skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Larry and Sergei where high-achieving CS students at one of the world's leading universities, which also happens to be known for spawning all sorts of ground-breaking entrepreneurial ventures. That gives them at least some credibility.

The concepts outlined in the OP are very basic, not ground-breaking at all. There is no hint of a reason why the OP should be even remotely believable. The whole thing sounds like puerile wishful thinking.

To me, what it sounds like is a child designing his ideal car with an ice cream dispenser, and seeing how oh-my-god, it could also be used as an ice cream truck - win-win!..

That's what I was criticising. Harsh, perhaps - maybe even excessively so - but fair.
Helping other startups can help your own
CSS Variables coming in Safari
Survey data from 1981-2007 says happiness is rising worldwide
Celestial clues may end ancient debate about eclipse in Odyssey
Flexibility Is Bad Design
http://www.nudgethem.com/ for reminders, a global appointment maker would be logical for them to add/tie into.
Odyssey of rhapsody
Off Topic But Important:

Could you point me to the most medically-reputable ways to quit smoking?
The Ministry of Education way has its own problems, namely that these kinds of organizations aren't really interested in education per se but in social engineering.

PS I bet most of the science faculty at your school had written loads of journal articles etc. How many of the business faculty were self-made millionaires?
You're kidding me? The computing world is about to witness the most drastic paradigm shift in its history. After all is said and done, the threaded or sequential process programming model will not only be superseded, we will kick ourselves in the ass for having been so stupid for so long.
I was trying to build something like Launchy or Quicksilver for gVim. It would be fun to have something like this. It is irritating to take your eyes to the last line of the program to enter commands. I would like to type :vs or :w or :wq or whatever in the center of the screen without moving my eyes far from the code i am writing
CSS Variables are here
salmon ravioli
2-word summary:

YAGNI principle
More seriously:

About a decade ago, I helped write this: http://www.powermedia.com/pilot/index.shtml

It seemed brilliant at the time and we were recreating something that had already been successful (http://www.catamount.com/NewtonApps/Aloha2.html).

There were lots of Palm users AND lots of AOL users, how could we fail?

It turns out that there were very, very few Palm MODEM users. And without the modem, it wasn't going to work at all.
Web naming rules relax, .pg available for $100K
Unfortunately, most central Ministries of Education tends to be filled with politicians rather than education PhDs (or by PhDs with a mostly politics interest). Who knows if that's better than the average local school boards in the US.
Another will address "e-mail overload," especially organizing and viewing less important messages.

Maybe MSFT will buy Xobni and ask them to move to Cambridge now...
so i guess the master plan is preferable?
Advertising spent .vs traffic to the site
hi guys...

trying to put together some information on a project, that ties the amount a biz spends on online advertising and the traffic to the site.

is there any place where this kind of information might exist (short of in the depths of an online ad network biz!!).

basically, i'd like to tie the businesses listed in jigsaw that have websites, with the traffic (views/usage/etc...) that the corp's site has, along with the amount of $$$ that the site spends on online advertising...

any thoughts/comments would be greatly appreciated!

thanks

mark
caliventures@yahoo.com
Well, except for those with children of course.
New James Bond trailer ! Quantum of Solace
If you're writing software without any kind of plan I feel sorry for you.
Ask HN:  How to credit blogger for finding news?
I posted to HN a link to a newsite, but i found it through a blog. Is there any way I can give the blog some credit?

example:

blog: http://www.greentaxi.com/?p=796

article: http://edition.cnn.com/2008/TECH/06/26/domain.names/?iref=hpmostpop
How to design a reputation system for your social media site
I wrote a code generation system that put together nice tight little apps, with UI, database interface, batch processing, and a report generator. It came in really handy for the simple apps everyone seems to need every once in a while.

My partner and I sold a few simple apps and then he found an opportunity in a large company for a much more sophisticated app. He quoted based upon the already demonstrated performance of me and my "little tool".

