skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Interesting article. Although, I'm not sure about the following statement: "Entry-level developers seem to make about 75k-90k a year in most places." That's seems to be a bit overestimated, at least for an entry-level web developer.
The sort, OK, but the URINameSpace lookups? I think all the other elements of parsing XML take so much more time that in this case the "optimization" is really nonsense. I mean even having spent time on optimizing that code was probably a waste, premature optimization. (I have never written an XML parser with namespaces, though).
"L" is not a code smell
Ah, a new internet meme. A few years ago, it was Haskell monad tutorials. Now that everyone is hearing about YC, they think they need to learn what the Y combinator is and then blog about it.

Why not just contribute to the Wikipedia article?
Martin Eberhard Blogs About Getting his Tesla Roadster
I think this poster is somewhat Naive.

It ones thing to sell your vision and philosophy to a VC. But to ask them to be fun, principled, and the whole firm thing...

"I'd like to be able to walk into my VC's office and have just about anyone there be interested in talking to me--and not have to feel like I'm waiting for just one person."

It sounds more like hes looking for someone to pat him on the back then an investor.

The VCs job is to get a return on his investment and in the process help you get to that position. At the end of the day its about business regardless if your "vision" and "passion" is about helping people find their calling or whatever his intentions are.

How about a list of things you'd expect from a VC in terms of the business, not personality or character? The only one I saw was "knowledge in our market".
Gist - a git powered paste site
I guess the guy doesn't have a point. It's irrelevant if hyphens tak 2 or 4% of code. They are still practical (better than underscores), you have to use something to separate word in long identifiers and as you pointed out, cammelCase is not the right way.
A good implementation of an idea I've seen before.

The really impressive part of this is "mixturtle". I remember it and its easy to type. You've got time to improve the interface. The name is very clever: WIN on branding.
It's amazing how they'll copy features of other websites in an effort to keep the users and their data on their site.

What's hilarious is that since they've changed their look & feel, they can't justify that lawsuit against that German social network anymore, heh.
Well.. we are adding a comment feature to the videos which will allow users to enter short text messages. Also, we were going to allow users to customize their videos by adding characters or action related animation which gives us another anchor to extract video context. However, we are not able to find right service to use that information and display a related ad.
Academia has come up with several scenarios like this. A friend of mine at MIT told me about a similar idea in which they considered using iron filings to promote plankton growth. The problem with solutions like these is that they are likely to introduce their own problems. Case in point: I'm no chemist, but wouldn't adding a large enough amount of lime to do this have a pretty major effect on the pH?
From the site:

I have extremely limited resources, and I could do more if I had more resources. Maybe I deserve a break, Actually I think every one does. But while that isn't happening, I'm not going to wait for it. I'm going to do something.

Best thing I've read this month. Best wishes for success.
Amen. Any discussion of code style (symbol naming, whitespace conventions, braces, whatever) that is based on an argument about how long it takes to type the code is just wrong. A good typist can write thousands of lines of code an hour at least. That is so far below the development speed of even the best hacker as to be pure noise.

There's a mild case for different code styles from a readability perspective, I guess. But arguing for (e.g.) case insensitive symbol names because the it takes too long to reach the shift key is just insane. But regardless: code readability is 90% a function of organization, not style. I will always prefer to work on well-organized code in mixed styles (or languages) than spaghetti code that adheres strictly to an elaborate style convention.
Radical Honesty
magnum opus?
Some people don't want cell phones but think they can be useful in emergencies.
How about programming languages as women?

I met this little girl named Logo when I was just a boy. I have no idea what she's doing these days, but I still think about her. She was my first romance.

I took BASIC to a dance in middle school. I was so clueless about how to talk to her that more often than not I would have to quote magazines verbatim as a way of communicating. As a result she never respected me and I never felt comfortable around her. We broke up after the dance.

I didn't really date in high school.

