reported a while back. That puts it on the opposite end of the spectrum from Google. In between are media sites, which are generally passive, but more conducive to clicking on ads than an active site where what you're looking to do is completely different from the ads.

They will be/are profitable and will probably IPO, but I don't think it'll be huge. The numbers don't justify it.

Unless they have something crazy up their sleeves, which is a definite possibility.
Major Facebook Announcement Thursday: Facebook Platform
Thank you everyone for your responses :) I was worried about the visas, but I think I need to focus on the hacking instead..
Well, if you avoid side effects assiduously enough, other languages can certainly have that sort of purity.

However, you have to remember, avoiding side effects is what enables lazy evaluation, which is a huge gain in terms of performance. If you're not restricting side effects, you can't default to lazy evaluation.
I learnt to program by writing a Forth compiler in assembler (Dad taught me). It was a superb way to learn.

One of Forth's strengths is its ultra-simple syntax. If you thought Lisp had little syntax, think again. Forth is just tokens and whitespace. You can write a compiler than can compile itself in a few screenfuls of Forth (and I'm not talking about eval).

Forth is obscure but beautiful. It's reflective, meaning you can write code that writes code (macros). Also like Lisp, you can easily roll your own control structures or add an OOP interface. But it does lack good libraries and a decent-sized user base.
I may have misinterpreted what he wanted, but if you're asking 'how do I learn to hack', it's a whole different question than 'how do I learn to write mediocre web applications'

If your goal is to learn to build rails sites, start with rails; however, if your goal is to be good at programming and subsequently be able to build things that other people can't, in the sense of PG's hacker advantage, then you should learn to hack, not build rails apps.
Ruby is so perlesque if you use all the $ variables, it's almost a push.
I have just started poking with forth, after seeing some network card firmware source written in it.

One of the most interesting things, to me, was the built-in disassembler: if you ask 'how is this word defined', and it's not defined in the current environment, it'll go disassemble the binary and show you that.

Pretty insane, if you think about having to write software to interface with old / undocumented / closed source libraries.
Oh yes, and Forth has an elegant solution to Paul Graham's "accumulator generator" problem (though Forth isn't dynamically typed, so it only works for integers):

: accgen create , does tuck +! @ ;

From comp.lang.forth:
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.forth/msg/f06370fed978abff?dmode=source
A Great Idea Lives Forever. Shouldn't Its Copyright?
This is quite a provacative article. I don't think I agree with its conclusions, but still an insightful read.
This is (sort of) a misunderstanding of how most buyouts work. Google, were they to "acquire" facebook for $6B would almost certainly structure it as a stock-swap merger. This way the acquisition isn't a taxable event, and they can use stock instead of cash.

At GOOG's current market cap, $6B of dilution would be pretty minimal.

Not mention the $10B of cash equivalents (and growing, fast) on their balance sheet to buyback stock or even do a full cash deal if they were feeling crazy.
True... And not having lazy evaluation encourages one to write Matrix.CalculateDeterminant() rather than Matrix.determinant, as it should be. But I don't think that has to do with reuse.
How To Crank Through Your Gmail
In general, if a startup fails, that's part of the deal. The entrepreneur loses thousands of hours of work. He doesn't owe anything to his investors.

What's different about Evan's story that compelled him to repay them?
Interesting, but does it still work if you are sending far more messages than you are receiving? I haven't used Twitter, but I imagine that for every SMS they receive they have to send out dozens of update SMS (to all "friends").
Does YC help with the visas?
Ok, that makes it much clearer.

Another thing that I found annoying is the 'please wait' screen. It plays around with my mouse cursor and gives me a 'forbidden' (circle with a slash) rather than the proper hourglass/waiting cursor that is appropriate for this situation. You might consider canning the 'please wait' bit entirely, or make it less prominent.
OK, let's get rid of copyright and instead require individuals wanting some protection for their works to publish under Creative Commons Licenses.

