skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, of course it can. Consider the alternative statement "No startup can succeed outside of (SF,NYC,BOS)." It only takes one counter-example to disprove that statement. Can you find one startup that launched outside of those cities that succeeded? Ok, done.

Now the bigger question "does operating in one of 'those cities' have advantages?" or "is it easier to succeed as a startup in one of 'those cities'?" is a different issue. Certainly there are reasons why so many startups come from certain areas. But if you really are wanting a binary "yes/no" answer to "Can I - at least theoretically - succeed somewhere else" then there's really no question. Yes, it's been done [1] and it's being done.

FWIW, I'll point you to some examples of the kind of stuff that's going on in one area (Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill/RTP, NC) that's outside of the traditional "tech hub" areas you mention:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2233892

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2233666

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2129698

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2222813

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2116846

http://meetup.com/RTP-Hackers-Founders/

http://www.meetup.com/lsc-rtp

http://southcap.eventbrite.com/

http://eseriesmarch2011.eventbrite.com/

http://www.joysticklabs.com/

http://www.launchboxdigital.com/

http://www.newsobserver.com/2010/07/21/590526/american-tobac...

http://blogs.newsobserver.com/business/five-companies-join-a...

http://www.vcic.unc.edu/

And just for a little additional context:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Triangle_(North_Carolina)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_Triangle_Park

[1]: http://www.redhat.com - maybe the best known of the Triangle area startups from over the years.

And NC is just one area that has a lot going for it, outside of Boston, NYC, Bay area... there are plenty of places you can launch a startup, you'll just need to do your research and evaluate the relative merits and advantages and disadvantages of them. One example of a disadvantage frequently cited here in the Triangle NC area is that it's generally considered harder to raise Angel / VC money here than out West or in Boston / NYC. It is possible of course, it's just harder.
Ask HN: Why is Ruby on Rails the absolute Best programming language?
I'm 24, non-technical, involved with a software start-up.

I know there's somewhat of a generation gap between development platforms, what are young developers using? What should I avoid?

I hear Ruby on rails is sexy, php is sexy, VB.net is not sexy, Java (html and css) are good as all-around foundations, html 5 is sexy...

But I want to hear it from the horses mouths. What languages are appealing for developers to KNOW for building startups, Also helpful to see examples of what people have built in each.

Seeking buzzwords like 'agile, flexible, developer community around the technology, '
Well, Java is worse than most things, but even for Java - djb redo, recently implemented by Avery Pennarun (apenwarr) is better than everything else.
This doesn't actually fork a JVM process, right? It's just splitting up a calculation "unit", which behind the scenes gets mapped to different execution threads. Does that sound about right?
This complaint is kind of like complaining about people going to dance clubs to socialize and hook up rather than dance.

OP, I'd suggest you accept the current state of affairs, or start your own event focused on what you want to do. Why rain on other people's parade?
We are entering dark times for innovation.
Back to the Future made realize I want to travel through time, and eventually ride a levitating skateboard.

However, reality never quite mirrors the movies.

It's great that your brother, after watching a movie that encapsulated about .000000001% of his total lifetime, realized he might want to pursue a different path in life. But, IMO, the best approach to this is not to think he is suddenly capable of taking over the technology operation of ANY startup. Maybe what wasn't clear in the movie is that most of the people involved in the early iteration of facebook had been performing their roles for some prior amount of time. Zuckerberg had been hacking for a while, the finance guy had been involved in finance for some time (he was the president of the investment club or something like that). You don't just watch a film and say "I'm CTO, bitch"
Anyone have some good advice on getting out of this sort of pattern, if it was established in your youth?

The only teacher that broke that habit at my school was my Chemistry teacher. He knew I was very smart, and I started handed in the bare minimum of lab reports. For example when he was expecting 6 steps of working and 10 lines of analysis, he got 1 line of working/answer, and two lines of "bloody obvious, X = Y" style analysis :P. He fixed that by shouting "What is this? Hmm? You're a lazy toad!!!" at me in front of the whole class... not very professional, but it worked. He always got the best of my effort. And I think he always marked me down compared to the rest of the class: whilst my work may have been to the same standard as them, it wasn't close to my best work.

In the world of work, the best antidote has been working with other very smart people. To stand out or earn their praise, being smart isn't enough, you have to get things done too. When I was slacking off for 20mins here to check Facebook, and 10mins there to read some news... they knocked out 30mins of code and moved on. Crap!

So I now look for smart people to work for/with, ones who work harder than me, because they inspire me to actually work, not just coast-work-coast through my day.
App Press: iOS Apps Without Code Via Web CMS
A former coworker emigrated to Chile from Uruguay, and he reports that it's by far the most progressive country in South (and probably Central) America... they have low taxes (in comparison to Brazil, Argentina or Uruguay), are far more advanced technologically and enjoy a higher standard of living.

