skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm using a 24" iMac and it's great for development. A MacBook whould come in handy if you want mobility and it has a nice price also. I don't think you'll have performance issues with any laptop you might choose.
Lisp Style Guide
Also, reddit already does this. Looks like this on iGoogle :

[-]Bad Software Design: Getting the Level Wrong
[link][more]
Google mashup - find the "web 2.0" startups near you
This reminds me of a web2.0 map I saw a while back - check out http://www.fourio.com/web20map/

Just submitted it to news.yc as well.
Thanks for the address, I will take a look! I think the game-like mechanics should be used for this site as well, however, I have yet to determine how this will be done...
This has to be weakest idea I have seen come out of Ycombinator.
He lost me at "since its strongly typed....". That's not a feature, its a bug in most cases.
But you can view the fact that people are commenting on a company. If a whole bunch of one liners suddenly appear as soon as the work day is over, you could guess that it's been banned at work and everybody's griping over it.
On the 'submit' page, adding a note about the feature request thread would save us lots of "Upvote this if you'd like news.yc to..." posts.
+1 reddit does it indeed ... very convenient ;)
Hehe. I just put DH up there an an example. I chose it to host some small personal projects because it didn't seem too bad a deal... I don't use a fraction of what I'm allotted.
We do (look at the source) but most feed readers seem to ignore it. If anyone can tell us how to format the feed so that stops happening, we're all ears.
VMWare on macosx isn't that good. But parallels is excellent assuming you have macbook or macbook pro. I run ubuntu and it works like a dream.
Paul, you have theories about everything, how about this one? :)

There was an interesting article about why jazz is more popular in Eurpoe and Japan than in the U.S. Accoring to the author, it was something to do with abstract thinking: if music is a language, then jazz is the most abstract part of it - no feelings, no relation to real-world notions, just pure musical math. (I'd say also baroque music is as abstract as jazz.)

SecondLife in a way is about abstract thinking, too.
Twitter goes Mobile
In an interesting coincidence, Europeans outnumber Americans approximately 2.4 : 1 (730 mil to 300 mil), so maybe there exists a simple explanation for this phenomenon...
Of course you're only getting what you pay for at other hosts if you use exactly your allotment.

Consider the websites I'm working on now, I need some advanced features so I have a medium sized package with way too much disk and bandwidth.
You probably took that number from Wikipedia, where Russia (100m) and Turkey (80m) and many other unrelated countries count as Europe too. The exact number for today's EU is 486m.
There might be a http://flagr.com (flagr is a YC startup) map for startups already. I haven't looked.
hmm, that's not really for startups... it's more a general "map it" application...
Feedvalidator finds a couple of problems, but I'm not sure that they're related.

http://feedvalidator.org/check.cgi?url=http%3A%2F%2Fnews.ycombinator.com%2Frss

Maybe try generating an Atom feed? Atom seems to be much better defined than any of the myriad competing RSS implementations.

Or maybe toss a hyperlink into the description tag rather than the comments tag ... from what I see in the RSS 2.0 spec, comments is a more of a "should" rather than a "must". The spec itself refers to it as an optional element, and Winer (I think) says in a note that implementers "should" support it. Clearly some of them don't. :-)
Someone mentioned below that it's working on Reddit. I just looked at their feed, and it looks like they are indeed putting the comments link inside "description" rather than "comments".
That's actually pretty cool. But it'd be better if they were just audio files you could browse through.
Wasn't May 2006 also when Apple claimed that they'd never produce a mobile phone?
Like I (opaquely?) said last time this came up (http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=12380 ) you could try giving each <item> a <description> child with an escaped link in it a la reddit (http://reddit.com/.rss )
It seems to me the most likely explanation is that Europeans care more about liking highbrow things. Most people who like jazz are also rather proud that they like it.

