skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't know of any startups that outsource their development. I know of startups that pull in the assistance from other studios or extremely talented contractors nearby, although the last startup I was in, we did that early on (seed funding stage) and the studio that worked for us did a terrible job. It was a nightmare and in the end, I was sent in to fix all of their problems in Flash. It was a combination of incompetence on behalf of the studio, and they weren't physically present, so the pressure on them for succeeding wasn't as strong as if they were in the same room as us.

What happens if you outsource? You'll either save on two things: time and money. If you save on time, you're going to pay a high price for good quality. If you skip out on price, you're going to get crappy code, and you will spend just as much time explaining to the developers how to build your product. And I know of startups at my school that have re-written their entire code base simply because of how rapidly they're iterating. Can you imagine what it'll be like trying to get a company from another country to write your initial code base, and then eventually hiring someone to manage it? I'm guessing it will be a nightmare. There's a reason why companies like Google and Facebook are desperate for top engineers, it's because the quality becomes a competitive advantage, it's pretty important in a startup and investors know this. That's why so much emphasis is on your team, and not necessarily your idea.

Why not stick it out for a month and write your own prototype? It will take the same amount of time to find, hire, explain, review, and finalize code being done by someone else.

I want to say that any ambitious angel investor or VC will NOT fund you if you outsource your development. Why would they? You aren't bringing much to the table at that point. And if your only advantage is some code that was written, well I'm sure your angel or VC already has several programmers in their rolodex that could do the same thing, with better code, much faster. So you'll have a very hard time convincing someone why they should invest in you, instead of just pass the idea off to one of their existing startups to work on if their current gig is failing.

I don't want to discourage you from pursuing your idea. Just keep all of this in mind when you make your decision.
Ah, well that's unfortunate.
Any free on inexpensive Python and Django server hosting around for playing around?
"Earlier this week, David Recordon announced the creation of the Open Web Foundation at OSCON 2008. His presentation is embedded below" using Flash... =/
I prefer http://www.10minutemail.com
Is TheSixtyOne a YC Startup?
I'm just wondering if TheSixtyOne.com is a product of YCombinator? I recently discovered it (and work for a media startup myself), and I find it fascinating.
I totally missed the after-party. But then I had to bale by 10pm as we'd totally forgotten to eat all night :(
Each window manager is not its own platform. These are platforms in their own right, a platform defined by the API, the theming, the standards, the libraries; the window manager is merely one part, out of many, that compose these platforms.
If you're comfortable with PHP, then use PHP. I'm currently using CodeIgniter as my PHP framework and jQuery as my javascript library. Don't have very many complaints right now.
Interesting that they are apparently abandoning the del.icio.us domain hack.

"soon to become http://delicious.com/your_username"
Nothing can protect the "idea." If all you're contributing is the idea itself, you'll soon find yourself cut out of your stake, even if the idea takes off. Your engineers or investors will work around you :)
In fact that URL will not get you anywhere ;)
I suggest looking at the "Worse Is Better"/"Right Thing" discussion, as it maps perfectly to your situation: http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html

Worse Is Better gives you fast results with tradeoffs that you already knew of, while Right Thing approaches will allow you to discover hidden problems as you attempt to write the ideal program. So you learn more when you start from scratch, and that is a worthy goal.
> If you’re writing code like in Damien’s example and you want to be able to insert lines without changing a bunch of variable names, I have a tip: increment by 10.

10 PRINT "BASIC LIVES AGAIN!!"
20 GOTO 10
"... T-Rex: so this is reddit after all ..."

I disagree.

Puns are hacker activities. The real power of a pun is being able to see things from different angles and perspectives. References to "reddit", cynicism and reasons not to learn seem to be closer to what you mean ~ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=248509
You know, I'm really not usually too picky about this stuff, but I have to say, this is an extreme example (for me, at least) of presentation overwhelming content - I started to read that page, and the combination of the font size, the layout, and (mainly) the color scheme literally made me dizzy within seconds. I actually can't get through it, the text starts to pulsate on the page as I look at it and it's so distracting that I can't parse the content.

Maybe a great product, maybe even something revolutionary, but in all likelihood I'll never find out because of the website's color scheme.

It's funny, I'd always heard that white-on-black was considered bad design, but up until now I never really understood what "they" meant by that...
Given the number of people alive, and the number of research positions in universities, I have trouble accepting that this premise was ever true.
Free Artwork - Cool
Madness and genius actually form an intersecting Venn diagram. This falls squarely in the middle.
But quality is much harder to evaluate than quantity, particularly in the short term.
> It also seems that Danes are held in some regard internationally

We're actually just flattering you so you won't come pillage our coasts anymore. ;-)
now that there are about one hundred less executives to go through at yahoo, this thing might actually make it out the door (assuming y! isn't bought before then haha)
[insert name of company] is not dead yet.