Unfortunately, every single out of the ordinary thing we ran into was not "generatable" by the tool. So I had a choice, hand code or upgrade the tool to generate it.

My choice was my "best failure story". I chose to add funtionality to the tool to generate code needed for an open project already well behind schedule. I didn't stand a chance. Even hard coding everything probably would not have saved the gig.

Lessons learned:

- Code generators must have hooks for custom code.

- Don't commit to using a code generator until after you have the customer's requirements and know that the generator can already handle them.

- Don't build your tools on the job site unless you're really good and know that you can finish on time.

- Don't let a few early and easy successes let you get a big head. It's never as good as it seems. (It's also rarely as bad as it seems.)

- Have complete, open, and honest communication with your partner(s). You don't have to know every single thing each is doing, but you better be on the same wavelength.

- Put everything dealing with external parties (customers) in writing. Commit to nothing until everyone agrees.

- If there's only 2 of you, you both better be hackers. There's just too much technical work for one to be overwhelmed and the other to be "waiting".
The Evil Side of Google? Exploring Google's User Data Collection
I'd second this. I hated school (and eventually dropped out and went to college a year early), but it was because it on the whole seemed a sham. Finding friends wasn't really a problem.

There are hacks to the process -- there are activities that take a lot of time and brains, but tend to make you "cooler" within the HS world. For me it was creating a rock band with friends.

That experience was huge -- that's where I learned the basics of audio engineering and recording, learned to work effectively in a group, wrote software to organize my collection of guitar music, started learning the basics of music theory and so on. Until I quit my job to work full-time on my startup those experiences were still driving me -- I was working in a company writing pro-audio software.

The thing was, that still made it possible to be "cool" without "wasting time".
I think you're pretty much correct. It's more like the board of trustees of a "non-profit", since the board elects its own members, rather than having shareholders elect the board. The system works reasonably well. The president is selected for competence and there is a stable secession process.

I think it is foolish to argue that China should be more democratic. People today forget how dangerous democracies are that don't have systematic anti-jingoistic indoctrination. Read the history of how universal suffrage in Europe from 1880-1914 led to the rise of militarist-nationalist politicians ( Stephan Zweig's The World of Yesterday is a great book on this topic). Do we really want to see the Chinese equivalent of Bill O'Reilly and Ernst Lissauer? I'll take the 90 year old men, thank you very much ...
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=232092

I've been thinking of it for sometime now, but I've not submitted to YC because I lack a cofounder... Anybody interested?
Great!

They will make my life easier.

Only if HTML implemented the same concept, one can dream.
So can you be both deep and happy go lucky patriotic in America?

This is an impossible question to answer. It depends too much on the definitions of "deep" and "patriotic"... words which are fuzzy enough to span continents. "Patriot", in particular, is almost impossible to define objectively... you start out with some reasonable definition, and ten minutes later you discover -- possibly to your horror -- that the word has shifted to mean "someone who supports my position on Issue X". Everyone agrees that George Washington was, objectively, a patriot -- except for his Tory contemporaries.

But, if we insist on trying to answer this unanswerable question, my answer would have to be "yes". Give me one or another popularly-accepted definition of "happy-go-lucky patriot" and "intellectual" and I'll bet you we can find plenty of people who fit both categories.
slavery?! every part of the world has had slavery at some point... (Most of those countries had revolutions... we had a civil war)

Vietnam? at least we have the guts to go to war. Europe didn't and they got their asses handed to them, we then bailed them out.

Pox blankets? stupid or asinine (I'm not looking it up. Your probably referring to us infecting the 'Native Americans') but I'm sure we aren't the first to do something like that.

Being an actual American... I don't see that we are all that patriotic.
XP's last day: Your last chance to avoid Vista
To my eyes, Ruby as a language looked a lot like an internal IT app that is built as an aggregation of features. There might be a wonderful, coherent design in the implementation that I can’t see, but the interface I use seems like a bunch on one-off features that don’t play well together.