The government there does seem to "get it". There are, of course, several problems as in every Latin American country, but mitigated.

I forwarded the link to several friends, some of which are thinking about starting their own company, and I'll strongly consider it as soon as I finish my Master's.
Since the Twitter service is free, the "only" money to be made is in the displaying of the content. I believe this is recognized by UberMedia and also by Twitter and the cause for the "kill-switch."

IMO, Twitter should charge $0.001 per tweet and make $2M+ per month (http://royal.pingdom.com/2010/06/08/twitter-now-2-billion-tw...). They could also charge API users at $0.01 per sent tweet and $0.001 per received tweet and let the ad- or fee-based 3rd party twitter clients compete with a free Twitter(tm) client.
Evolution isn't easy, even in Galapagos
I understand the email overload - if I don't respond to something the same hour, it often takes months.

Still - I view twitter posts as too public for anything remotely sensitive, and DMs as similarly interruptive as SMS - so I rarely DM people I don't know very well. I'm probably wrong to view it this way, and perhaps I should re-evaluate.
on the web there are 3 basic user sources: search, social nets, news sites.

search requires lots of good content; if you are using large dbs as raw material are adding real value on any scale a long tail search strategy will make sense. no campaigning just make sure google can read your site and you have good stuff.

social will work if a dialogue between users is intrinsic to your product. a virus will take hold if you make a good facebook experience.

either of these are added to a more important factor: your users ongoing experience. this will not only create viral opportunities but will make all of your efforts additive.

save the news for last, once the others work you will be a news story effortlessly.
My Lisp Experiences and the Development of GNU Emacs
One easy way is to give away prizes to the top 3 apps built at the hackathon. The reason why people actually coded at the iOS hackathon were the prizes (I attended). Obviously submissions built prior to the hackathon would be disqualified so this prevents people from building it, then attending.

There's still lots of socialization, but I believe hackathons should be centered around code, otherwise you might as well just call it a foursquare mixer. There were lots of really cool apps built at the iOS hackathon -- I'm really glad it was so hacker-centric, however the prizes were significant. Paypal gave away 3 iPads to winners that night.

Also, if the goal is to get people learning about the foursquare API -- the only way people will learn is by practicing. I learned a lot from others at the iOS hackathon -- even stuff I thought I already knew well. I think foursquare would get a lot more mileage if they just added a few small prizes to fuel competition.

Some of my friends are marathon runners -- they say that if the city sponsoring the running event offers no prizes, almost no professional runners will show up, but if the city offered a $100 small prize, there will be a significant amount of pro athletes attending. Does foursquare want pro hackers attending, or do they just want scavengers who are attending for the free food?
According to Sabry's criteria for pure languages:
1. it is a conservative extension of the simply typed λ-calculus.
2. it has a well-defined call-by-value, call-by-need, and call-by-name evaluation functions (implementations), and
3. all three evaluation functions (implementations) are weakly equivalent.

Disciple is pure.
This is argued in the first chapter of Ben Lippmeier's thesis: http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~benl/papers/thesis/lippmeier-imp...
Conveyancing | conveyancing fees and quote
No, was a bit hard to make it to .ca from .au. However, they did inspire the structure of the Haskell ones.
The Force is here : Telekinesis 2.0
> I work in C# (worst language EVER!)

You lose all credibility right there. C# is far from the worst language ever, and a pretty decent one among mainstream object oriented languages.
Yeah, this is true.
solution: start your own event. call it Actual Hackathon (TM)
Not if they overlook the problem, as many of the first posters in this discussion did.
I don't check "best" very often. I also don't spend much time on the front page. I check "comments" and "new" and "ask" a lot more. I stopped watching the News years ago. It's mostly sex and violence -- ie "eye candy"/sensationalism of some sort. I think part of your problem is that you hang out on "best". "Popular" stuff is often sensationalistic in the worst possible way.
Charles Babbage comes to mind: "I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question."

This is like asking professional writers what words they think aspiring writers should know, and what kind of pencil they use.
I didn't find this article that interesting (MG articles typically aren't). Twitter kicked companies who continually violated their terms of service and refused to stop when contacted multiple times. Why is there at story here? Am I missing something?
I guess it has a bit to do with the different focuses, at the foursquare event your likely to get people who are trying to grow a business, so networking will be a primary goal of theres and it is advantageous to them to show something more polished to get some attention for the project.

A quick look at the Haskell page shows you guys are more focused on the language and supporting libraries themselves, which I assume most people are doing it out of love for the language and programming rather than any commercial gain.
As soon as I read that I looked for the date of the post. May, 2007. This is before C# 3.0 was released and chances are he was even using 1.0 based on impressions from his boss.

