skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Prance with the horses, Skittr with the mice
PHP developers migrating to RoR - Universal trend?
It's only been three months [Feb to May] and you're complaining already? No wonder you schedule YCombinator for 3 months intervals at a time, and then run to new teams and ideas. ;)

The point of my idea is that with a back and forward button in the navigation area, you leave the mouse in one spot and click away as the page refreshes or uses AJAX. You don't lose your spot. You don't have to drag anything.
I've come across Greg Gianforte before on ITConversations. Listen to the talk because his lessons are compelling and covers the bootstrapping article you supplied, "Bootstrapping Your Company", 2006 MySQL Conference, 19Mb, mp3 42m, 2006APR25 ~ http://osc.gigavox.com/shows/detail1624.html
Site swamped? Takes ages to display the front page, if it manages to complete.
Ask: Is the Algorithm Working?
I'd probably be willing to learn how to interpret line noise if I only have to parse 9 lines for every 96 I'm parsing now

bzip2 -9 <hellow.c | uuencode hellow.c.bz2
This is design as in graphic design, not software design. Just in case anyone else didn't realise from the title.
'... But is it working? the numbers would suggest that it isnt. ...'

but it's being written on techcrunch and other news filters. How long will it take for some tv spot on wacky ads in pubs and billboards?
Yahoo's Flickr Takes on Google's YouTube
Web 2.0 - A new sport community
Step 1) Make a realistic five year forecast and sum all revenues over this set.
Step 2) Apply pixie dust and happy thoughts.
Step 3) Adjust ratio depending on quality of data set and desired outcome.

Basically you're pulling a number out of your ass that you hope correlates to how much money you're going to make. If you're doing a valuation for investment purposes, someone else will most likely be doing the number crunching for you.
Not surprised, heard this a couple of weeks ago listening to Caterina Fakes talk on ITConversation (The History of Flickr) where Fake didn't rule flickr out for hosting video ~ http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail1755.html

Wonder how this is going to be executed and it's effects on flickr?
I think aston means that he thinks he gets a full point for his comment, Not what the justification of the 0.5 factor is.

I wasn't sure on this, but I didn't think it was straight 1 point so the 0.5 might be right, I am sure other people have more evidence.
Do karma point ever go negative? If they dont (which is my view) then the sum of comments is rounded to 0 if less than 0.

Karma = [SUM(KP1,KP2,..KPn) - n] + ROUND0[0.5x((KC1,KC2...KCm) - m)]

I changed ROUND to ROUND0 where ROUND0 always returns 0 or more. Is there a math way of representing that, that I cant remember?
YC runs thanks to our 'spare cycles.'

Or is it the other way round?

Our 'spare cycles' add value because of YC?
Vote up if you want 12" MacBook Pros
This post is not current, sorry about that! But its fairly current to extrapolate the statistic.

What is the current trend, when it comes to the most preferred development framework? I am sure the open source community has marched forward since Oct 2006.
Great inclusion. Why? Well it has to do with software developers who have highly developed skills with algorythms, numbers and language but abysmal visual, colour, drawing and graphic design skills. So any book that 1) makes them see they have missed out developing these skills and 2) the basics of how to start and recognise what is required is good.

I can only think of a handful of developers who are hackers, programmers and artists. Just like maths, writing and playing music it's just another form of literacy to be learn.
This should be a philosophical question for Paul.
Can the Karma be negative for a user?
The trade-off then would be between absolute web democracy Vs keeping the users 'happy' (capitalistic?)
I don't know how this is going to make it happen, but I do want a 12" MacBook Pro bad enough to sign any petition for it.
Sorry about that aston and immad. Even I believe its not 0.5 deterministically, but I think it averages to 0.5. The system appears far more adaptive/dynamic than a completely deterministic model as suggested by the formula. But again, its a model.

