skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't think this should even be a discussion. If it covers costs well and your solutions work, discussing this doesn't matter.

I started with using .Net for a startup four years ago. Back then there were no Redis, NoSQL wasn't even a invented as a term, cloud servers were just a concept and scaling wasn't anybody's primary concern. In four years the only optimizations I ever did were done via SQL Server profiling or just by modifying a bit of code. I pretty much learnt .Net during this time and the sites I work for get pretty hammered at their peak times and handle well.

So yes from experience .Net is a good starting point. If you know the internals you can probably write and architect code that scales well too without falling back on NoSQL services. You won't need to go looking for complicated PHP cache solutions etc, you won't need to get in the trouble of selecting complicated frameworks. The whole setup gives you ease of mind.

No arguments against LAMP or other environments. Just that I always found .Net to be easier to work with!
The german magazin "Stiftung Warentest" (a _very_ respected organization) did some extensive vacuum testing a few weeks ago.

You can see the ranking here (unfortunately in German):

http://www.stern.de/wissen/technik/stiftung-warentest-ueber-...

The tested Dyson made last place (from 12 contestants) with mostly average results. It's the most expensive and least effective machine they tested. The biggest disadvantage is the sound level: it was so noisy that it was downgraded.
I suspect the "5,127 prototypes" figure covers the entire development cycle to date, including 35 models and a highly successful business -- not 5,127 prototypes in his garden shed before the DC01 went on sale! (That'd be some shed ...)

Lest we forget, these days Dyson has a research, design and development centre with 350 engineers working for him:

http://www.dyson.co.uk/insidedyson/article.asp?aID=dysonhq
Fallows endorses CloudMagic GMail search extension (Chrome, Firefox)
I can't talk for Python, but from my limited experience the Ruby community started to get the submerged in a wave of sub-par developers when Obie Fernandez et al. started to promote the meme, that attending a Ruby/Rails related conference puts you in the top 5% bracket of software developers.
I think it's safe to say that .NET doesn't need defending. People who use it tend to continue using it whenever they have a choice in the matter, and quietly get good results from it every time.

It doesn't need defense because it's not being attacked. It's not being attacked because it just plain works. Granted it's a bit boring, but really that's one of its advantages.
Judging by their constant use of the words 'simple' and 'flexible', I'd assume simplicity and flexibility.
how do you know when he'll be done?
Let's make a shit JavaScript interpreter in python.  Part two.
I've worked at a fairly affluent private school, so I'll give you feedback based on that. However, you don't really give enough information for me to tell you what your product might be worth to a school.

- Charge annually. Schools are full of paperwork and approval processes. A once a year ritual of approval is easier than agreeing to a monthly bill.

- If it's less than 1k there's a lot less friction towards approval.

Caveats are that schools do prefer to host their own software (usually on windows) and can be willing to shell out large amounts of money for the right product (Blackbaud).
Yes, I had to vote Ruby/Rails even though I almost never use Rails. I use Ruby/C for almost everything.
thanks for your reply, however I don't think that our burn rate is high, it's just that we did not had to many savings. But your are right about the part time we will look into that even if that means that it will delay our lunch date by a couple of weeks.
Great piece. Your write ups are educative. Keep it up
I am also quite familiar with the Java (and Ruby and pre iPhone Objective-C) ecosystem and invested quite a lot time in getting proficient with Scala since 2007 but recently got hooked on F#.

My experience has been, that the available documentation on .Net (and F#) is so much better compared to the other stacks I know, that after three months or so of dabbling in my free time with .Net I already feel like having a much more solid base in .Net than the other platforms (where I have 4, 3 and 6 years experience).

Granted this might be due to me either suck at Java, Ruby and Objective-C or me not yet having real world experience with .Net and being oblivious to ugly corner cases, warts etc. you only come across on a big real world project.