Pascal was my college girlfriend. At first I couldn't believe she was so scantily clad -- where were her line numbers? We had a brief torrid affair. When I got a chess simulation to compile on my first try I thought that maybe I should major in CS to spend more time with her, but ended up studying other subjects and got involved with completely different kinds of women.

After a circuitous way back to programming, I ended up involved in an office affair with a coworker named C. I worked as hard as I could to prove myself worthy of her but she seemed so cold. I never really knew what she thought of me. Our relationship taught me a lot, though.

When trying to complete a masters in CS I got involved with a woman named C++. It was a dark, confusing time. She was crazy. I always suspected she was abusing drugs, and cheating on me with one of my professors.

I finally settled down and got married to Java. We've been through so many ups and downs together it's hard to imagine life without her, although I must admit that my eye has been wondering lately. Some really hot women have been flirting with me and sorely testing my fidelity. I don't consider myself the cheating type, but it's all I think about sometimes. Maybe I'm having a mid-life crisis.
We Want A Dead Simple Web Tablet. Help Us Build It.
Software as a Service: When Your Business Model Becomes a Paradox
Please change the blog so I can subscribe to it. I'd love to see how this develops over time. Plus, if I'm ever feeling timid, I can just go check out that turtle :)
I want in!
Inside the Lego Factory
This (how much space hyphens take) is a total non-issue. What a waste of time.
Having read Mr. Vanier's musings on programming languages for several years, I highly doubt this situation is as you posit.

Regardless, I'd much rather see the web full of blogs on theoretical computer science than blogs on the lives of "stars" and "fashion models".
I'm betting it's all the application DRM & restriction enforcement that is causing the majority of these bugs.
Way cool. Of course, I couldn't resist the temptation to try it out, so I just contributed to polluting it by creating an anonymous "hello, world" paste. Apologies to github. :)

I'll definitely use it for real in the future.
Right, IIRC UCW is (was?) using both components with either html templates or html generation.
The differentiation from songza is in the brand - which, in a market like music, may in fact matter a good deal.

(also the differentiation is that songza's more usable. but yeah.)
In my opinion no explanation should be necessary on the homepage. I went straight to the navigation bar to find an explanation but was tripped up a bit because "How it Works" is the third link on the bar and not the first.
It is pretty focused - I've made the mistake of not focusing enough in a previous startup, and won't make the same mistake twice (hopefully...)

It just happens to cover several of the points in the article in a coherent manner. I'm looking forward to posting here in a few months when I'm ready for launch to see what this community thinks of it. That'll be a good test of whether I'm onto something.
Why Abundance is Good: A Reply to Nick Carr's "Is Google making us stupid?"
Didn't the XO project give us some indication on how difficult it is to create this type of thing?

And unless Arrington is ready commit to this project full-time, it is going nowhere fast. I suspect that he is using his clout to simply trying to get into the inbox of vendors.

Don't get me wrong, I'd love one.

I suspect Apple is working on something like this. We have the technology of Air and the technology of iPhone. Their love child could fill this gap.

I don't know going OS-less either. I think "Grandma" mode would be fine, otherwise, I'd rather have more control over the box.
Neither Fortify nor Network World understand Open Source
The plan is soon to launch an API where you pay a monthly fee to integrate streamfile functionality into your own site/domain. Plus we will charge for the regular service, that are currently for free until the 31st of August.
I'm in NYC and its been working fine, those are functions of the phone
The lesson: Focus on the details - you usually can't do anything about the big picture anyway.
On a related note, it seems Canadians are indeed far behind when it comes to celluar phones compared to the rest of the world: only 69% of adults have a cell phone!
http://www.reportonbusiness.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080721...

Of course, anyone who knows anything about the Canadian wireless industry - a nasty oligopoly with unheard-of contract lengths and extremely high prices will not be the least bit surprised by this statistic.
As of this time, the touch screen will make the $200 price tag impossible. The $300-$400 is very possible however.

