skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I find it interesting that he is interested in enterprise ROI types of technologies. Something I think is undervalued here at Hacker News.
Mono is a very developer friendly open source project as well.

They have great info on how to contribute.

I actually submitted my first open source project patch to mono this weekend! If you are looking for a project to contribute to, I can't recommend mono enough.
6 things you shouldn’t do when pitching a VC
If Women Were More Like Men: Why Females Earn Less
AIDS pioneers and cancer researcher win Nobel prize
It seems like the core message (apart from getting to profitability quickly) is pretty important to YC startups keen on getting acquired - "in a poor economy, companies really need to find better, cheaper, and more efficient ways of operating."

In other words, stop making widgets that turn your Facebook friends into zombies and start creating ones that make it easier for people to sell or make things.
Construction Equipment Rentals
Stephenson Equipment have enjoyed over 50 years of success by providing unparalleled support and services for lifting equipment, paving equipment and construction equipment in sales, rentals, parts and services
I was very disappointed that the Stanford Machine Learning lectures were almost exclusively about "how" and not about "why".

Maybe they don't know why? You'd have to know the core principles to know why.
Scientists aim to deliver e-paper in full computerised colour
Think You're Multitasking? Think Again
It depends on the frequency of use and where the hand is typically located. The index and middle fingers are strongest, so the keys under them are the most valuable. I'm typically chording on the modifier keys and spacebar, so "v" and neighboring keys are quite valuable to me.

I agree that the default tool shortcuts in that area are somewhat wasted; Photoshop seems to have chosen shortcuts more for mnemonic value and got lucky with the Marquee tool forcing Move to the "v" key. Crop ("c") isn't needed with the same frequency as the drawing tools, and Zoom ("z") -- while useful for beginners -- is effectively unnecessary with the ctrl-space and ctrl-alt-space key chords. "x" (exchange foreground and background), however, is extremely useful e.g. for quickly switching between drawing and erasing on black-and-white drawings.
I don't know, I'd say that browsers are already pretty commoditized. Pre-installed on every machine, several free alternatives available, etc. If anything, they're commoditizing Javascript processing, effectively giving a clock speed boost for internet usage.

But their pages are already the fastest pages on the internet, so it probably doesn't help them sell too many more ads just with speed.
Here's the relevant link repackaged to get around the parens problem. http://tinyurl.com/4epkag

Heh. A site written in a lisp-variant has trouble with parens. :-)
Earlier discussions:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=289215

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=152565
Demotivating a (Good) Programmer
Earlier discussion of Zed's EaRing paper:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=221678
Actually I think a recession would help the internet ads market.
California Drug Discount Program Vetoed by the Terminator
It appears that California’s prescription drug discount program has become a victim of Governor Schwarzenegger’s pen. The prescription drug program which was enacted in 2006 that was designed to save Californians without health insurance millions of dollars on the cost of prescription drugs received mixed reviews over its short life.
Your post started good, ended bad.

I personally see nothing at all wrong with PHP. I'll go read some of the other posts, but I wonder what's so bad about it. (OK, except that built in function names have no pattern to the naming.)

I think people hate it precisely because it's so easy to get started with. Have you ever met people who, the more obscure something is, the more they like it?

Linux is now too mainstream for them, so they use hurd. You see it with health food too - regular health food is too mainstream, so now you must eat local. Soy used to be eaten only by health nuts, now that it's mainstream, they say not to eat it.

These are people who hate all the regular languages and love the obscure ones (I won't name them for fear of flame wars). You can like an obscure language, but if you also hate the regular ones, you just want to be different and that's all.
Would anyone miss mono if it disappeared? I don't think I've ever installed something that required it.

Or is Mono much more popular for desktop/gui applications on GNOME? (Not my world)
It can be intentional if the right side is a function call.

But something like:

if (errno = 0) { blah(); }

is almost certainly a bug.
Alright, buying ads during a recession is great since everybody else is not buying ads...