I suspect you'd also find more Europeans than Americans are fans of Beuys, or Lacan, or Finnegan's Wake, or other such things that might have been created as controls in experiments to measure pretentiousness.
How to evaluate a Startup idea?
When you come-up with an idea for a startup, how do you evaluate it? How do you conclude that it's good, that it has potential to become a good service? Let me know what you think about the criteria I've described into this short article.
Here is a previous news.yc post on a related subject: http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=13035
thanks for the link. felipe wrote down a criteria, but he only refers to new ideas. not all businesses start from new ideas. hey, when Google started, there were a lot of search engines available, right? :)
I would avoid all web hosts that offer crazy pricing and a lot of bandwidth because they are either amateurs, desperate, have terrible support because of the number of accounts as well as because those prices attract cheapskates, who then drag the support team's morale down.

However, a lot of bandwidth is important as insurance so you don't pay overages and the host doesn't turn off your site for the month.

On the other hand, more important than that is the ability to upgrade to a better package at a later time. You should be able to upgrade to 800 GB bandwidth for about $80 to $120 a month. Though of course you'd want to get a dedicated server with that kind of traffic, it takes some time to research another web host, sign up, check them out, try them out at different times of day, upload some stuff, wait for the dns to propogate, and more. So, you want a host that lets you upgrade to an account with more bandwidth the same day you request it.

Hosts that have a $5 plan, an $8 plan, and a $12 plan as their highest, I would avoid. Hosts that have a $20 plan for 300GB, $60 for $500, and $80 for 800GB, I would think actually plan on their users using their bandwidth.

I signed up for KnownHost.com just now, who have the best uptime AND 38 servers with who knows how many VPS accounts on each one, and they have immediate e-mail support and a very fast VPS. I am going to have to switch to something else that has ruby on rails preinstalled because neither I nor the tech could figure it out, even after trying 6 different installation instructions, removing cpanel, with cpanel, etc.
Are you running a tech startup or tech enabled startup?
What do you think is the differnce between a tech startup and a tech enabled one? Which one is yours?
I don't use a Mac any more (decided to go back to Linux), but my base-model 15" powerbook served me wonderfully for two years. Just pop in an extra gig of RAM.
Mark Zuckerberg looking to make $1bn off facebook? Wants to take it public?
Orange Launches Netvibes/Pageflakes Competitor
http://www.mayasmom.com/r?u=http://shakira.teenwag.com/playvideo/2571
One video to prove why no geek on Ycombinator will ever lay Shakira So startup guys better make tons of money :)
Facebook Data Miner - How Much is Information Worth?
How much is the information in facebook's database worth? Presumably, facebook is trying to convert a user's information into dollars. Traditionally, this task is called advertising - but I don't think advertising is the right word anymore.

Can someone point me to the revenue of (1) blanket advertising (2) targeted advertising. Finally, (3) does the targeted advertising from google differ from the targeted advertising on facebook? My intuition says yes, but I'm not sure I understand why. Sorry, this is more of a take than give post, but I'm hoping it might spur some interesting discussion.
Should we have girls on Ycombinator too
"Why bother going to college and paying for CS degree if after 10 days with a RoR book you can start your company!"

I think that's kinda the point of YCombinator...
Just got back from the Apple Store with a fresh 17" Macbook Pro. I'm in heaven right now.
Transparent Etiquette: Moderating behavior in a post privacy world
Someone should start a startup to somehow leverage high karma on all these sites into cash.

Not in a slimy calacanis kind of way but one that rewards all interested parties.
Definitely seems like something worth taking a look at.

"all of twitter's traffic on 2 machines?" - how did you come up with that number? Sounds reeeally fuzzy to me.

One day all these webapp frameworks should just have a good old-fashioned shootout.

Define a very tight, clean spec (perhaps for a Twitter clone?) and have all the best & brightest from each webapp framework duke it out once and for all. Record stats like dev time, not just final performance after all optimizations have been implemented.
10 web application security tips you should already know
nicholas.s.barnes at gmail.com
To Groovy Or JRuby
Since you like to judge things without giving a fair chance, there's not much anyone can do for you.

Have you ever used a language in the ML family or one influenced by ML? OCaml, Haskell, Scala, Standard ML, etc? Have you ever used a language with type inference?