If they do build it and keep it open (which is by no means a given when it comes to stuff like this), it could be a wonderful success.
Neat, except it doesn't always use the correct syntax highlighting. It seems like it uses filename extensions to determine the language, which can be ambiguous if two different languages use the same extension (I tried saving as Objective-C but it shows it as Matlab. Both use the .m extension)
If your starting with an internet connection and an LCD then there is a lot of value in an ok (.95c plus) CPU . (Kindle, Cellphone, PDA, Laptop).

But, if your starting with a cheep (.05c or less) CPU then adding an ok CPU, LCD, and an internet connection probably overkill. (Watch, Toster, Fridge, dish washer etc).
If you're going to do something that is as jolting to the user as hijacking the right-click menu, you'd better get it right. As in, get it _perfect_.

When I right-click near the right edge of the browser window, the playlist pops up off-screen and hidden, creating scrollbars. Novices won't get this at all, esp. since it's not the interface people are used to.
Here's a great video that bryanl made showing off gist and what makes it interesting:

http://www.vimeo.com/1381658
If Apple does this, it's unlikely to be cheap.
Good question. I'm not sure, but I think it has to do with that Sweden has one of the highest penetration of fiber optic networks due to government subsidization starting early 90-ties.
Did you leave out Prolog because she was an impossible contradiction?
The Techcrunch Web Tablet Project
> But as Sun enters it new Fiscal Year FY09, and the clear directions from Management has given the right positive goals to the Sun PostgreSQL Team which will lead to Positive Growth, Self Sustaining model and help contribute to the bottom line of Sun.

If I were being sarcastic, I might say that, translated, that's "yes, it's dead at Sun".
OS-less might be worth it if it allowed the thing to turn on and off in less than one second.
Feeds with summaries or whole articles.
Thats how Kindle should have looked like, instead of that 1980s looking contraption amazon came out with
Also, good write-up in next month's WIRED: http://www.wired.com/gaming/gamingreviews/magazine/16-08/pl_...
Dead simple is near impossible to create with this many chef's stirring the pot already
Needs controls to play/stop/pause, and a volume slider please!

I also hate having my right-click menu hijacked. Please re-think that...
It certainly seemed to be the case for the particular hypothetical developers we would be hiring (the specific languages and technologies we use).

Your mileage may vary, but the general concept (paying market rates) still holds.
TrueCrypt Leaks Could Expose Your Sensitive Data
Well I'll be damned...

Is this a case of Arrington actually trying to make something happen instead of watching things happen?

I for one, am surprised. I am very happily eating crow. Not that anyone should care, but I have always disliked Arrington and the other bunch of observers because they think they're important when all they do is watch things happen and then write about it.

I hope this succeeds, and I hope they carry it through to completion. I will buy one of these for sure when it comes out.
bayleo: good point, maybe we should change the order on the bottom navigation bar..
I disagree with your assumption that no serious programmer would use camel case. Apple's APIs use it and I don't think I've ever seen any program that uses them without using camel case. I find it very easy to read and prefer it to hyphens and underscores.
New Design, New Powers, New Responsibilities
We got a bunch of feedback actually on the content-type issue. Definitely something to fix.
Well, for instance, Marx believed that all history could be understood in terms of conflict between the working, middle and upper classes. But that simply isn't the case. Freud believed that a persons personality was shaped by their relationship with their mother. We now know that that is only one of many variables.

Time will tell on Nietzsche :-)
John Resig -   DOM DocumentFragments
It'll try to guess the highlighting if you name the file with an extension, otherwise you can select the correct highlighting via the dropdown for the situation you're describing.
Pixel Qi should allow the touch screen component to be very inexpensive...
I didn't name my paste, I selected the language from the menu:

https://gist.github.com/198/bac462c7c01cedb22624147def12c65b...

The weird thing is it seems to use the correct highlighting in the "All Gists" listing.
I like clean and sparse web pages, but this is going too far. How about a "what is this" or "tell me more" link?
The very first thing I see:

Error
You have to enable Cookies!

