skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
the purpose isn't to show getting data from wikipedia. this can be done with any html table
Great article and the example from the 70s (brk has some good points) was a good one. A LOT of innovation happened in what were very difficult times on a macro level. Living / working cheap is absolutely key. I knew the economy was going to tank back in January when I started my company, but I still did it.

I'd also like to see more "inventions" (another good point from brk). There may be a certain amount of critical mass of development that has to happen around other technologies. The last 10 years or so have seen optimization in the development cycle for web apps, resulting in their relative low barrier of entry today. It could be my ignorance, but I don't detect the same level of commoditization in other industries. Of course, a higher barrier of entry is great for the people already involved.

Another way to look at the "inventions" issue is the rather quick evolution of non-web technologies to web accessible interfaces. We've seen this happen with telephony, video, radio, print, television, navigation, security systems, and many more, I'm sure. It's pretty amazing actually. I think you'll continue to see more of this over the next few years, so we'll all still have stuff to work on.
Ask HN: Review our app, Muspy (new album notification service)
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The Android fine print: kill switch and other tidbits
nothing is going to beat google.

if you tried and had a great idea, you'd get bought out in a heartbeat. then google would have your great idea and be even more invincible.

by the way google if you're reading this, i have a great idea. bring your checkbook.
I love a good piece of satire. Almost makes you think the author's serious, but with just enough bs thrown in to let you know he's not.
MS and Apple happened to come along when the microcomputer was really starting to take off, and they were able to ride that wave

That was the point I was making with those examples: that technology evolves independently of the stock market. So if it's time to build the Apple I or Altair Basic, do it whether the economy is good or bad.
Start-Ups Give Idaho an Identity Beyond Potatoes
> I'm surprised I haven't heard any Python coders piping up.

Because either indentation is a non-issue for you or you don't use Python.

Any decent editor solves this problem to the 98-99% mark. There's lots more interesting things to do than dick around with that 1-2%

Python forces you to keep your indentation correct and sane so it's never so whacked you need special tools to deal with it.

Proper indenting is subconscious like other languages ';' at end of line or parens around expressions in if/for. That is when it isn't automatically handled by your editor...
Game Design Lessons From Evolutionary Psychology: Social Status, Pt. 1
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The Great Crisis Swindle: How Entrepreneurs Can Survive it
Even though I'm a Python veteran, I see 3.0 as being a big boon for newcomers. Even though Python is pretty popular now, removing any barriers to adoption would only help it more, and one of the best ways to do this is to adopt non-programmers. The fixed design flaws make the language more "pure", which in the eyes of a beginner mean there are less gotchas that make no sense, such as 1/2 = 0. It's a 'very high level language' so it needs to start acting like one.

One of the links in the story sums this up in a much better way than I could do in a comment: http://www.comp.leeds.ac.uk/nde/papers/teachpy3.html
I'm not sure I follow that bad times being a good time to invest means that its a good time to start a company. Investors want a low price, but for founders I would have thought the amount of effort (price paid) is fairly much independent of the economy.
Wow, interesting. The only shortcoming is that you made this all up.

People in PLENTY of more evenly paired occupations flirt all day long. If flirting is something a woman hates then go right ahead into programming! You can easily avoid human interaction almost entirely.
It is nice to read some sober thinking on the economy...

PG has it exactly right. Startups are HARD and there are so many factors that are more important than the state of economy.

The odds of success are low enough with a startup already that the economy shouldn't really change the decision making process.
Remembering Jon Postel: Looking beyond the decade
No we don't, accurately, and thanks for nothing.
Is there anywhere I can go and see a full size copy of the IP block "map" that's thumbnailed in the article?
I wonder if we'll end up with the kind of movement that swept Usenet back in the 80s when everybody's .sig seemed to contain content for 'the line eater': Explosion, terrorism, Osama etc
Pre-Market Stock News Alerts
How exactly are they going to save a product's image by affiliating it with pseudo-science?
How do I actually use this on other sites? Seems I can't or am I missing something?

Also you probably know this but if I make the abbreviation:
hh = hello hello
Then add another one like:
hhy = hello hello to you

hh is replaced with "hello hello" before I can finish typing hhy.
No matter how much they would like to think otherwise, the Catholic Church is certainly not a family business.
Another great essay Paul, I wrote up a blog post with similar conclusions last week: http://www.charlesju.com/2008/10/5-ways-recessions-help-star...

Sorry for the plug, I just thought it was funny that we're on the same side of the equation, when everyone else in the world isn't.

It seems to me that somewhere along the evolution of the internet we forgot the golden rule of any business:

If you make stuff people want, they'll pay for it (either directly or indirectly), and you'll make money. Recession or not.
Technically, the continent of Australia was part of the super-nation Oceania in 1984.
I tried searching for theirs to no avail, but it looks like they used Randall Munroe's idea for using a Hilbert Curve to display their data. (See http://xkcd.com/195/)

Immediately following Randall's post, I did something similar using DNS queries and log files. I never finished it, but it sure was fun at the time: http://flickr.com/photos/yellowbkpk/tags/hilbertcurve/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnivore_program
I completely agree with Business Week. This stock market is oversold.