It'll give your company a boost if you buy more that you would usually and your competitors buy less.
I think Beagle's in Mono...I know that a number of GNOME apps depend on it.
Download CSI TV Show
Are you tired of missing episodes of your favorite TV show CSI? Don’t you think that the DVD’s are way too expensive? Would you like to enjoy all your favorite CSI Episodes at the comfort of your own home? Imagine how easier and cheaper it would be if you could Download CSI EpisodesOpen in a new window. The reality is that you can actually download all CSI Episodes from the Internet at very High Speed; the only problem is finding a reliable and affordable service.
I've never found language advocacy posts useful unless they give at least one example.
This was caught here:

http://www.nabble.com/Bug-in-fetch.c:doit--td1143190.html
Download Desperate Housewives TV Show
Are you tired of missing episodes of your favorite TV show Desperate Housewives? Don’t you think that the DVD’s are way too expensive? Would you like to enjoy all your favorite Desperate Housewives Episodes at the comfort of your own home? Imagine how easier and cheaper it would be if you could Download Desperate Housewives EpisodesOpen in a new window. The reality is that you can actually download all Desperate Housewives Episodes from the Internet at very High Speed; the only problem is finding a reliable and affordable service.
Obama accused of palling around with terrorists | TechJaws
Couldn't agree more. There are too many social media type start-ups out there, and too few revenue models.
The argument here seems to be that PHP is great because you can use it to get things done quickly.

But Python and Ruby, among other languages, are also available for Web programming, and you can get things done quickly in them as well. Plus, you can do some things in them much more easily than in PHP.

I think the most important thing in the development of any hacker is to constantly scratch the creative itch. A close second to that would be to constantly explore.

While PHP scores better on those measures than some other languages, I think developers that use it day-in and day-out eventually find it painful to use. At that point, the language becomes a burden, because it discourages you from creating and exploring.

I think it boils down to where you are on the learning curve and how much heavy lifting you need/want to do on a regular basis.
Just in time for the second dot com bubble burst. Soon you'll see these at auctions for fractions of their original asking price.
>The main problem is the popularity of PHP.

Yup. All those people saying it's bad - there is only one problem with it - it's too easy, and too many people use it.

Rather than repeat myself: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=324895
Broken thread, see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=324853
...so you want to invest in businesses that will deliver good ROI in a short time. Makes sense.
The problem with PHP isn't merely that you can write cleaner code, or more maintainable code, in other languages. The other languages also offer abstractions that are difficult or impossible to make use of in PHP.

But, that said, I agree with the point of your essay. It really doesn't matter that a hacker's first language is lingustically impoverished. The entire point of being a hacker is that you go on to learn several more languages. And I don't buy the argument that your first language indelibly warps your mind -- that's an argument from the era of old-school microcomputer BASIC, the kind with line numbers, no function calls, and only global scope. That was a terrible language, far more impoverished than PHP ever was, yet I and everyone I know started with it, and we all grew out of it just fine.

The other point I'd make is that far too much attention is paid to the reasons why PHP sucks, when we should instead be trying to figure out why PHP even exists. Specifically, we should be trying to figure out why all the PHP programmers didn't learn Perl instead, and (more importantly) why Java didn't displace PHP despite its massive marketing advantages and its (supposedly) better design.
You're saying, now, that it is statistically relevant.
Note to self: "Keep self out of Soviet Russia".
Mecca: A new social browser
I would have thought the chamber these beams travel through would have to be kept at vacuum to work -?
If this works, and the iPhone 3g pricing scheme also seems to be working pretty well, there should be some kind of new venue for research into what it is about our brains that makes many people treat "hidden" (but right in your face) costs differently from other costs.

The iPhone version is even more odd, because we keep hearing that people hate recurring costs, yet the iPhone is packaged as $X up front plus 2 years worth of $Y / 24. Isn't the whole "unlimited broadband" pricing strategy based on the idea that people hate to pay repeatedly when they could just pay once?