[insert name of company] thinks it'll go for a walk...
I dunno. The parts I am mentioned in are in the neighborhood but factually incorrect; a bunch of things are the exact opposite of the truth. And she calls me Josh. Ugh.
Hehe, I blueboxed like a demon when I was 14 (1994). I was led astray by a guy who I traded C64 software with. The box was my Commodore 64's soundchip and a piece of software. You'd ring an overseas 0800 number (Barbados for instance) and 'break' the line with a 2600 tone. Then, you'd issue a series of other tones which were the USA number you wanted to phone.

I got free phone calls from the UK to USA for a while, and all I did was listen to a band's Dial-a-Song and chat lines. It was fun though.

The best thing is, I never got caught...

The ability to call the USA from the UK this way, ended in about 1996.
The dichotomy between single assignment and variable-name reuse seems to be false. In OCaml, you can just rebind the same variable name again halfway a function body, which will cause a new variable with that name to be bound, having a scope of the rest of the function body. Everybody wins.
having just graduated myself, this is really not surprising. its also not really that new of a concept -- after dealing with one semester of college book prices (which cost my friends and i 400 to 600 dollars each) many people started pirating books. there was a copy store down the street who would copy entire textbooks for $20. there was also the student who bought the books for the largest classes, took the pages apart from the binding, scanned them with an auto-feeder, and sold e-copies for $1 each which could be printed free of charge at the university's library. to me this just sends another signal that it is time for these stagnant industries to adapt to the times, and become more innovative with production and distribution of their materials. they also need to realize that college students won't accept being taken advantage of with ridiculously marked up prices - so they can either change and benefit or be left behind with nothing.
Mm, fighting the urge to say I'm not surprised.

Will you point out any specifics Joshua?
Video: how to survive a robot uprising
Damn. I thought we were still on track for 2036. Somebody's slacking off!
Ah,but you can try to overcome the obstacles in very different ways. You can accept the system as it is, and merely try to compete harder within all its parameters as an individual. Or you can group-organize with others and try to change way the system works - like anti-discrimination laws, set-asides, development programs, affirmative action, etc. (sigh, I know, I've said some things here that will not be taken well - but think about it).

There's quite an industry devoted to saying that accepting the system as it is and trying to compete harder within the game is somehow right, while challenging the system and changing the game through group action is somehow wrong.

Who built the brick wall there in the first place? Maybe the best action is to get some allies and to attempt to tear it all down.
I usually whip up a dirt-simple "Django-inspired" WSGI microframework (regexp-based url dispatcher, RESTful views, jinja or genshi templates, decoupled optional request and response objects (no shared state between requests), signed-cookie-based sessions, etc.) based on what I need as I go.

Instead of using an ORM, I've discovered an amazingly flexible, efficient DSL for dealing with Postgres. It's called SQL. ;-)

I wrap my model objects around sql queries, so, externally, the objects have a nice ORMey OO interface, but internally I can do all sorts of wonderful Postgresql magic).

After the first time you do it, making a new microframework usually takes less than a day, depending on what else I have to get done. (The reason I reimplement is to prevent myself from adding useless features that I "might" need someday on some future project).

One of these days, I might release one, but strictly as a code-dump example, not as an ongoing project.

(Back on topic, my recommendation to the OP is to start with Django. It's beautifully designed, and has served me well even after I stopped needing its code).
Thankfully at hacker news it doesn't get ugly (yet !), unlike programming.reddit.com has become.
You're welcome to write a few books and become well-known for your business or programming acumen as part of your investment of time early on for future payoff.
This is the niftiest news I've read all day.
Given that that phrase is a snippet I've heard over and over in news coverage, it's inevitable that it will be repeatedly applied as other than yourself. It plays into a widespead mythology that success is purely a matter of virtute/good-attitude (anti-straw-man: I didn't say attitude has no effect at all), and a concommitant view that for those who did not succeed it's due to their unvirtuousness/bad-attitude. How could it not be used to "look down on those who tried and failed", given the part about "... stop the people who don't want something badly enough. They are there to keep out the other people." - that wording invites anyone who succeeds to think that the "other people" are lesser, the ones the wall is there to keep out.

And critically, this doesn't all exist in a vacuum. His intent might have been entirely benign, but that doesn't mean the overall effect will be entirely benign.
Interestingly scala makes the choice fairly explicit - val or var - your choice. In practice I find I default to using val - as I know when I debug I only have one place to look for where the value is, and there is generally less cursing when a value mysteriously changes (it doesn't).