Huh? Is this guy talking about Perl? Is he talking about the same Ruby I know? His criticisms don't make any sense. Ruby is well-organized and well thought-out. It's not without its flaws, but it has far fewer than Java or Perl. Hell, Ruby makes Perl look like Java.

(If he hates Ruby this much, I'd hate to imagine what he'd think of the gigantic featuritis-striken kludge called Java or J2EE.)
Propose YC: Share office space + learn + make more money
Hey all, I'm a freelance web developer about to take a 6-month long trip down the Western US coast. (Check my submissions page for a thread about it.) Once I'm done, I need to figure out where I will live and work. I know there are other freelancers on this board, and I want to brainstorm a little. (Let's assume I settle in the Bay Area.)

1.) Does anyone want to share office space? I'd prefer not to work from home; it's too easy to get distracted. I would be very willing to chip in a few hundred a month to rent an office with 2-8 other people in similar situations as my own. It would be an really awesome environment to work around talented people doing the same thing as I, without the whole boss/coworker relationship to tiptoe around. I really like to talk about web development best practices and brainstorm ideas for apps. Plus, it gets lonely working by myself.

2.) I think once we get beyond the initial share-an-office space, we could leverage our various talents. I'm a C# and PHP guy. Java pays well (from what I hear), but I have no desire to learn another platform. I come across Java work from time to time, and I'd be happy to pass it along to anyone in the office that knows Java. I'd be more apt to do this if I'd met and worked with the programmer in person and knew they were good. Also, I'm a code guy. I can't make a pretty page to save my life. Are you a Photoshop/CSS guru? Great. I probably have work for you. Very few programmers use every platform/language; we usually specialize. Which means we've usually turned down work before. Let's share that. Or, are you working on a PHP app with a complicated regex? Let's talk about it at lunch and I can probably help you. If you want, buy me a beer later. Good times.

3.) If we get a bunch of great people I can see it becoming a co-op of sorts, where we'd emulate those big medical complexes that have a Radiologist, Oncologist, Physical Rehab guy, and Optometrist sharing a building. Hopefully we could develop a reputation and become our own "headhunter" firm of sorts, possibly even have a dedicated work recruiter. But I can see a lot of our business coming from referrals and word-of-mouth, as mine usually does once I get a foot in the door. Two .NET guys want the same project? Great, write proposals and present them to the client. Operating under a business name and having dedicated office space would let us seem more professional and charge higher rates - that's undeniable. We could also possibly share database servers, books, code snippets, bandwidth, printers, and more...(UI testers? Guitar Hero controllers?).

I think if we could do it right, we could really have fun, make some friends, learn a lot, become better coders, and make more money. What do you all think about this? I wouldn't mind it if you were founding a startup, but this is not for crazy-cheap bootstrappers with six guys on laptops around a card table.

Myspace and Facebook have led us into an era where we interact with our friends online, but our work acquaintances in person. Shouldn't it be the other way around?
Why Parallel Programming Is So Hard
I've wondered the same thing. I suppose it's difficult for people to take off from work. But if you had a group of 10 parents/20 kids, you could have each parent take one day off every two weeks to be the teacher for the day. It might work quite well. You'd miss out on the clubs, sports, field trips, etc. that are probably the best part of public school. But perhaps those could be made for with organizations outside of schools.
FYI - Your blog made the SD Times News weekly email newsletter last week.
Raganwald is one of the most prominent Ruby programmers I know of, so I would say it's unlikely he hates Ruby.

