skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I would like to coin a phrase: "seduced by syntax".

I think humans LOVE syntax; and syntax is often loveable, crystallizing a new viewpoint into a linguist pattern that allows this viewpoint to be diffused by our amazing hardwired capabilities for language. J does that.

That being said, sometimes being seduced, while REALLY FUN for a little while, turns out to REALLY MESSED UP in the long run. I think J and APL are like that too -- just break up with him, really....

For another metaphorical take: I think Python and C are like English -- boring, with a lot of fun syntax stripped out, but very, very useful. C++ is like Mandarin -- completely complicated, but so much literature and history is written in it that you have to take it seriously. Shell is like the pidgin languages. And J/APL ... they are like Quileute (the language spoken by Jacob-the-Werewolf's tribe): completely difficult, arcane, counter intuitive, and only spoken by like six other weirdos (ie don't bother).

All these languages are seductive, though.

J programmers love to exchange emails like "I found a way to calculate pi to the 80th decimal with only 4 characters" ... as if that is remotely useful. We have J code in use in our office -- its fun, if you like speaking Klingon, but it is a complete waste of time and sweat for any pragmatic applications. If you want to do complex weird matrix stuff in a few lines, learn linear algebra and tensor operations for chrissake, which actually have some utility in the real world. And don't be fooled by APL/J types telling you their language is mathematical -- it isn't, in the sense that you can't actually derive new results with it; it is just difficult (good math makes thing easier).

Sorry for the rant. I wish the damn language would disappear, and we could remember it wistfully like SNOBOL, Ada, SAS, and other bad experiments in seductive syntax.
This is a great description, and I really appreciate you posting it. I might update my blog with it, and really should have looked at Wikipedia too. Thanks.

You make my point perfectly. Wikipedia is very clear to call it a "company." That's what I'm saying. Two hour projects aren't companies (unless they file to be an entity, which I believe makes it a startup - 3rd qualification bullet in the post).
That isn't even necessary as a success condition, but in general, YC invests in Texas Hold'em because they see the glimmer that suggests you're capable of eventually executing on FarmVille. (Zynga wasn't Zynga on day one, either.)
Don't forget -- it's nothing until it's something!
Interesting article, clear explanation. One minus : in the conclusion it is assumed that the problem of pursuing nuclear power is about risk assessment on nuclear plants. This is partial truth biased by current events, in fact many side effects are at stake (the plundering of uranium producing countries like Niger, centralized energy production and its consequences…)
Same here... that was the best part...
I don't think there is an "actual startup community". There are just people that do things, some of which may become successful.

Google did not have much in common with Value America, which did not have much in common with LiveJournal. They were 3 projects, or startups, or businesses, or whatever. In the late 90s, Value America was by far the most successful, but look where they are now.

Similarly, I think it's a mistake to fetishize certain ventures as being "real" startups while the others are just "projects". Those Stanford grad students who are playing around on stuff after class may be the next billionaires. Similarly, that Sequoia-funded startup with revenue and an ex-Googler founder may just be dust in the wind in five years.
I think there may be a bit of confusion here, as the recent post about the increased number of daily stories on Digg's frontpage was written by a Digg user and posted to their blog, not written by Digg staff or otherwise endorsed by us. (I work at Digg.) Our last blog post was yesterday ( http://about.digg.com/blog/how-get-started-digg-filtering-my... ) and about a couple of new features we rolled out.
Social media popularity can predict stock prices
In that case, was invading other countries also part of their 'culture'?
Interesting little tool; I'm here working with my devs, will see if it makes it easier to share all the little things we find when hacking away :)
Android beats Iphone at web browsing
Furthermore, the ideal cycle efficiency is 1-T_low/T_high, where T_low would be the exhaust temperature and T_high the combustion temperature for this engine, in deg K.

T_high is limited by chemistry and materials to abt 1400 K, T_low depends on a whole pile of stuff, but in practice cannot be lower than 700 K or so for a simple (as opposed to compound) cycle that this engine uses. So the absolute maximum theoretical efficiency, using perfect insulators, frictionless bearings and ideal gases is about 50%.

Modern car turbo-diesel engines get abt 40% efficiency, stationary diesels reach 50% efficiency. Note these are compound cycles.

tldr: 3.5x efficiency improvement claim is bullshit.
3) I dont pay Airbnb fee on second stay and just contact my 'paid friends' directly. They need to consider this and if its a problem in scale.

That's a really good point. A common theme in Paul's argument is that "AirBnB could be the next eBay." But eBay's worst nightmare is buyers and sellers communicating directly, saving each other money while cutting the company out of the revenue loop.

AirBnB is almost more like a dating service than a marketplace... a 'buyer' and 'seller' who prove compatible with each other will never need to use the service again, at least not in the same city.
Meetups by place
Hi everyone,

This is my first post on Ycombinator (I'm a serious noob). I was wondering, has there been any success on place based meet ups of Ycombinator advocates? Anyone in Vancouver?

