skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I did more or less the same thing in Chicago in the 90's. It's a miserable existence, but you feel so hip, cool and victorious knowing that you've escaped the burbs. A lot of the buzz in Silicon Valley about living in San Fran reminds me of that, too.

Isn't that what your 20's are for, though? Trying new things, being able to risk a bunch and learning that perhaps there are other things that are more important than being hip and trendy? And, you gain a lot of experiences and lessons learned, so even though you're malnourished, it's not all bad.
it's not so bad.
Do you require privacy/crypto?
Major League Baseball's 2.0 - MLB's New Economics
Why I won't work for Microsoft
Parent was being too harsh. As a designer, I don't think it looks that bad. It's not amateurish in any serious way, and it avoids the current cliches, which is refreshing to see. To me it kind of looks like cool design from, say, 1997, and I don't mean this as a putdown (I liked 1997) -- the choice of colors and the 3D just give it that sort of feel. Probably not the worst of things; you're targeting "civilians", so your product doesn't need to be too design-forward. Your featured sites look pretty decent.

Seems like a cool product. I'm actually developing something kind of similar, intended mainly for online magazines and long-form blogs.
eBay?!?!

dnforum.com

namepros.com
[ "foo", "bar", "baz" ] * ", " => "foo, bar, baz"

It's pretty bad.
"what problem does a web application solve that a desktop application does not?"

security, backup, mainentance, collaboration, streamlined development, agnostic client, open source, economies of scale for administration, development, and deployment, etc., etc., etc.

Oh ye of little vision.

Good article to time capsule for a nice laugh in 2011.
Anyone tried Mashable's web 2.0 forum?
"There are plenty of companies that get acquired before having a solid business proposition."

That doesn't make it a good idea. The answer to "Who is your target market?" should not be "Uhhh... Google?" There are many more companies that built a "cool" product that was useful and used, couldn't monetize it, and died because of lack of capital. Somehow I doubt YC has ever invested in a company that flat out had no exit strategy outside of being acquired by a big company. You've got to have something because if none of the big fish bite you're screwed otherwise.
http://github.com
It's definitely changing how we think about friendship. What you use to decide on your friends on socnets might have nothing to do with how you decide on your real friends.
For all of my projects, I have an assembla account (http://www.assembla.com) with SVN access. I don't know the privacy/crypto details, so if you're storing private/sensitive data I can't help you with any details there - I'm doing open source stuff and couldn't care less who sees my code. Your situation might be different!
It's funny how the author spent quite a bit of e-ink describing (as opposed to commenting on) things that could be inlined or linked to.
Reddit redesigned
Until a few months ago, we hosted our svn repository on berlios.de . It went down every few weeks, so I don't recommend them. We started using them when sourceforge only had cvs. Nowadays sf.net supports svn, so you might look into that.

Somewhat recently, we switched to git and started hosting ourselves, but you might look into code.google.com .

If you don't actually want your code to be public, just get some free online storage. Do you really need more than 5GB?
Well, if it works it's a great model...

A "sell the company" business model is like becoming an actor with a mind of becoming rich like Tom Cruise. No doubt some people who do it will find some success, but by definition this is something that (a) works only for a small number of people (the world needs a limited number of movie stars, Google & Co acquire a limited number of companies) and (b) contains a large element of luck - many actors have comparable talent & looks, many companies can (and a few already have) build a Twitter-like product.

The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a great book about the randomness in our lives: http://www.amazon.com/Black-Swan-Impact-Highly-Improbable/dp...
assembla.com for me too
My suggestion is to get Dreamhost (500GB, 5TB transfer) and buy this for a 2-year time. Enter the promo code "5050" to get $50 bucks off, making this a $150 for 2 years hosting plan that runs svn and you'll never run out of diskspace.
I run a VPS with SVN and Trac. Does everything I need.

My backup job runs from home using a scheduled script (cron, tar, scp).