If you want performance and you don't want to sacrifice garbage collection, at the moment ML-family languages are the best thing around.
On further reading I think these guys are aiming at the market of low-ish bandwidth sites that only use say 3GB per month, but are paying $30 for say 1TB:

"When you use one of these services, you're betting your monthly fee that you're going to land in the "sweet spot," usually around 75% - 95% of what their package allows, where you're getting a great deal. Use too little and you're paying a lot for it. Use too much and they tack on overage charges.

When you do that, you're making that bet based on a few hours of research. The guys you're betting against take those bets for a living, all day every day. They have all the info, they hold all the cards, and they make a lot of money. It is possible to beat the odds and get a great deal. Like a casino, they can afford to let a few people "win" because so many people only think they do. But it's a lot of work, and it's a new game every month. "

https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/about/faq.php#30GB
Are you misusing Alexa numbers? (Probably)
"Finnegan's Wake" shudder
Microsoft, Yahoo May Partner to Challenge Google in Web Search
How to fool VCs into thinking you have traction, Part 1
TwitBin: Inline Firefox Twittering (less than 2 weeks and $1000 to develop)
5 hottest startups according to Killer Startups
I'd never heard of any of these "hottest startups", how about you? Which startups would be on your list?
Microsoft And Yahoo Combined Can't Beat Google
Which editor do you use for Lisp?
Programming consists of a few things. An editor, a compiler, source control, and so on.

The editor is particularly important when it comes to being productive. I'm inexperienced with Lisp, and I've found a few things inside Visual Studio that I feel particularly reluctant to part with. "Go to Implementation" is one. I just move the mouse over a function call, press alt-G, and it takes me right to where that function is defined. Another is a complete list of defined procedures for the current file.

Does Lisp have an environment that has similar features?

Shawn
You haven't heard of emacs?
I've heard the name. I didn't know you could specifically write Lisp in it. Thanks.

Is that the only one?
Emacs is the best. It's written in an old dialect of Lisp itself, and you can customize it and script sequences of actions in it with Lisp. It also has SLIME, which is the Superior Lisp Interaction Mode for Emacs, (see http://common-lisp.net/project/slime/), which is the most amazing IDE I have ever seen for any language, and I've used VS.NET and Eclipse and all the rest.

That's for Common Lisp (CL), which you may or may not want to develop in; I personally frequently choose to write in CL because it has a very large library, and because it has SLIME.

For Scheme, Emacs is also good, but there isn't something analogous to SLIME.

SLIME has go-to-definition of a function as one of its more basic features, along with auto-completion, convenient listings of arguments when you first write down a call to a particular function, and much more.
Sounds like just the thing, thank you!

I have a quick question that I can't justify creating a new thread about. Since you brought up Lisp implementations though...

I was about to choose to write my programs with SBCL, but it looks like the Win32 port isn't yet complete. Since I'm aiming towards using Lisp in games, speed is an issue, and so is running on Windows. Would you or anyone reccomend a dialect of Lisp which is fast and runs under Windows? Even just 1/4th the speed of C would be excellent.
Ask on the #lisp IRC channel on freenode about whether the SBCL win32 port is complete enough for your purposes. It's coming along. Remember to ask your question and then leave the chat idling, so that if your question isn't answered right away, people who have left it idling and then come back to it can see your question and then answer it.

I believe CLISP runs on Windows. I have no idea whether this is at all practical, since I don't use Windows, but maybe you could use a Unix emulator like Cygwin and run SBCL (and your game) in that, invisibly to the user?
Heh, creative. I'll investigate that. Thanks!
Chicken Scheme compiles to C. It's also directly supported by SWIG, so it's (reasonably) easy to call functions in C DLLs and the like.
bad-ass!
Same here. Yes.

I use the booq backpack. Great fit and it will stand up whether or not you have the laptop in it.
This post is definitely old. Anyway, I've never really done any serious PHP (I'm a Ruby/Rails hacker), but for those that have, have any of you checked out Code Igniter (http://codeigniter.com)? Opinions? On the surface it looks very similar to RoR.
Google Testing New Search Results Layout
Sometimes I think I am the only one on the planet who hates CPAN. Chasing dependencies gets old really fast. I really really like the python packaging model -- many packages contain a single code file which you can just save to development directory. No installation, no munging around with paths.