Just all seems to say that the average consumer is not thinking very much...
Enterprise (or paid small-business services) always comes back in style in recessions. Look at 2002: the two big IPOs were PayPal and LoudCloud/Opsware. It's because ad spending - and particularly, ad spending in unproven mediums - tends to fall dramatically when money is tight. It's the first thing to go, well before productivity enhancements.

Of course, this means that for entrepreneurs starting companies now, consumer may be the way to go. It'll take a couple years to ramp up, and by then, the field has been thinned because investors only want to invest in enterprise startups. So there's more chance of the surviving companies getting the consumer attention they need to survive.

Sucks for people (like me) who started consumer web startups in 2007, though.
To put it less shortly, I will have to write my own article.

But I always wanted to do one.

"Solving the web problem" means nothing unless we can define what the problem is. If the problem is to quickly push out a dynamic page, then PHP is good, at least as good as ASP or JSP in their PHP-ish mode.

Its adoption rate also shows it's a good solution to the "push dynamic pages out" problem, but there are at least two angles to this problem: the point of view of the programmer and the point of view of the server manager. I suspect the adoption rate has a lot to do with the availability of "US$ 2.99 hosting" options, most of which offer PHP. So, it can be popular both because it's a really good option, because it's dirt cheap or a combination of both.

You emphasize the rapid results thing, which is good - if the larval programmer doesn't get some feedback, he or she won't stay interested long enough to learn. But there are other ways of giving feedback - a GUI, for instance. Or printing to the console. No web is required here except for the reason PHP is web-centric.

And then, there are the structural problems with PHP. No namespaces, too much magic in type conversions and so on. Believe-me: I have seen a generation of programmers lost because they were poisoned by Clipper and then by VB. They never really recovered. Maybe ther never will.
Where is this meetup going to take place? I want to know just to make sure I can get there in time.
My Five Months With Google Chrome
Overgrown Amazon.com
How Philadelphia incubator DreamIt Ventures wants to improve on Y Combinator model
That's incredibly smart of Nokia.

I can see many people being attracted to Nokia's phones because of this free music thing.
But Python and Ruby, among other languages, are also available for Web programming, and you can get things done quickly in them as well. Plus, you can do some things in them much more easily than in PHP.

I hold out great hope for these languages, but they are still very new. (Technically, the languages themselves are as old as PHP or older, but their popularity in the web problem space is new.)

Some of the advantages of being old are easy to appreciate, like the fact that PHP is so easy to deploy that most cheap shared hosts deploy it as a matter of course, and the fact that it runs really fast. Others are more subtle. There are enormous user communities centered around user-focused, PHP-based toolkits like Wordpress and Drupal. Ruby and Python just don't have these yet, but that may just be a question of time. The Drupal community is now huge, but it took nearly eight years to get to this point. There are a few Ruby and Python-based projects which aim to be the equivalent of Drupal (everybody wave to the Insoshi folks!), but they're only a year or two old.

Which is too bad, because Ruby is so much more satisfying than PHP. The future cannot arrive soon enough.
$25 million is a lot of money, but so is $1 million in funding. Most web 2.0 companies need no more than $100k or so to get to profitability, and can easily exit at $2.5 million. Same ratio, but it sounds a lot more achievable. So the only real issue is scale.

Bear in he's talking about enterprise software (i.e. support contracts, custom software, consultants). When you start doing custom work and get paid by the hour your revenue goes through the roof. So you can get to a $25 million valuation pretty easily, if you're willing to be a software/consultancy hybrid.
Be nice if this site was up.
So he's saying: a good language teaches you to think as rigidly as the language requires, and doesn't let you just do what you want.

I quite disagree that that is a useful thing in a language - it might be necessary, but that's not what makes a language good or bad.
"it was horrible. Procedural, PHP inline with HTML, calls directly to mysql library functions"

There is NOTHING wrong with any of that! Making something more complicated does not make it better.

