skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask YC: Do you think there's an audience online interested in reading/writing?
I had an idea back in September about creating a new method for editing and revising text files online. You know, for people interested in critiquing things and for writers who want feedback on their writing. Right now, the only solution available is text document - textarea, which is inefficient and scares away both writers and editors. I had a better idea and worked on mapping out a quick idea for a site.

I've had quite a lot of work since then, but now that I'm graduating I have a lot of time to actually work on things, and I'm wondering if it's worth trying to make this site. I'm not thinking about venture funding or anything regarding making money off of it, not yet. I just want to see if it's possible to make a sizable set of writers online, more so than there are on sites already. (Not counting Scribd, which is focused more on display than it is on editing/revising.)

My one worry is that text takes more effort from users. It's harder to create and it's harder to read over, even if editing is made potentially simpler. Do you think that Internet users would be willing to spend their time reading and editing people's work if it was made easy for them? Or do you think that there's an inherent barrier in text that keeps people out? What would you think considering the various communities online you've all seen?
link to alexis' presentation: http://sp.reddit.com/StartupSchool.ppt.zip
Exactly, if my professor was like this, I probably would have gone past Calc II.
Disclaimer : I help run Urbanspoon and I wrote the app. It'll be available for free when Apple launches the App Store.
Add DNS to the list of necessary bits. I'm always stunned by how little most web developers know about DNS, and how often it bites them in the ass. It comes into play on all sorts of performance, redundancy, reliability, scalability, and server migration questions. It's not a particularly hard or deep subject (at least, to grasp as much of the topic as a web developer needs to know), but if you don't know the basics, you will run into problems at the worst possible time.

Our products touch all aspects of a web developers stack, and so I suspect our forums are pretty representative...and DNS problems are the second most common type of problem we hear about (trailing well-behind email, but well before PHP, Ruby, Python, Perl, performance, security, and pretty much everything else). I pretty much expect to recommend O'Reilly's DNS and BIND daily, and keep the BIND page of our wiki open at all times for referencing in my responses.
It's worse than that. "Scientists confirm that parts of earliest genetic material may have come from the stars".
Facebook’s Second F8 Developer Conference Announced
Even better... "Scientists confirm that parts of earliest genetic material may have come from the stars."

Headlines are awesome. Give it a few more levels of indirection (esciencenews <- hacker news <- bob's blog <- talk around the watercooler) and babies will be dropping from the sky to populate the earth.
Google: we don't know how to make money from YouTube
What If Copyright Only Applied To Commercial Use?
Someone please buy AP a clue
Yes and no. I don't claim to know the answer to the hard question of consciousness. But, I think no one else does either. Even if we did have an answer I doubt its communicable. I do think my understanding of consciousness is deeper then most peoples. I've done a lot of meditation, a few peoples share of psychedelics (which do not themselves contain answers, but can open doors), and consciousness was my focus in college. I know what Im talking about well enough to know what we don't know. We don't know anything to give us a good reason to think we could put consciousness in computers.

The deeper you go into your awareness the more universal the experience is. You can verify this experientially. Our bodies, thought patterns, emotions and memories all die but the awareness they all rise in (which, being aware of space, time, and identity, is outside of time, space, and identity) is immortal.
I may have been a little over excited on this one, but its still very significant. This is complex organic molecules, direct precursors of DNA components, found in a meteorite. You can downplay this all you want but this is no clay pit vs house :) Sorry again for the sensationalized title; I think I've been exposed too much to Digg, will do better next time.
And cookies! If you want to know what pain is, you should try managing cookies by hand.
Actually, at any given time, a large number of the "hardware" operations being passed to a modern CPU are actually being "interpreted" using the microcode implemented on the CPU itself.

Even in the case of instructions which do map directly to hardware ops, the CPU is still doing branch prediction and prefetching, which implies that the code is being examined (i.e., "interpreted") before being executed.

I'm not trying to say that performance isn't better when funneling native instructions down to the CPU; rather, just that it's worth remembering that there's really no such thing as "[running] on bare metal" any more, at least on a modern x86 ISA system.
Taking on the Eee, perhaps. But as has been said on this site before: you can't take on the Air with a lower-end product. Considering how part of the Air's smoothness involves the perfect hardware-software integration, you could even say that it's near-impossible to "take it on" with a Windows computer. It won't be nearly as smooth.
How to watch Euro 2008 live at work
I think I agree with this. We do TDD and the first test we write for a new module is usually a high-level test that walks entirely through the process, touching several classes or libraries. Then we write smaller tests, working our way down to fine-grained level with multiple tests for individual classes/functions. We catch errors at every level, and the end result is (usually) clean, bug-free code.

My understanding is that this is frowned upon from a TDD purist standpoint. Our high-level tests that touch lots of areas of code probably wouldn't be written in most shops.
The real Aaron Greenspan?