For instance, Yahoo is definitely worth more than a 16 X P/E, no internet company of Yahoo's reach and size should be worth 16 X P/E. $2B in cash, $4B in liquid assets, and only $2B in liabilities. $1B in profit, every quarter. It's just a function of the rest of the world going online and using existing web portals, a lot of them are going to use Yahoo. That, or they'll receive another offer for a buyout, which is highly possible.

Another good stock buying technique is to buy small chunks of the stock market over a set amount of time, I believe this is called "averaging down". It relies on the fact that you don't know where the bottom will be, so it averages that risk across multiple investments, which is a lot safer than just placing 1 bet for where you think the bottom will be. I think that if you were to average down into a leveraged index ETF right now (ie. MVV), you'll be making buttloads of money in 5-10 years, with an averaging down investment schedule to take the money you want to invest, and split that investment up over a 2 year span.

Of course, I'm just a lowly tech entrepreneur that has also lost a little bit of money in this recent downturn, so what do I know, haha
Twitter is more a threat to productivity than to security.
The diversity trumps ability theorem
Finally, Corvette seats that fit right in C5.
If I had one complaint about my C5 it is that Corvette seats are just not high performance looking enough for me. I found the solution in the East Coast Corvette parts catalog. Custom leather Corvette seat covers that fit perfect.
Columbus Day == Startup Day?
Next year Columbus Day should be rechristened Startup Day.

I think we've evolved beyond the knee-jerk reactions against Columbus. True, his voyage did kick off an arguably inevitable run through the native people of this continent. It's a tragedy.

But we have no reason to hold that against Columbus! He didn't set out to destroy entire populations any more than he set out to discover North America! Let's not let the pendulum swing so far the other way, not only (rightfully) taking away his credit for "discovering" a continent but assigning him blame for the ensuing death? Let's settle down and look at what he did that's worth noting.

He took a chance that no one else was willing to take for the sake of huge business returns. Oh, but it wasn't just for the money. It was for the adventure, the knowledge, and the pride. When faced with zero funds of his own to help him achieve what he felt he knew to be beyond the horizon, he went searching for capital. The VCs fo the day, royalty, heard his pitch and funded his quest. With cash in hand, he didn't cash out. He didn't pawn it off to someone else: he spent long hours and risked life and limb for knowledge and business. Something we should all celebrate.

Sound familiar?

Next year let's add to the list of Startups in history. Let's celebrate them on Columbus Day.

Thoughts?
The punchline, from the abstract: "We find that when selecting a problem-solving team from a diverse population of intelligent agents, a team of randomly selected agents outperforms a team comprised of the best-performing agents. This result relies on the intuition that, as the initial pool of problem solvers becomes large, the best-performing agents necessarily become similar in the space of problem solvers. Their relatively greater ability is more than offset by their lack of problem-solving diversity."

It's not always true, of course, that a randomly selected group will outperform a group of top performers. But the result does suggest that it's worth thinking hard about the tradeoff between diversity and ability, and that sometimes the former is more important than the latter.
Cool startup, I like the logo. The video is a nice touch, people are just too lazy to read these days (myself included).

Suggestions:
- Lose some of the fluff. For example, in your "what?" section, you could've written it as simply "We notify you when artists release new albums". There is no reason to have more words than you need to describe your product.
- I would have preferred voice in the video. Don't be shy, having a voice over helps a lot.
- Maybe add a way to import information from existing sources like Last.fm or Facebook's music interests?

I'm intrigued by how you guys plan to monetize this, but maybe I'm just greedy and should be thankful for a web app that helps alleviate some of my headaches.
Have you seen http://hitbio.com? You can comment your google search results and forward the the 'bio' you just created to your potential employer.
Wish I had more time as well. I love madebysofa though.
"In studies where they offer one group of undergrads money to complete some random task and another group does it for free?"

The studies are pretty wide ranging. For example, people paid to wear their seatbelts are less likely to do so. People who are offered money if they lose weight are less successful, and are more likely to gain even more weight. If teachers are offered money if their students improve on a test, the students will do worse on the test. Students who study something in an attempt to get a good grade will have a more superficial understanding of the material than they would otherwise.

"Things work differently at the other end of the expertise spectrum."

Maybe that's true once your work is at the genius level and you don't need any more external validation, but even if so how do you get there? If you've been mastering your craft for twenty years and then you're offered money it might not be damaging, if done right, but being offered money too soon may well harm the average person.

"The great artists couldn't bring themselves to produce shit, any more than great people in any field ever can."

George Lucas.
It doesn't sound like this metric means you could buy one of these companies for the current market price, liquidate it and come out ahead since they don't take debt into account. Or am I reading it wrong?

I still think someone or some group should buy Microsoft outright, halt all R&D and get a nice 20-30% per year in dividends for the next 10-20 years until it dies. (similar idea)
Wow, we really are moving closer and closer to 1984.

