skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
OO is all goodness, just like FP. But the way it is implemented by some people can make it impossible to easily understand or modify -- just like FP.

OO is simply organizing your code before/as you write it. Combined with UML, it can be a kick-ass way of describing your general strategy for dealing with complex problems. Or it can take something simple and make it into a monster -- it's up to you.

Another way of looking at OO is that you are building your own language as you go along by starting with nouns (types) and adding all sorts of verb-clauses to hook them together. You can do this in a super-cool, easy-to-understand way, or you can get a bit carried away and try to recreate the dictionary when you only need a few nouns and a few verbs.

OO's goal is not tight, beautiful, concurrent code. You want to feel like Picasso or Spock, go write FP.

For all of those reasons, OO just isn't as sexy as FP. You're not writing something that scales to a zillion users right out of the bag. You're not doing a lot of meta-programming, recursion, lambda calculus and such. You're not writing anything sneaky, clever, or bound to impress the other nerds. Everything just looks plain Jane. Add to that all of the examples of bad pattern usage and other atrocities in the OO world and I can easily see why other ways of doing things can seem more attractive.
pandora pays royalties to soundexchange, the same way internet radio does. they in theory pay artists. although, i'd be interested in hearing how many artists actually get paid by sx and how much.
walterk does have a point... but it's pretty ok... i bought a "crumpler" keyboard protector with it, which can also be used to wipe the screen and "grease" of the surface
He's making a killing with his "ugly" products and had 17x revenue growth in 5 years. I'm sure if he could charge an extra $100 per license, he'd make the software prettier. As it is, he primarily sells bug tracking software to Windows programmers. It's not exactly a sexy, design driven business.
There doesn't seem to be anything about it in HN's robot.txt.

Of course, it may have been implemented in other ways.
Assuming you know the core Ruby library, would you call this explicit or implicit?

class GetterDone
attr_reader :a, :b, :c, :d
end

Rather than being a runtime attr.startswith check, this will generate actual "return self.foo" methods in the class.

Think of this as generating code using a UI, except you record the minimal UI commands, rather than putting the full output into your source files. The commands themselves are still explicit, it's just that they contain only the interesting information with the minimum amount of boilerplate.
Are your cookies very good? Do people come around to your house to eat your cookies no matter how rude you are to them? If so go for it, if not well I'd be thinking about something else, the snack food market is incredibly competitive and done to death.

Even worse, say you do get it working whats to stop someone else opening a cookie shop next door? As others have said business schools are made for this sort of ahem 'cookie cutter' business model.

Run the numbers and if you think it will work well go in with both eyes open and good luck.

If there's three of you why not two get a job and the third run the shop full time, get some cheap student labor for busy times and as it takes off the other two can wind up their other jobs, or if your IT guys get short term contracts and rotate even if its wildly successful it will be a year or two before it could support 3 people full time.
Yes, with nicer closure syntax and/or lazy evaluation, lots of macro use cases can be eliminated. However, making single definition work as multiple definitions is a pattern that I haven't find ways other than macros.

For example, think of defenum macro that expands to a bunch of defconstants:

(defenum (ONE 1) TWO THREE FOUR (TEN 10))
=>
(progn (defconstant ONE 1)
(defconstant TWO 2)
(defconstant THREE 3)
(defconstant FOUR 4)
(defconstant TEN 10))

(Haskell programmers would use types for enum-kind of stuff, but suppose that you really need to associate numbers to those symbols.)

Or you can go further to name the enum itself, defining conversion functions between symbolic names and their values:

(defenum the-numbers ONE TWO THREE ...)
=>
(progn
(defun symbol->the-numbers (sym)
(case sym
((ONE) 1) ...)))
(defun the-numbers->symbol (num)
(case sym
((1) 'ONE) ...)))
(defconstant ONE 1) ...)

Without macros, you need to have some procedural interface to modify the global environment to realize these (which is, imho, worse than macros).
I am as scared of Perl 6 as I am of the Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot, and other things that don´t exist...
The Filter Has Launched
True in a world where you have a 1:1 application to database mapping.

