skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The downside is obviously the prolixity. The upside, of course, is that if you ever want to slightly deviate from the default implementation in another language, it's a huge pain. If you notice you're doing the same image transformation multiple times, take the few hours (or few minutes with a Google search) it takes to get something put together that works exactly as you want it. Whenever I'm writing in a language with lots of libraries, I find myself compromising on functionality for the sake of convenience.

And it's not as if Java isn't giving you more flexibility. How do I tweak that Python code to make the image load faster? Can I get Bicubic interpolation on the resize? How well do those image objects integrate with other parts of python, i.e. are they basically just special objects for this library or could they be used in other ways later?

As a person who doesn't mind writing code and whose IDE autogenerates a lot of boilerplate anyway, I think I'll take the 100 line hit so I know what's going on.
Surely the next step is to contact some VC companies and ask for say, $10 million :-). This really is an open ended question! If you are about to start programming then there is no limit to the possibilities so you'd better pick a direction to go in that you will find interesting. Good luck.
I suppose I was using "afford" somewhat loosely. I still think $6 billion would be a huge amount for Google to drop in one place, stock or (especially) otherwise.
Right, I'm saying, code reuse via no side effects is a nice part of the package deal
It's amazing how poorly people can use reason. The author is a good example. He feels that if he can make an analogy -- however strained it might be -- that he has won his point.

Obviously he's wrong. An idea is not physical property. He gives a passing nod to the founding fathers but fails to mention any part of the debate that led to the copyright/patent clause. Jefferson, for one, says that it is ridiculous to treat an idea as if it existed in the physical world. That's why they settled for "limited monopoly" -- because they recognized that you can only live in a fantasy world for so long.

I guess if I had to answer this guy directly -- the question posed in his headline -- I might say:

Great ideas do not live forever. They need to evolve and have the benefit of other minds to hack at them, to improve them. Ask Walt Disney. He took the ideas in the stories of the Brothers Grimm -- horrifying stories, if you've ever read them -- and made them new, as well as palatable. Every idea has its time, and its author does deserve a short monopoly as a congratulations. Then it's others' turn. And in my book, that limited time is very, very short: perhaps five years, perhaps even less.

Ideas benefit from hacking. If we want to stifle creativity and innovation, we should freeze them in time with laws. If our aim is the opposite, then we should consider giving them lives of their own. You're right: ideas live. But things can only live if you are willing to give them freedom.
Extending IP rights tends to increase the incentive.

Maybe, although I'd argue that shortening "IP" rights creatives more incentive. If your cash cow only lives for so long, you might be more motivated to make more cows.

Also, incentive for the author only exists when the copyright/patent is held by the author, and while he's alive. Our copyright laws allow copyrights to be "purchased" and bequeathed (no such allowance in the consitution), and held long after the author's death. Charles Schultz is never going to create a new Snoopy. Why is his copyright still valid?
I was thinking along the same lines. The whole argument reads like one of those anti-piracy commercials we see before movie previews... think of the poor starving artist! (Don't think about the reason he is starving, which is that the publishers/labels/studios reap most of the profits for themselves.)

He also seems to think that copyright only applies to the world of books. This is probably natural because the guy is an author, but copyright has been expanded to include so much that infinite copyright terms would grant dynastic control of almost all media and culture.

I would like to point out however that the point is moot. Every time Disney comes close to letting Mickey Mouse slip into the public domain, they successfully lobby congress for an extension to copyright terms. So, as far as we can tell, the terms are already infinite, because I don't see Congress saying no anytime soon.
http://www.blogmaverick.com/2004/05/25/success-and-motivation-p4/
How does YC's moderation system work?
How to Design for Word-of-Mouth
I'm sure everyone knows but me... or maybe it's one of those 'competitive advantage' secrets... I was just curious how the ordering on the front page works, etc.
No, but I've tried pressing spacebar to turn the page.
You have to pay something like 29.99 USD for every bump up on the front page you want. The guys who have their stories at the top pay somewhere close to the thousands, if I'm not mistaken.
Up arrow, down arrow.
The problem with over-abstraction is that it makes all specific tasks equally difficult. In order to make the hard easier, it makes the easy harder. And that's assuming that you aren't using some slight boundary condition of the abstraction, in which case even the hard becomes even harder still.

