skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You can read the whole book online here and decide for yourself:

http://eloquentjavascript.net/

My opinion:

It is a book that anyone of any skill level can get something out of. It is one of the few books that is technically a beginners book, but it does not talk to you like you are stupid.

Most importantly, it is focused just as much on software craftsmanship as it is teaching you javascript. It is a great introduction to functional programming and the 'good parts' of object oriented programming.

Why should you buy the book if it is online for free? Well, I have extreme respect for people who try to teach others and give away their work for free. I like to support them in any way possible.

Crockford's book is great, but I don't really subscribe to the 'if I could only buy one book on x' mentality. I prefer to get my information from as many sources as possible and Haverbeke should definitely be one of of those sources.
Good luck with your venture. Just stay true to your original intent. Please do not sell out to the giants once you'll make it :) Focus on startups and not on Facebook.
However, you make a big assumption.

I make no such assumption, but I'm not willing to support dictatorship in order to avoid dictatorship. Straussian compromises of democratic values quite honestly make my blood run cold.
Make sure you're changing it in the User File Preferences, rather than the Default File Preferences. The default preferences get overridden by the platform specific ones.
Blood test will help to detect memory loss in old people
Jump on that offer quick.
My mistake, I have Safari 5.0.3 as well. However, I've done some more testing and it seems as if the "bug" only occurs when you're logged out of Twitter. Let me know if that's the same for you.
"Imagine someone at your work insisting that Java and Javascript are the same language."

This is a rather poor analogy. Someone confusing Java and Javascript might believe they can paste their Javascript code into a Java program and have it work. Nothing of this nature will result from confusing clips and magazines. A shooter isn't going to expect to be able to use their Mosin-Nagant clips with their PSL, any more than they would expect for the PSL magazines to be valid replacements for their Winchester 1895 magazines.

It is incorrect, but it's not all that bad. 95% of the time, it is clear from context; the remaining cases primarily concern weapons with a fixed magazine, for which the user probably does know the difference.
Hehe, smart move on your part. Steady wins the race. Ping me when you're ready to launch (email in the profile) and I'll send you a bunch of traffic. No guarantees of it will convert or not, that depends on a lot of factors but if it won't help it certainly won't hurt.

Being in a 'bad' area is also an advantage, if you can make it there you will be virtually without competition.

Happy coding!
That's good feedback -- thanks! I'm surprised that she found it too easy for a 12 year old, but Just Right for a precocious 5 year old. I was afraid of erring in the other direction.

Did she give examples of good books about computer science for 12 year olds? Maybe she meant kid's books in general?

Proofreading: it's a manuscript, of course it needs proofing. :D
"Attack of the Personal Clones" expansion would have to include Bill Gates... ;)
Consider this: if they can predict unplanned admissions, they can
a) better plan for these admissions
b) try to work with these individuals to help them manage their health better

Maybe I am naive, but it seems to me that this is not a zero sum game, you lose, insurance company wins, but a value added for society
Fingerprints?
Do you ever think that maybe Mahalo isn't working out and perhaps it is time to give it another go with a different product? It's good to evolve but at some point, throw in the towel. I'd say the same for Seesmic. It's admirable, but at some point after many reinventions, you've just got to step back and examine honestly if you're wasting talent and time on a losing ticket. There's very little about Mahalo that makes it attractive other than the great design. When does anyone say to themselves "Hrm I bet Mahalo has this information" or "I should check Mahalo.com." However if you do plan to stick it out until you're bankrupt you might want to think about employing librarians. Helping resolving information needs is what they are best at.
That gives me an idea. What if Google were to provide free anti-spam tools like Akismet that integrate with forums, blogs, and wikis? They could detect the spam patterns and essentially blacklist those spam sites from the search engine. With enough sites using their tools, Google could build a significant dataset of what these sites are trying to do to generate spam links.