However out here in the real world, it's common to have n:1, i.e. many applications all accessing and modifying a single database. The question is, then, how do you implement common or mandatory logic in a way that avoids having to re-implement it in every application, and protects the data from a misbehaving application? Why, you expose access to the underlying data through stored procedures, problem solved.
For the majority of human history, some humans have treated others as property. That's wrong.
My girlfriend and I stumbled upon a cupcake spot in Georgetown (Washington DC) this weekend. It's a somewhat similar model, and they have a site that gives you a sense of the branding: http://www.georgetowncupcake.com/

Cupcakes...there's a higher perceived value and a fun/childhood/novelty aspect. I paid $3.00 for one, it would be tougher to charge that for a cookie. The store was busy, people were buying them by the half dozen for parties. There was a viral aspect as people were walking down the street happily eating these messy cupcakes. Anyway, I love cookies and wish you luck! Let us know how you proceed.
Educational software--desktop apps so far.
Here's the fundamental problem with OO: not everything is an object.

Some problems decompose naturally into functions.

Some problems decompose naturally into procedures.

Some problems decompose naturally into objects.

OO has extremely poor fit with functional programming at a fairly deep theoretical level. Procedural programming is often very useful for doing synthesis on a data set. Object programming is often very useful for people doing stuff to their virtual "things". The problem is when languages anchor to one abstraction or the other at a fundamental level (ruby) programmers tend to think they have to follow along.

In truth, it's about finding an abstraction (or set of abstractions) that fit the problem at hand. A lot of what makes OO hard is cases where one really needs to break down and say "but this bit? this bit is procedural" and having the experience to be confident of dropping the OO approach at those points.
Yes try explaining to "graduate trainee" that a table is not a class and a row is not an object.
NAQ - Never Asked Questions
Richmond Virginia Criminal Defense Lawyer, Car Accident Attorney, Attorneys Richmond
Virginia Personal Injury Lawyers and Richmond VA Personal Injury Attorney offering Free Consultation
>Without IP protection, the industries that have made our media our chief cultural export would be economically unfeasible.

I guess the 'our' is supposed to be Americans. No chance that someone outside the US might read the article or have views on the issue. There are actually those who would argue that this 'chief cultural export' hasn't entirely been a good thing but I guess they don't really count according to this article's viewpoint.
Ask YC: Just launched. Need traffic. Any suggestions on getafreelancer, elance, odesk, etc.
Here begins the life of a twitter-like online dating site. www.TalkAboutADate.com. I've thought about using the above for classified ads submissions, forum postings, etc., to promote the site. However, I think this is borderline spam, so I'm phrasing the ads carefully. Suggestions would be gratefully received. Thank you.
+1 for the 'Down by Law' quote, but the rest of it seems fairly similar to a lot of other content in the same vein.
recursion is not as overhyped and widespread as OO is.
Well, that is true, but you are forgetting that the "other things" are what the program is for. Physicists may write dodgy FORTRAN but that's fine, because the programs are only a side-effect of doing their real work. I would go so far as to say most of the people writing code (if not most of the code that exists) was written by people who aren't programmers.
The Worth of Recommendation Engines
http://www.google.ie/search?q=%22This+sentence+can+not+be+fo...
Yes, I realize that debian runs fine on a powerbook. However, I need a new computer anyway.
Where in Brooklyn? On Coney Is?
Taking a Breather From Social Media? Maybe We’re Doing It Wrong
What you're talking about is essentially a syntax specifically for getters, I think (I don't know Ruby that well). I guess my general point about "too much magic" goes away when the magic is part of the language, just on semantics. That is, you don't know the language if you don't know what magic its syntax does.
Something cool would be if you could adopt a "web 2.0" cookie shop by continually getting feedback on the cookies, I'll explain:

You never get the same cookie twice, every batch is different, the ingredients are always different; you constantly change the recipe based on customer feedback.