PS: I use a very strong templating library personally. It's called PHP.
Sorry. You guys killed it :). Working with slicehost to get it back up now.
Let the People Click (Pandora Changes ads too fast)
Appleton Tower, 8th Floor at Edinburgh Uni (entry from the back entrance).
I'm curious .. what makes a good resume for a developer (in other words, a hacker) ?

I've had one job in my field since out of college (same one since I finished) and I've learnt a lot but I have no clue how to really portray it all in my resume.

If I am applying for a development position do you think the hiree will care that I have experience with SEO, building brands, etc? How does one portray it? Are cover letters that important for a development position? And so on..

I've had a tough time finding well written articles on this subject but Scoble has made some definite good points, now I'm more intrigued
In the Background (Some details on iPhone behaviour)
"Various other things have been tried: music as a loss leader for concert tickets, advertising-supported music services, even virtual tip jars that allow fans to pay whatever they think an album is worth. None of it has worked."

It hasn't? Does anyone have evidence to back this up or is this author just making assumptions? The concert ticket/merchandising model still works to this day for many bands (because they get horked on even legit CD sales by the recording companies). The tip jar model has only been tried by a few very successful bands, any evidence that it was a failure?
Matt Mullenweg: Wordpress Evangelist/Rock Star
And you've used 20 words to do the same. Me: 11
> Sucks for people (like me) who started consumer web startups in 2007, though.

Do you have anything you're working on now, Jonathan?
Same here, good ol' Mortal Kombat on the ti-83 was a blast. Then of course there was my own version of "Drug Dealer" Ah memories of high school math class.
audaciously

The odds of winning the lottery may be 1 in 500 million, but for some people the odds of becoming rich by any other means is zero. If you define your goal as "becoming rich", and meet the above characteristic, then the lottery is no longer audacious or irrational.
* He also brushed aside concerns by some analysts that Dubai's property market is becoming overheated and due for a potentially sharp correction.

"In Dubai, demand outstrips supply," he said. "There might be a slowdown, but there definitely won't be a crash."*

Good luck with that...

I can't tell if it's over-exuberance or if Dubai really plans to attract more multinationals to headquarter there ala Halliburton.
We're trying.
Stocks rise before House bailout vote, drop afterward (Great Picture)
Everything you said makes sense. In fact, I think your requirements should apply at all times, not just during tough market conditions. There's really no excuse for startups not to be lean, agile and cheap. Maximizing output from scarce resources is what entrepreneurship is all about.

So can we get in touch with you re: funding? ;-)
I think that most lovers of "obscure" languages (I'm thinking Lisp, Erlang...) couldn't care less about being different. These languages challenge your mind and allow you to solve problems more efficiently.

Or have you every seen a serious project done in Whitespace, Brainfuck, etc?
The problem with this list, in my mind, is that it's a checklist of descriptions of a successful company.

If the signs are this obvious then the valuation would already be high enough to be unattractive to an angel.

I've done some (roughly 8 deals) angel investing myself, and prefer to look for something market-shaped; matching buyers to sellers, or similar; a team I would seriously consider working for; and a working prototype for me to look at.

The first is because that's the kind of thing I like to think about and because I think those tend to be scaleable businesses, the second is because as an angel I want to actually spend time for them, and the third because I think most powerpoint presentations are crap.

There are some additional parameters around investing (like how much the valuation is) but I'd much rather help an entrepreneur who is going to shoot for the moon.
A business that has an inherent call option, that could boost its base-line exit value by at least 10x

I will go ahead and expose my novice status and ask: what is an inherent call option?
If Hacker News can kill your site, then it has problems.
This is not the sort of situation I would invest in. If you are billing by the hour, it is unlikely to be a leveraged business, and the investment return is unlikely to be as comfortable. Additionally, due to the smaller size, there would have to be many, many investments; it's hard to find many of very good quality.
I don't know that enterprise technologies are undervalued at HN, as much as they often cater to a smaller market.
My side project (to my main start-up which is my main side project) is enterprise focused, and I'm sure I'm not the only one. But enterprise is rarely as interesting as consumer. Doesn't mean not useful or interesting, just not AS interesting.
Sources? Not even anecdotal evidence?
no offense: you don't have idea. Learn very well some other good language and you will see the difference. This is natural in programmers, until they don't know what is the next step what they have now sounds good, but often it is not.
In other words, stop making widgets that turn your Facebook friends into zombies and start creating ones that make it easier for people to sell or make things.