Usually, the first thing you think of (in this case, the way the python is implemented) is usually best. If you need something more specific, a specific, instead of abstract, solution is probably better.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/LeakyAbstractions.html
Is Wikipedia worth billions?
Charles is great stuff. Buy some for a special lady in your life. Even the box is made of chocolate.
How did Facebook grow so big suddenly?
I remember at one point of time they were smaller than bebo, hi5 etc. Suddenly, they obliterate these people
Facebook Opens Its Pages as Way to Fuel Growth
I admit it s good thing to happen now, I am not bitter in any way. i am almost glad.

1) The investment is not a lot in monetary value but I couldn't get started without it, in that respect it is "worth it" I could probably pay the person back if the company made even a little money. The person is still involved in the sense that I could ask for help and ideas etc but i would not expect proactive participation.

2) You are right, almost no value has been created as of yet, so if we were to shut up shop tomorrow, he would have lost out.

3) I think the ejector button would be too strong, the advice etc this person has given and i am sure will give will be invaluable. however, i would not expect a LOT of work in terms of execution. But then execution is what matters. If the company did well I believe this person would join. But i would not expect him to leave his job in uncertainty.

4) He left because he is just not THAT interested in Web Apps. No interest = no determination and no determination = no startup in all honesty. Maybe I should have seen this coming. I was visibly more enthusiastic than him.

I think I will push forward until launch (mid-summer) on my own but will look out for another co-founder. If anything this situation has made me more determined to succeed. I am reminded of Evan Williams at Blogger!
What's the source of your statement? I've talked to few cell companies and they never offered anything even remotely as attractive. Best we could do is get a discount. You're talking about revenue sharing. I've never seen anyone extract that out of them.
I would like to know the exact front page algorithm as well. It will help me clone YC News that much easier. :x
Did they change the application deadline? I could have sworn the deadline to submit the startup was end of May, now it's July 6?
Yeah, but Charles Schultz could sell his copyright for more money because the new holder knew that it would still be valid for a long time.

Though, there might be a case to be made that we'd all be better off if copyrights could not be sold, only licensed for short periods.

I think the point here is that it's a complex problem, and the article does nothing to represent that.
IN BRIEF: Need-to-know news for the entrepreneur
Startups increase 29 percent
No more cingular...ATT drops the brand!
Is venture capitalists and seed stage funding an oxymoron?
last100
If you have enough balls to learn C from K&R, you could try learning C++ from Koenig & Moo's "Accelerated C++" instead. C++ contains everything in C, and has a lot of handy higher level constructs. You can deal with the specific idiosyncrasies of pure C later, but can get started quickly with C++. http://tinyurl.com/26cjz9

If you don't have any background in programming, or don't really know that you want to learn C or C++ specifically, I would recommend starting with Python. C++ is good if you know that you want to write systems software, or need to interface with C/C++ libraries. If you're just looking to learn to code, then learn Python. kyro said that he enjoyed learning from the free ebook "How to Think Like a Computer Scientist: Learning with Python". http://www.ibiblio.org/obp/thinkCSpy/
Ahh, Parallels will take more RAM - I wasn't considering that, thanks for pointing it out. As soon as you start running XP your memory requirements go through the roof.
Congrats :) I have first edition of K&R in my bookshelf and I still love it. It cost 25 slovak koruna /approx $1/ at that time :)
Universities Need To Develop Entrepreneurs
You're right: complex problem. My real point is that the authors of the Constitution thought they'd settled it. The 1st ammendment says that freedom of expression cannot be denied. Copyright law says "ok, temporarily, this expressed idea is off the table, so that the author will make more."