Can you give your analysis on the capabilities of the students surrounding Facebook at the time? They were probably all bright and talented, but did they have the drive, dedication, analytical skills, and abilities to do what was required to succeed? I'm curious because Harvard has the best and brighest in the country (arguably), and I'm wondering exactly what that means in a quantifiable way.
You should really indicate in the title that this is a visualization of the commit history of people in famous open source projects.

But I was really taken away by it. I have new respect for the patience of language developers. They just keep plugging away!
If you don't know who the _stiff_ is, you probably run around well outside Ruby circles. Hit up hackety.org and spend enough time to go through some of his archives.

_stiff_ is a uniquely creative guy. Instead of copying-and-pasting source code, you'll often find him sketching it out on paper with doodles.

He's a tough guy to define. Maybe it's best not to. Maybe that's why we don't know his real name. He is a hero though to many of us.
On MW, there are an infinite number of worlds at time t if an infinite number of quantum outcomes has occurred by time t. Anyway, it sounds like you're thinking this: There are an infinite number of worlds. A quantum event happens in many of them. There are more worlds where it happens than where it doesn't. Therefore this event is more likely.

But that's not MW. MW says that something happens, and when it happens, you get one world for each outcome. There's a problem here because what these outcomes are depend on the basis you write the wave function in, but that's a different issue. It's certainly not saying that there are an infinite number of worlds, each with a determined series of events, and we have probabilities because some of those worlds are more numerous than others. That's modal realism, as I said in a comment above.

By the way, that doesn't just raise its head in the context of quantum mechanics. It only does because it gives us reason to believe that it's physically possible that things could've been different than they actually are. But it seems possible-period that things could've been different, even if physics was deterministic. Even though it might've been physically determined that I went to the grocery store yesterday, it's certainly possible tout court that the whole universe had gone differently, and I could've gone to Fenway to see the Sox game instead. But does that mean that there's an alternate universe where my otherworldly counterpart went to Fenway? Isn't there a simpler explanation for why that's possible? QM has alternatives, like the Bohmian and GRW theories, which are far more plausible as well.
The bubble is in full effect.

There seem to be a lot of people that think their projects somehow require funding. Your online social alarm clock is not a startup.

Stop imagining how you're going to make money off of crappy widgets. Get out there, be curious and build things that solve actual problems.
Leary was a clown. A holy fool (maybe). But a clown none the less. He did lasting damage to our ability to unlock the potential in psychedelics with his antics, and his more extravagant ideas cloud what we can actually learn from psychedelics. Fuck Tim Leary.
Facebook traffic catches up to MySpace, but not where it matters
We could make spam uneconomic with a similar implementation.
In the US, copyrights are automatic. You can register pieces of work as a way to prove that the work was created at a certain date and time so that you can sue somebody in civil court for damages but the central office is not the mediator for copyright disputes.

It is that registration date that's important, not so much what the author put down as the copyright year. So people that post date copyrights will have a hard time convincing a court that they truly own the copyrights without any other supporting evidence (such as registration, notarization, or other means of proving a date).

And I'm not aware of anyone post dating copyrights years ahead. That would make no sense as copyrights firstly last decades after the person's death and secondly can easily be extended. So delaying the "start" date of a copyright has no particular advantage.
tptacek - Thank you for letting me know how Wikipedia works. I did not realize that, and next time I will be sure to investigate into the issue further prior to posting it.

I saw this link pop-up on my feed, and knowing _why and his contribution to the ruby community, I felt this to be relevant. In hindsight, it now seems like it wasn't that relevant.

To fellow hackers out there, my intention was not to post for the sake of posting. I appreciate the HN community, and find myself frowning occasionally when certain articles get upvoted. I certainly did not intend to pollute the quality of articles that make it HN.

To all, my sincere apologies.
Yeah.

I remember way back in the day being on psychedelic mushrooms once, walking through the woods, and talking to Buddha, who had appeared in a rock wall in a tunnel I walked past. Then I was like "I just saw Buddha, I should say hi and talk to him." I turned back said "hi" and he was like "Dont be a Buddhist, figure it out for yourself." So I know exactly what you mean.
| Not knowing wikipedia's process at all, I would have thought that why's entry was about to be deleted as well.

From the big note at the top of the page:

"This article is being considered for deletion ... Please share your thoughts on the matter at this article's entry on the Articles for deletion page."

There's nothing there to suggest that it's about to be deleted, and getting more information about the process of article deletion is as easy as following the links posted in the note at the top of the page. Wikipedia tries to be fairly transparent about this sort of thing.