Wouldn't detected who's trying to generate link spam be a fairly effective way of removing them from search engine results?
On buying a hardcopy book that's available for free?

Well, if it is a good read, I eagerly will shell out money for a printed copy that I do not have to read off a screen. In a way, it's incentivizing, wishing to reward such an act of open collaboration.

Also, I believe if online feedback is used properly, definitely will result in a superior book product.
A couple more details from some experiments I've done:

• This behavior does not appear in Google Chrome
• It does appear in Safari 5.0.3, but only when you're logged out of Twitter
Originally it was all done manually, but we've been automating more and more.

Feel free to send me any feedback. steve@yipit.com
What if I'm trying to find a sports geek's blog post about the history of NFL jerseys, or something like that? My personal problem with all the search engines is that legitimately interesting/useful amateur content, or even things like mainstream news articles, gets lost in a sea of sites that are trying to sell me stuff when my query could be construed as even remotely commercial. Unfortunately this is a trend I don't see changing, because (a) the hawkers have more expertise and resources than the bloggers when it comes to SEO, and (b) the search engine itself benefits financially by assuming I want to buy things and showing results accordingly (especially if it's Google due to AdSense).
Congratulations. Don't worry -- location is overrated. I met a few folks with successful software businesses in the DFW area when I was there for a shareware conference.

(And besides, it can't possibly be worse than the Japanese hinterlands, and this town can still pack a room once a week with software businesses which are successful for a broad range of "successful".)
Yuri Milner, SV Angel Offer Every New Y Combinator Startup $150k
Blekko Takes Curated Search Mobile With iPhone And Android Apps
This is somewhat related:

http://i.imgur.com/Tz0m3.png
At least understand the real reason (which someone aptly stated in one of the comments above, money laundering and such) before talking about things that have nothing to do with the decision.
No true Scotsman... Really - this is a matter of taste (what slang you prefer). As a former arms dealer / in a family of government weapons contractors and servicemen, we all use "clip" as slang.

It's like everyone calling car wheels "rims"
OK, gotcha. I misunderstood. With that I agree.
Just watched this - amazing in so many ways... I tried looking for more information on Ahn Chol and supposedly he is just MIA for quite some time.. Hope he is alive and safe somewhere.
Wow, big win for YC!
Struggle is struggle. Wikileaks is just as important of a world issue as Egypt is.

I'm watching Food, Inc. right now. Is the battle over food less or more important than Egypt? What about Tunesia? Different people value different causes differently. A healthy Wikileaks will probably affect my life more positively than a new Egyptian government will, but that doesn't make me less happy for them.
Joel, David has a great problem: he's extremely successful and facing the scrutiny of people who think he should be more perfect than he is.

The answer to this problem is never to tell people to "go away." The job is challenging, as you know. You work your ass off, for years. Finally you get something out there, and if you're lucky, people love it.

That's where the modesty has to kick in. Big time.

When you're even a little bit successful, you learn that customers are not bar chums who you punch in the shoulder and laugh when they say something that offends you. You adopt an unusually elevated posture. "Yes, I see what you mean. I probably could have handled that better."

I know you're good at this Joel, so don't hold your friend to a lower standard.
Wow; that's great news. Congrats to the YC companies for this opportunity!

Guess it's time to get cracking on those YC applications, folks...
Holy shit. The word "disruptive" is overused but it's pretty applicable here. Crazy.

But is this fair to other angels/investors?
Nothing wrong with learning to program. You might get farther asking for help and advice if you didn't assume it's so easy that you can learn how to do it from books and web sites in a few months. You're insulting people who have put lots of time and effort into programming and web development. You will get a similar reaction from any skilled professional or tradesperson if you suggest you can go from zero to employed in a few months by reading books.

It probably is possible to learn how to drive a car and the rules of collecting cab fares in three months. It's probably not possible to learn how to efficiently navigate a medium-sized or larger city in that time. London cab drivers study for nearly three years and average 12 exams to get their hack license.