You could just as easily send your tar files to Amazon S3
DON'T use Dreamhost.

I once had my SVN with them; you have no control over availability - and availability wasn't good, in my experience.
sedo.com. they'll pay you the ad revenue your site gets if you park it and point it to their servers while you have it for sale with them. you can either auction off the domain or just list it for sale and accept offers through them. they do take 10% of the final sale price, though.
I agree with you that many of these shortcuts are obnoxiously read-only, but that was probably the worst example you could have picked. That notation is nicer than Python's standard ", ".join(["foo", "bar", "baz"])
Although the slides date back to 2003, I wonder how much of it is still relevant?
Actually I don't think corporate M&A guys are the least bit influenced by YC. Investors are, somewhat, but not acquirers.
For small projects I use http://www.8svn.com which is pay as you go service, similar to nearylyfreespeech.net
accessibility as well.

I can access news.yc on my t-mobile dash, my mac, my desktop & my friend can access it on his iphone or ubuntu machine. Installed native apps can't do this, unless you install them, which requires download and os compatibility.
You are underestimating the power of an ocean of determined people with nothing better to do.
you no longer have to login. if you have old cookies from *.nytimes.com, clear those first and try again.
We have both public and private accounts with assembla - they're great.

We used to use their entire package (bug reporting, trac, etc.) but now we're only using them for SVN and use locally-deployed software to manage the rest of the toolchain (mostly Atlassian software such as Jira, Confluence, Crucible, and Fisheye)
assembla here too, and very happy. you can set it up for git too if you go into Admin >> Tools
This article misses the point badly. Sure, web apps are becoming thicker clients. But they're clients which run on any OS (and often on your phone), and can be downloaded with no install process and few worries about malware. And how many of your old stand-alone apps are even clients at all?

From the developer's perspective, it's even better: there's no upgrade process for your users, so new features and bugfixes can go out to all your users instantly (or not, your choice).
Powerlist: A Structure for Parallel Recursion
Barriers and journaling filesystems
I'll second SitePoint. They have some very high profile sites sold on a daily basis in their marketplace.
"Why, aren't there robots or something doing such things?"

I'm actually kind of curious about what is preventing this equipment from actually becoming a robot:

'“I can teach them easily,” he says. “My equipment is goof proof, it has to be.” By that, he means that an employee need not even know how to drive straight, the tractor is guided by a sophisticated guidance sytem hooked into three satellites. “If I overlap six inches on fertilizer or seeding,” he says, “it wastes nearly $10,000.”'

What's the need for a human being in the machine at all? What could he or she do in there but screw things up?
DO NOT USE godaddy's tdname.com. They hold your money for over 30 days after receiving payment from the buyer.
I'm not picking on Ruby, I'm picking on the article. The worst example? No, that'd be:

does = is = { true => 'Yes', false => 'No' }

does[10 == 50] => “No”
It's a common operation. You should see how many people have to code it/get it wrong in topcoder. So it overloads * -- how often are you going to multiply a string?
I think you're massively overrating the latent pool of reversing and software protection talent, and I backed my argument up with examples. There aren't 1,000 DVD Jon's out there.

[late] Let me reword that: if you can break BD+, you do have something better to do, and you can charge 250-350/hr to do it.
I have 400 facebook friends, but I can definitely feel that the monkey number is 150...
if __FILE__ == $0
# Do something.. run tests, call a method, etc. We're direct.
end

That works great... until you execute the script via a symlink.
Yeah, The guy who did all of the current designs [ http://kkellydesign.com ] Is really over the 'copy apple' phenom among designers (apple is over it as well, but many didn't notice)

The point of the OP was that we have a good product FOR designers (and civilians), not that we have designs to show off. If there are designers interested in being design-forward, then have at it; it just happens that most of our customers are conservative mid-west businesses and organizations.

