skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The author is correct that, as a language "in the small", Scala offers many more ways for a programmer to create hard-to-understand complexity. Though many things have been conceptually simplified (the distinction between primitives and objects has been abstracted away so that most developers don't have to worry about, for example) there is a whole lot more stuff that make it easy to hang yourself with. (See implicit conversions and parameters, destructuring and pattern matching, and the power of the type system). Most of these things can be used to make code more readable, concise, and flexible, but can also be used to great ill effect.

When it comes to programming "in the large", like the author seems to be describing, I couldn't disagree more. Here it's Java--the culture and ecosystem--that tends towards over-abstraction, huge frameworks that obscure rather than illuminate intent, ridiculous class names that include "FactoryFactory", and so on.

I would argue that the second phenomenon--the hugely complex frameworks that have arisen in the Java world--is a direct consequence of the lack of power offered by Java, the language. Complex frameworks that do dependency injection through bytecode generation and XML configuration files really aren't necessary in the Scala world, where 90% of what you're actually trying to do can be done using compile-time mixins. The factory pattern can be replaced with anonymous first-class functions, with a net increase in clarity and conciseness. Most things that makes Scala more complicated in the small can be also be used to replace even more complicated, ad-hoc patterns and frameworks that make big Java projects such a pain to work on.

That said, it could be true that introducing Scala into existing codebases that already have thousands of lines of Spring XML config might simply introduce additional complexity, without offering a realistic path to removing all of the nonsense that supports the legacy Java code.
Open government, burried data: up to 40,000 people to be priced of the net
I've always wanted a bright orange shirt (#ff6600) like the default topcolor with a nice large Y on the front.

I'm wondering if there is a trademark that would prevent someone from designing and selling one (even after explicitly stating no affiliation/connection with YC.)

Wikipedia Commons[1] says Jessica designed it and has trademark restrictions however...

EDIT:

Followed the rabbit-hole and found this: http://ycombinator.com/legal.html which states This image of our logo is released under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 license.

..I unfortunately am not familiar with that license, but after reading up on it[2], it would seem fair game, as long as the person(s) gave attribution to Jessica/YC.

Anyone have any counterpoints/corollaries to prove me utterly out of touch with everything, or am I correct in my understanding here?

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Y_Combinator_Logo_400.gif

[2]: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/
If you're Mark Zuckerberg, or Paul Graham,...do you still get to sit at the lunch table with everybody else?

This is such a funny question. I'm the co-founder of http://LetsLunch.com: we let you apply for lunches with Silicon Valley celebrities and you'd be surprised how approachable they can be.

But really, we are a way for fellow HNers to meet each other without the obstruction of a computer screen.

That's because we believe in is that there are plenty of brilliant people you could meet (over lunch...) who are not famous yet. Those are the people you want to get to know. Meeting pg is just icing on the cake :-)
You're right, and that's what makes this incredibly disheartening.
Moving forward with Mozilla F1
Source, from an insert in the January 2011 issue in HOW magazine: http://blog.howdesign.com/how-magazine/rules-to-live-work-by...
This is right on time, thanks, hopefully I can get my beta pass soon.
I haven't seen the shirt that inspired you, so my opinion probably isn't so useful.
Just a random idea someone might think has commercial potential. Or not.
Startup X - A Meta-Meta Startup
They will answer the ten most popular questions next tuesday.

As much as I love Reddit sometimes, a good number of the upvoted questions are disappointing although not unexpected.
I'm not sure there's a bubble, but if everyone on HN just pretends there is one and we say the word "bubble" a lot in major publications, then maybe we can despeculate technology investments and invest in them ourselves...
Well said. It is amazing to me that so many people here can't understand the difference between a bubble and isolated investor activity. A small group of potentially bad investments is not the same thing as large-scale irrational exuberance.