Also, note that this article was considered for deletion about a year and a half ago, and the overall consensus was to keep it. It's probably gonna be sticking around, although it needs some heavy cleaning up.
Hey, I'm not arguing either way. I said he's borderline notable, and I'm not that interested in arguing which side of the border he's on. I'm just trying to understand why some people seem to care so much that this guy should be listed on wikipedia.

(I certainly wouldn't imply that "Ruby users are self-important fools", because I've used Ruby myself in the past. But I'm sure only a small minority of Ruby users particularly give a damn about this guy anyway.)
Fixed: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/dont-end-your-urls-with-exe/
Why don't you buy that?
"We" aren't. 30-odd people so far have promoted it, and the remaining majority has no practical way to counter those votes.
He also wrote http://tryruby.hobix.com (an interactive Ruby tutorial, with an Ajax interactive ruby shell, give it a try) and unholy (a WIP Ruby to Python bytecode compiler) , and is in fact known and respected (John Resig and Tim Bray voted "keep" on the AfD page at Wikipedia) as much for his achievements and his skills than for being inspirational and for his ability to think (way) out of the box, which are impossible to quantify.

You have to read him for some time to understand. He's the only code artist that I know.
Architectural Styles and
the Design of Network-based Software Architectures (http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/top.htm) is a very readable dissertation on Web architecture. It is the definitive source on REST. Architecture of the World Wide Web (http://www.w3.org/TR/webarch/) is also worth a visit.
You should talk to this guy: http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=markbao
A counter example by Paul Graham from "Six Principles for Making New Things".

"Here it is: I like to find (a) simple solutions (b) to overlooked problems (c) that actually need to be solved, and (d) deliver them as informally as possible, (e) starting with a very crude version 1, then (f) iterating rapidly."
Ok, I will have to learn a lot more to grasp the details, but I see I'm wrong. Thanks a lot for your time and for the interesting replies.
He cashed out as part of the second rounds of investing. I've heard numbers ranging from 50 mil to 200 mil.
Detailed revenue breakdown of a gadget blog ($61k in dec 2007)
Start with these 2 books from Philip Greenspun:

- Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing

- Internet Application Workbook,

http://philip.greenspun.com/books/
My friend's company has a policy: Everyone gets code reviews all the time by peers.

The benefit is, the reviewer gets to learn a different part of the system, and the person getting reviewed gets his code scrutinized. It is a very beneficial system.

As far as showing bad code: There is a different between delivering crap and delivering code you are satisfied with. If you are satisfied with it, thats when scrutiny is necessary. You need to get a feel for when the code is good enough, because you can spend all your life making it just a bit better. Same kind of stuff applies to artists, you just need to know when to stop improving and start letting others scrutinize the work.
write up a good contract and have it signed, possibly with some sort of clause to revisit the agreement after a year to see where things are. if its broken, take legal action.

if you're going to require a VC deal, then this won't be a simple case of him letting you use the domain, as most any company worth its salt won't allow such an easy failure point if the domain name plays such a big part of this working. there will be some legal bindings in there for at least some length of time.
One of the hardest things to understand about evolution is how quickly organisms change their environment. Before self replicating life forms showed up on earth there was probably a thick soup of complex organic molecules in the land, sea, and air. However, once the most basic of life forms showed up they would quickly consume the abundant resources out there. So while a tiny fraction of early DNA might use components from meteorites there is little reason to think they played a significant role in the evolution of life on earth.
Why are we still 'releasing' software?
Over and over and over, I've made this same recommendation when someone is new to the art and is banging on the Rails train: Do PHP first.

You have nothing to lose learning PHP. I love Rails, but I use PHP in a pinch. Hell, even DHH said he fired up PHP recently and liked how quickly he could wire up small bits.

Rails is too magical and mystical. If you don't understand the lifecycle of web requests, you are going to be shafted really quickly when Rails starts its magic tricks.
What I wanted to know before I left college: A programmer reflects
Sloppy is a function of the guy at the keyboard. I've seen beautiful PHP source and shitty Ruby.
without a clear consensus to delete, the article isn't going anywhere

This isn't true. A blog I like got deleted from wikipedia a while back (IMAO.US back when it was only Frank J) on the charge of not being notable. There wasn't a consensus to delete. There was a huge argument, then they just deleted him.
Is Twitter the next marketing channel?
Yes, you have a chance, of either invetment or (even better) market success.

A prototype might be enough to approach early-stage investors, mostly angels, and a live beta definitely is -- if either helps confirm a market exists, by demonstrating a compelling experience that attracts real use or a craving from a valuable market.

I think you're on the right track: build, build, build first. (Take up some programming yourself to help.) Use that experience to understand the interesting parts of the problem and test the concept either with representative customers or (best of all) real via-the-web users.

If you achieve accelerating adoption with users, or even hints of revenue. you have a good story to approach investors -- who exist everywhere, not just SV.