The idea is that you can easily go from your design to powerhouse website without lots of complicated work, and coding-language markup to worry about. Designers don't need that (but it's certainly available to those that want it).
Somewhat like this way (in Perl) of finding the larger of two numbers:

[$a => $b]->[$a <= $b]

I tend to just say max($a, $b) though.
163. I speak to 4 of them more than once each month.

"Is there real, concrete, value in thousands of peripherally connections or is it just another trend — another flash in the pan?"

I think the key word here is 'connections' - there's only going to be real, concrete value in real, concrete connections - the fact that I have Michael Arrington as a 'Facebook Friend' doesn't mean squat.

The final question is mine - How many Friends do you Want?
Yeah. I never divide strings, either. I think I'll override :/ to form filesystem paths! x = "var". x/"log"/"messages". Awesome!
"The risk with Steve's method is inbuilt assumptions you can make answering his questions, long before a real person ever sits in front of your program."

Not really risky if you iterate this the same way you iterate software.
Structures of Participation in Digital Culture
RescueTime uses BrainTree and they took us on without a single paying customer. This has since changed, but we are still quite a bit less than 100k per month.
github. has varible size cheap pay for accounts. if it's open source the account is free, but if you can't make your code public you have to pay for it.
But make sure your "tell it right" and occasionally refer to a number "they haven't heard before"
Canonical Redirects with Google App Engine
It is currently possible to associate multiple URLs with your App Engine instance.

However, the administration interface doesn't permit configuring any redirects. The burden is thus on the app engine developer.

This entry discusses one possible solution for canonical redirects via some simple python in your app engine application.
Double-Edged Swap
I'm only speaking about the experience, not the people themselves. If you want to learn how to live workfree (I think that may actually be a thing) in the US, being homeless on the streets of Santa Monica would teach you a lot. But if I was Craig, I'd be looking for the guys who work at a Hormel plant in Kentucky instead.
+1 for Assembla. Excellent and free. Can't get better than that.
Hmmm. I prefer the cleaner and simpler original design.
read the slides, its still relevant.

1.8.x and 1.9 are just experimentation and intermediate steps to ruby 2.0 which is a "start from scratch" project
Ugh tell me about it. Paypal has got some of the worst customer service I've ever witness in my life. I've sent them several emails regarding the use of their services in other countries (the reason being we have some customers who work in Shanghai) and they're responses were either canned(which did not answer my question at all) or treated me liked an idiot and referred me to their documentation. Which by the way is in need of some work as well. They even had the gall to send me an email to rate their customer service!! PayPal FTL.
We have different opinions on what's important in a language. I want something that's as fast to write as prose, so that my mind can focus on other things in the problem domain. This may mean that my code is rather unreadable to people used to coding in specific idioms. But functionality is commented at a higher level, so then what are they doing reading individual statements from my code anyway?

This means that, sometimes, I find myself in opposition to the python community for its goals of readability and regularity, but it's a powerful language chalk full of good ideas and one of the most important tribes on the net, so I still use it.
They need humans driving the tractor for the same reasons we aren't all commuting to work in robot cars and buses.
I share your hesitation. Those that are little-known tricks would cause any reader to do a double-take.
I love Ruby for it's expressiveness even more so than Python. But the author's code examples tend to make me hesitate for the reasons that bad Perl code makes my eyes fall out.
"We now have technologies that effectively mix web and desktop technologies, something I like to call 'webtop clients', manifest in Adobe Flash Player, Java Applets, and Microsoft Silverlight."

1. Flash is used for: video, music, ads (usually also only to enable video), and sites for the sort of web design shops you don't want to hire. Also, games, a special case. When was the last time you saw Flash used to recreate a desktop-GUI-style app? That OpenLaszlo (sp?) sure is taking the world by storm, eh?