"Dude, if someone said Facebook is worth $50 billion, then we have to be in a bubble -- Dropbox and Github better get ready for a huge meltdown!"
If you're male and you want to teach, going into elementary education is one of the riskiest choices you can make. Our attitude has a distinctively negative attitude towards males in these domains -- men aren't supposed to want to work with children, and if they are, then they must be perverts and molesters. This attitude has gotten worse and worse over the years. A man being alone with a child is sufficient to cause a panic in a passer-by. And since we've raised children to be increasingly afraid of strangers -- which is another word for men -- we place men in a situation where their entire lives can be ruined by one mischievous child telling one fib. This is the society we've made, and I don't think a few initiatives here and there are going to change this prevailing (and institutional) misconception, at least not for a long time.
I'm confused. Is Matt's company going to benefit because unemployed people will want to use his site or because recruiters will want to use his site?
For the next recession, if this isn't changed, I'm going to develop a business model of small businesses who hire for a fee, keeping resumes current.
Haha, agreed. We'll just keep giving away valuable things for free, and keep selling advertising to each other. Nothing bad can come of this :)
Weird, sometimes the text is in second person ("Your older sister is the most popular...") other times third ("Python cares deeply about you..."). Not particularly entertaining anyway.
Nothing wrong with a shameless plug :-P (I'm sure you understand that I didn't literally mean lunch...). That seems like it would be really fun, like a blind date, except you're looking for technical connections, not romantic ones.
I think it's a reference to Ada's reputation for being a "bondage and discipline language": http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?BondageAndDisciplineLanguage
Startup investing is not based on revenues, like it would be if you were investing in a part share of a restaurant or something like that. When a startup is valued at $10 million, it doesn't mean that the company, as is, is worth $10 million so much as that it has a 1% chance of one day being worth $1 billion.

The way you make money investing in startups is to make a lot of bets that each have a small chance of paying off big. So while I'm not saying anything about the specific companies you list (most of which I don't know anything about), a list of recent startup fundings should always include a lot (perhaps a majority) that investors will ultimately lose money on.

The problem is, you don't know which the winners will be. They usually tend to look very unpromising. If you'd made this list 5 years ago, it would have included a web site for college students, bizarrely thought to be worth tens of millions of dollars.
I think I've seen people affiliated with YC with a shirt that just has the orange box with a Y on it.

Other YC shirts I know of: "make something people want", and when you get acquired, you get "i made something people want"
Man Tweets Without Really Thinking About It First
Models' real faces before photoshop
crazy
A barebones, 30-minute (5 minutes if you're good) FizzBuzz-esque puzzle given to candidates up front has drastically reduced the number phone interviews that leave me paralytically depressed at the state of CS education.
I don't know why you were down voted, but I agree. I don't understand how someone/some people can contribute so little yet gain so much.
Then don't upvote it.
There's a typo in the first example. You're missing a '1' in the first argument when you execute the ajax call.

The pub/sub is all local right? I got really excited, then not so much. I still see the value, but I was hoping it was more like Google's javascript+serverside-component PuSH client. [1]

http://code.google.com/apis/feed/v1/devguide.html#hiworld

(It's really cool, Google runs a PuSH bridge so their server side component subscribes to a Pubsubhubbub hub and receives updates and pushes them to the browser. I want to see an OSS implementation of it since it's really slick and PuSH is a neat protocol).
I wish I could search the job database without having to sign up first.
You could, but the type is on an orange background, so I'd have to upload a just white design, which I can't do at the moment. If you want, ping me and I'll do it later. (my email is in my profile)
Maybe if it were Nordstrom buying boo.com in 2001, maybe. But Hautelook has millions of subscribers, and it's in a market where Vente Privee, the pre-eminent leader in that space, made almost a billion dollars last year.

These quick sale sites for fashion are huge business, nearly as big as local coupons.
I called the late-90s tech bubble (ask my friends and family!), and I called the last decade's housing bubble (ask my wife!). This doesn't make me Nostrodamus, but it does give me more confidence in my ability to see (really big picture) macro-trends.