C# isn't half bad now, but back then, I agree it was fairly crummy.
I am reading The Way We're Working Isn't Working, also by Schwartz, and I would highly recommend it (though you've already read one book by him, so it might be overkill).
Maybe competitive events get more people coding?

I went to the first SF startup weekend where 40 people tried to implement a single idea. A democratically selected idea which was the first choice of very few people.

They have since switched to competing self-selected teams and much better ideas and implementations resulted.

See? Distributed decision making works better for many things.

Anyway, my point, besides the blatantly political one, is attend events where the structure and rules are conducive to what you want to do. And if the rules aren't published in advance, call and find out. And don't be afraid to leave if you think you're time will be wasted.
Agreed.

I would choose Python over C# for my own projects any day. However, I can't comprehend the senseless hatred that people have for C#. It is a nicer language than Java (imo) and it has very good performance. Furthermore, due to Mono, C# is no longer a closed platform.
HTML5 drawing application for Chrome - whats next?
"When your only tool is XML, every problem looks like it's a schema declaration and a few XSLT transformations away from a nail"

This almost exactly describes a Project Manager I've worked with -- he has had experience with a CMS system that was entirely XML-document based, and sees almost every problem as solvable with XML/XSLT, and pushes it one his teams.

Which is a good example of why project managers shouldn't be allowed (or at least not depended on) to make technical architecture decisions. We've ended up doing a giant site search project based on huge XML indexes...
The night owls concept is generally a fairly short event to, so most people don't come expecting to get to much done rather to work in a bit more relaxed environment and interact with other like minded people. (In the Melbourne version anyway).
Familiarity breeds contempt. Often it's the language that coders are currently using that seems like the worst, because they're dealing with that language's problems on a daily basis.
i started writing a paper on ADHD but didn't finish it
It's true (and it's great news) that Python is becoming one of the most important and popular programming languages, but this article does a pretty poor job at showing this and explaining why.

Other than Python's popularity for web development (where it faces competition from Ruby and PHP) Python has been adopted in many other settings, and that probably contributed quite a lot to the numbers indexed. For example, in the last year many of the biggest financial institutions have moved to developing critical parts of their systems in Python. In fact, it can probably be said that Python became popular _despite_ not becoming very popular for web development until quite late in the game.
80% of a typical magazine's income is from advertisements. So 90% off isn't much of an income cut for the magazine.
> [...] Python, Ruby, Haskell, Ada are gaining popularity

Ada???
Please, can the original poster edit the link? It really doesn't make sense to link to an anchor in the template section.
Asked me to sign in to Google Groups. Closed tab.
link redirects me to a login wall
Property solicitors
I did. The only hackathon I ever did was a TechCrunch Disrupt hackathon last year. I stayed up all night, and made a real-time, semantic question-and-answer site where you could invite your friends via instant message.

It didn't win. Some robot that stabbed imaginary people in the air won.

It looked like most people there used existing software and just added something onto it. If I knew that, I would have come and added something to YouMixer.com ... I think I would have won :)

Update: I just went there and it looks like it somehow took off in spain!
Ask HN: Dropping out of college and moving to SF
I'm trying to figure out whether this is a good idea to follow through with.

I'm a freshmen in college and I'm not really enjoying it. I did a lot of drinking and partying first semester, but it's gotten really old. It's just a repetitive cycle that isn't truly satisfying. Drunken weekends feel like wasted weekends (although I suppose this might not be the case if I had time to do anything meaningful during the week).

Most of my friends have no ambition or motivation to do anything substantial before they graduate. As someone who gets extremely passionate and excited about new ideas, projects and tech in general, being around people who can't relate is draining. I've found a few techie friends, but none serious enough to work on projects with.

The only times that I've felt truly aligned with the people around me were at the TC 50 and TC Disrupt conferences in SF and NYC. They were beyond amazing. Walking into those conferences felt like walking into my own front door. I fell in love with SF the week I was there for TC50. Even before, it's always been my dream to live in the bay area just based on the concentration of tech.

To the point: I'm considering taking a year off from school and moving to the bay area. I'm looking for some insight from people with experience, as none of my family or close friends know what to think.

Moving to San Francisco and working for an awesome startup would be a mind-blowing experience. I'm up for long hours of hard work. My only concern is finding a startup to work for and being able to cover the cost of living. Product and business development related work is where I think I can contribute the most. Is it realistic to think that anyone would hire a 19 year old, unproven college drop out?

Deadlines are approaching and nonrefundable deposits are due, so I'm not sure whether to go gung-ho just yet, or to play it safe and pay the deposits. At this point, it's basically riding on whether I can cover living expenses. What do you guys think? I would really appreciate your suggestions or advice. Thank you HN.
I actually think it would be cool if there was a section for regular people to add themselves to wikipedia, as long as the pages were kept to the same editing standards, minus notability and references of course. Would probably find that so many normal random people lead really interesting lives.
Congratulations on your project !