My favorite example: pyparsing
http://pyparsing.wikispaces.com
http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=11086
Now can you get submit to inline the newly-added comment without reloading? :)

[edit] Agh, it already does. This totally rocks.
Are you capable of using complete English words, or R U not?
Nice point.
CLIMACS is also worth a look.
CL - SLIME

Scheme - quack.el (http://www.neilvandyke.org/quack/) Not so powerfull as SLIME.

AFAIK there was a support for scheme (scheme48) in SLIME. I don't know a status of it.
An MBA is not a degree in "stuff." It's a degree in business administration, which is a well-defined field of study.

What graduate degree is more relevant for a Director of Finance or M&A financial analyst than an MBA? Like any large company, Google has lots of business needs which are most appropriately handled by businesspeople. Just like engineers -- we can learn on the job, but we can also get professional credentials from a university.

And I can't believe I'm having to defend MBAs. I'm a grad student in engineering and I'm somewhat unimpressed with the direction of the MBA program here. But it's a legitimate learning experience if you're trying to be a business administrator at a medium to large company -- like Google.
I like the idea, anonymity but based on verified identity, facebook could do a similar spin on it for university gossip, or in fact you could do a similar spin on it for universities with a little fb integration. No one should be using it from there work though because if they post anything offensive up quite a lot of companies monitor all traffic and it wouldn't be hard to find out who it is. Txt-in method would help with that, trcky but not impossible.
Rupert Murdoch on the 'Power of Networks'
It's still absolute democracy there are just rules that have to be obeyed :-). Anyway the system is heavily (and rightly) skewed to encourage and award participation, hence no down-votes on submissions.
The Inside-out Web
pg mentioned that he uses vi with a REPL ( http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=587 ).

I recently began using emacs + SLIME for writing Lisp and revert back to vim for everything else. I've also tried vim + VIlisp.vim, which sends Lisp code to a running Lisp interpreter. It seemed pretty decent though I don't really have enough experience writing Lisp to really compare.

Anyone else write Lisp in vi?

SLIME is great, but I really miss vim sometimes. Fortunately, Slim-Vim is in the works by the author of VIlisp.vim. Here's a couple comment pages on Lisp with vi/emacs:

http://programming.reddit.com/info/1cij7/comments

http://www.lemonodor.com/mt/mt-comments.cgi?entry_id=689
Color Schemes, Color Palettes, Color Theory
Paul, might you modify the submissions page to have some guidelines?

Point people to the Feature Requests thread as they clearly don't notice the link at the bottom of the page. Remind them that this is Startup News so it would be good if the posting was applicable. Tell them where to find Slashdot if that's what they want. And explain that they are not the only ones with RSS feeds so they don't need to just copy links from there to here.

Personally, I think news quality has degraded since karma came along. Some people are clearly keen to move up the leader board and starting a new thread is one way to do that. How about not rewarding karma for a thread's score? It can still be voted up by others to show it's interesting but karma must be earned by quality comments on the thread. Either that, or let us down vote threads to penalise non-applicable threads.

Better statistics may help show some light. http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=18085
What's the most bandwidth you've ever used with DH? Every shared host place I've talked to has CPU limits and would shut the site down or force an upgrade long before you would get near 4 TB.
You're giving me rumor and second hand inuendo and no stats. You say you can't remember them offhand, but I don't think you ever heard any-- that weren't made up on the spot.

The fact of the matter is, there are many very successful startups in Seattle, Portland, Chicago, New York, Boston, Houston, Dallas, Los Angeles, etc. etc. etc.

People in the BAY AREA think that the BAY AREA is necessary for success for a startup.

But they are not taking from any kind of a scientific knowledge.

Its just provincial arrogance.
Did you try running under parallels?