And to me, what we're seeing today is in no way comparable to a bubble. Maybe some companies are being purchased at inflated prices, but there a ton of startups out there that really could change the way things are done. Most of the individual startups may fail, but I'm pretty confident that overall, many sectors of the economy are ripe for disruption. The economy will be changed.

That or somewhere around 2008, my mental habits went from skeptically pessimistic to irrationally optimistic. Could be the case; these are happy times... :)
But by saying lunch, you hit the nail on the head. Actually taking the time to sit down with someone for lunch is one of the highest forms of respect. In contrast, a meeting in a cold conference room doesn't convey the same message.
You can block them and many, many more with Ghostery. I've installed it on all of my computers/browsers.

http://www.ghostery.com/
Something I've thought a lot about, and I'm still unsure on what to do. You mean, consolidate WeddingType and WeddingInviteLove together? It might be a good win for SEO, but I worry on two sites, while both focusing on weddings, are targeting two distinctly different groups. That was my reasoning for making WIL it's own domain, rather than putting it under WeddingType.com. Still think that they'd be better consolidated?
Yesssss that is my favorite as well....
Yes, I have struggled with severe depression in the past during school and work to the point of coming home in tears because I'd have to make dinner and didn't have the energy to.

Suggestions:

1. Set a level of activity that works - the things you simply must do to survive and the things that make you happy and don't stress you out. Everything else, try to turn down or delegate.

2. It may be depression that can be treated medically. I don't know how it works in the USA, but if you have a doctor you may want to talk to him/her -- or go to the health clinic on campus once you resume studies.

Good luck. The good news is that you can climb out of a depression.
Green screen monitors were very common with Apple II machines. My programming classes in high school were taught on Apple II and IIe machines hooked up to green screen Apple Monitor II monitors (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Monitor_II).
Would you consider sharing the technology stack that you used to create this application?

I love the visuals. How perfect for a brand manager to show that doing X can result in Y.

Thank you!
PHP BDD framework Behat releases v1.00RC2 and new website, docs
How iOS certificates and provision files really work
How does a tech startup that employs a few highly skilled people affect people the surrounding area?
I did not even realize that the delay feature existed. Neat!

>It has trained me to make sure what I'm saying is true before I hit submit.

I was having a conversation with a friend of mine recently about how talking to her was forcing me to research more, and how that was good. Anytime I'm talking to this friend [via email], I'll spend quite a bit more time researching than I do actually writing.

This is one of the many reasons I love HN so much. It's filled with staggeringly brilliant people, and it forces me to go out and learn things before submitting.

So thanks for that.
Looks like it's going to be open source!

https://github.com/gameclosure
It's interesting to see the flipside of this (he said, veering wildly offtopic). On OKCupid and other dating sites there is a particularly style of picture many girls use, cropped but obviously they're with a male, like his arm is around her or something. Projecting female values, they think they're saying "look, I've had a boyfriend, that proves I'm not crazy". Unfortunately the message received by a male is "she's not over her ex".
Yeah, easier said than done though. If you're really an entrepreneur it's pretty darn hard to be passionate about ONE idea!
HTML5 Canvas Performance in deviantART muro
The smaller names are already shipping - I got an Archos 70 and 101 this week (after weeks of delay for the 101, mind you). The Viewsonic G-Tab and Huawei Ideos are out there, too.