But honestly my first contact with some of the books and online resources available for the .Net ecosystem and comparing that with what I was accustomed to was shocking.
Seems like this wouldn't be needed for most software startups. Even with the 499 limit, you could raise, say, $100 each from 400 investors, and have $40,000 of runway to get you to the point of looking for angel or VC funding. More complex problem domains would probably need more, of course, and it wouldn't work at all for a hardware company that needs $100,000 in equipment to get off the ground.
I am just curious. What .Net libraries do you find messed up?
Where's the historical evidence for this? Can I draw a graph like that for steam engines? The plough? Telephones?

Without that it's just an optimistic line on a whiteboard that means "there won't be another dot.com crash, this time it's to real".
http://www.fanfiction.net/u/2269863/Less_Wrong has links to rss feeds, I'll use that as a bookmark/reminder and maybe one day a "Ok all done" entry will show up.
The advertisement at the beginning of each screencast is annoying.
Is there a recording of this talk or did you happen to be present?
This is the perfect Hacker News article. I learned something new and mathematically-interesting about the world, the author came up with a niche development to get us excited, and we learn how to apply that to improve our own lives.
It sounds to some degree like we're advocating vocational education.
When to start your startup?
I don't like the wooden background. I think it's tacky, and it's precisely not the minimal approach you are promoting.

Otherwise: good work. The selection of music it gets me when selecting an artist is rather impressive. I can see me using this a lot.
Several hundred? I think you're at least a couple of orders of magnitude out there...

The point behind the rocket analogy was that rockets are inherently dangerous, uncontrolled projectiles. They explode, spin out of control, travel at hundreds or thousands of km/hr - but that's apparently ok. And it is, because there are safeguards in place.

a) how are you getting the ore back to earth? Your choice is to either burn it back in on a rocket or splash down your hundred or thousand tons of platinum somewhere. Rockets are hideously expensive, which leaves you with... an uncontrolled projectile.

b) mass drivers have a small amount of thrust, over a long period of time. It might take a couple of years to get it captured by earth - think slow orbit corrections over time rather than an uncontrolled asteroid missile. Once you get to that point, you'll have several more years to circularise the orbit. Hardly an uncontrolled projectile - Its path is easy to predict, and is incredibly unlikely to hit the earth. You'd need to burn a lot of energy to do so once it's in a stable orbit.
(disclaimer: I'm currently a Java web developer)

If startups choose Java for performance reasons, which I believe was your point, couldn't they instead focus on alternative JVM languages, such as Clojure / Scala?

With these languages, you get the best of both worlds. You can use a more "powerful" language, while keeping the benefits of the JVM (performance, portability, tooling). And you can very easily use Java libraries (Lucene, Hadoop...) if needed.

Jython and JRuby also look interesting. And JDK7 will bring invokedynamic (JVM instruction to better support dynamically typed languages).
Why do you need YC?
i have a friend who is content to read it chapter by chapter, says it gives him a bit of a dickensian experience. he'll let me know when it's done.
La Reina del Sur capitulo 29
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La Reina del Sur,capitulo 29
Icon Cool Graphics Converter Pro – Graphics converter
Icon Cool Graphics Converter Pro is published on 7 October 2010 . It is Graphic converter and an image viewer.
for me the tablets, particularly the iPad is no match for a Laptop. You know, the iOS is restrictive in many ways even after you jailbroke it. Maybe, we need a good OS product for the tablets, only then may I count tablets as a nice alternative to Laptops.
OT,
I wish Github would start offering unlimited private repo + limited collaborators say 5 or 10 for a reasonable price
Snell and TAS To Demo Morpheus-Driven Screentoo Multiplatform App
As many have said here, it's about actually writing code in the end, personally I learned C++ by writing an electronic schematic editor as a front end to a SPICE circuit simulator, so I learned C++ and the Windows API at the same time. Of course as well as writing code, reading other peoples is useful too, when i was learning there weren't the reasources there are today, you can go over to github or sourceforge and find lots of interesting code to learn from, and do code reviews on to see how you might have done things differently.
I would like to hear how this specifically differs from say Kohana or Symfony2, both of which are PHP5 only and have good communities already.
Sorry for bringing the general level of HN down with this comment, but after reading all your comments in this thread I just have to let it out - man, you're the biggest douche I've ever seen online, and that counts for something.
Education is a niche market?
1) There still are real 3-button mice for sale: HP DY651A goes for $12. It's a very nice USB optical mouse with 3 buttons and no scroll wheel. Perfect for Acme. If you insist on using a flawed one button apple mouse, you only have yourself to blame.