Also, you could have a new recipe every month by like adding a few customer recipe's and having people vote on it, then every month you could come out with a new cookie or something like that.

I might sound crazy, just a few ideas I had based on hearing your idea.
cool. but how will you make money from it? not saying one shouldnt write C++ compilers just wondering how you will make a business out of it.
No, the decision to post a link to his commentary was probably right. If the commentary gets this much discussion, but nobody clicks through to the article, it's fairly clear that we aren't terribly interested in the article, but we are interested in the commentary :-)
Four (or Five) Reasons Why It’s Time To Spring Clean Your RSS Reader
"I think the current copyright situation lets citizens do pretty much whatever they want"

Share a song with some friends, create a mashup of two cool songs, use some music in a short film they've made, make a collage of different drawings, write new lyrics for an existing song and record that, use samples from an existing song to create something new etc. etc.
interesting. i am working on the netflixchallenge myself.
I have some ideas about doing a food business (not a restaurant!). I'm not sure I'd really call it a startup, though.

Hecl is more mobile than web: http://www.hecl.org
Lumos Labs Gets $3 Million Funding for Brain Games
Your best bet is to watch Ramsay Kitchen Nightmares, UK and US. If I were ever brave enough to open a culinary themed enterprise like yours then I would use those shows (especially the UK ones as the US get a lot of help with makeovers!) to give you a good grounding on what the difficulties can be.

Its a very hard idea I would say, good luck though.
This is hardly new. I read about it on TC maybe 15 months ago.
"I don’t think our current copyright system is failing. I think that right now it’s working incredibly well. iTunes is proof of that. Despite the fact that anyone with an iPod could, with just a little effort, fill it with stolen music, millions of people are paying to do so. Without the laws we have in place, that would not happen."

Since you assert that people need not pay attention to the copyright laws which are in place, how does it follow that they'd stop buying music if the laws didn't exist? I would suggest that the success of the iTunes Store in the face of various well-known sharing methods suggests that it can compete without needing copyright law.
For a "scripting language", yes. Compared to C, no.
Translation: we got $40k and some second tier press. For free that isn't bad, but I'd still pay for DEMO if I was launching a consumer product - they get real press (magazines, newspapers, etc) for the cost of 1 month of a PR firm. Now if that was free, that would be sweet.
Where I currently work I guess you could call us a retail startup? Small retail store that has one team (me) focused on building an online presence while the rest focus on the out-the-door. I don't know if retail can be considered a startup though?
One thing to note about bank loans: usually the bank asks that at least some of the credit line is made personally liable to you/someone on your team. It's like the first time you get a credit card and you have a parent/guardian underwrite it since you have no credit history.

The business is like a person, with its own Tax ID and everything (just as we have social security numbers), and when that business has no credit history you may need to use yours to get it started and establish a credit history. When you put some of your own money on the line, the bank feels a little better off since you're risking your own capital along with their capital, and not just their capital.
ests that actually measure stuff give you data, and proudly claiming to be unswayed by data because you can imagine an exception is not rigorous.

Agreed, and likewise I would appreciate an understanding of the lack of absolute certitude of the predictive power of said data to an instantiation without giving external factors weight.

Again, my argument was not intended as a parody, just as a nudge toward the "middle ground" you speak of.
The choice of words is very important and not trivial in the least. Notice how you just said "piracy of a song", when in fact the copying of a song is not "piracy" which equates to robbery aka theft.

The words we choose are very important when discussing ideas, just ask the republicans who have used this technique for years to sway the public to their side on various social and political matters (death tx vs. estate tax being one example).
> the increased eyes and ears on content

Those eyes and ears were supposed to be looking at ads, where more impressions equals a happier advertiser. It isn't obvious how that extends to donation-ware, when everyone can just move on to the next free source of music.
It's easy to test. Talk PG into putting a "tipjoy" link right beside "link" above every comment, and see what happens.
Always on the look out for new places in Brooklyn. What's the address so that I can stop by?
No shit Sherlock!