Schultz could sell his copyright for more money, sure. But how does that benefit anyone else? He was already given the right to publicize Snoopy -- a right that not all societies enjoy. In exchange, he would have to realize that his monopoly was short-lived.

The way Jefferson saw it, once an idea is expressed, it's not just yours anymore -- it's in my head, too. Obviously you don't own what's in my head. So with copyright laws, we're saying that the 1st ammendment does not apply, temporarily: you may know the song, but you can't sing it, even though we've now taken away your freedom of expression. That can only be short-lived, or we may as well withdraw the 1st ammendment. And it's not as if Schultz created Snoopy in a vacuum; he was influenced by other comic strip artists, and he certainly did not invent the form. Did he owe them money? Did he owe society money for allowing him to blast his drawings out to us without explicit permission?

(I've always wanted to say something to Lars from Metallica. During the Napster thing, he said, "They didn't even ask us. They just took our songs." To which I'd say, "yeah, Lars, but you never even asked me before you made your crap songs impossible for me to avoid. If I leave my house, there's your shitty music. And you never even asked." There are two sides to this coin, and it's remarkably convenient for copyright "owners" to forget that.)
Cool site. I co-founded a startup that was doing a very similar thing in 2002 (it failed). Here are some ideas that will hopefully make your site successful.

- Start off with a really niche site. For example: Vegan food in Portland, Oregon. It's the niches that sites like Citysearch aren't serving very well.

- Don't code any more features. Spend the next 3 months on marketing. Making this site successful is an exercise in savvy marketing, not programming.

- No one cares about keeping track of restaurants they visited. Everyone cares about going to good restaurants. Same features, different message.
Yeah, I figured that might be the reaction, but to use an idea of Warren Buffet's, YC News has a natural competition 'moat' in that it's backed by YC itself... why would you go to another startup news site? Unless Sequoia starts it's own news site, I think YC News is safe. I know I come here because I know the content will be reasonably related to what is going on at YC, not because I think the moderation system is the greatest thing since sliced bread.

On the other hand, if it uses the same system as Reddit or something, I could see the reluctance, since Reddit gets to fight it out with a bunch of other sites and doesn't really have a natural monopoly.
i guess the key is a combination of various factors,one probably is the no-nonsense design and features, it really is what they claim as social utility,next gud move was opening up to genral public..and then the media attention they've been receiving..
Facebook is inherently viral. They are clever about this and don't get in people's way. Also they make it really easy to find friends through other friends, which I don't think the other companies does.
Ditto the recommendation on "How to Think..." ...a few years ago, I had no programming knowledge whatsoever, read about 1/3 of the book, and was already building useful stuff (to me, anyway).
My guess: They will start selling professional accounts
Psychologically Profiling of Your Site Visitors
How to deal with domain name squatters?
Ignore them and go find another name. Often time the name grows on people even if it seems weird at the beginning.

Suboptimal names didn't kill yahoo, google or del.icio.us, and probably won't kill your project either.
I know the best advice is to find a domain that is not being squatted. But if you want a domain that is being squatted, how can you try and get it for the lowest price? I haven't been able to find any articles or information on this anywhere.
1) Get an aol.com account to seem like you're a newbie and email them an offer of $300 and wait for response, calibrate based on response.

2) Make offer through Godaddy domain market

3) Sue them

4) Think of a new name & register that
it's secret
Can't connect to Google or GMail at 3:09 EST, anybody else?
... maybe in a few years we will all say:

"Facebook dominated the most monetizable activity on the internet: connecting people together"
What Facebook did was smart. They initially marketed it to the 'older' and 'more mature' group, meaning those who just entered college and older. They made us feel as if Facebook was a way of establishing ourselves in a new and more sophisticated community, a 'community where we weren't pestered by annoying high schoolers like on Myspace.'

Then when the time was right, they opened it to all.
Sometimes Threadless surprises me
I'm in this same situation right now. I've tried to email them saying it's for a school project, which isn't actually un-true, but I just never received a response.
I definitely have the impression that many Java developers just love to play around - they program for the sake of programming, not for the sake of getting things done.

