skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One way to get some C-learnin' in Java school is to get a Computer Engineering degree instead of CS or Software Engineering. Microcontrollers and embedded stuff still has a lot of assembly and C.

That's what I did, anyways. Now I'm an embedded software engineer, writing in C++, and able to handle pointers and memory and such.

My issue is how to learn functional programming. Can't learn it on the job, as this is a C++/Java/C# shop. And I haven't found a decent way to learn it as a hobby.

Hobbies are for scratching an itch, which usually means Python frankenscripts to make some mundane piece of work easier, or quick one-offs in PHP to amuse friends, or python/html/css projects that'll never be finished but seemed cool when I started.

Maybe someday the dirt cheap shared web hosting space will have RoR or Erland or Arc...
"Saving the business" implies saving the idea of the business as such: no business, no musicians besides those who are independently wealthy, which means less good music for the rest of us. "Saving the business" doesn't imply that they must necessarily make loads of cash.

I don't know if his idea is any good, but one hopes that there is some model besides "tour lots" that also holds some promise for the Brian Wilson introverted studio wizard types.
Bravo! Well done lads!
Balsamiq, a bootstrapped startup featured here some time ago, makes $10k in 6 weeks
Rare is the person who offers some insight into what could or should be done to <anything>. Even rarer are the people who are busy hacking together their own ideas for how to do it right. That's the very best way to say something else is wrong: demonstrate how you think it ought to be done.

Great comment!

Perhaps this should be part of the hn guidelines :-)
Blame Mickey Mouse. An old analysis:
http://writ.news.findlaw.com/commentary/20020305_sprigman.ht...
"Even if we made all of our current products us 0 energy, we might want more energy for other things than the amount saved."

Let's say it costs 5 dollars to save one kilowatt of electricity. Let's also say it costs 20 dollars to generate one new kilowatt of electricity. Both ways, we get one new kilowatt of electricity, but one way is less expensive. Of course at any given time we would be pursuing a mix of strategies that involve both new generation and conservation. We should always pursue the mix of strategies that is the least expensive, assuming the cost of carbon is internalized.
With security at risk, a push to patch the Web - International Herald Tribune
Ebert's book also fascinated me because he so rarely dislikes a movie. He's an open guy. He likes a lot.

Bloggers (including ones here) like writing to the masses. If it will get them readers, they'll write about it. Few writers really hold themselves to standards online, which is a shame.
emacs and vim are so different from "desktop apps" that you won't notice the difference.

Well... gVim is pretty nicely integrated into Gnome, picks up theme/colors/icons, etc. I like it a lot.

Thank you for replying BTW: I will definitely install 4.1 myself. If FF and Gimp experience won't suffer, I may actually consider switching.
Congratulations on the write-up on RWW as well by the way.
Congrats Ryan and team!
Wow! The results are 1,000 times better.

Nice work, Sam.
Nice, downloadable Rails API documentation.
Teenager invents vehicular antitheft system
A year from now, when we realize that no scientific progress has been made in months, we'll look back and curse this announcement.

Just sayin'.

(This post brought to you entirely in jest, because some people here are apparently confused.)
Maybe we'll see some good mathematicians from Zimbabwe soon. You know, guys that grew up counting in quintillions and using scientific notation every day. They should have quite a knack for big numbers.
This is not the obvious solution to the problem? I used to use this method to compute test averages in my head when I was in elementary/middle school. Teachers were often willing to read off the (anonymized) scores of a test, but weren't willing to do the math and figure out the average. Also used it in college to figure out what grades I needed to stay above a 3.0 GPA, and on the SATs and AHSME to figure out my margin of safety.

IMHO, a more interesting interview question is:

"How would you efficiently compute a sliding-window average, where each number has an associated time and each time a number comes in, you want to quickly compute the average of all numbers whose timestamps fall within the last 5 minutes?"