Look around you. Everything you see around you, literally everything other than the human beings and maybe the plants if you're in the countryside, everything around you is there because a business put it there.

99.999% of them don't have any technical ideas at all.

The advantage of a brilliant technical idea is that it scales better. Hiring more people to make more money sucks. The holy grail most people who start technology startups are following is an idea which scales so well that it can be built up to be worth millions or billions even though only a handful of people really built it. You couldn't do that with a construction firm, by contrast.
I did not mean any offense.
Perl 6 is here now. There are two working implementations, they're just in heavy flux.
"didn't know how to do any Web programming"

That doesn't mean they didn't know how to code. Adjusting to web programming is not so hard if you are already a coder.

That said, it is indeed inspiring
Aren't they just charging the price that they can get away with? The publishing house and authors get the part of the money that would normally go to the printers, loggers, shippers, etc.
"Is Twitter Down?" - Yes or No
Why Time Warner Cable's pay-per-use Internet experiment will fail
My bet is that his fear is unfounded. It will play out just like Perl 5: Only smart guys making popular libraries will use the language modification black magic and it won't be a problem.
Those publishing organizations. If you're not a songwriter and/or don't own at least part of your publishing, you don't get royalties that way. A lot of major label artists don't write their own songs and it's not just the pop/r&b singers. A lot of rock bands hire songwriters as well. Overall, the entire industry is shady and the majors are grasping for the last bit of CD revenue that they can find.

You're going to see a lot more 360 deals like the one Jay-Z just did, although they'll be doing them for much smaller amounts from much smaller artists and they will be TERRIBLE deals for the artists. Jay-Z got so much because he has the power, influence, and track record to justify it. The majors want to own the entire vertical but won't create any sort of deal that is going to be fair for new projects.
If you're going to be crunching petabytes of 32 bit floats, then by all means, use C or even FORTRAN. Most of us don't have a requirements that stringent, and something like Lua is just fine.

Unfortunately, a lot of us are brainwashed into thinking we've got to act like weather simulation programmers, when we're really doing business apps.
you make it oodles better than any other c++ compiler out there????
Ask YC: Should I believe the Rails hype?
I'm a php developper and have been for a good 7-8 years now. I took the time a year ago to learn cakePHP and yes, the documentation was lacking, but I hung out with the devs in #cakephp and can now safely say I know it almost inside out and can whip out applications like it's nobody's business.

Thing is, in university I learned C, assembly, C++, java, PERL, in various environments, so I know I can pick up RoR in a couple of months, especially when I leave my company this month to start coding my web application ideas.

My question is the following: I'm drowning in RoR propaganda and consequently am actually considering learning it. Is this a wise move or is my time better spent taking what I know (cakePHP) and developping my ideas now? I'm curious what you all think.
People will pay alot of money for a good compiler.
Are you using computer vision techniques to do this automated video monitoring?
The situation with Java is very different. The language itself is not owned by a corporation. There is no need for a "clean room reimplementation," as was necessary for Java.

Also, Avi's trick with Gemstone/S can also be replicated with any other commercial Smalltalk. It can also be replicated with the now Open Source Strongtalk VM, which is a Smalltalk VM as fast as the the commercial ones.

And when YARV is ready to put under apps like Rails the Ruby community will have another VM as fast as the commercial Smalltalk JITs.
SquirrelFish is faster than Tamarin
Yes, this is where a lot of companies get lost, asking people for money in any amount is hard, and it comes with a bunch of unpleasant responsibilities. Providing something for free gives a warm glowy feeling and if advertising can support it, have at it; but remember that it's not a business until you have a proven revenue model.
Let me guess (or pray) - they've fixed the STL compiler error message headache - if true I know many ppl who would line up to pay for such a product. Even with the intel compiler and STLport the error messages are the biggest PITA.
I'm currently looking into making molds by using an industrial robot to carve it out of foam from a 3D file.