My friend, up-voted me once each for two separate comments, but my Karma remained the same. As a matter of fact, I observed something similar with the submissions as well. This could imply the following -

1. Karma calculation is not interrupt driven, but its timeout based (I probably hadn't waited long enough!) OR

2. The weight for the comments (/submissions?) could be a function of user Karma, with an average of 0.5 (I probably did wait long enough!) OR

3. My friend's up-voting was suspicious (Highly doubt it!!)

My bet is on 1 and/or 3.
So, it might be my browser, but whenever someone uses a British pound or a Euro currency symbol in a comment, it shows up as two ascii characters rather than the desired unicode character.

You might wish to:
1) verify your database and code support unicode
2) use the utf-8 charset for your pages instead of ISO-8859-1

:)
The flaw in your reasoning is you present different areas and don't consider overlap. The way you explain it, you make it sound like a hacker / coder is a beast more constrained by his class than a twelfth level paladin.

A successful startup will have members who individually fill many roles with diverse skillsets. For a web startup I fully believe the most important factor is being able to take whatever vision you have and form it into reality.

If you don't understand the customer base you won't do so well. If you can't build your product you won't do anything at all.
I'm curious, how long does a migration take? As in, being reasonably familiar with another language, you decide to port to or program in a different language, which you have little prior exposure to.
I'll second the call to Python. There's a fairly large community around it, it has a lot of libraries to use in your code, the source is very easy to read both because of it's enforced formating rules and the clarity of the language itself, and on top of all that it's even useful.

My point against Ruby is that it has a lot of magic. Python explicitly tries to remove magic and make everything clear. Magic is nice once you grok it, but for learning I'd want things to be straight forward.
Eh, I had spotted the reference, but thought you were serious. QM was the dark ages of my uni years, so I'm more suceptible to it than I should be, I guess :)
I'd suggest emailing Apple. It would probably be more effective.
I've noticed this as well. I start at 1 and anything higher adds one. The karma formula just seems to be very simple. Add one for every up vote and subtract one for every down vote you get from other people on anything.
Interesting Pay-as-you-go hosting company (With Lisp etc. on CGI)
As I have wrote in response to this article:
http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=18973

You need to be careful in using the word "intelligence," because it means different things to different people. Paul's post doesn't explicitly address this, but he doesn't need to. The point is the "I can improve" attitude can strongly influence your chances of success.

You are born not with a base level of "intelligence." You are born with natural tendencies to excel at certain domains. You can be an excellent mathematician but find poetry opaque. In that case your Chess analogy holds. Where the tendency isn't immediately obvious though, is where hard work is the determining factor. Some people never seem to hit plateaus, but for those who do, it's the effort that pushes you across it. This is very well investigated by KA Ericsson; it's called "deliberate practice" or something, and the theory is actually quite simple.

Also, brain connections are malleable after adulthood, albeit less dramatic than those of kids, but significant enough to turn an OCD patient into a normal person. Jeffrey Schwartz if you're interested.

man, i kinda miss reading this stuff.
Magic P* words
Oh, I thought I was going to have one sent to me if I voted up...Damn.
Social Nets and Cell Phones
On the other hand, I saw myself and my struggles very clearly in this article. Maybe because I wasn't allowed to skip classes in government school, I made all A's very easily and was never really challenged. The real world has been difficult and frustrating for me because I am not used to failure. Try "acing" Unix the first time you attempt to learn it! I still fight with the little boy inside who cringes at disapproval from teacher every time my rails app serves up an error. Hopefully, being aware of my problem will enable me to eventually develop the Edisonian-tinkerer mentality that all the successful hackers seem to have.

I am sure that many other hackers, being bright people, share this problem as well.
email this thread to 10 other people and Bill Gates will send you a free Macbook Pro! my brother's friend at the University of Ohio tried this and it really works! and you will add 2 inches to your pen15 size! but if you don't do this in the next day then 5 people in your family will die!
Bootstrapping is exhausting, not sexy.
Are you really getting a great deal or are you being manipulated?
well i want a macbook badly and dont want 5 people in my family to die......
Python, Flash, or JavaScript.
1. Interesting product or service. I like to work on cool problems.

2. Team that I like and trust. Implicit in this is that it's people I know; I can't imagine working with non-technical strangers on a business idea.