Copyright can't be forever because it's too restrictive. Information wants to be free.
i have the confidence and motivation to go it alone, however, i think startups work better with twos. most of the initial work is done. but post launch a one man band may be a little too much!
When is a startup not a startup anymore?
Hmm... interesting story... the question, in my mind, is when will the rest of the world learn the good news?? Especially when travelling in places like South America, everywhere you go, everyone runs windows computers... They're just easier to handle, and manage, when the software comes pre-installed. That people haven't yet had the opportunity to learn and use linux, or that there isn't an open OSX for them to be able to use is a crying shame... And until they have access to the software, they won't be able to enjoy these benefits, that we know to be the case, of Microsofts legacy starting to be buried...
Businesspundit: Please Stop With Your Chinese Math
Powerful lure of the useless extra feature
Yahoo!s New Mission: Its About the People
Mozilla, Google Favored Over Adobe, Microsoft for Web App Deployment
Social bookmarking sites better at search than google?
Take the time to discuss in detail the reasons for his loss of interest. There may be some good ideas there. I'm not suggesting trying to convince him to stay, but it's never too late to change focus in subtle ways.
When you start:

+ Putting policy above common sense.

+ Hiring project managers.

+ Have daily status reports.

+ Have a change control process.

+ Place slickness (suits) above productivity (hackers).
Sales prove elusive: Emeryville gourmet chocolate company has a rough go of it (pay-per-click)
Copyrights and patents don't exist to protect their inventor. They provide an incentive for people to create IP, which is beneficial to society. Extending IP rights tends to increase the incentive. On the other hand, works in the public domain are sources of wealth in their own right (esp. patents). Thus, there is a critical amount of protection X, where society is best served. X varies with the field, technological status, and other things.

The inventor's well-being is only a side-effect of this optimization problem. The same argument applies against claims that taxes "steal" from people. It's all just a big incentive structure. Nothing personal.
Cambrian House: A Web 2.0 way to start a business
Welcome to the era of gullibility 2.0
Google, Salesforce.com reportedly in alliance
Even Yahoo! Gets The Blues
'... What about Moore's law, though? ...'

You are correct that Moores law helps but only to a point. It's not computer processing power that is the bottleneck at the moment. It's the telephone companies and Internet access. The ability to push that data around the Internet. What we all need (idealistically) is our own feed, independent of the monopoly that currently exists.

I happened to be listening to a Brewster Kayle talk on this particular problem (ITConversations ITC-400, Universal Access to All Knowledge, 1Hr38m, 45Mb, 2004DEC16 ~ http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail400.html ) and he goes into great detail explaining the problems with physical distribution of information via networks.
- Once a copyright expires, the physical medium encoding the work (book, CD, etc...) becomes a commodity, which anyone can replicate. Under good competition, the profit from selling those should be very small. Even moreso in the digital age.

- The article complains a lot that everything is inherited, except IP protection. One can look at it in the opposite direction: these days, many rich people are coming out against inherited wealth. Taxing it to a larger extent than normal would make sense, from a mechanism design point of view. My guess is that this cannot be done effectively; people would just start giving away their property to their children before dying, escaping the "death tax". Copyrights are easier to take away, because they have a natural owner.
Too complex. I saw that, and I thought - too much information at once.
Sounds like they are trying to reimplement the web.
I'm new to Linux. I've got Ubuntu and K&R. Now what?
Good points both. Arguments like the article's sound plausible because copyright law is currently weirdly implemented. What is so special about the creator's death? Assign copyright for a fixed duration from publication, just like patents.
"Intel should be ashamed of itself" -- OLPC's Negroponte
Intel's Classmate has inferior technology with much higher cost, e.g. the screen, and the poor battery life, last time I looked. http://www.gettysfamily.org/wordpress/?p=34
... go start a company?
one-to-one personalized social news via a discussion forum/email hybrid using explicit credit allocation
The idea here is to combine public discussion forums with email.

When browsing through a public forum, you can give credits to people whom you would like to hear news from.

For example, you might give 2 credits to person A. A may then send you 2 emails (only).

So this encourages people to make insightful posts in public forums and email so that they can receive more credits to send personalized news.
'... take more of a back seat in return for less equity but also less initial investment ...'

Bummer, but all is not lost. This is actually a good thing to happen now, rather than later. How much investment? A lot? Can you do without it? Can you repay them back? Is it worth keeping someone on who doesn't really want to contribute but still wants some control?

'... we have been working on the project for a few months ...'

This is good. The longer you work on the project the more investment is required (time, money and effort). It's also good to weed out early someone who is not willing to go the full journey. So in this respect you are lucky. You haven't created a lot of value that has to be split up or given a dollar value.