2) If you're on a Mac, you can run the plan9port version of Acme, no need for Acme-SAC.
There is already a standard.

http://groups.google.com/group/php-standards/web/psr-0-final...

Voted on back in 2009 by members of Solar, Cake, Doctrine, Zend, Symfony, Typo3, PHP Core, Yahoo! and others.
I think the valid argument here would be that PHP is the cheapest/easiest option for most webmasters out there. When a normal person -- say an artist -- buys hosting, it isn't likely that he'll sit down and set up Python or Ruby. No, he'll upload a copy of Wordpress (on PHP) and be blogging in a couple of hours.

That said, it's NOT true that Facebook still uses PHP because they get cheap developer power. See this Quora thread: http://www.quora.com/Why-hasn-t-Facebook-migrated-away-from-...

From FB's former Director of Engineering:

The reason Facebook hasn't migrated away from PHP is because it has incumbent inertia (it's what's there) and Facebook's engineers have managed to work around many of its flaws [...]
I'm not sure why it's socially acceptable to convince people to part with their money for things they don't need, or to risk their money in games of chance, but not to encourage them to invest in the potential of an idea.

If the problem is misrepresentation of what they are investing in then there are already laws to protect against this, just as there are laws (at least in Australia) protecting consumers from false advertising or spurious sales claims.
Readability works on the page: https://www.readability.com/bookmarklets
Resharper is fantastic for speeding up programming and refactoring, I like to add vim to the mix (something like http://www.viemu.com/) for "simple" text editing as well.
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Ask HN: Lift and building realtime webapps
I'd appreciate it if anyone could share any experiences, positive or negative with the Lift web framework. Our development team is familiar with Java and related technologies and we're looking at platforms for a greenfields project that will allow us to build realtime messaging services (in this case for medical referrals). We were attracted to Lift as it has excellent support for Comet, supposedly allows for very secure apps, and runs on the jvm (nice, but not a requirement).

My only initial concern is that without any prior experience with Scala we might find some of the concepts in Lift too foreign. Are there other approaches to building realtime systems that you'd recommend as an alternative or are we on the right track?
That's an interesting dilemna. I'm a Java web developer, I know the platform / libraries / tools really well, and know how to get things done with it. I've dabbled with more powerful languages in my spare time, but I've been using Java 8+ hours a day for the last 3 years.

If I were to launch a startup, should I go with the "cool shiny powerful" language, or should I stay with the boring verbose language that I know well? Would the fun factor of using Clojure / Scala / Ruby / Python / Blub++ be worth it? Would the language "power" offset the time "lost" gaining experience with a new platform? What about hiring? Hackers love powerful languages.

So many tradeoffs.
Nice! This is like a wall bucket list: http://bucketlist.org/
In my architecture class, we didn't get to a lot of this stuff (sans the caching). However, everything we did cover we implemented via circuit simulation software. You'd be surprised at how tricky some of the stuff can be. Although controllers are really simply (at least, when you use microprogramming).
Specifically there's a new chapter for the first time in weeks.
A 2600 Hz sine wave! rimshot
Germany - same here.
A Potential Silver Lining in a Government Shutdown
Yep... you're right... s/several hundred/thousands/

My main point is that rockets have a big red button, and an 8,000,000,000kg rock does not.
HMS Ark Royal on MOD ebay. Terrible User Experience.
Checked out the video, and it seems like a well designed app serving a niche audience.