3. Non-technical founders know what they don't know and don't try to trivialize it. They don't all have to be hackers, but they do have to realize that you need hackers to get a web startup off the ground.

4. Fills in gaps in my skillset and covers areas I'm weak in. I'm more than happy to have someone else do the dealmaking, the people-stuff, the legal minutiae, the graphic design, and the drumming-up-business part.

5. Offers fair equity. Doesn't need to be a majority, but you're dreaming if you think you can get away with 5-10% (some dot-coms in the first boom tried that, with predictable results). If there's one other founder I'd want at least 35-40% (assuming he did almost all the non-technical work), if there're two others I'd want at least 25-30%, if there are multiple I'd want equity on par with what the other "primary" participants are getting.
How does $1/GB compare with other hosts?
Marketing doesn't start with a product. Marketing starts with figuring out what is the right product to build. You should have some idea what the market wants before you start designing the product.

One of the things that attracted me to my (non-technical) cofounder was that he has a pretty good understanding of the market space. That's valuable in the beginning, because it means less flailing around building the wrong project.

Of course, you shouldn't only be doing marketing, because that tends to take a lot of time before development, a lot of time after the product is ready, and very little time in-between. But a smart cofounder (and who would partner with a dumb one?) can find other ways to help out in the meantime. My cofounder is learning Flash and helping on the UI end, for example.
The system seems to work well and I see no reason to make it more complicated. In the ideal world you might get more karma for stories you've written yourself as opposed to stories you found elsewhere and submitted, or perhaps there might by a leader board for the highest average submission rating, but the current system seems to get the job done.
I hope that PHP developers would realize that PHP is atrocious and just run away from PHP. RoR is pretty popular right now, so I'm sure a bunch would land on RoR, and it'd be a serious upgrade. :-) I bet most people who use/used PHP got there because it was popular, and not because they compared the relative merits of the languages.
How'd your friend up vote the same comment twice? As far as I know, the system only counts one vote per user per comment or post.
Social Software Building Blocks
"I bet most people who use/used PHP got there because it was popular"

This is fairly accurate, but not quite the whole story.

Ascribing PHP's success to "popularity" makes it sound like a simple fashion statement. The reality is that, due to its popularity, PHP has a ton of libraries and an enormous base of existing code (ranging from little hacks to parse a certain data format all the way up to full-blown applications like MediaWiki). It's not just the language, it's the ecosystem.

That's a real advantage that's often overlooked by those who advocate other languages. Also, don't forget that PHP hosting is cheap and ubiquitous. Rails, not so much.

That said, Ruby is catching up pretty fast, and I've been using Ruby (and sometimes Rails) for any new project that isn't tightly coupled with existing code. For me, writing Ruby is vastly more pleasant and efficient than writing PHP, even though I've been using PHP for five years and Ruby for only one.

I still write a lot of Java, too, but JRuby is starting to eat into that pretty fast. It's an end run around the library/existing code problem.
Apparently it's just not gonna happen: http://yourtech.typepad.com/main/2006/05/its_official_no.html

Which is too bad, I've tried the 13" macbook and it's just too big (for me). It's almost 2" wider than my pb.
I pay $20 a month for DreamHost and they allow me 4TB a month. However this place looks like a great web host if you're not building YouTube. Now I know where to host any lisp projects; unfortunately, they don't handle RoR very well.
I think this "don't promote your own stuff" idea is some kind of lame artifact from reddit.

I couldn't agree more. It's frustrating on reddit to see users downvoted, just because they posted their own blog. IMHO, it only solidifies the "monopoly" top content producers have on the market. New bloggers have no way of promoting their own stuff, and nobody to do it for them.

Regardless, until things change, I would rather not submit my URLs if I think I'm going to take the heat for it - even if the content is good.
A curious and insightful view.

Those cycles however aren't really "spare", or they are spare only in terms of producing money. I'm paid for some part of my cycles, then I'm not paid for some other part (OSS, social Internet), and finally there are really spare cycles that I may enjoy as being literally spare, e.g. hanging out in a pub.