Maybe we should talk? My mail is in my profile.
Anyone have the skinny on incorporating offshore?  Say, Bermuda?
Delaware vs Bermuda, or somewhere else offshore. Has anyone sussed the pros and cons?

Obviously it doesn't matter if you have no revenues and are just shooting for the liquidity event. But let's pretend we're talking about a profitable private concern that will stay private.
Starbucks offers new flavor: Free Wi-Fi
Just watch the screencasts and spend a day or two giving it a go :) It's incredibly simple to get a webapp up and running, then you can judge for yourself. Judging by your experience I doubt it would even take you a couple of months, most probably it would only take you a couple of weeks to have the basics you need to write a webapp.
Many happy carriage returns!
Wales opens up Wikia editing to anonymous users: "This is a complete overhaul of everything"
I'd say as things change, volume will be a big issue. At the moment, an artist might bring out a new album each year. Which is kinda lazy. They make an album, and that makes them millions.
How about they knuckle down and bring out a new album each month?
Why is freeloading wrong? Or tax evasion, for that matter?

In any case, here is the argument. Theft is wrong because it violates the individual right of the property owner.

Copyright exists to provide a temporary incentive for content creators to continue producing. It's not a natural right, it's a collective bargain between the public and content producers. "You get a 14 year monopoly to make some money, please continue writing songs."

That bargain was broken a long time ago (roughly Mickey Mouse invention date + 14 years).
I think it's better to stick with what you're familiar with.

To use books and written languages as an example, can anyone name a writer who suddenly wrote better books when he switched to a different language?
Except that you're off by (at least) several dozen orders of magnitude. Twitter, in fact, is several thousand times smaller than even GMail, which has ~100,000,000 registered users to Twitter's ~1,000,000 (http://twitterfacts.blogspot.com/2007/10/twitter-number-of-u... - and that's assuming twitter's user base has over doubled in the last six months while GMails has remained stagnant for the last year or so).

Google manages to route large messages between GMail users instantly, without breaking a sweat, and with 100% uptime (so does Microsoft, Yahoo, and every other major email provider). They have no trouble dealing with users who send or receive thousands of emails a day, while twitter claims this is some sort of pathological, borderline-impossible case to deal with.

And GMail is relatively trivial compared to actually indexing the internet. The last decent estimate I saw (2005 - http://www.cs.uiowa.edu/~asignori/web-size/) suggested the indexable WWW is ~ 12 Billion pages - and god knows how much that has increased in the last four years.

Seriously, make sure you're in the right ballpark - hell, in the right galaxy - before talking out off your ass. Twitter's problem should be easy today - it was solved decades ago. The fact that Twitter can't scale is nothing more than a testament to their incompetence.
Yes, they're charging the price that they can get away with. But they can only get away with it because it's an anticompetitive industry. Publishing house X should see the inflated price of ebooks as a revenue opportunity - undercut everyone else by charging less of a markup, and they would probably get a much larger chunk of the market to make up for it.

My guess why this isn't happening is because Publishing house X shares half its board of directors with Publishing house Y, and they have some sort of (probably implicit, since probably illegal) agreement to do whatever is necessary to keep a lock on the industry, by restricting access through new digital channels. See also: the music industry, the film industry, the television industry.
I don't believe that a typical Java IDE provides a clean enough abstraction to make code generation a big benefit. When it comes down to it, you're still looking at a window full of all the code that the IDE spit out for you. Think of code generation via a compiler versus code generation via an IDE. The code that you see in the window of your IDE should be solely for human eyes. If a lot of it can be trivially automated, then it doesn't deserve space in that window.
I wasn't making any value judgments about languages and speed, only stating the obvious that Lua is very fast as an interpreted language, but not so fast compared to fast compiled languages.
BrassTacks – A Raw view of Business Planning
biggest PITA = startup opportunity

(Often true, but not necessarily)
Dead like COBOL - Is Java ready for replacement?
Javascript closures so that a programmer can understand them