This type of problem comes up all the time in the financial industry - I had to implement it for my last employer. The best algorithm I can think of takes amortized constant time and linear (proportional to window size) space. Anyone able to think of a better one? Wall Street wants you. ;-)
How Search Engines See Keywords
Dyamn! Congratulations, folks!
Ask YC: How to debug javascript in IE??
I can't stand Internet Explorer - it is so frustrating trying to debug javascript in IE when it works perfectly fine in Firefox.

Is there a better way to debug javascript in IE other than narrowing down your code with alerts? Any help would be greatly appreciated - thank you!
Well done! Knew this would happen the first time I saw how awesome it was. Proof - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=169159
The best algorithm I can think of takes amortized constant time and linear (proportional to window size) space. Anyone able to think of a better one? Wall Street wants you. ;-)

It's easy to prove that linear space is optimal -- you can't store N bits of information using less than N bits of space.
I think his comment about IMP might apply to a few of the terser modern languages (emphasis mine):

"The second thing about IMP was that it was an extremely terse language. For example, where in PASCAL you would say "IF X > 0 THEN...", in IMP you say "X+=>". In other words, your program was very short. You felt like you were writing elegant programs, because there were only a few characters, but you couldn't read them the next day! Being very terse meant that you couldn't fathom this bunch of marks on the page..."
http://www.billyreisinger.com/jash/
Now that's a good acquisition. Omnisio was very cool. Could slideshare be next?
I know for a fact that I watched a video of this presentation in the Spring...OSCON must have been a re-run.

Here it is: http://blog.timbunce.org/2008/03/08/perl-myths/
Wow, this is really good news. Omnisio, how long did it take you from the inception of the idea to selling it?

Why did Google/Youtube spend $15mil acquiring the company instead of creating a similar service? I think more than the technology itself, Google would like to hire the Omnisio team.
One system without a password? not too talented....

97 systems across 4 different government departmental networks?... whole different ballgame right there.
thank you very much - I am going to give this a try now
Free download ebooks on Computer & Programming
Congrats!

Just for my education: say that TechCrunch is correct and they did sell for $15 million and that YC took 6% equity in the company. Does that mean that that YC gets a $900,000 payday too? Or is it more complicated than that?
love the facial merging idea
Showing relevant images is hard http://sampullara.appspot.com/yuil/search?q=cuil
Back in late '99 early '00 I was given a retail boxed copy of SuSE Linux 6.2. Between that and Slashdot (believe it or not) I ended up on a path that took me to working with Unix professionally and programming on Free Software stacks. I learned C and compilation and kept going on up the chain.

The personal growth and achievement which was spurred by my introduction to Linux has just been phenomenal.
Perl works as a hyper-sed, but I think sed and Python are apples and oranges.
I was throwing a concept around with a friend of mine about 2 years ago where the dating site would learn what type of people you're attracted too when you click on profile pictures (using some kind of facial recognition technology presumably) and then be able to suggest profiles you would be potentially interested in.

The side effect of this would be that shy people could still keep photo's in private galleries, but still get taken into the overall equation and potentially matched up with someone who might find them attractive.

Fortunately (or unfortunately? Depends how you look at it I guess) we had no real interest in starting up a dating site at the end of the day.
Any serious CS program should have a class like this:

http://moodle.cs.huji.ac.il/course/view.php?id=66

Workshop In Computer Construction - From Nand to Tetris

(book page: http://www1.idc.ac.il/tecs/)

CS students need to be exposed to the lowest possible level of how computers work at least once, just to know that it exists. After that, it depends on each individual's curiosity.
"Inertia happens."
many many kudos
Unless Omnisio got other sources of funding. That also takes taxes out of the picture.
Wow! That is awesome... they're like what 14 months old? So awesome.
Thanks for posting news about Balsamiq here on HN ph0rque. I am quite excited by the RWW review, it's incredible to read about my own company on the #1 blog I read every morning...I still can't quite believe it.
Ah yes, I remember Brijit. Even longer ago, in the late 90s/early 00s there was a site called BriefMe that did email newsletters based around the same concept. Similarly, it also closed up shop -- possibly for the same reason (it was paying people $5 per short summary and I guess couldn't break even on the other end).
Wrong, wrong, wrong, WRONG. I think a lot of people who comment like this make such comments because they've never used Macs for any real period of time.