'...	What to do when your co-founder takes a backseat? ...'

Use the ejector button?

'... What do you reckon I should do? get another co-founder? ...'

Find another co-founder. Work out if you need your ex-founders investment, skills at a later date. If not re-pay the investment. Try to determine why the co-founder has left? Is it because of lack of interest, skill, commitment? Is it they found a better offer?
You've got to be kidding. "No good case exists for the inequality of real and intellectual property"? The writer has put hardly any thought into it at all. There's no insight here; just shallow, selfish thinking.
What's your aim? If you've K&R are you trying to learn C? If you want to learn the Unix philosophy then get Kernighan and Pike's _The Unix Programming Environment_. If you want to create a web start-up, learn Python and Django. What skills do you already have?
'... I'm new ... Now what? ...'

Learn how to become a hacker ~ http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html
There's no such thing as intellectual property. Copyright is a limited monopoly that the public gives to an author in exchange for an author enriching the public with his works. If the public is never to enjoy the full enrichment that comes from the work (such as being able to use it for the basis of other stories, the way we do with Shakespeare), then the intent of copyright is being perverted.
Amazingly Bad APIs
Are you a Django fan? If not, what's your motive for solely recommending Django, instead of TurboGears or Pylons?

(Yes, the fact that Python has multiple frameworks is a problem, but settling on Django is not a solution.)
That's a good post. The same thing he describes with Java, with the UML and the "abstraction" quest, happen on big .NET projects. C# is a fine language if that's your thing, but boy look out for the UML architects and the patterns. You'll have a tough time doing things like, "I just want to display a person's name on the screen" without getting into adapters, visitors, etc.
Last blog post was about file uploading, with emphasis on image files. This one uses image resizing as the example. What is Paul working on?
Django is a reasonable enough one to learn. He hasn't the skills to examine the possible contenders and make a good decision himself. After learning Django, then he may be in a position to better appraise the competition.

Likewise, I didn't say "read a book on Unix" but gave a specific, worthy, contender. As a complete newcomer there's little more annoying than general hand-waving.
He should also read Snow Crash or Cryptonomicon to become inspired to hack. Man I love those books.

Snow Crash at scribd: http://www.scribd.com/doc/10862/Neal-Stephenson-Snow-Crash
A poor implementation of the web. Doesn't sound like it'll be very friendly towards other websites :(
What do you want to do? Join one of the smaller open source projects, get a mentor and build something amazing! :-)

Seriously, I do think that some hands-on useful development is the fastest track to become a master of your domain! :-)
Here's the Google cache, in case you get stuck at the paid registration screen: http://209.85.165.104/search?q=cache:hx6IysW2pqMJ:boston.bizjournals.com/boston/stories/2007/05/21/story1.html%3Fb%3D1179720000%255E1464211+Angels+clip+wings+of+entrepreneurs&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us
Anyone heard of a decent performance comparison of Rails/PHP vs ASP.NET? I have a rough idea of difference in speed between languages (Ruby/C#) but as far as frameworks are concerned there is more than raw language power to a framework performance.

I have seen people compare only interpreted frameworks before (Django/Rails) but nothing like Rails/ASP.NET.
We still have some major features we want in place before we open it to the public. But the people on ycombinator are probably some of the most critical we will find so we decided to give an early sneak peak to you guys.

We will be sending out a second batch of codes today.
But as we have noticed that some of our emails are going straight to junk.

So if you applied for an invite code last week please type your email address in as the invite code to gain full access. Let me know if anyone has questions. Thanks
"No one except perhaps Hamilton or Franklin might have imagined that services and intellectual property would become primary fields of endeavor and the chief engines of the economy."

What bullshit. Ideas already were the "chief engines" in their time, a somewhat famous period called the "Industrial Revolution". The crown forbade the transfer of manufacturing knowledge, textile mill plans, etc, on pain of death. The Colonies were forced to sell raw materials cheap and buy manufactured goods dear.