That said I am not sure the imaging API is as bad as Paul makes it. My guess is that the jpg-api of Python is more like the "escapeMYSQL"-method in PHP. The Java API is very general, so that you can plug in different codecs and encode the image in whatever way you want (JPG, TIFF, GIF, whatever). Can Python do the same?

On the other hand, only JPG matters for Web development, so the generalised API might not be much of an advantage.
Fine here, I'm not connecting to Facebook from several locations.
i.thumbnail([220, 133], Image.BICUBIC)

Having everyone rewrite those 100 lines is really inexcusable. Throwing in a few convenience functions to make the common case simple would not detract from the "flexibility" one bit. It shows that they gave zero thought to what people will actually do with the library.

BTW, want to take a stab at writing the "save at different quality level" code? (since you don't mind writing lots of code) You can post your solution here.
Proof Mobile AJAX Only Works In A Parallel Reality
There's nothing honorable about buying high and selling low. It's bad business and if this were the creed of our "model entrepreneurs" the world would be a worse place indeed.
Python gives you both upsides (the easy typical case AND the custom arbitrary C/C++ code case). Granted one needs to know C/C++ and not Java.

If whatever operation you need is not already implemented by a Python module you can just write those 100 lines of fast C++ code and then call it from Python.

As far as knowing what's going on in general you can always look at the Python source code.
How to Get Acquired by Facebook
Maybe thats why you didn't recieve a response.
It's a shame justifiable homicide is still illegal.

Email them and make a very firm offer of a few hundred bucks. Don't go higher and don't be afraid to walk away. Find options to the name you really want. Options are leverage. Most squatters want a quick buck. If you offer more than they've paid for it and don't seem desperate you stand a good chance of picking it up for an ok price.
Build a succesful service using the Facebook platform.

I suspect that one of the reasons that Facebook has released the platform API is to allow small teams of external people to their R&D for them.

There's probably a million features that might or moght not appeal to the Facebook userbase and they can't try them all out by themselves.

There's always the danger that they might simply rengineer any successful service but my hunch is this that they would be likeley to acquire any such site becuase they wouldn't want to discourage people building on the Facebook platform.

They wouldn't want to kill the goose that laid the golden egg, would they ?

Anyway, it's just a thought ...
By the way, do excuse my atrocious spelling :-)
Can I borrow your co-founder? I need another body to apply to YC. I don't need anyone else to do the work, just someone whose presence will tick YC's boxes.
I consider it morally wrong to pay domain squatters. Will never, ever do it. Like squeegee men or street vagrants, the way to make them go away is not to pay them.

Just get creative - there are tons of usable domains still available.
It's not a start-up anymore when you start hiring people for salary with no equity.
searching GoDaddy for a good domain, we stumbled on wamily.com and it was available and so perfect. Wamily = "Web Family". The choice of the name actually helped us shape the product.
YC will probably see through that, unless your faux-founder has a CS degree from one of the top departments, or some equally amazing credential. You might just apply and stipulate that you're looking for a co-founder, rather than go with an impostor.
Where is the best place to learn about pay-per-click advertisement? For retail startups the practice seems essential.
How To Think Like A Client
Guy Kawasaki Responds to Truemors Criticism
Define your situation please.
TV shows do it all the time. You don't think they encourage people to vote multiple times just for the hell of it, do you?
The web... except with very precise demographic information. Voluntarily submitted, no less.
no way man! they'll do an amazon !!!!
In your articles, the target content of an annotation hyperlink should also have a hyperlink that takes the user back to the place in the original content where they were at...
hey i will join ya! lol
Latest Motgage News - Updated Every Hour
Submission for Digg API Visualization Contest-Diggquarium
To the editor: Please see wiki
Follow up on the copyright article.
Why pay domain name squatters hundreds of dollars when we can create an original domain name for you - risk free!