And he has a point. While Ruby is certainly more coherent than Java, it's clearly less coherent than io or Lisp or smalltalk.
Sounds Syllables Semantic Synapsis

Missing Meaning Men Meander

Wanting Wonder Where Wonder Wanes

Musical Mirrors Mussing Meaningless Means
As a counterpoint, in southern California all the champion high school football teams come from the Catholic schools and small school districts outside of LA. The LA school district itself is giant bureaucratic behemoth. Despite having large numbers of players getting scholarhips, the actual football teams from LA public schools aren't that good. ( http://www.vdare.com/sailer/080629_schools.htm )
Syncplicity Integrates Zoho
Three conditions,

1) Late night
2) A (production) Windows system (don't ask!); and
3) C:\WINNT\SYSTEM32>del *.dll

The rest is ... as they say ... history.
if you don't want to deal with the overheads associated with obtaining and maintaining office space, there are a lot of coworking areas that a small group of people could make use of on the west coast. http://coworking.pbwiki.com/

a dev shop definitely does carry more weight when it comes to billability and reputation. especially one with office space.

ironically, i contributed to your last big thread, too. i'm pulling up roots on the east coast and moving to seattle for personal reasons in the next few months and have no definite plans for employment. we can talk, if you're interested, although seattle != SF.
Ruby is well-organized and well thought-out.

O RLY?

Just kidding. I think Ruby is well thought-out. Just for a chuckle, what does this snippet of code do?

p = Proc.new { return :to_sender };
p.call

What about this one?

l = lambda { return :to_sender };
l.call

Why and how do they differ? And given that they differ in behaviour, what do you think this should return? False, right?

c.class == l.class

As for my criticisms, my main point has to do with Ruby not being implemented in terms of itself. Almost everything else that troubles me can be traced back to that issue.

http://weblog.raganwald.com/2006/11/significance-of-meta-cir...

http://weblog.raganwald.com/2007/12/why-rubinius-matters-to-...

http://weblog.raganwald.com/2008/02/turtles-all-way-down-ple...

p.s. Please remember that the post was not titled "What's wrong with Ruby," it was titled "My Mixed Feelings about Ruby." So it can well be that I have a viewpoint which does not reflect how intelligent people feel about t he language.
Obviously people aren't dying off or anything. What 'crisis' refers to is the fact that many couples in certain countries feel they can't have kids.

Clearly it's a complex issue, but the whole point of the article is that the birth rate varies quite a bit from country to country: Japan and Italy have very low rates, places like France and Sweden do better.
In the context I was taught power had that very specific meaning. In this specific meaning money isn't power (though it can buy it), and money isn't prestige (though it can buy that too, see billg). In this definition, Bush has lots of power, and almost no prestige. Prestige on the order that Djikstra, Knuth, Turing, etc. have tends to last much longer than the people who earned it. Money and Power have almost no meaning beyond your lifetime.

If you follow the narrow definitions of the course, things tend to fall in place fairly cleanly.

One of the things that makes me wary of this model is that you can buy one for another. To be truly elemental of what people want you wouldn't be able to buy one for the other. You can't exchange lead for gold no matter how much lead you throw at the problem. This leads to confusion about what is what.

If you can buy power with money doesn't that make them interchangeable? Well yes, but that's not the point. Well what's the point? People tend to crave power money and prestige. But can't you buy power with money? ... And the cyclical argument continues :)
Cool! Though, this will be one of those features which is only useful in years to come when Firefox 4 and IE9 supports it, sadly. But once it has a wide audience it will be an amazing feature!
Your web framework - what you use to fill up your memcache.

This is too classic not to be quoted for tl;dr visitors.
How to Turn Your Network into Fort Knox: 100 Tips + Tutorials
If you’re a small business owner or just someone who loves shopping online and is addicted to your online banking, turn to this list of 100 tips, tutorials and resources that will help you beef up your own network security.
Blocks may not be able to genuinely accept blocks in Ruby, but I was able to get something pretty close: http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/ruby-talk/...
Auction-rate pricing for reservations
http://nyc.tablexchange.com/

PrimeTime Tables is an expensive, members-only reservation service.
http://www.primetime-tables.com/
Hey, that link is pretty awesome; I had not seen that before. I'll be passing through Seattle circa September, so send an email to samstrip at gmail and I'll get in touch. SF as a final destination is not set in stone by any means, I just figured that would best let me judge the response.
I think at least optimization of airplane parts by evolutionary algorithms has been done. Also, why start with a car?