The second type of cycles, that is, when I may produce wealth with no immediate pay back are becoming increasingly important and potentially rewarding, thanks to the Internet. That's probably what Web 2.0 is about (no matter how much I hate this term :)
YC folks: I sure hope you told this crew about password hashing.
If You Could Only Read 5 Blogs Which Would They Be?
Google Gadgets are now an AdSense unit (auction widget space!)
Why MiYahoo! Would Be Lousy For The Venture Economy
Ubuntuforums.org might be a better place to ask than news.YC, though I'll say I'm quite pleased with my Thinkpad Z61m. It's no longer available, but I'm pretty sure the widestreen T60 has the same hardware in a much thinner, lighter package for the same price. The Macbook-sized Z61t is also a good bet. Ubuntu almost works out of the box, though I had to install a video driver before I could start X on the live CD. Debian works with no more hassle than usual.

I've never heard Thinkpads called pretty, but they do look like the serious machines they are. Dells are mostly cheap crap, and they look the part. I wouldn't worry too much about looks - instead, consider that Thinkpads, like many Apples have magnesium frames and hard drive shock protection.
Second Life: Europeans Outnumber Americans 3 to 1
The way to Lisp | Tux Deluxe
Lemonodor - a mostly lisp weblog
I can't share the same enthusiasm as the author. Some points make sense, but it's certainly not the "nexus." Fileshares aren't going to work well on phones. Link sharing won't. Full-featured real time chatting won't (not the conference call).

That's because none of this is enjoyable on a dinky screen! Information driven social networks requires a medium that can transmit more information than 320x240 pixels. And going beyong that would require you to sit down at a coffee shop or something, in order to focus and digest that information. And at that time I'd prefer a ultraportable with a long battery life. Oh and speaking about battery life and wireless...
Regarding words that start with the same letter and mean the same thing in different languages, as long as you stay in the same language family, there are plenty.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_intelligibility

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differences_between_Spanish_and_Portuguese
This was on programming reddit, where it was remarked that lemonodor had not nearly the glory it used to.
I'd never heard of it before today actually.
If this comes to pass, one has to wonder if, just as political incompetence brought about the sunset of American world dominance, this sort of short sighted, ethically bankrupt, style of capitalism will not go unpunished.

I have no doubt that IBM is awash with inefficiency, however, I do not imagine that the companies future propsects, reputation and commercial viability figure as highly in this deciscion as the vast sums to be paid to executives to meet arbitrary figures, probably set by the same people making the deciscion and reaping the reward.

One can only hope that at some point in their lives, someone will visit the same misery on these people that leaks so freely from their fountain pens.
Well, yeah, of course people using a popular open-source web platform are going to be the ones interested in a different open-source web platform.

Now if VB programmers started switching, that'd be something.
I'm presenting the point that you shouldn't lump everyone into one category. If you notice the anti-MBA feeling on the forum that they are useless on a team.

Well, how would hackers feel to be lumped into the category of a "beast constrained by his class than a twelfth level paladin."

The point is: Don't lump people based on their degree
Who is sumitting to TechCrunch20 and what's the area you're conquering (i.e. new application, dating, media) etc
New Search Engine For Kids
Would YC have a problem with a startup "built to enjoy", with no exit strategy?
Direct replies or any descendant?
Heh, well if you are building YouTube, Dreamhost isn't going to do much good either. :)
Agree/Disagree?
Top 100 Alt Search Engines
I tried to post a comment, but there seems to be a problem with their Lisp CGI's.

On Lisp vs. Python:
http://lemonodor.com/archives/001497.html

"Readable" languages are rather manager-centric. And because software managers become increasingly unimportant (or decreasingly important :), so will "readable" languages.

Of course programmers need readability too, but given a choice they'd rather stick to a concise and powerful language. Why? Probably because a powerful language, among other things, doesn't require you to get back to your code and fix it too often, and hence, you don't need that language to be too readable. It allows you to solve a problem in small, rock-solid and easily testable chunks.