Visit http://PowerNamer.com
Hmmm, I definitely wouldn't recommend newbies learning C++. Every time I've tried to dig into C++, it's been a turn-off. K&R's great. C's great, and it's small enough to get your head around, but if you want to know a language like C++, yeah, definitely agreed about Python.
Facebook Photos Infrastructure
True on the surface. But Ruby's everything-is-an-object is a big difference in the way you think when working in each of the languages. Ruby definitely guides you into an OOP mindset, while Perl leaves all paths open...I don't necessarily consider this a win, but it is a pretty big difference in the way one thinks, even if the syntax of Ruby is immediately comfortable to a Perl programmer.

We almost never use OO in our Perl codebase, except where bolting on OO makes a lot of sense (specifically, the UI functions, some CPAN modules that have a more natural OO interface), but in the Ruby code I've written it's all objects and it never feels forced or bolted on. Partly, it's the tasks we're doing where functional programming makes more sense, and partly it's due to having a large codebase that pre-dates Perl 5. Oh, yeah, we also have a huge swath of disparate data being passed around amongst different systems and services, and it's very natural to pass them around as arrays and treat them similarly to lists in lisp. map, grep, shift/unshift, and pop/push get a lot of use in our code. I'm pretty certain we'd do it differently in Python and we'd probably do it differently in Ruby. It'd probably take quite a bit more code in either of those languages, but it might be more readable on first (and second) glance.

Perl 6 will change some of our practices (in three or four years when Perl 6 is wide-spread, anyway), but not all of them. Objects will be beautiful in Perl 6, so we won't avoid them, and argument passing will be much cleaner (right now we pass around refs to arrays a lot, which is somewhat fragile when API changes happen), so those things will change, but our treatment of data will probably remain similar.

So, I agree with you about Ruby syntax. It looks very similar, and is very comfortable to me, as a long time perl coder. But when you actually start building things, the comfortable paths diverge quite a bit.
What's the deal with his blog posts ending mid-sentence?

From part 3: "I remember going to every single" --?

From
http://www.blogmaverick.com/2004/06/08/rules-of-success-1-sweat-equity-is-the-best-equity/

"Could you imagine the" --?

Was he interrupted by the Dallas cheerleaders walking in his office en masse so that he forgot all about even coming back to it?
You stole my idea! Are you spying on me?

:)
These are common tasks for any website that has images, which is probably half of them. That's why it's crazy that the tools are so bad.

I've actually considered writing a photo sharing web site (since there aren't any good ones), but that's not what I'm doing right now.
How to become rich
Resources for Would-Be Entrepreneurs
Navin Pathak, senior partner of Entry India, tells us how to benefit from the booming India economy.
What's the trouble with C++? It seem to me that using the higher-level constructs of C++ is a lot friendlier than having to malloc and free things all over the place. You don't have to jump into C++ template metaprogramming. :-)
Interesting new marketing technique from 37Signals: testimonial videos that don't sound phony/cheesy
since when do 'honorable' and 'stupid' mean the same thing?
Best business books: Jim Buckmaster's picks
I don't think Google had the superior results for the cited queries. Sure, they had the official page for the product first, and the wikipedia entry second. But are those really the most useful web pages about those products? I am not so sure - I don't count the Wikipedia article because it seems to me people might just go to Wikipedia directly, they don't need a search engine for that.
Trends of online mapping
You forgot 5) Kick them in the shins till they cry like little girls
No need to stick to the API from SUN, btw., it seems that several other imaging toolkits are available. For example

http://schmidt.devlib.org/jiu/introduction.html

Don't know about the quality, I just yahoogled it.
The more important question is, What in the Jumping Jack Flash IS Twitter. I have been to the site twice, heard people ooh and aah over it, and for the life of me I have no idea what it is. Dot com bubble anybody?
From what I gather it seems like he wanted out of the project. At some point it seems he decided "I'm not really a podcast guy, I'm a Twitter guy" [not a quote]. He did what I think was a pretty honorable thing and took the hit himself. He could have easily shared the loss with his investors. I would of course agree it was risk they signed up for, but he chose differently.