Three off the top of my head: the contrast of dark grey for focused apps to light grey for unfocused ones means that you can see what's focused instantly. This is useful because Apple encourages opening multiple things at once: the green button for maximize sizes most apps so they fit whatever's being displayed and nothing more.

There's no unused pixel. KDE 4.1 shown here has large blocks of matter at the edges of their windows. OS X does not. Likewise, that little grey button on the top right, the one that minimizes bars that you don't need, allows for much more efficient screen economy. No, you don't care, because you like looking down your lengthy xmonad nose at us common serfs, but a lot of us LIKE doing a lot of different things with our computer, and Apple doesn't compromise: we get an efficient system AND one that, you know, does stuff.

Not to reel off Apple's most recent ads, but Stacks mean you can access a lot of information without cluttering your screen, and you can still keep it all organized. Making Downloads into a stack means that suddenly your desktop is blank except for things you drag off from other apps and screenshots you take. It compartmentizes your computer into Downloads, which are things that take a little while to get, Desktop, which are things that you grab quickly, and Documents, where things are organized.

Three given as impulse. I could literally spend hours going into fine detail about the small little bits of polish that Apple has applied to their operating system. You can say a lot about OS X. You could argue that it's not "efficient," though by some definitions of efficiency it outstrips Linux and Windows by far. But you can not argue for its not being polished. Apple is the industry MASTER of user interface, they have perfected the art of polish, and if you say otherwise you are a stupid, ignorant fuck.

I say that with all due respect; I'm sure I'm overthinking your little flippant remark. I upvoted you because your comment leads to a venus of discussion - but you're about as wrong as a nerd arguing operating system on a Y Combinator site could possibly get.
Ahem...

Nice work, Yahoo!
Except for the semantic part...
AOL blog cuts permanent, after all?
I hear you, please don't take my comment to heart, it was more tongue in cheek.

And I agree, family is more important but you can use it to your advantage - get your kids started early. May I suggest some bed time stories?

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0201485419
Cuil isn't a pulp fantasy hero? But it sounds SO much like one.
Wii MotionPlus from AiLive
It works as long as you have an accurate historical baseline and you are able to accurately track the amount emitted by each source. IIRC cap-and-trade has been used successfully in a few other places, but I don't know where offhand.

On the other hand, I do know that a tax has never solved a single air pollution problem anywhere in the world.
wow! congratulations omnisio team!
Business social network PartnerUp acquired by Deluxe Corp.
Re matchmaker; hasn't this already been done? I was under the impression that such a site already existed.
JavaScript in JavaScript
Nice, but the link should point to http://sampullara.appspot.com/yuil/ not http://laserlike.com/2008/07/30/yuil-vs-cuil/

From http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Please submit the original source. If a blog post reports on something they found on another site, submit the latter.
The 10 Commandments of the Social Web
this kinda stuff has to embarrass cuil, the results are better (yahoo) but still perhaps an engine like goog, Y! or MSN will by their indexing technology (that is supposedly cheaper)
Bootstraps vs. VC Funded — Who’s most likely to make the most money?
Exactly.

At some point [I'm assuming based on legend and claims it once was] the american "higher" education system became a business, rather than a true academic institution. The purpose has nothing to do with giving students a solid education: it has entirely to do with getting their money, and giving them a good "social" experience that convinces them to convince friends, family and offspring to go to the school.