I think that Honeycomb introduced a lot of uncertainty into requirements. When would it be ready and would the shipping product be able to support it? Would Gingerbread be sufficient?
Hey, that's what I said: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2215290:

Ever wonder why it's taken a year for anyone to build a 9"/10" iPad competitor? It's because no one can get capacitative touch screen in sufficient quantities. Even Samsung (which owns the factory!) had to make do with 7" screens.
Now, finally new factories are beginning to come online, which means that competitors can release their products. The problem for them is that Apple locked in much lower prices (because of their bigger purchasing power), which makes it hard to compete on price.
there are many ways they will be affected, to list a few:

- FB, Zynga etc. use a lot of technology infrastructure. When that growth ceases, a lot of hardware vendors, service etc co's will be affected

- when/if bubble pops, it will affect investor confidence - lower if any valuations for new start-ups in that space and less cash for existing companies

- even stricter regulatory scrutiny (SOX will be peanuts compared to legislations that will be introduced after this bubble pops)

etc etc
Steve Jobs Health Worries Escalate
Thanks for the feedback. Since our launch three months ago, we have been occupied with:

(a) working one-on-one with some of our larger users on some premium features that we will be opening up soon.

(b) supporting our userbase; we got a significantly larger number of signups than expected from our initial beta launch and have been seeing double-digit monthly growth since then. As a result we've had to delay some feature work to fix lots of bugs and scaling issues in order to effectively track millions of tweets our beta users.

For the latest product updates, follow our blog or @crowdbooster on Twitter. We're also looking at other ways of getting the word out to our users about major new features when they are released. Thanks for sticking with us!
It's interesting to be reminded of the productivity step function messaging. I would say that's happened, massively. What it seems to have done, though, is drive down the total cost to achieve something, rather than drive up the final value of an organization. That's definitely a surprise.
The ability to work on a project full-time is worth the equity you give away.
Solar Flare will cause massive communications disruptions tonight?
It's "duh" moments like this that I'm glad to have HN feedback. :) Going to get that working in the next few days, thanks so much!
Checked the website referral logs which led me to this topic :) I'm one of the founders of trakt and right now we have real time scrobbling plugins for XBMC and MediaPortal. Boxee and Plex clients are beta tested right now as well. Check out the site or hit us up @trakt if you are interested in beta testing Boxee or Plex.
New North American Companies in BonitaSoft's Partner Program
"Why are so many people complaining? Generally, it seems those who are complaining are not making their own product. I can understand how reselling something another person has made means tough margins."

Look at Mog. They are making a quality product and also providing aggregation of others' products. Having a subscription to each musician's content would be pointless. It's the search, the ability to make a playlist of music from all sorts of areas that makes the product worthwhile.
When I saw the title my first thought was "too bad it won't be a shirt of the actual y combinator", I was pleasantly surprised, will probably be purchasing one soon
Big data analysis is currently hot, and will almost certainly only get hotter. You can apply big data analysis in many areas, but only a few have been tapped so far. What used to be $CRAZY_EXPENSIVE amounts of computing power can be leveraged to provide new insights into existing fields. In a word: Hadoop. Combine that with your NoSQL tech of choice (HBase, Cassandra, Riak, etc).
The stack is Pylons (behind uwsgi+nginx), PostgreSQL, and my own task scheduler[1]. Right now it's hosted on Linode. Will be moving to DotCloud eventually. :)

[1] http://github.com/shazow/turnip
The undercurrent where he's trying to expand the accepted definition of "by trivial algebra" is interesting. Essentially Zeilberger argues that if you can plug something in to Mathematica and it can solve it, then it's true "by trivial algebra" by today's standards, and we should stop bothering to prove such results by hand.
Global alcohol consumption: Drinking habits
Ask HN: Any commercially successful Arduino projects?
Hey! I have just ordered my first Arduino and am totally thrilled to start experimenting soon!

Looking around on the interwebs, I couldn't find any commercial (successful) projects based on this platform. Could anyone point me in the right direction or do you share my observation?
You didn't answer the question. Every expenditure of taxpayer money needs to be viewed through this lens. That doesn't mean that the answer is never to spend the money.
Publicness Needs Its Advocates, Just Like Privacy
Child labor was induced by very specific incentives, and it was easy to spot. After the ban on those labor practices, there was no competitive advantage in being the guy who openly hires children and gets slapped down.

Adverse selection problems in the job market are not so tractable. When we ban discrimination against traits that are very valuable to discriminate against, the ban just isn't going to be very effective: employers will find new and more subtle ways to continue their discrimination.