(Java has final, and C# has 'const' which is kinda similar).
Although in their case you have to choose extra verbosity, but its often worth it.
Flash is an open specification:
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/swf/
"To merge" is a lot different than "some guy thinks they might".
Wow, I am so tired of the B-list-blog circle jerks. The cycle isn't even amusing anymore. Someone hears a rumour and then passes it off as news. Then other blogs pass off the news as news. Then the haters show up, and claim that the news is impossible. Then the hater haters show up... and the cycle repeats.

I don't really know what the point of this post is, other than "god damn it blogosphere, shut the fuck up about this stupid shit." I feel better now...
Thank you, I am relieved that someone pointed that out, I was kind of worried, I mean, this is a site for HACKERS after all . . .
Use django, not because it's easy to get into, but because later you can use the large number of django apps to get kickstarts into things like adding a forum, blog, etc.
>Justin Rattner, CTO and a senior fellow at Intel, told Computerworld that perhaps as early as 2012 we'll see the lines between human and machine intelligence begin to blur.

Already, we are seeing the lines between human and machine intelligence beginning to blur. It blurs every time you google something.
I agree with most of what you say. But I also think homogenity is not the whole story. How many non spanish speaking kids are there in a typical Mexican classroom? I know Mexico does have an indigenous population, but I think the share of Mexicans who don't speak proper spanish is very low. Probably even lower than that of native swedish or russian speakers in Finland.

My conclusion is that economic and teaching related causes are probably more significant than ethnic ones. I think you would find that mixed language elite schools anywhere in the world rank higher than the average Finnish school. Sadly, it's a poignant feature of most european immigrant populations that they are poor and uneducated. They don't just speak different languages, they don't speak any language particularly well. It's just averaging of course but that's what the PISA test does.
A closed online site for sharing textbooks would really take off. The PRQ has been unstoppable so far. It can't really be stopped.
Everything is representable as a string in Tcl, but internally that's not the case, nor has it been for over 10 years.

Tcl's a very interesting language by the way - more than most people give it credit for - and was very successful in its heyday.
Delicious 2.0 Imminent Again
> It also gets really ugly when foo, bar, and baz are instead line-long expressions, which they often are

I sometimes use variables to "take a breather". You do some heavy, syntax and/or meaning laden work, and put the result of all of it in 'current_velocity' or whatever, and that conceptually helps you to move on to the next thing with the result of what you've just done firmly in mind. Single assignment doesn't prevent that, obviously, but sometimes functional code uses them less and just uses a bunch of nested functions. Those Haskell examples you posted seem like a nice idea, by the way.

http://journal.dedasys.com/articles/2007/01/17/clockwork-lan...
I'm taking Calc I at my community college right now to get it out of the way instead of taking it next semester. The textbook costs $110, used. I cant remember how much it would have been if it was new. Probably around $150.

Then on the flip side, I've got a class next semester that has 4-5 books required that cost a total of $50. So it's not dead set "Community == cheap, University == expensive" Its closer to "((University || Community) == expensive)" :\
> And you might say that it's their loss, and I'd probably agree with you.

Enough people give up, though, and it's your loss as a user of that language. Say out of every 100 people that give up, 1 is someone who is capable of contributing something good back, and 10 are people who might have answered questions on mailing lists or IRC, or written some blog entries or something. Languages do have network effects.
Reminds of pg on Viaweb: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=99143
Chamillionaire was cool, Julia Allison turned out to actually be pretty nice also. It was nice to meet the founders of tipjoy.com. Talking to various Facebook employees, including the creator of FireBug was interesting.

Wish I could have hit up the after party, next time I guess.
it was just too painful hearing people pronounce it "del issy oos?"
Gemstone Jewelry
Sparkling gemstone jewelry and rings. Gemstone jewelry of all colors set in sterling and gold.
Wow, it is indeed pretty cool. It's like a combination of YC companies iJigg and iilwy.

http://www.thesixtyone.com/#/static/about/

Founded by at least one YC alum
strangely enough.. i find myself addicted to this site
One thing you should be aware of is that Django's philosophy is to cleanly separate between what designers do and what developers do. That's why you don't (by default) get to use Python in your view templates as you would in php/jsp/rails. Instead Django provides yet another mini language just for views, including control sturctures, expressions, etc.

If you are a designer and developer in one person, Django might not be the best match for you, unless you love something else about it (there are many things to love about Django)

I found that I don't use most of what web frameworks provide. But you could argue that just using Django's nice regex based request dispatching is worth it, even if you decide not to use their template engine at all (it's replaceable after all)

To sum it up, what is it that web frameworks do for you? It's basically request dispatching, forms processing (validation and stuff), view templates and ORM. If your applications handle a lot of form to database CRUD, using a framework is helpful. Otherwise you could just as well use naked mod_python because request dispatching is actually rather trivial and python already has a simple template engine built into the language.
After reading these comments I've realized that trying to "go it alone" in Python is biting off too much at once. It will be too long before I can finish anything usable, and I'll lose motivation.