2. Nobody uses Java applets.

3. Nobody uses Silverlight.

Statelessness is the core strength of the web, and the core strength of web applications. The limitations the web naturally imposes make for better applications and a better user experience than the GUI paradigm. (Every time I hear about some great new continuation-based web framework, there's always an example showing how easy it is to create the equivalent of a modal dialogue, and I always want to hit the writer over the head with a copy of a decent book on interface design. Modes are bad! Statelessness is good! The resource-centric model is good! Users like these things for the same reason you like REST better than SOAP and modular code rather than otherwise — people don't do modes!

(Sorry for the rant, these GUI partisans get me riled up.)
FriendFeed Should Kill Those Who Accuse It of Murder
It sounds like you just said, "my code is unmaintainable, but that doesn't matter because it's commented".
But the author's code examples tend to make me hesitate for the reasons that bad Perl code makes my eyes fall out.

It's nice to read the article for that reason. Hopefully people will realize that you can write horrifyingly bad code in any language. I'm looking forward to the Python edition ;)

Maybe we can start approaching language design rationally when people start realizing that all languages suck big time. Even Ruby. Even Lisp.
Vertically challenged.
I use http://duplicity.nongnu.org/ to backup to Amazon S3 (it has support for various other backends). It encrypts with GnuPG. S3 charges a few cents per GB of transfer and a few cents per GB of storage per month.
It's been written. Look for the articles on how to mimic Ruby "case" statements with Python dicts.
Unless you have a partner that will take care of the marketing and sales side of things, that's probably a mistake.

There are several things that making the effort to new customers will give you:

1. Money. If you have more paying customers, you have more revenue. More revenue means you can pay to make problems go away. Taxes, accounting, web design (if that's not your forte), and even the sales process itself (though it's almost certain that no one can sell your product better than you can early on).

2. More feedback. You might be going the wrong way. Early adopters have a very different set of requirements from the average user (generally). So, the more mainstream your sales process becomes the more likely you are to find out that you're on the wrong path. It's very easy to keep going further and further into a niche--and if that niche is too small, you're gonna be in big trouble before you even realize it. It's entirely possible to featurize yourself out of the big markets by focusing on the tiny niches that your early adopters live in. For example, our early adopters tend to push for scalability solutions for single websites--but our mainstream customers just want to fit more customers onto the same box. If we spend all of our time building scalability solutions, we'll find ourselves only being able to serve 2% of the market extremely.

3. More users who can help you help other users, via forums or mailing lists or wikis, and can help you make more sales. It is a reinforcing cycle. We had an amazingly great sales day today, because we got mentioned by people we don't even know on Slashdot. Because we reach out to our community regularly, we support the sites and communities that would use our software, and we (or I, rather...Jamie is full-time on coding, always) try to close a deal with a new hosting provider (even small ones) every week or two.

Building a better mouse trap isn't going to make you rich. You have to "ring the cash register" sometime, or you not only won't get rich, you also won't be serving your customer as well as you should be.

But, I do think the blog post in question spends a bit too much time on checklists and making elaborate plans.
Has Microsoft ever sued anybody for patent infringement?
We use Beanstalk for hosted Subversion. They've been pretty good so far. And have super integration to Campfire and FogBugz, etc.

http://www.beanstalkapp.com/
Yes, many of the "tricks" are Perl-esque.

But #16 is a good one — I like one liners but after reading I looked through the code base in one of my projects and sure enough, explicit true/false was spelled out in methods returning booleans...

(rand < event_prob) ? true : false

Shorter and sweeter...

(rand < event_prob)

As opposed to the hideous...

if event_prob
return true
else
return false
end
Love the new look. More seperation, better use of typography/colours in general, and just overall better feel. Don't get why so many haters dont like it

Oh wait, I do, but Reddit is smart and listens to its users: Preferences -> Compress the Link Display (Which is the top tory on reddit right now)

Good job guys!
That "trick" is in K&R.
I like the suckiness curve graphs. Told me all I needed to know in a pretty picture. I didn't even have to read the whole article.