Convince the user. Why should I?
He really is just describing a Nokia N810 tablet. When a reader suggested that, Arrington replied:

"yes, although we want to build it a lot cheaper and have a much bigger screen."

So, he expects to replicate the N810, but with a bigger screen and better price? How is he going to beat Nokia and still make a profit?
Key word you said: "I think." Yet the code was taken from an actual XML parser, where one of the goals is performance. The optimization is likely the result of experience and data.
Isn't he basically describing an iPod Touch with a bigger screen?
Y Combinator Diaries: Installment #6
"""... when we were discussing the ultimate web browsing/cloud computing client hardware..."""

WTF is a 'cloud computing client'. Personally I'm sick and tired of hearing the word 'cloud' being used in every hyped project now.
just pushed a fix for this - thanks for pointing it out. it should be live with the next update.
Steve Jobs' Health Worries Won't Go Away. Time For A Succession Plan
My Mac does wake up in about a second right now. However, I see your point and totally agree.
That page crashes Firefox and Safari. edit: no one else?
For my mobile devices, I'd rather see a modest computing power increase, and (assuming power per transistor shrinks such that power usage for a top-of-the-line CPU is approximately constant) we end up using around 5 to 10% of the current desktop's power.

To me, a laptop with 20 hours of charge and maybe the power of a current quad-core would be far more useful than a short-lived, hot, noisy machine like we have now.

The same goes for a cellphone. I'd rather have 100 hours of on-time than the ability to use heavyweight technologies. Being able to forget my charger without worrying much when travelling is far more important to me.
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3177/2689707981_6c5fc0c808_o....

I don't think it would be using Windows Firefox!
My two main thoughts on this are:

1. It won't cost $200. The Nokia N810 has similar specs and had a price drop to $300, so I don't see how this will happen. It might be possible to source the parts for 200, but not build it, ship it and make a profit.

2. Why not use Ubuntu MID? I have not used it, but it was made for these kind of devices. Certainly much easier and cheaper than writing custom linux/ff code. Just add Firefox with a preset homepage to the startup and you're done :)
Is Facebook’s redesign aimed at Silicon Valley, not everywhere else?
I did a research about this subject and it could be done... even with price around 200$.

They will face two big problems:
1) touch screen
- what type they would use? how it "lights"? weight?
2) battery
- capacity? POSITION of battery!
and few other problems such power supply (integrated?).
CPU, RAM, SSD are not problems, they are cheap and really easili intergrated, OS is not problem too (already seen such devices with Linux).

And the last thing is design... lets face it. It's important how it will look and feel when carrying. And I'm not talking about catching the right size of it (in my research A4 is too big and A5 is too small).

So lets see what will happen... I offered I will try to help them, what about you?
Do you think that they want to make profit? Didn't Arrington said that the whole device will be open source?
Very good post. But I was wondering how you value your ideas up front? Also, any scope for going back and revaluing it (e.g. if it brought in much more revenue than expected, with little work required i.e. little dilution) during your regular valuation meetings?

I'd be interested to know, a year down the line, whether these frequent meetings ultimately were a productive and motivational use of your time? On reading your article, it certainly seems like a good way to do things, but it'd be nice to have it run its course and then view it in retrospect!
Game Law:  Convergence in the Interactive Entertainment Industry
As far as valuing ideas up front, we plotted them at discrete points in the creative process. There was one particular "critical" meeting we used early on as a landmark, because a lot of our product ideas came out that day. We would ask ourselves "what % of our value was idea X before that meeting?" Then we would extrapolate it to a year out, to see if the slope of decay looked right to us. With some linear interpolation, we came up with a number along its decay line that represented its value today.

Revaluing things retrospectively isn't something that we've talked about yet but it's certainly a space for further exploration. I think our hope is that there will be enough time delay between someone proposing an idea and its valuation that we'll have some actual customer data or feedback that we can evaluate.