Good luck with your career change. I think your expectations are unrealistic, and I've worked with a lot of programmers, but I'm prepared to be surprised. Post again in three months to tell about your first contract job.
Try to speed it up a bit, right now its painfully slow. Also secure against SQL injection: http://bit.ly/ggCvsv
Developers: PLEASE stop releasing so many different versions of the one program
I found this interesting - "have gone so far as to establish an independent “mesh” of connections". Mesh networks were pretty big during the last .com boom (in principle anyway) maybe they'll make a comeback thanks to repressive governments?

I want my Paranoid Linux!
> It’s the most investor friendly investment that I can think of, short of just handing people money as a gift.

s/investor/entrepreneur/
Damage? What are you talking about? The routers don't literally catch fire.

It disrupts services while the attack is active. A sit in is the correct metaphor.
Congratulations. Getting the wife in on it is a very good move.
$150,000 in convertible debt. With no cap and no discount.

I suspect all 40 companies will take the money on those terms. You would be crazy not to.
"scraper sites or sites with less original content"

To clarify, this change measures unique content site-wide, not just for a particular web page/url?

I may be too focused on semantics, but it would be important if you are trying to maximize visibility for a single page in Google's search results and your other pages have a significant amount of duplicate content.

For instance, one page on your site is about a WordPress plugin you've created (it's totally unique), but on most of your other pages, you've copied and organized relevant sections of the WordPress Codex so that your users can easily find the documentation needed to customize the plugin. Is your unique webpage about the plugin safe? I was always under the impression that search rankings were determined on a page-by-page basis rather than site-wide.

P.S. Sorry if this was already asked and I missed it.
YC is now the best deal that exists.
Metaphorically.

I studies graphics and animation years ago in the days of OS8 and OS9, and I believed all the hype about how much better Macs were than PC's. So, I was extremely excited when the school I was attending got a lab full of G3's and G4's.

Then, I started using them for hours on end and the beating that I received was through the horrors of using hockey puck mice, and mice without a right click. The trauma of the "click of death" on zip drives. Being exhausted and sleepless and helplessly furious after a render that was going to take 22 hours crashed after 21 hrs and 30 minutes. And, finally, the horror of realizing the that the amazing innovation of being able to "write my video files to DVD" was more or less useless because burning 5 minute video file on the g4's super drive took 2 hours.

After being bitterly disillusioned with apple and mac products those years, but feeling that there was something terribly terribly wrong with me because it was so obvious to everyone around me that "Macs are so much better for graphics".

So, I quietly saved up a dollar here and a dollar there until I finally had enough money to put together my first PC build and I installed Win2k on it, and never looked back.

After my first build, I felt so liberated by being able to upgrade my hardware when ever I felt like it, I never went back. My 20 hour renders at the computer lab took 1 hour on my new processor.

I've been doing my own builds, and swapping out parts in my PC's ever since. I've tried OSX repeatedly. I've built a couple of hackintosh's. But, every single time, the trauma and the horror, and the deep deep bitterness and resentment that I have harbored in my heart against Apple has never gone a way.

I loved Apple once. But after those 3 years of using exclusively Apple products, now I only have an Apple shaped scar burned deep in my soul.

I don't expect other people to agree with me. I know they think that I can't code worth a crap because I'm use Windows as my OS. The disdain and contempt that people have of my favorite OS hurts, but nothing will hurt me as much as Apple has. It's an emotional thing I have.

All that to say, I will never trust Apple again.

:)
</hahaha but, no, really>
Congrats to YC and all of the startups. Sadly, I can already hear the chants of "Bubble!".
I agree. It's a sad case of what-might-have-been.
A job!
So this investment isn't at a valuation and the valuation is only decided at a future round at which point this converts into an amount of equity based off that valuation?