We found this to be true today...a couple of independent folks talked about our product in a thread on Slashdot, and we had our best sales day ever. All tiny sales...but a whole heckuva lot of them. And, they'll probably be the kind of customer that keeps coming back, assuming we keep them happy. And in all cases, we're finding that folks are saying, effectively, "All of these things suck, but this one over here sucks a lot less...and they fixed it when I told them X was sucky." And all along, we've been trying to remove the stupid features and add in new functionality without adding new complexity to the UI (as best we can). I think the battle against increasing complexity is a battle worth fighting, and I become more convinced of it every day.
TED Talks: Hidden Worlds (video)
Do you remember before Google? Do you remember how bad search engines sucked and how irrelevant the results were? Google was smart enough to see that when lot's of pages link to a site, that site must be considered relevant by a lot of people.

Ranking results by inbound links was the breakthrough that made search actually work. Paid links are bad, they allow people with money to game the system and make irrelevant content show up in the search results. Unless you're a spammer or an SEO, Google is doing the right thing for the user. It is the user after all, they're trying to serve, not middle men trying to arbitrage the system. Ideally, they figure out a way to make spamming and SEO completely irrelevant, that industry needs to die.

You act as if you have some right to show up in their search results, guess what, YOU DON'T. It is Google's search engine, they have every right to do with it as they please, including exclude anyone they wish.

Google's logic isn't flawed, yours is. Google's search results are not a free market, they have every right to game their own system to make them money and there's nothing unfair about it. You have no rights and no expectation of rights about how they index your site with their search engine.
I use svn and bought my space from http://svnrepository.com/
Exposure and brand building are valuable, just less valuable than actually capturing someone's business at the moment.
I don't really have much specific knowledge on encryption, but I've heard over and over that this or that DRM method was "the one", and time after time they've fallen. It's enough to make me skeptical.
I didn't think PayPal could lose anymore credibility, but they've managed to prove me wrong!
Tell me something I don't know.
His choice of phrasing is perhaps poor, but no it is not a contradiction.

If you don't know your life could be better, you are spared the disappointment of knowing you lack something desirable.
C Compiler Written In Python
Family intranet startup - would love your feedback
My partners and I are building a service that lets any family set up a family intranet site. We've just put up a beta and would love to get your honest feedback (even the brutal stuff.)

http://kinverge.com/

Registration is required, but it's just an email and password. (The site lets you upload photos and other content, and lets you invite others to your group, so it's easier to check it out within your own user account rather than using a single generic test account.)

Really interested to hear your input and advice. The idea for the site grew out of our frustration with not being able to keep track of family information -- photos, birthdays, giftlists, announcements, etc. -- all in one place. We also wanted to make that place so easy to use that even our non-tech-savvy family members can participate.

What do you think? What's working for you, and what should we be doing better/differently in your opinion?
How about this:

"What problem does a web application solve that a desktop GUI frontend to a network server does not?"

Browsers are huge beasts. If, looking at a single application, one could take away from the browser all the things that a particular application does not need, what would that application's size be? Given good UI libraries, perhaps a million times smaller?

Of course, it's the good old "Worse is better" again. I haven't lost hope, though. I'm sure we can come up with something better than the browser.

edit As an example of something vastly better that already exists in a stable form: http://www.rebol.com/docs/easy-vid.html
Flex is Flash with GUI love. With Flash 9 using a better caching mechanism for the Flex framework, we may see it used more often online.
Until we can move data across a network (or worse yet, the Internet!) as fast as data moves from the hard drive to the processor, we will have a need for client-side apps.
Why Google needs its own nuclear plant
Having the creator of Ruby give a presentation outlining the shortcomings and planning for future fixes points more to something 'good' about Ruby than to something sucky.
I'm curious, what else exists out there on the 'mainstream' as alternatives to Paypal?
I think the problem is with the blue background they added.

I do like the customize your reddit although it should take less horrizontal space.

*update
here is a picture without the annoying blue background
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2288/2526292005_6ec376faf4_o....