TLChan
Make the template app static, sign it with whatever special permissions MobileSafari has. (I'm assuming that some special permission is needed, signed by apple.)

Instantiate the app by copying it and placing the files related to the specific instance (manifest, html, cached files) in the standard mutable data directories (Documents, Cache, ...), which wouldn't affect the signature. (The name of the app and icon would have to excluded from the signature.)

If this is how things work now, I wouldn't be surprised if the lack of Nitro was just an oversight on Apple's part (i.e. they forgot to give the template app the right permissions). If home page web apps are granted a special exception to the usual app-signing, I could imagine that they can't give them these permissions without leaking them to everyone.
Nope. They won't be stuck. A huge part of building this type of business is automating it.

Derek Sivers completely automated CD Baby to a point where he wasn't even needed anymore. Then he sold it for $22m.

Actually that's the perfect example of what I'm talking about. Not sure why I didn't think to to mention it before.
A startup is a business - that's what it's short for isn't it, "start up business"?
So a project is a project until it is something you want to turn into a business. Then you can call it a startup.
I just posted our concept on your site: http://leanthingy.com/idea-spotbankscom
Ok. I get the strong sense† that Fried and DHH are in love with 37signals. Which may be why they haven't bailed to shoot the moon yet.

So when you say something resembling "you'd expect to see companies like 37signals trying to roll the snowball into something like Twitter but that rarely ever seems to happen", I'm inclined to point out how that misreads the dynamics of companies like 37signals.

† (won't bore you with details, but I have many of them)
That's right. I'm not. I sold my startup last year and am working for the acquirer. I'm building stuff on the side, and having fun. But those are projects.
Ask HN: NXNE? Push for Canadian startup launchpad?
Hello HN,

I'm just leaving SXSWi now after helping my buddy promote his site. It's been a good experience here with a bunch of VCs, music crowd etc. A lot of people are saying that SXSW is over... As in.. it's overhyped with too many startups and just too much noise for any company to successfully launch like Twitter and Foursquare had in the past.

In the next couple months, I'll be pushing my startup to gain users. I'm looking for a good venue to do so. It has to be in a place like Austin simply because it's related to finding/discovering great places/activities. NXNE seems like a good location as it just seems like a simpler SXSW. I'm not really needing VC interest or super techie interest... just need early adopters. It's also good because I used to live in Toronto where NXNE is.

Does anyone have any thoughts on NXNE from HN?
Cause it takes a lot of effort to make a 'fake' facebook profile - I had one and it only lasted a few months before it was locked out pending government-issue ID being sent to them, since I wasn't actually using it for anything more than looking at the occasional thing that required an account I can only assume they monitor for unusual use patterns.
I don't think I have a place calling other people out for the word they use to describe what they are working on. That being said, I've started lots of projects, but nothing I would call a startup. Some have generated revenue, many have not, but none were really sustainable revenue generators that I saw a future in.

I personally want to reserve the startup label for a project that evolves to show its potential, and that I'm passionate about and ready to fully devote myself to.
Yes there are a lot of bold statements written as a blog posts going around, which are mostly for the purpose of ranting and self-promotion.

It's like a bolded tweet.
Nobody who sees the new 37signals office will walk away thinking "these people lack for ambition". I don't want to bicker about this point you're trying to make; maybe you're right and there's a different breed of ambition at work in the shoot-the-moonies. But 37signals is not just a "good job and enough money".
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It's difficult to focus when there are many, many, many challenges bearing down like sandbags on your shoulders. You know how your site (if you started one) has days of low traffic and days of high traffic? Well, look at the long term. Did your site increase month over month? If yes, then keep pushing forward. If not, then step back and think about why your not moving forward. This too shall pass ~ honestly, I always thought that was BS, but if I look back at all the times I was overwhelmed with work, and think about how quickly I dug my way out, it's true. It all passes.
Has anyone tried browsing with IE6 lately? At the time, everything was probably compatible with it.. but my school still uses IE6 and I am finding more and more common web pages are broken by it. At this point, it probably serves more as a content filter than anything.
2011 37signals is not the same company as 2001 37signals. They've been doing product for just about as long as Matasano has been in business; ~2005.
Can we also stop calling every entrepreneur with a "successful" exit an expert and someone whose every word we need to live by... some are just lucky, if not most.
Have you seen http://www.rubyspec.org/?
One of the best problem-solving strategies I was ever taught was to respond to things like this with "well, what if it wasn't?" Don't try and fight their reasoning about why it's impossible, because you won't win - instead, step around it by getting them to ignore the part they're/you're getting stuck up on.