The author also conflates the problem of publishing cartels with copyright, jangling an image of the poor starving writer brutalized by the pinko copyleft junta. He gives it away: the author gets 10% of sales while the publisher gets 50%. Who, then, is to benefit most from unlimited copyright? Why should we worry about the yachts of the writer's grandchildren when the writer is being robbed blind in his own lifetime?
Wikipedia content imported into Study Stickies
Does Your Website Pass the .7 Second Test?
Bad Hair Days Lead Pair to Web Incubator and Venture Capital
Interesting to know what they have the power of doing!
It's Time to Call your Biggest Customer
It's probably a new paradigm of enterprise software that enables clients to achieve their full growth potential.
I thought it would make for good discussion. Seems I was right :)
Google has alot of data and as you can see alot of reasons to share it!
Success and Motivation - Mark Cuban
There are two fundamental problems here.

One is that the customer can't easily discern between a good company and an evil company without doing business with them. Once they hit a certain size and have a large enough customer base, reputation helps.

But companies that act in their own short-term interests without regard to integrity are likely to out-compete companies that try to behave ethically -- so all other things being equal, if a large company doesn't make a fuss about ethics and integrity, odds are it's evil.

The ethical company has the long-term advantage, but the unethical company has the short-term advantage. If the unethical company can use the short-term advantage to its benefit, it can build up enough of a business that it's hard to topple despite being unethical.

The second point is that the larger the company, the more its inherent trend towards self-serving (probably evil) behavior. Bureaucracies are inhuman, because the responsibility for the evil act or evil policy can always be passed on elsewhere or euphemized away, and a large number of problems turns into a statistic. One person screwed over by the company is a real problem; ten thousand screwed over by the company justifies the budget for the complaints department.

It takes a very principled, very public stand to avoid both of these problems.
The value of learning all those different languages is not that they're immediately and obviously useful. The value is that each one has a different set of tradeoffs and assumptions, and being fluent in all of them will teach you how to think more flexibly.

Sure, a beginner should use a language where he gets feedback and support. But a beginner who aspires to be a real programmer rather than a 9 to 5 coder will need a much broader base of experience than he can get by only working in one or two languages, and understanding that sooner rather than later is key.
I agree with this list - completely in spirit, though I'd probably recommend different languages in a few places - but I'd also recommend at least playing with a couple of "industry-standard" programming languages.

Playing with C++, for instance, especially after having used C and Java, will give you a better understanding of what not to do. And if you play with Objective-C for a while too, you'll see two ways of handling object orientation that are dramatically different: what seems like a minor difference makes for drastically different expressiveness and flexibility.

I'd also recommend picking up Perl, for a different understanding of what not to do. Ruby is at its core a reimplementation of the good parts of Perl, with inspiration from Python and Lisp, and it hits a very sweet spot as a result; Perl has a lot of good parts, but it has a lot of warts that seemed like a good idea at the time and have been preserved for backwards compatibility.

And one of the things that I've noticed is that Real Programming focuses on interfaces in a way that toy programs don't: in web programming, for instance, you're more constrained by the browser-CGI-server interface than anything else. In programming for platforms with GUIs, the learning curve is not the language you use but the API to the window system.
Remember, though, that nobody thought search was monetizable when Google dominated it. They didn't have a business model until almost 2 years in: at the time, the fad was to turn search engines into "portals" and cash in through banner advertising on the home page.

FaceBook also has the advantage of being locally-based: ads can be targetted very specifically to people within range of local businesses. People don't really search for restaurants within walking distance, and even if they did, Google doesn't know where they're located. Facebook does, however, and can display ads for local businesses that the user might not be looking for now but might want to visit later.
If you take a serious look at the constraints under which C was developed, the systems it was to be used on, and the problems it was intended as a solution to, you will see that it is most excellently designed.

Unfortunately for C, the constraints have changed, systems are orders of magnitude more powerful, and people have attempted to use C for many things it was not well-suited to.
Hm, I guess that's fair enough. My main concern is that if he starts with Django, he might never know there's other frameworks.
You need to separate the analysis:

1. What he/she gets as part of investing capital in the company (and whether that's going to be equity or debt)

2. What he/she gets as part of having an operating role in the company.

The good news is that this happened now (vs. later). The bad news is it sucks to lose a co-founder.
Whatever it is I can assure you it doesn't involve a database.
Here are the links to parts 2 and 3:

http://www.blogmaverick.com/2004/04/25/success-and-motivation-part-2/

http://www.blogmaverick.com/2004/05/07/success-and-motivation-part-3/
What hooked Google's 12th recruit