(Experienced folks can defer building a bit, because they can raise money based strictly on their proven abilities plus the intended market. But for young first-timers, proving-by-doing can offset that advantage quickly.)
You might be right. On the other hand, the article does paint a picture of a greedy, evil asshole with no respect for other people or for his own word. Who do you know with a business card that says "I'm CEO... bitch."?

There are ways to gracefully push people out, and then there are ways of posturing yourself by forcefully and publicly kicking people out. He obviously does not know how to do the former.
The Emperor: The ultimate geek workstation
This is one of the worst top articles I've seen yet on news.yc.

Thanks guys
Urbanspoon rocks, and this is a great idea. I've wanted something like this for years. :)
there are two issues that I see:

1. People tend to lurk rather than participate (on most large forums, something like 1% generate 90% of the traffic)

2. People as a whole have very poor writing skills and "crowdsourcing" editing and revisions will likely result in works with poor grammar and structure.

I've thought about an idea like this, but more like a 'Choose your own adventure' type crowdsourcing/entertainment site. I'd make it wiki style where each "page" would have multiple paths to go down.

The hard part is keeping the pr0n out (there's actually a huge demand for text based porn of all things).
Good points, but you made that sound kind of complicated.

Here's an example of a Leaky Abstraction. My programming language is called Ben (hey that's my name!) --

# build_webpage()

Tada. Fire up your browser, point it to localhost and bam! you have your own personal webpage with a photo section and a forum. See how easy it was.

Then you think to yourself, wait -- I want a classified ads section, too!

Ah, this is when the big leak happens.

My Ben framework doesn't include that bit, so you are going to have to dive down into the C that I wrote Ben with and muddle about it to write that code yourself.

It gets nastier too.

You could probably hack together a classified ads section in your favorite language in a couple hours, but since you've bet the farm on Ben, you have to get up to speed on how my framework works and you have to use my language of choice.

The abstraction is now leaking so much that you get out PHP and just do it all by hand.
If I had one of these, I'd never want anything else again.
MSFT scalability = multiple app servers load balanced.

Here's the typical example: http://highscalability.com/plentyoffish-architecture

In my experience, virtuals/slices do not scale well for app servers in the MSFT stack.
Talk to Phaedrus about that one.
If fuel prices are keeping people at home more, I'd imagine that they will spend more time online leading to growth opportunities for online services, business collaboration, social networks, games, etc. I.e. just the thing for the YC crowd.
I don't think anyone except the parties involved can know if that's true, so there's not much point in speculating. But I will note that nothing is better for getting term sheets than already having other term sheets, particularly a Sequoia term sheet. I wouldn't pitch a VC that I knew from the outset I didn't want to work with, but I'm sure some companies do.
Truthfully, no, it's not all that significant. Here are the relevant wikipedia entries on those molecules:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uracil
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xanthine

These are simple molecules. Many organic molecules (including some more complicated than this) have been found in space, either in meteorites or spectrally. This are significant only because they're chemically related to what life ultimately ended up using here on earth (or at least Uracil is, being an RNA pair base -- I have no idea what the Xanthine connection is, honestly).

Really, this isn't all that surprising.
its not too clear in the article, but the figures are for the coolest-gadgets.com blog.
I agree that projects are best developed and released incrementally, but I don't see that as being the same as releasing unfinished code, or code which otherwise doesn't meet the developer's own expectations of fitness.

I read the article, and he makes good points, but he was also concentrating on a specific subset of software development, and I don't think the principles apply equally well to individual projects or projects developed by small teams.

Also, it glosses over the reasons that we all developed those habits in the first place: the software development community is notoriously acerbic. Although most of the time nobody may care about your unfinished code, eventually you'll post something, somewhere, that will elicit an ugly response that could have been avoided if you'd just rolled out something a little more polished. (See also: the OpenBSD development community.)
i'm too retarded to install this but not too proud to admit it.. it sounds like it scrolls 2+ windows with one control:

xcroll
I should have sold them 100DrunkenMonkeys.com ;-)
Reputation Design Patterns
I am reluctant to do PHP because of time contraints. I am working on this stuff after work, and at some point I would like to actually be able to build something. Anything. When someone says do PHP, my visceral reaction is no.

However, if the experts here think that PHP would be a worthwhile detour even though I plan to go with Rails, then I'll go with that. I guess I'd just like some assurance that I can pick up the basics this way and that I can do so in a reasonable amount of time.

Yes, I know patience is a virtue, but I just want to make sure that my time is spent as productively as possible. I do very much appreciate the advice from everyone.
This is good advice. I enjoyed approximately the first two thirds of GEB, but got bogged down in the later chapters. A number of chapters can be appreciated independently of the others.

(And if it turns out you don't like Douglas R. Hofstadter, perhaps you will like Egbert B. Gebstadter: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egbert_B._Gebstadter)