I've read about convertible notes before just a little confusing at first.
I've never sold a company, but I've dealt with a couple of pretty questionable cofounding/employment contracts lately, and making a deal seem "very much like a standard-fair offer" seems to be an old trick. I had someone tell me they'd been using an agreement for years when there was an obvious typo and font change to show me it had probably been altered at the last minute.
All I'm saying is "clip" doesn't mean "magazine for a pistol" - which is the misconception. Clip, as used commonly in slang, is for any magazine. Rarely would one refer to stripper clips as just "clips" - usually it's "stripper" or "strip" to avoid confusion.
I disagree. I think the point is to grandstand and to pretend to be Neo for a day.

Reading the commentary, it seems that these guys were far from familiar with the game they were playing.

Furthermore, unless you were involved in the attack, how could you claim to know the point in the first place?
That's a job for law enforcement. Let them do their job and you do yours.
Not really, I think most of here would assume YC would in the next few years produce a solid return. Here your basically aligning youself to YC's performance instead of trying to pick which ones you think will turn out the best. Although sounds like they are still doing that additionally.
To be fair, shorthand is a lot simpler than C++.
>I don't really care because I got paid anyway.

Right, and loads of authors won't get paid without copyright. So they need it.
Totally agree on the redirect. As far as our response, there would essentially be nothing to publish. We inform the repo owner and the rest is up to them.
That is awesome. I wish I'd made it into the winter 11 batch :(
Investing in a company based on its acceptance into YC? Hm. Also, I think this breaks the model a bit, I thought the point of the initial small(er) investment was to drive creation of a product or business model that could then expand naturally or take further investment once they've proven the products value/viability etc. I guess for some it would be a bonus, but for some it might be a curse?

Although "Paul Graham seemed very pleased" implies it doesn't, so I figure I'm wrong. Maybe it is for the better, especially when it's optional...
It's very inspiring to read your post. Being 12 years your senior and still sitting on the sidelines, this could just edge me over to starting on my startup idea!
Super news this, that's going to have one nasty little side effect, YC will see an order of magnitude increase in the number of applications they will receive in the next round.

Predictably there will be a lot of bitching by other angels, imo they should create a fund and offer to match.

YC might become a one stop shop.
This is what I was thinking. It might be better for people trying to raise money from other angels who aren't a YC company because the new YC batch now has their boats floated for quite a bit more time.
I've been dog sick all week, apparently from iron toxicity. Why is this awesome? Because I was so anemic my entire life that I didn't get regular (monthly) periods until age 40. I took iron supplements for years and only stopped needing them a few months ago. As best I can figure, all this crazy alternative health stuff I do has fundamentally changed something in a big way. My best guess: All those years I took iron, I was absorbing it but not utilizing it efficiently. So I ended up high iron, probably while still anemic for a time. Now my body functions better and suddenly is wigging out over the iron overload. It's been kicking my ass. And I think it's the most amazing thing.

That's my awesome find this week.

(Prepares to regret this post. I should know better than to hang out online after a week like this week. :-/ Now onto the next thread. ;-) )
This isn't about entertainment, this is so our users know why repos are missing.
A lot of people will hate this, but it's neither unfair nor immoral. There's nothing stopping anyone else from making similar deals, including you.

What it does do is turn YC into a market index. Interesting.
I nodded vigorously through every sentence of your comment. Well done, and good to see you're a computer scientist and didn't have to rely on jargon to make your point.
> And the separation between the spec and the "proof" bothers me: what is the point of a spec if, after building a product, you can't verify you built it right? I would consider such specs as incomplete.

You have a spec, that says what the code should do. This is independent of the code; there can be many ways to write the code to match a given spec.

You have a proof, that says what the code does do. This is intimately tied to the code, and with the right languages and tools can be the code.

You verify that you built it right, by seeing that they match.

This is abstraction, the basic interface/implementation distinction; the spec is an interface and the code+proof is an implementation.
There are thousands of people involved. I'm sure that some people want to be Neo, but not all of them, not by a long shot. Also, if you'll note, Neo had a political cause...