Anyway, 5 years ago, getting Linux running on a Powerbook was really easy... I would think it would be better now, not worse...
I did some research on Flickr some time ago and it turned out that Flickr is European-centric too. Is photography as a hobby a "highbrow thing"? In a way, yes, but the opposite of that is countless crappy "three of us at a barbeque party" pics. Given a choice, I'd stick to those pretentious hobbyists, because creativity is pretentious by definition. (But not everything that's pretentious is worthwhile, of course.)
Apple just ordered 500 million 4GB flash chips from Samsung, this is on top of their long term contract with Samsung. This is far more than can be accounted for by the iphone or ipod demand (And are expected to be shipped by the end of this year.)

Intel announced Robson technology awhile ago, which ships in their "Santa Rosa" platform which is scheduled to ship in May - this month.

Apple has gone a bit longer than usual in releasing laptops... they are overdue for both MacBooks and MacBook pros.

On June 11th Steve Jobs will be giving the keynote at WWDC.

Last week Apple announced that they would be shipping laptops with LED based displays "later this year". Such a change will require a design change in the laptop- eg: a new formfactor. It might be like the aluminum books now, not really a new looking formfactor compared to the Titanium powerbook-- but thuroughly new internally.

Thus, I think the odds are very good that new laptops will be announced on June 11th and that the difference will be significant enough that its worth waiting a month before buying your mac.
"everything I've seen and heard so far"

Of people on this planet in the %99 of achievement-- intelligence and creativity-- China has far more than the US.

Ok, you've just heard different, and if you think about it, its mathematically true.
I've figured out what that odor is... I couldn't quite put my finger on it for the longest time, but now that I've identified it, its very distinct.

Its smug.
Sunday morning off-topic thread
You can delete this if you want, but I thought it would be fun since there is very little Sunday traffic anyway. I guess the only problem is if it is at the top of the front page tomorrow morning.
Amazon's uptime is not that great. In fact, Amazon is probably one of the worst run "engineering" companies around. They hire bright people (generally) they just don't make them managers.

Before I left, my manager (after a reorg) was a totally incompetant jerk whose prior training was a degree in "criminal justice". He knew nothing about software development, and had been at amazon his whole career- 7 years managing programmers.

I am amazed that they have only a few days of downtime a year.

I wouldn't be using S3 myself, except that (contrary to advertisements) its not run on the same "proven" infrastructure as their ecommerce platform-- but a new one built by a seperate team, and that team isn't hobbled by the incompetance that has built up over the years on the ecommerce engineering side.
WriteMaps Launches Geni-Like Sitemaps Tool
Internet More Dangerous than School Violence, Sexually Transmitted Diseases for Children: survey
Its a great deal for a blog or anything normal...

If you need the bandwidth though, you can go to S3. Easily you could host your html at their site and then use S3 for the big files ($0.20/GB BW cost, $0.15GB storage cost at S3).

I think site pricing is based on the theory that people think that bandiwth is expensive and they are afraid of using too much-- so Dreamhost offers huge bandwith in their plans--- but they won't actually let you use it. Most places are like this... which makes nearlyfreespeach.net a really good-- honest and straightforward-- choice.
I've had a love-hate relationship with Beryl since Ubuntu 6.06
Save your blog with BlogBackupOnline
Mozilla CEO: We are no 'Frankenstein'
No joke: Will Ferrell is serious about the Web
After seven years, government data-regulation committee recommends new federal bureaucracy
Don't be afraid, Linux isn't just for geeks
Intel, Dell hold off on internal rollout of Vista
At the very end of this address to Stanford students in the Q & A section, Janice Fraser of Adaptive Path talks about "Intrapreneurial" ventures, where she and her partners of an existing company evaluate ideas for a new business direction.

She and her partners created a list of gating criteria, by which she means "how will we know if this is the right venture for us?"

Their list included:

- something that would catch on virally

- redefining a category based on a user experience challenge, because we are a user experience firm

- solid revenue model

- relevance to our ecosystem

http://edcorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=1561

I think the gating criteria themselves are probably specific to the partners and their skills and passions, but the concept that you get the team first, come up with a whole bunch of ideas and throw out 95% of them based on specific, well-thought-out criteria, is a good one.