So, I've decided to aim for "FAST" and use Django to get a working website out the door as soon as possible, and study programming at greater depth on the side (without expecting that effort to pay for itself immediately).

I started going through the book "Practical Django Projects" this evening and it feels right at my level.

Thanks for all your perspectives! I appreciate it a lot.
wow this guy is pretty repetitive about letting you know he has a phd. kind of annoying in the beginning, would have been nice to get a faster start into the talk
People who are just trying to govern themselves, rather than be governed. That's the heart of nationalism.

This is very wrong. Do you think nationalistic parties suddenly seize to be nationalistic in the moment they get the power to rule their country? Do you think that no government appeals to nationalism of their own people?

Nationalism is anything that appeals to members of a nation to defend a each other against a real or perceived threat. Nationalism of a national state gone big - China, Russia, Japan - becomes "imperialism".
URLinfo is a tool for handling web pages
Try Google AppEngine. It's free, very easy deployment, and allows Django (minus some things like database) or roll-your-own python against their web API.
Stellar presentation. Opened my eyes to what python has done for the last few years - one of my pet peeves, in place sorting of lists, has been resolved with the sorted function. Thank the gods. 90 seconds later I was at Amazon.com purchasing the latest copy of Learning Python. I've already been inspired enough to get my hands dirty and write a network strafeing harness in python for a project I'm working on. Thanks Sunshine!
I agree, but I also think using a framework is just as good in the long run...

You basically have hundreds if not thousands of people working on your project with you, fixing bugs, making it faster, more stable, and adding under the hood features. Something you would need to do yourself if you created your own framework.
Now do this:
The Financial Times does that as well. This illness is easily treated by deleting cookies though. Maybe it works for the NY variety as well.
Yahoo misses mark with Zimbra Desktop office suite
That's exactly right.

Look at World of Warcraft (WOW) vs most other mmog's, the language used by an average WOW user is much more coarse, yet WOW decimates other mmo's for subscription rates.
InfoWorld's top 10 tech startups for 2008
it would be nice if there was a recent playlist so that i can re-play again the songs i played.

it should be automatically added in the temporary playlist if it was played it for more than 1/2 of the time of the song.

update:
i see they playlist is the results of the current page. So i suppose the order of the playlist could be re-ordered in the way i play it.

maybe the best solution is to add two buttons more for previous/next within my playlist and not the results of the current page.
Literacy Debate -  Online, R U Really Reading?
i meant it in a joking way, because reddit was the first time I observed the phenomenon in node comments.

after all reddit was in its begginings a hackers place
Ask YC: Replied comments
There are times I return daily in HN to just check the front-page if there is anything new, so I don't click my comments to see if there is any update, so there are times I never check to see if I got a reply.

Sometimes also, the comment maybe more than 2 days old therefore I wouldn't scroll enough (even if I don't comment so often) to see there is a reply.

So, is there any chance we could have the "comments" link in bold when there is a reply or update in the parent comment we participated?

I suppose it's really easy, just checking to whom the comment belongs at the time of the reply and just set the flag for notification.

Thanks.
Same here. But (in Firefox) View..Page Style..No Style takes care of it.
The key point is, you can download Python and be doing useful work with it very quickly. If you are a complete novice, you could still probably have something actually useful done within a day. This is in part due to the library you get with it. The path into Python is very smooth too. I look back on my own code; at first I used it as a sort of glorified shell script, and now my code is all list comprehensions and lambdas. Python (the technology and the culture) caters to all levels. There's very rapid positive feedback, everything you learn immediately has a reward in power/productivity.

OCaml for example is a language I'm into at the moment, but it's a good thing I knew C first because sorting out it talking to my Oracle databases has been a complete shag (and, crucially, not something that the language developers, being academic researchers, give a stuff about). And my experience is, you have to be a relatively good OCaml programmer before you can start to be productive; there's a lot less opportunity to learn by doing, you have to study first. The point at which the positive feedback kicks in is a lot later.
Err, there is an awful lot of real, working, production code being written in Python and Ruby.
Maths is about numbers in the same way that literature is about letters.
When is one thing equal to some other thing? [pdf]
Faster Math Functions [pdf]
Not Just Me Then: Wordpress development process is so daft that Spam Karma creator quits.
How Not to use OpenID
Google releases new Google App Engine SDK (Version 1.1.1)
Using Mercurial patch queues for daily development
Mozilla's jmalloc: Treaps versus red-black trees
Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction [free ebook]
Profit Lance rs Headquarters
"Perfectionism causes procrastination, because if you haven't actually done anything, you can't be criticized (especially not by yourself)."

What about criticizing yourself for not doing anything?
Is this not what MIT are doing with OCW?
The Hydrogen Hoax