Bans against discrimination on race and religion were effective because employers were hurting themselves with their bad decisions, and it was hard to hide discriminatory practices. The incentives lined up to encourage a diverse workplace.

As a counter-example, bans on age-based discrimination have been very ineffective. Age-based discrimination can be subtle, yet hugely profitable for employers.
It'd be nice if someone would bother to set up a site or a wiki to collect these ideas in one place. Call it "Please somebody make this" and bootstrap it by annoncing on HN :)
Yeah, they were in Firefox when I built that page but I (oddly) forgot to check on other browsers.

I'm actually in Rome right now and my laptop was stolen a week ago (sigh...) so fixing errors like this unfortunately have to wait until I can use @shazow's computer.

Thanks, on my list. :D
I can't speak for LISP or Logo, but her Haskell entry was completely divorced from reality. It would have been a better fit (and somewhat appropriate) if she'd just copy-pasted the OCaml entry.
Snow in San Francisco - Pictures
That's almost always the case with reddit AMAs that accept the highest-rated comments.
You don't know why he got downvoted? It's obviously not "only in America"...
- Back in the day I knew Java (when I was a CSC major briefly) but I haven't written anything in it for years.
- Yes, I'd consider myself very strong in HTML/CSS
- So I've heard, but I've also heard it has its major downsides!
Our current technology is a long way off -- but he's making a prediction (or maybe more of a suggestion) for 15 years from now.

I wouldn't have guessed even 3 years ago that we were this close to having a working Jeopardy player.
Direct link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3FPJn26Kqk
The saying is actually "…not just a river in Egypt." The fact that the Nile is a river in Egypt is somewhat less enlightening.
First thought: "Yo dawg. I herd you like Y-Combinator. So we put a lambda in yo lambda, so you can recurse while u recurse."
The library tomh linked to is not a part of the Scala language or the standard library.
They Want You To Fit In So They Can Ignore You
That's what I was thinking. Surely in the end it makes no difference. I suppose it might make it easier for employed people with lower skills to move up, when they have to compete with unemployed people with greater skills.
8 Creative Ways to Keep Your Staff Healthy - cool ideas for startups
I am completely clueless about databases. @shazow told me which kind to use when working on WIL locally (Django does make it easy, plus I have the add-on "South" which apparently does a lot of work for you as well), and DotCloud took care of my database problems when I launched.
1) Let me click on one of the attributes to search all within that attribute.

2) Include a description of the attributes and the process.
Toss them in a river.

If they sink they are innocent.

If they float they are in a bubble.
We're big believers in open source and a lot of our technology is, as you can see, open source.
Timestep, our canvas game library, is probably the most interesting project there at the moment.
It's a useful abstraction layer on top of canvas that can then be used with the Game Closure SDK to deploy to other platforms.
Query Language Modeling for Voice Search
Diagnosing strange mystery illnesses isn't common, but not doing as well as one could at diagnosing and treating routine illnesses is more common. Automating the diagnosis and treatment process would just be the next step in the evidence-based medicine movement, which is already moving in the direction of having doctors follow best-practice flow charts derived from statistical data.
It's been here for a while now..
We were told that we didn't have a magic bullet for getting customers, though I'd think that lack of complete hacking experience (we were missing a crucial back end component) probably didn't help either.

If you get an interview, just let them ask as many questions as possible. 5 word answers. Don't elaborate unless they ask, keep it simple. Stay calm. :P
Aforementioned co-founder here. I think there is a lot room for improvement, but the site successfully does the core of what we set out to do. If we can't direct traffic to it now, the question is will continued improvements eventually lead people to use the site, or are we just putting lipstick on a pig.

Any suggestions are appreciated.
Well I'm from America, and I didn't take offense. However, my only reference is what I see here in the states.

I guess my point is that if you don't agree, perhaps it's good form to explain why.