Anyway, the point was that there seems to be a "data mining" algorithm that is very successful without forming scientific theories, namely the algorithm the brain is running. So I think the guy proclaiming science to be unnecessary might have a point. The article of this topic reminded me a bit of the ramblings of somebody defending his job that has become superfluous.
I left the PhD program after finishing my MSc and passing my qualification exam without trying my candidacy exam due to financial pressures. I could have easily scraped together enough with part-time jobs to solve the immediate pressing problems I had. While I certainly failed to finish my PhD, I would still be there today if I hadn't decided to leave when I did.

Other than the really obvious poor choices, it's hard for me to look back and say - oh yes, obviously that was a mistake and a failure! After all, if it was a choice - how can I predict what may have happened if I made the other decision? If there wasn't a choice, then it's not really a failure.
Did you consider getting a new partner? :P
"I'm just guessing here, but I think it may be because American school systems are decentralized. They're controlled by the local school board, which consists of car dealers who were high school football players, instead of some national Ministry of Education run by PhDs."

The real difference is that most European and Asian countries use tracking ( http://www.vdare.com/Sailer/080622_paradox.htm ). Forcing all students onto the same curriculum makes no one better off. Less apt kids don't learn the skills that would actually be useful to them. The nerds have their courses dumbed down, and earn the hatred of the kids who receive poor grades.

Local school boards do not actually have that much control. Have you noticed how schools have nearly the same basic structure everywhere? Education PHD's have an enormous influence because they control the education schools. That influence has been almost entirely pernicious. Plus they have a lot of control over curriculum requirements that come down from the state and federal boards of education. Teachers unions have an enormous amount of power and are also a national organization.

One more under-reported factor is the Supreme Court decision in the 1970's that made school discipline much, much harder to enforce. Read "The World We Created at Hamiliton High" ( http://www.amazon.com/World-We-Created-Hamilton-High/dp/0674... ) to see the chaos that ensued as a result this "student rights" decision.
Oh yes. Understand me correctly, I am a believer in the appropriateness of the current system in China. I do agree with you, to pursue the establishment of a democratic system in China right now would be to follow a decidedly misguided course. The jingoists would take over in fairly short order.

Believe me, I feel more safe going to sleep every night knowing that China is run by boring, old, stodgy, conservative men who are anything but rash.
sure thing. you already set out on your trip?
Nice. I guess the author never experienced the joy of having this lovely conversation with his users:

Programmer: That feature you asked for two weeks ago? It's done. Take a look. What do you think?

User: Oh... hmmm... yeah, that's kinda wrong... See, I know I said I wanted X, but I just realized I actually wanted Y. But Y is very similar to X, can't you just tweak it and I'll come back to take a look after lunch?

Programmer: Well, actually, yeah, Y is a lot like X, but I tried to just "start shipping great software," so I didn't take the extra day which will make X->Y only take an hour or two. I'll have to start from scratch. See you in another two weeks.

User (two weeks later): Actually, Y isn't quite right. Can you do Z?

I'll go so far as to claim that code which can't adapt to changing requirements is either (1) pure genius because it just works and does exactly what users want, and therefore rare, or (2) unused, or (3) thrown away. Obviously it shouldn't be overdone, but the ability to balance between flexibility and delivering working applications is precisely what defines people who, as the author puts it, "ship great software."
Agreed. But alas, I hate it when these features are announced, because they will only tease me for years to come until it's widely released.
I've been thinking about taking on the European market as well. I'm based out of Geneva... Would be interesting to see how European restaurants respond to this concept - I find them generally behind the curve. I still haven't done enough research into European competitors, so will do that first, find out what we can do better, then get in touch ;-)