In some cases, I suspect there is genuine "let's use Java because it's heavily used in industry." But in most cases, it's "Let's use Java because Java is EASY, and our students don't want to take hard classes with things like pointer math and C".
Try GoGrid (www.GoGrid.com) thats actaully the true alternative to Amazon EC2 (windows support as opposed to Amazon EC2 which doesn't support it. It is also cheaper)
Yes, on many of those points, you're doing it wrong.

Whatever, it’s okay not to use a framework. And if you don’t count Smarty as a framework, then you really don’t ever need a Framework.

No, m'dear. It's not ok to not use a framework for non-trivial web applications where so many suitable frameworks exist. If you're writing a reasonably complex application, you are always using a framework. The question is just - which framework are you using? The one you cobbled together while focusing on building actual functionality, or the one that a lot of people have poured countless hours into to make it good?

Yes, you're doing it wrong.

Wrong. You do not need to use an ORM layer. If anything, your life will be more painful later as you figure out that many of your bottlenecks are abstracted out of sight and are hard to uncover.

Not using an ORM layer as a way to resolve future, unknown performance problems is an extremely stupid example of Premature Optimisation ( http://www.inter-sections.net/2007/11/08/premature-optimisat... ). Why don't you write it in assembler while you're at it? Then your code will be even faster.

Yes, you're doing it wrong.

Chris has clearly never used a Ruby Gem or CPAN or PEAR. Much of it is slow, buggy garbage.

I use gems and rails plugins every day. Whatever Chris may have used or not used, I find them extremely suitable for many tasks. If you're writing your own code all the time, you're wasting your valuable time.

You're doing it wrong.

If you rely on unit-testing, you are setting yourself up for a rude awakening.

If you believe that, you have never been awake.

You're doing it wrong.

If you spend half your time ensuring you DRY, you are wasting your time.

Half is a bit much, but Chris never mentioned half. Classic strawman. If you don't spend any of your time refactoring your code, you're doing it wrong (I can do strawmen too)

If only because I worry that some of the smart-but-inexperienced YC folks might actually believe what he writes.

Don't worry about us, worry about yourself.
As I read this I happen to be listening to a selection of songs I put together using Omnisio. Great Guys.
The only possible explanation for having an image of a monkey associated with Paul Graham is that they applied to YC and were rejected.
My advice is to just teach yourself the stuff you want to know. If you want to learn C, pick up "The C Programming Language" and start writing programs in it.

I have never even heard of fixed point theory either. Instead of blaming my college I'm going to take charge and learn about it myself. We are truly fortunate to be living in a time where information is available at the touch of a button.

As a side note, the ability to learn by teaching yourself is much more valuable than the ability to learn in a classroom. Getting practice now will put you ahead in the future.
Google acquires Omnisio
Omnisio only had funding from YC, no other funding rounds.
I'm kinda notorious for stating that I don't ask questions like this in interviews. My basic feeling is that asking for any working function that computes the average of 100 numbers will eliminate 1990 out of 2000 blind submissions, and you need something (be that an interview question or a conversation or whatever) a lot deeper to differentiate the remaining ten competent people from each other.

But that doesn't mean that you won't run into someone out there asking a question like this.
This is about 10 months from when they started.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=169052
Vertebra: p2p XMPP Cloud Control Framework
The best approach would be to piggy-back on an existing protocol that works. VNC is the one that comes to mind first.
Out of curiosity: how is this news? Google claims there was no Private Road sign. If that's the case, then there's no case against them: they weren't warned ahead of time. And why the importance of the quote? We all know it's true.
True. Dvorak still hasn't caught on.
Photography, mainly landscape (large format) and macro (digital) -- http://pbase.com/Tamerlin
(I do aspire to professional status as a fine art photographer)

Hiking -- goes well with the photography

Martial arts

Film making, specifically in special effects

As for the reasons, all of them give me more opportunity for intellectual challenge and creativity, and hiking and martial arts are also good for physical health.