I'm desperately looking for such a powerful "write-and-forget" programming language. Is it Lisp? I don't know yet.
Direct replies to any comments or stories can't be downvoted.
Iminlikewithyou invites here (All out)
I have 4 invites to give out. Leave your email and the first 4 people get one.
username at wardtek dot ca
Errata - My friend up-voted me on two different comments, once each. My score should have increased by 1 Karma point going by the 0.5 weight for comments, but it did not, immediately.
theodore DOT haile AT gmail
thanks
dupe http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=19582
schmoe AT sent DOT com - oh well, thanks anyway.
twism AT hotmail DOT com
If anyone can send another invite to mojuba dot juju at gmail dot com

Thanks!
Management at big companies is good at beating the ambition out of their employees.
sorry dude.. all out.
Lisp is perfectly readable after you spend a few days to a week reading it. You just have to get used to the organization of code, and then you start to read code by indentation, rather than by paren-counting. Then everything is very smooth, and it's just as readable as Python.

Perl is known as write-and-forget, although Lisp does everything it does better, except for CPAN.
Please add a link to comments in the RSS feed
Hi, I mainly read YC Startup News through a news aggregator. Could ya'll add a link to comments for each entry in the feed?

(This might be a good idea for Reddit's feeds too...)
'Mark all as read button' Firefox extension for news.YC
That's probably because it doesn't have the glory it used to, and so nobody thought to tell you about it. My impression is that Planet Lisp has much more vitality.
I hired Damiano Albani on oDesk.com to make this Firefox extension for me. It marks all the articles on any page of news.YC as read (it changes the color of all links to the color of visited links).

It seems to work fine - he did a good job.

He said that it couldn't be done in Greasemonkey in a reasonable way so we did it with a Firefox extension.

The extension also works on http://techmeme.com

Let me know if the extension is doing something stupid or stealing all my passwords or hurting the children.

I am tri-licensing it under the MPL, GPL, and LGPL.
jordan.mclain at gmail dot com
Good suggestion, but it has already been posted in the features request thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=7851

(This might be a good idea for Reddit's feeds too...)

Regarding the reddit request, you might want try posting that @ http://request.reddit.com
startups map
Touche!

The irony is, we are trying to use the spare cycles effectively, such that we can generate better spare cycles in the immediate future.

The recursive nature of this relationship guarantees success to the relentless, I guess, where the quality of the spare cycles keeps getting better.
So a few weeks ago I registered a new domain name, startupsmap.com, where I want to, well, create a map of startups :)

For the initial version, I'm thinking about some simple and straighforward features, like allowing people to put their startup on the map and give some additional information about it (like if they're hiring, if they released something, a small description/keywords about what there'ye doing, etc...). Maybe even integrating with their blog or news room to highlight them on the map when something has changed...

Once this is done, people like me will be able to see what startups are in their area, what they're all about and even if they're hiring, to apply for a job! :)

Also, people with money to invest, will be able to check out the "new local ideas" and pay them a visit.

So, the whole reason for posting this here is to get your 2 cents on this idea... any constructive comment will be appreciated. Thanks!
Regarding links to the comments in the RSS feed, it would also be nice to preview the comments in the rss reader as well.
pg beat me to it!!

What does this mean? My thoughts:

1. European users are relatively more jobless (this post http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=18996 further validates the claim)

2. European users have fewer options for gratification on the Internet

3. The long tail of second life members as a whole, in particular is skewed in favor of the European long tail. Its either longer or fatter.
Microsoft-Yahoo: Which Products Would Win
One dollar per gigabyte is extremely expensive.
Sounds like a good--focused--idea, here are a few questions that pop into my mind:

How will you be different from existing competition (example: craigslist)?

How will using it be fun and informative? (shufflebrain.com/etech06.htm has some great examples of using game-like mechanics to make users invested, in this case I think you'd want some sort of quality ratings for companies, applicants, and investors).
I don't think Google or other search engine for that matter will make any distinction if it's blog.companyurl or companyurl/blog. You can choose whichever, it will make no difference in how the Page Rank is computed.