I didn't participate in any DDoS, but it's not like this stuff happens in secret. All you have to do is know where and how to look. It's not exactly secret where these kinds of things are organized and discusssed.
absolutely not. YC is getting their percentage at valuations of around 200-300k.

This investment will convert at valuations closer to 5M these days. So in fact they're effectively paying 10x what YC is paying for about the same stake in a company post the financing.

Congrats to YC and time will tell if it works, exciting either way.
The model has changed. Now it's about the ability of Paul et al. to pick horses.

(Also the Ycomb environment and all that too)
Strong, 8-character passwords are 1 in 5132188731375616. Is that really so weak?
Correct. Google can fix the stock launcher in one of two ways: retain the old layout and just fix the bugs which prevent usage right now or come up with something new. Since the focus of Honeycomb is tablets, I am guessing they'll go with the former option.
That is not my meaning. A pure anarchy where anyone can do what they want to you goes directly against the examples I gave and the Harm Principle (see response to apl).
If by modern financial and legal infra-structure you mean things like stocks, futures, and derivatives, then I don't think I agree. The modern infrastructure insulates two parties in any transaction with brokers and exchanges.

For example, if the "losing" party on an options trade can't pay up, the exchange pays for them. The exchanges and brokers set margin requirements to reduce the risk of non-payers.
Best and worst for what?

There are lots of magazine articles that do "best and worst" lists -- for example: best companies to work for. What are you looking for feedback on?
When was the last time you looked at a yc company and didn't say "Damn that's a great idea." and then follow it up with "wow that's pretty good execution too".

It's a little scary how good the yc companies seem to be lately.
This is awesome. It's great to see big money split up into lots of small investments. I've always wondered what would happen if Microsoft took 1 billion dollars and make 10K $100K angel investments. Something amazing would surely come out of so many trials. Traditionally, that 1 billion (if invested in startups) would be doled out in 100 or so $10MM-ish chunks, mostly to later stage companies.
Wow, amazing deal. Only time will tell if its good for them or not.
The Mozilla team could learn from this.
A look back in time.
What I love about this strategy is that is introduces a PR cost to the sender for sending DMCA notices.

It also increases the likelihood that the DMCA is legitimate, at least from the senders perspective because they'd rather not be seen lying in public.

Making this republishing policy standard among online companies with a standard URI like /dmca-notices/ would allow aggregation and probably reduce DMCA total cost to publishers.
Without Internet, Egyptians find new ways to get online
Right. $150,000 paid in advance. Whenever the company raises its first significant money (usually >=$1M) that $150,000 buys equity at the same rate the new investors are paying.
Web startups are now rock bands, and YC is the record label.
Ahh, the people who wrote this code weren't morons, just "edgy" non-conformists.
Clearly, a "truly free country" would fall apart instantly due to the inevitable chaos and evils. Thus why I didn't even bother making the distinction between "free" and "free-er". I assumed it was common knowledge.

My personal definition of freedom is the ability to do anything within the realm reasonable laws. I feel a vast majority of US laws are reasonable. Maybe you don't agree, maybe you do. I'm happy & patriotic US citizen and that's all that matters!
Getting innocent bystanders involved is literally the point.

Indeed, and in a civilized society, there are rules against hijacking others' dollars and interfering with others' lawful commerce, no matter how just you believe your cause to be. Thus, what you call 'literally the point' is also the 'mens rea' for a criminal prosecution.
Capitalism happens. plays tiny violin

Less sardonically: if YC is so ridiculously superior to other investment models that investing money at these terms is profitable knowing nothing of the actual company invested in, then the system is broken. This is the market's corrective measure, attempting to come up with a better approximation of the true value of early stage startups. Might it discomfit people who made a lot of money when it was broken? shrug
Every YC batch should have at least 1-2 big wins. They're betting that it's more important not to miss out on those than to save a little money trying to pick the winners. A great strategy if you can afford it.