It takes a bit of persistence and convincing the other party to engage in what they consider a flight of mental fancy, but once you get over the "impossible" part and start figuring out how to solve the rest of the problem, I find that a solution that avoids the initially-impossible part tends to present itself. That, or you'll figure out why what you thought was impossible isn't. The beauty of this is that it works equally well when you're trying to convince someone else of something you know to be right and when you're trying to figure out a solution yourself.

The other easy strategy I use all the time (and this is more for concrete problems, as opposed to intellectual/theoretical ones) is start by deciding if the problem is one that can easily be solved by throwing money at it. If it can be, then it's a much easier question - you just have to determine if the problem is worth the money it would cost to fix it, which is simpler. If the problem can't be solved with money, then you know where to start to find a solution (enumerating all the non-monetary resources you have and seeing what might work).
Why reddit was down for 6 of the last 24 hours.
Shrug That depends on what I go on to do with it, right? If AR or some other idea goes big, then it gets retroactively upgraded to be the amusing "when it was still scrappy" backstory.

I'm totally happy with where I am in life today, and there are a bunch of happy places I could see myself in two years, lifestyle business or no. A word of caution: not everyone selling Obama cereal intends to be doing so forever.
Yup, still one of the surprisingly best keep secrets in start-up-dom is that Facebook apps is a much better, albeit riskier market than iPhone apps.
To me, what Coviello is saying is don't worry the thieves haven't stolen some secret 0-day that would provide them immediate access through your RSA kit

I am no security expert (far from it!), but I've seen enough compromise disclosures with inside information to read this the exact same way as you, especially with this note from the advisory:

We recommend customers enforce strong password and pin policies.

Advisories like this are like poetry: every word matters, and a phrase like "... reduce the effectiveness of a current two-factor authentication implementation as part of a broader attack" is too pretty to not raise my suspicion. RSA could be 100% busted, and this phrase would still be technically true.
According to wikipedia 96% of tweets are not news

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter#Tweet_contents

I don't use twitter for news because I don't care to sift through the 96% of drivel people seem to put up there. But your saying people actually do that?

How do people find good context on twitter? Do they follow people who only post good news type stuff along with their boring friends?
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Spot on!

I like to think of stages as below:

Ideas > Experiment > Project > Startup

Not all of my ideas follow the model, but those are the stages I like to think of.

Note to self: A blog post expanding one each satge.
Apple clobbered by rare Wall Street downgrade, Japan looms
Why Reddit was down for 6 hours
The Dabble people themselves practically announced that they'd be doing this a year ago. They said they'd give notice. They gave notice. What do you want from them?
Check the following sites --

vworker.com
elance.com

you will need to spend some cash, or really convince someone there is gold at the end of the rainbow... to get a technical owner on board. I see potential in your idea. Check out Axure to experiment with interfaces.
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Sounds like Twitter hasn't even reached startup status, then.
Ask HN: How do AirBnB, Etsy etc. handle payments?
I am interested to know how sites like these handle payments. ie. accepting money from one group of people, taking a cut and then distributing the money to another group of people

PayPal makes this near impossible to do, and they are known to freeze a lot of accounts where this is the use case.

I remember reading somewhere that early in the history of AirBnB they were with Paypal, had problems, and had to implement their own solution. Does anybody know what that solution is? Is it simply (heh) opening a merchant account and using authorize.net or similar?

I am very impressed that both AirBnB and Etsy are able to handle payments in/out so well across so many users, bank accounts, etc. across so many different countries and currencies.

Is there an easy low-volume, no merchant account way of doing this for products that are just starting out?
Ach. You beat me to the Wankel reference.

I do feel like we've seen this movie before. The problem with rotary engines, usually, is that their round shape and operation, though efficient, can make sealing difficult. So they can be plagued by emissions issues when it comes to the wear-and-tear of everyday use.

But it would be sweet if this engine licked all of that.
In general I agree, but in your specific example (assuming that there's a universal coding convention that everyone is expected to follow), I think your "Bad" is better than your "Good". If something is obviously wrong, call it out, simply and factually. Chances are it was a simple oversight, and "Why did you decide to go against our naming conventions?" sounds passive-aggressive.

I find questions most useful when the issue really is a matter of opinion, and they're just as likely right as you. For example, "why did you decide to key this webpage's data by content hash instead of by URL?" This is a sincere question - there may be arguments for both approaches, and the point in asking is to tease out those arguments and figure out what actually is the truth. It's an acknowledgement that you might be wrong, and not an attempt to paper over the certainty that you're right with diplomatic phrasing.
So in reading that chapter it seems like REST can be boiled down to these statements:

1) Client-server

2) Stateless

3) Cacheable or noncacheable constraints

4) Uniform interface

5) Abstracted so that you can only see the layers directly in front of you.