As to the long-term viability of our system, only time will tell :-)
I'm sure the people who made those optimisations took very good benchmarks before they made them. And, most likely, they do work under the right circumstances.

However, to make a generalisation/optimisation of my own, in 99% of the cases, trying to write overly clever code like that is a waste of time and does not result in faster code - though it does obscure your code and make it harder to optimise later when you actually need to. It would probably be better for 90+% of the people who will stumble on this article to never have read it.
You are obviously focusing on the presentation-layer (mediawiki) and completely ignoring the data store that everyone else is quite psyched about.

Here is what scalaris provides: distributed, fault-tolerant, replicated key-value store (a la Dynamo/SimpleDB.) This layer can be smeared out across hundreds or even thousands of nodes, it can provide data consistency across the replicas (via Paxos, something that SimpleDB/Dynamo cannot provide and pass back to the application layer for reconciliation) and it can do this rather quickly.

That is a rather powerful component to make readily available to any Erlang app. If you can't think of ten or twenty possible applications of this then you are not trying hard enough.
How is different from America Online in the 90's? It wouldn't be exactly the same, and the execution might be better, but wouldn't it be much the same?
How to Tap Your Nap
it is planned to launch it on fb first, yeah
It's a very ambitious project. Doable although I think something like this really needs leadership, guidance and a project timeline.
everybody has his/her own reason to be unhappy or sick, I guess
PodTech: What Happens When You Misunderstand the Long Tail
Those videos are gorgeous! Highly recommended.
Interesting analysis -- Fortify's rankings of open source software included centralized email address and contact information for reporting security vulnerabilities. This naturally favors the corporate-run open source projects (such as JBoss) as opposed to distributed community efforts.
Open source just means Arrington won't need to pay coders to write the software, and will get to enjoy discounts from people who have contacts to help build the hardware.
"I'm sure the people who made those optimisations took very good benchmarks before they made them."

Hah, good one! Very funny!
I liked it. For my search it brought back some very obscure artists so I am not sure where you're getting your data. But I discovered some music I liked by some new artists so that was great. Memorable URL.
XML parsing can be done with a simple tag stack and a linear walk through the document. It's very cheap. And a quick loop over 6 (or whatever) strings in L1 cache can easily be faster than a generalized hash table lookup. Given that the namespace tag lookup isn't a huge deal anyway (just walk up the stack doing a string comparison at each level), any optimization needs to be pretty lean to start with. I'd guess that the hash thing is probably a wash; this is the only technique likely to work well.
he was wrong.
What does TechCrunch have to do with profit? If bubble companies can build software, why not hardware?
I don't think he cares about the profit portion.
is techcrunch spamming YNews? why would copies of the same story be at the top of the news list?
Great work.
His blog posts are good. http://news.quelsolaar.com
hey what about these

statistical mechanics: moody, frequent phase transitions

condensed matter theory: field theory's materialistic sister

nuclear theory: angsty valerie salonas type, likes dancing in circles with other angsty femmes
Wait for the new OLPC.
The cowboy is only the logo for our beta campaign: by sending out Wanted signs to your friends you may invite them in a funny way,and if he or she is signing up both of you get free minutes for calling.
Wouldn't it make sense to prove that global warming caused by humans, is actually occurring first? BTW carbon sequestration is already occurring - see e.g. diatoms and other ocean organisms.
Oh yeh, looks like it works in IE but not FF. I get presented with a download box in FF
Why do ruby devs always append Fu to everything they do.

Oh awesome, you made a browser sniffer!
Two tiered SSL certificates
Startups didn't run out of ideas, its just that the simple stuff that you can do on your own, has been done to death, and the VCs are too enamored with the "easy" stuff, trying to get a piece of the pie, that they don't want to take the risk on something complicated which involves a much higher investment. I mean look at all the web companies getting funded in the startup phase, most of them are pretty small investments.
Well, Rusty is not exactly a n00b, so that's not a joke, really.