Martial arts is also good for stress relief ;)
I like Dell. I know I shouldn't, because they're a terrible company, but they're dumb in such a slapsticky way. You can't take them seriously.
There have been several. A few other non-matchmaking dating sites have added matchmaking as a feature, as well. (There is a matchmaker.com dating site, but I'm not actually sure that it does matchmaking, and the site blasts me with an annoying javascript chat-bot as soon as I visit, so I'm not inclined to explore further....)

Fundamentally, the matchmaker idea doesn't solve the chicken-and-egg problem of dating -- you still need to have people on the site with whom to make matches. While you could try to match people with non-users, this is really just a dressed-up form of email invites, which most people have learned to tune out. It seems that in order to really crack the chicken/egg problem of a new dating site, one needs to provide a value that is independent of the dating problem itself.
No, it doesn't. Cuill, like Powerset, is a new search engine still doing relevance and query reformulation tuning. It's a lot of work to get results as good as Google and Yahoo! deliver, and a large part of it is a massive body of training data to work with.

People who think this should embarrass Cuill are profoundly missing the point. It's a technology demo to show, "Yes we can make a functional search engine and our technology is not smoke and rainbows".

Powerset faced the same absurd criticism, and it was frustrating because people were so caught up in the search wars that they didn't see the product as its own entity.
The password box on the front screen is a plain-text box... change that to a password input box.
I'm liking Yuil. It definitely passes my vanity search test that I commented on here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=258828
The Myth of Moderate Exercise
seriously, a huge congratulations to these guys... i remember hearing about them when they first came out, but only got around to using (and loving) the service recently when i watched the startup school presentations on their site...congrats again!
Yeah. KDE has a fairly unique approach in the Linux community, and I've liked what I've seen from them quite a lot.
When will you startups learn? Single founder companies can't succeed.

badness=true
Dating problems are like depression in that the symptoms are familiar-- sentiments like "all the good ones are taken"-- but the causes are varied and numerous. No single cure is going to work for everyone, or even a large subset of the population.

Gender balance is the biggest problem with dating sites. Women get flooded with spam winks/emails and get bored sifting through the haystack of low-quality leads. Men have no way of standing out amid the spam and get very little attention.
JoelOnSoftware on Starbucks
Depends what you want to do. Which of the Y combinator startups is going to help children in developing countries?
Python Decorators Don't Have to be (that) Scary
Social news sharing survey results, part 1
My startup latest project: qwili.com
So it's like Apple's Interface Builder, but it doesn't produce executable output?
"Text messages are much more short and to the point"

No, short and succinct use of English is short and to the point. I am 23, and type in complete sentences, use spell check, and think about what I write, and who I'm writing it for. They should too if they expect jobs (especially ones that require constant communication, like the marketing job listed).
Shorter version: pedantry sucks. There was little to no insight in the original, it's just a list of stuff that can reasonably be argued to be "good". Those rules won't a great product make, but breaking them doesn't seem like a great idea for most people either.

My own feelings are closer to this poster's than the original list of admonishments, but these aren't issues that anyone should really be getting upset over. Basically: don't refute shopping lists. It just wastes everyone's time.
Hi there. I don't intend to stay a one-person-company for long, but right now I can't afford to hire anyone and I don't want to get external funding. Care to elavorate on why I won't be able to succeed?
Streamtech interview: Programming Problems
Congrats guys! Well done!
Congrats..cool tech!
I think he was being sarcastic...?
There's also Firebug Lite (http://getfirebug.com/lite.html) and MS Visual Web Developer 2008 Express (free) (http://www.microsoft.com/express/vwd/)
I don't even care what my score is, biohacker42. I add few links each day and stuff accumulates.
Oh, oops. Why is sarcasm the hardest thing to convey via email/IM/simple text? Hey maybe a one-person startup could takle _that_ problem! :)
Link to the Nature article if you'd like a bit more information http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080730/full/454561a.html . The video (linked at the bottom of the article) is pretty good.