6) Client side code, e.g., Javascript

7) (Potentially) Late binding of reference to representation

8) "The connector interface is similar to procedural invocation, but with important differences in the passing of parameters and results. The in-parameters consist of request control data, a resource identifier indicating the target of the request, and an optional representation. The out-parameters consist of response control data, optional resource metadata, and an optional representation."

But a lot of what is described as REST imposes additional constraints that I don't see in this description. Did I miss something?
This is so pointless and stupid. Maybe he's caught up in actually developing the site? Or using a staging server with bleeding-edge features that aren't reflecting his production account?
Paradox: You are actually telling him "not to do something".
I would have been interested to see the Unix and Mac versions of IE 5 included. And wasn't IE 5.5 a significant upgrade to 5.0, which was not included?
Dude, magnets do not stick to "metal things". They stick to magnetic materials, chiefly iron. When you find a magnet that sticks to copper or aluminium, it will be a story, you might get a Nobel even.
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1.0 came built into windows 3.01.
They build you up and tear you down.
[random: Gotta love this stuff when its submitted anonymously.]

Long snarky post edited down to the basic soundbite : Copyright is an evolving area where the judiciary is trying hard to keep up.

Google, and other companies, pay people money to create software which, in exchange for that pay (and free munchies etc) those people give complete ownership over to the company. It is completely reasonable to expect Google to do anything reasonable to limit the virality of the GPL's impact on what they do, especially in a product that they charge money for and expect to make serious coin on. Actions I would expect them to pursue are rewrites and selective litigation.
It would be better for startups in general if it was customary to open-source your solution if you shut down.
What is with that bar graph? Who thought 'I'm sure our readers can't comprehend the difference between '181' and '7', so we'd better put it on a graph'?
Can someone do a tldr of why Dabble is shutting down?
Suppose we could change that definition, it is wikipedia after all.
The Odd Artwork from Google Creative Lab's Creative Director Ji Lee
Heroku is partially down (my site unresponsive)
Forgive me back. I was writing more hastily than I usually try to do and being kind of a grouch about it.
vacation

reading

gaming
NewRelic is also having trouble: http://rpmstatus.newrelic.com/2011/02/17/having-trouble-with...

Not sure if these things are related.
The larger problem I see with regards to REST is: what resource are you hitting that would give you multiple types? Meta resources like /media, /things, etc aren't ideal; is there a better way to do it?
Really well put, and I should start off by saying I really like TDD. A lot. (also.. for anyone like me who had to look it up.. TATFT = Test All The Fucking Time)

>Mediocre programmers can drive anything into the ground

Sure, totally. But the XP/TDD cult gives them easy to follow instructions for doing so. There's almost a lowest-common-denominator talent-smoothing mantra behind some of these cultures. I think plenty of projects, teams, and people don't end up finding their potential as developers because they're obsessed with a religion that favors obedience to a silly process over intelligent, clever, elegance.

Okay. At this point we're probably drifting steadily off topic :)
Exactly the opposite. Start calling your projects start-ups. If you don't take them seriously nobody will. Every line of code you write, every project you do should be done with a purpose of building something great and making money off of it. Aimless projects are abound but when you start calling a project a start-up it changes your perspective. It means you are ready to work hard on it. It means you are ready to spend countless nights tinkering with it. It means you start caring for your users.

Projects are worthless, same projects when looked at from the point-of-view of a start-up look like an opportunity.
Hi Scott. I don't exactly agree, because the terseness and lexical density of the C code are the same qualities as cause people to recoil from APL/J/K programs as well (http://www.nsl.com/k/s/s.k). The implementation and language are cut from the same cloth. This of course is not always true (i.e. your point holds much better in the general case) - but it is true in this world, where program brevity and regularity are so highly prized.

Let's note that the payoff for departing from the mainstream in this way is not small: these languages achieve abstractive (compositional) power and elegance without sacrificing efficiency. Those two things are incompatible in nearly every other programming context -- so much so that it's a truism that higher-level code is shorter but slower, lower-level code is faster but more verbose. Yet here they happily co-exist.
If you're the one not using LinkedIn, which is the dominant player in the "business networking" space, surely this is a question which you need to answer for yourself? Why aren't YOU using it, and what features would YOU add?
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I think you're wrong. My work uses RSA SecurID and my password is longer and more complex than a 4-digit number.
Really, I always found it pretty useful. I guess this might be because when doing J->E translation I already had context from the source text. Still the WWWJDIC results at least link to ALC (which does give lots of context) or to Japanese Wikipedia entries (which can compare to the English version of the same article)

For arguments sake: http://eow.alc.co.jp/%CE%AC%C3%A5/EUC-JP/ has lots of usage examples of 略奪 in context suggesting it does in fact mean looting.
Until you own a building, it's a little presumptuous to call yourself CEO. Once you do own a building, It needs to have at least 3 floors.
Shouldn't that be RST?