I just registered on your site, I love the idea and the design. I was also afraid that I would land on an empty site, but there is already lots of idea to read and discuss about.

One little think that I think you can improve. You seem to love to write :) and I guess talk . We feel that on your website there is a looooot to read maybe to much.I find so much text overwhelming maybe you could reduce or delete some of it. My 2 cents...

Good luck on your project and congratulations !
The focus is primarily about building open source infrastructure, so yep, for the love of code (though often informed by commercial need).
Research quality data sets
AT&T reportedly provisions iOS 4.3 beta Personal Hotspot feature
Have you looked into Zen? Zen is all about focusing on the present moment so you are fully alive.

From one of the personal development books I've read, put a rubber band around your wrist. Everytime you catch yourself thinking something that relates to an old though pattern, snap the rubber band. If the rubber band breaks, replace it.

Stop trying to improve n areas, focus on one or two areas (ideally one). The hardest areas to improve on are the ones where you have strong feelings (against improvement) or apathy (no feeling - but maybe strong feeling that nothing can be done).

Accountability is huge - just having a friend to talk to about shared goals, working on a shared project will do wonders. For example, when I was training for my first triathlon, my training buddy Craig would text or email - 'Meet up at the Y at 5:30 Thursday'. And I would say 'Sure'. Whatever happened between the intervening time period, both of us would have to drag ourselves out of bed to get to the Y at 5:30 in the morning for a morning swim - otherwise, we'd be letting the other person down.

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there, does anyone hear it? Probably no. But if you let down a buddy or a friend, they'll let you know and you'll know (so that you probably won't let it happen in the first place).
Yeah, I initially wrote a comment insulting him for not being able to figure out how to fold a list in C#, but the fact is, that wasn't in the standard library until late 2007, so I can sympathize.
The article is about the author that has been a fan of PHP for a long time and now he loves Python. This is the base of his claim of Python popularity.
About the same number of people as at music hack day, I guess
Java has won. It is the COBOL of our generation. The reason why people hate Java is because they don't want to be programming Java - they want to be coding in something cooler. But the thing is, trendy doesn't necessarily equate to stability.
I think you'll find that many gatherings are like this. Tech Conferences in particular seem to fall into this category where half of the people are there to network and the other half are there for the meat and potatoes content of the conference.
I agree, and I'm assuming you actually mean that the impact of having a coffee shop in each location is huge. Borders failed at this, they originally ran their own coffee shops, then outsourced it to Seattle's Best. BN outsourced coffee while Borders outsourced the web business.

I have never been able to understand the fascination with Starbucks in BN. At my local BN, it's noisy, small tables, and no power outlets available. Can't do that.

Also, Peet's is so much better than Starbucks.
Do you know anyone out here?
Do you have any money saved?
If the answer to either of those is no, what would you once you got here?
What is your resume like? Any experience? Open source? Anything?
If the answer to the previous question is "very little" or "none" it is going to take a while to get a job. you may even need to just start doing some projects of your own/open source to get some experience. You might have to take some manual labor job to survive at first. Something you're willing to do?
Watch Donaire vs Montiel live stream | Breaking News
Show HN: A real-time, semantic Q&A Facebook app I built at TC Disrupt Hackathon
Try:

http://groups.google.com.nyud.net/group/comp.lang.lisp/brows...

or type the original link in to the form at:

http://dongana.com
http://www.startupchile.org/what-does-the-subsidy-cover/ says the subsidy covers operations, living (housing, transportation, food), and HR costs associated with hiring.
If you're using Java, you've already given up on not killing babies.
Hi,

First of all RoR isnt the absolute best programming language in the world. There isnt a best programming language in the world but there is language more suited to your needs !

Ruby on Rails as a Ruby Framework and Django as a Python framework are often praised to be good language to build a MVP. Because with RoR/Django you can build a product relatively quickly and easily.

If you want to learn how to develop, there is vibrant community for both of these frameworks and yes that is important if you want to start !

IMO: Choose your project then choose a language.
Wait a second, we do have a Wikipedia article for every Pokemon out there!
Thanks! Are there any specific areas you had in mind? Is the welcome message after you sign in too much?
I was also at the TimesOpen Hack day, and spent most of the day coding. There was a lot of chatter there, though (some of it contributed to what my app eventually became). Bring headphones for when you need to start building. Thankfully no one there presented deckware.
Can't say I've had this problem at any of the UK hackdays I frequently attend, only the US ones I've been to.

I think one of the differences is having an overnight. The networkers and loiterers bugger off after a few hours leaving just the developers and designers overnight who want to actually make interesting things.