If you find some success with it, might I suggest skinning the app to serve other niches that share similar needs? I can think of a couple just off the top of my head. You might need to make a few tweaks, but the majority of the feature set could be reused, and with the feedback you get from this app you might find ways to refine the design even further.
It was ok, but it wasn't worth the price. Consumer Report suggested something else when I looked....pretty much stating the $400 or so premium (3x the price!) wasn't close to worth it. I agree.

Honestly, if your canister vacuum is losing suction when it starts to fill out, save yourself $400 and empty it out..you'll need to do that anyways.
What is “entropy and information gain”
I've always thought Dyson make terrible _products_. The innards of a Dyson vacuum cleaner are no doubt ingenious, but the early models all weighed a ton and were incredibly difficult to lug around the house and actually clean stuff.

Same with the AirBlade. Clever idea, but it doesn't dry your hands, and the blast of air knocks your hands into the sides, negating all the claims of better hygiene.

I'm sure the Dyson process involves tons of prototypes, but I don't for a second believe they actually spend much time looking at people _using_ the damn things.
Many top schools have a policy which allows students who drop out to come back and finish up their degree if they want. So it is not a risky decision.
i have been rejected from ycombinator multiple times over the years probably because i am a solo founder- its hard to find other guys to work with that i get on with in my local area..

my startup is yrecruit.com - someone mentioned am i ripping of ycombinator - its more a play on words
Have you done anything with Grails or Groovy yet? My experience is that it's probably the easiest transition for Java devs, because Groovy is something that can be interchanged in each file with "plain old Java".
This is one of the few things that occasionally made me happy when I was depressed a few months back. I wish there was some way for this to see wider circulation.
That's the reason I didn't give it an honest chance. Nice to hear that was a misconception!

The other problem I have with it is the length. It seems as if its ideas could've been expressed a lot more succinctly. Is this another misconception? Or perhaps one isn't supposed to read it for the ideas themselves, but rather for the lit-wrapping? If so, is it of any interest for a non-HP reader?
As an MIT student, I can confirm this. I know someone who came back after 5 years to finish his last semester, and one of my TAs this term joined the military and came back after 10 years.
Useful tips and tutorials for web / Graphic designers
KeePass 2.15 released
Define "cheap"
Note: this account was created for the above comment only.
Update - evidently the talks were not recorded :(

Fortunately, his metrics project has a pretty good overview on github:
https://github.com/codahale/metrics
This would be wonderful in an ideal world, but providing feedback on thousands of applications would be an insane time suck for them.
A couple of decent places I always check first are

http://www.reddit.com/r/forhire/ Always found designers here who are either looking to build their portfolio or have time off between big projects.

http://dribbble.com/ You may not find cheap designers, but it's a great tool for looking for serious design talent.

Hope this helps
That is a great design for a 1st verison. Would be interested to know if you did this by yourself and had outside help?
Yazarak Kazanıyorum
perl ???
Reading the title, I imagined it'd be about a further abstraction to the DNS: a service where by you query an authority, eg: Wikipedia, a sequence of search terms, eg: Hot Sauce Committee, and it gives you the most relevant URL, eg: http://www.beastieboys.com/.
I take the top 20 similar artist from the last.fm API and then take the number one video for each artist and serve them up :)
I could not care less about the moral, ethics or ideas. I just like reading it as some kind of alternate Harry version with some tangents that appeal to the science nerd or socially inept geek side of me.

There are many moments where full knowledge of the Harry Potter books (at least the first 3) seems important. Also I don't think you would have much fun if you do not know how the characters normally are.

It seems really long. I am not even one third through it yet.

To be honest, I often noticed myself skip over the parts where some scientific method or things like that are explained/discussed. It is written well enough that so far I could pick up the gist just by reading lightly as I always do (scanning the pages rather than reading word by word (I wish I could do that sometimes)).
Black Male Doll: Dolls: Male: myintimtoys.com
Heres something quick and dirty:

A user input's a band or artist... or really anything they want to. You can insert Football, Funny, LOL Cats, or anything else you can think of. I'm aiming for people to use Tubalr for bands and artists, but it dosnt really matter, long as it has a use!