Or make it easier to be informed (saves time).
Doesn't take much to kill a WordPress blog without wp-cache or similar.

Was up for me just now.
It wasn't just hacker news. I disabled caching when messing with the style sheet and forgot to re-enable it. Wordpress sans caching was eating the low-end slice I had from slicehost. It should be fine, now.

PS. the slicehost guys were a big help, worth every penny.
I.B.M. Releases Bluehouse for Workplace Collaboration  - Bits Blog
EBay Cuts 10% of Work Force
An iPhone formatted page? That's a first for me. Odd, but I like it due to the lack of ads and clutter.
Customer Service: Old Technology is Often the Best
Dubai is the world's Las Vegas, and I agree is not immune to the worlds impending economic slowdown. Thankfully they have essentially unlimited cheap/free/slave labor to continue building.

Oh, and the rich keep getting richer, which doesn't hurt.
ROI is the key concept here to me. In a down economy, being able to save people money is a huge asset. If you can directly measure the benefit to your customers that's even better.
I correlate that Google could do this easily, but I don't think they will.
http://www.onista.com

For convenience.
Right now, I'm pulling pieces out of GameClay, polishing them up (including writing docs & tests, and code cleanup), and releasing them as open-source. I expect to be done with that in a week or so, though. Then I'll either try my luck in the salaried job market or start another startup.
Once upon a time I was the development manager for a product that we took from $100K to more than M$10 a year in sales. The President of the company called a big meeting, congratulated everyone on the success, and then explained that to take a company from being "just a product" to a sustainable enterprise rested on farming its cash cows and investing in developing future star products.

So... He was forming a product research group to think up new products, starting with looking at the exciting new wireless "space."

Cool, I thought, and asked to get in on the new group action. "Why?" he wanted to know, "you're doing a great job where you are." he staffed the new group with managers and developers from other teams with less successful products.

Shortly thereafter, I joined a start up.
Burning Down The House: What Caused Our Economic Crisis? (Video))
EBay buys three companies for $1.35 billion, lays off 1,000
Hakia and Ask release search redesigns, in fresh bid against Google
We Have Completed $4.5 Million in New Funding
What if you could only move your eyeballs?
Just to be sure-- does your list have an unstated requirement of "...and also has an office in New York" (or other specific location)?

If not, that's great! If so, I think it's fair to include that in your criteria if it's important to you.
Are Scandals Inevitable in Regulated Industries?
Stop Doing Shit You Hate
On the other hand, "may be a patent problem" is an appropriate description of any recently written software.

I would expect Microsoft to fulfill its "Linux violates n Microsoft patents" threat before it does the same for Mono: Each programmer using Mono enhances the .NET ecosystem, while each Linux installation degrades Windows' market share.
http://www.google.com/codesearch?hl=en&lr=&q=if\+\(\w%2B\+%3D\+[^(\.]%2B\+%3F\)&sbtn=Search

That takes out parentheses (for function calls) and structure member assignment because it might be two statements in one line (ugly and error prone as output will be exactly the same for a = b.c; if(a) {}; vs. if (a=b.c)
Automatic numbering with CSS Counters
Make Updates Enjoyable
Re-reading this, I want to emphasize I am only telling this story to as an anecdote in support of the idea that the perception of being tangential is demotivating. The story should not be construed to suggest that the President was making a management mistake.

The product continued to make them a lot of money after I left, so it's not like they lost anyone critical :-)
I'm considering using slicehost. What do you mean 'killed'? What happened? How'd you learn about it? How are they helpful? I'm quite curious as to what the parallels are to a 'real' physical server, like the one I have now.