Then Tubalr posts to YouTube.com and retrieves a list of the top YouTube videos for whatever was searched excluding videos that dont allow embeding(I post to gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos/… to determine if its embeddable, and throw it out if its not). Then Tubalr does some parsing and rips out the video ids and puts them away for the next step.

Once there is a list of all the videos, I then use YouTube's API to embed the YouTube player with the correct video. The YouTube API allows you to determine on the fly if a video is paused, finished, or any other state you can think of. Once a video is complete, it simply embeds the next video, using some jquery and a .php file with the player in it.

So what if a user hits the "Similar Artist/Bands"... well, Tubalr uses audioscrobbler.net's API by doing something like below!

Tubalr hits ws.audioscrobbler.com/2.0/artist/ARTIST_NAME_HERE/… and grabs the top 20 similar artists/bands and stores them for the next step.

Once Tubalr has the list of 20 similar bands/artists, it hits YouTube up for the number one video for each artists.

Then, after Tubalr has all the similar videos we just use the YouTube API to embed just like we did for the default option!
YouTube and Last.FM's APIs
Thanks man, I guess I can agree with you on the background.
Yup, possibly the best tutorial I found.
Ex .net dev here, keep learning python brother, the promised land is close!
Ah that makes a lot more sense then. Thanks for the clarification.
It has been that way for years. One day, I hope we will find out who is pulling his strings.
Engineering Blog
Hello I wait you all my engineering blog..
I just don't have the desire or time to tinker anymore. I used to spend days researching the best parts and tinkering with my setup to get it just right. Now I just want something that works and gets out of my way.
The Rationality of One Star Reviews
I still haven't found an IDE that compares to VS in terms of productivity and usability.

The elephant in the room here is cost. I work in various flavors of Visual Studio every day, and it is a nice IDE, but if I was bootstrapping a company, I'm not sure I'd want to shell out the money for an MSDN subscription[1]. I get the impression from the post that the toolset was already in place (paid for).

[1] I haven't looked at subscription options recently, so perhaps there is a start-up friendly level these day?
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And spotify only works in 7 EU countries, due to copyright laws.
Noise Based Patterns (Mosaic, Perlin, Simplex, Voronoi)
Better explained here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle
and some examples here: http://www.floor.nl/ebiz/gartnershypecycle.htm
Software stasis aka Java, seems to me more silly than software trends. I can't see any good reason reason to stay with Java when Scala exists.

I recently started using C#, VS and TFS after many years with Java and Python, SVN, and IntelliJ/Eclipse.

I can see why people prefer C# to Java, C# is better than Java.

TFS for version control I have more trouble liking. It seems to be inefficient across slow WAN's and is far below GIT etc. But if everyone is local and your needs are simple it can work.

Visual Studio for me (with Resharper installed) is slow, buggy and just dumb. In Eclipse or IntelliJ code updates during debugging worked ok, better if Zero Turnaround was installed, VS not so much. Navigating with IntelliJ was just better, with visual clues about how to get to implementations etc. And Visual Studio hangs for me regularly.

But worst of all clicking any of the Test buttons results in 15 seconds of waiting before I see a pass or fail. This just kills me.

I see a strong pro Microsoft bias in the .Net development community and I think this is a strong negative. It reminds me of the days before log4j beat Sun's util logging when inferior Sun technology won in the Java community.
Yahoo used a stripped down and customised version of Symfony (called ysymfony). As far as I recall they stripped out the Model part of symfony - so the entire Propel/Doctrine stuff. Answers for example, wrote their own data query/persistence.

So although you mention doctrine:migrate - Yahoo were not using it on Answers, and if Delicious, Bookmarks and Daily Motion were using the Yahoo version of symfony, neither were they.