Safety does not trump freedom.
LOC are not always accurate. I once rewrote 2,650 lines of C code as a seven line shell script. The previous programming team had written a data transfer program using their own implementation of ftp. I just used the one that was already on the computer.
Very insightful. Excellent catch.
I entered my email, but my facebook and linkedin profile didint show up...
This old PE firm I used to work with (not for), Platinum equity, was notorious for these kinds of deals. Sometimes they would even get paid to take over the company. I don't think they've ever had a losing deal.
I don't know that we can call Marx right; we can, however, definitively declare Francis Fukuyama wrong. History, even considered as merely a dialectic between opposing models of resource allocation, is far from over.
I love FriendFeed, and I think that this improves their virality by a lot.

I think that the next step for FriendFeed is to dump in some collaborative filtering so that I can get recommendations of feeds that I might be interested based on what I comment on and the types of things I subscribe to. If they can get that down, FriendFeed will be every tech nerd's new TV.

A question I have is whether or not you guys think FriendFeed can cross into the mainstream? It seems to me that most mainstream internet users only use 1 or 2 web services, so perhaps they are not suitable for the FriendFeed model.
The comparison to PHP5 is definitely interesting. PHP5 was released around 2004 with significant upgrades to the language with a high degree of backwards-compatibility and it still hasn't reached complete adoption. Only now with official support coming to an end and more web host support, will it become the standard.

The adoption of Python 3 will likely differ, since Python is not a standard feature of low-cost web hosts and has a wide range of uses outside of web development. It should be interesting to see how this plays out.
Do you know of any more sets like this?
Thanks Charles! I'm exploring the Last.fm integration, there are some interesting possibilities. As for monetising, CD and mp3 sales commission should fit nicely. People should want to buy the new music they are into.
I think the only way to fix the Zune is to somehow get free wifi on it (similar to the Kindle) and allow music to stream across the internet, any music you want.

The entire collection of all music on the go is worth $20/mo to me, and if anyone can pull it off, MS can.

Obviously in the current state of the world, outside of Asia, this is probably not a good product, but as WiMax starts to go mainstream, hopefully we can see similar applications.

The reason is because the Zune has no competitive advantage over the iPod. Every "cool" feature that is has is killed by its counter-intuitive software and obtuse case design. It needs something game changing, and that's the next game changing feature.

Of course, the cell phone will probably have a much better chance to make this a reality first before the Zune, but they can try.
I'm not sure I can name truly great hackers, but I absolutely know very good ones and sorta bad ones.

Here's what I mean by sorta bad. They are very smart people, they know the language, they can code and then some. They can work out very complex stuff, super complex algorithms.

But when working on a large project, over time they slowly start to wrap them selves up in such as a way as to quickly hit a wall of frustration. Their productivity drops 10 fold, and it's crawling on broken shards of glass from then on.

The other type of hacker, initially is indistinguishable from the first. Except that whey they work on very large systems, they seem to be able to almost smell where the code base is going.

They are able to keep a large architecture in mind, continually adjust it and adjust their code. Most importantly it seems they have a great intuition about which frustrations are worth pushing through and which you should go around of.

It's that kid of code foresight that great hackers have.
one of the problems with web-apps is that while they are cheap to get going ... many traditional VCs look elsewhere for their next investments.

It's not a bug, it's a feature.
Debugged lines of code.
"tends to be concerned with micro-loans"

Last year there was a very convincing video on Ted about Africa needing basic financial infrastructure like a futures market.

I've read other people about "Joe The Plumber" not having access to futures to protect large financial operations like purchasing real estate.

Also Nasdaq, NY, etc. are completely unaffordable for small ventures (perhaps why most people on dotcoms aim at multimillion sized IPOs.)

This has to change.
After reading the Woz interview in Founders, it's obvious that he wasn't paying much attention to the stock market. He was too busy doing what he loved. Their initial business approach (cash for product) may have been produced by their times, but they didn't let that stand in the way.

And that's the lesson for me. All I can control is my immediate situation. The other stuff is just noise best drowned out by hard work at things I enjoy.
>He mentioned that Python 2.x is will be supported for a very long time.

I know of shops that still use 1.5/1.6...
You are right, thanks for pointing that out.
Opportunity costs are lower.

If the economy were good, the opportunity cost of building a startup would be a high paying job as a quant.

Since it's bad, all I'm missing out on is a shot at postdoc #2 or a faculty position.
Very refreshing and rational. Thanks PG!
Pretty good idea and easy to monetize if people actually purchase through your site. I see this being less than 5% tho.

The logo concept is ok I suppose, but the overall presentation of your brand (logo+site) will significantly impact adoption of a product like this. I recommend you put some energy ($) into it... the logo reads like there's a 'T' in it btw.

I think you should enable some public features, for example a user can easily see any new releases within the last week. This will also boost your saturation on search engines.
I think it's fairly easy to write those things. What will be more interesting is actual data after a few YC rounds in a weaker economy.
Woah! Joe Armstrong, the inventor of Erlang, just sent me an email asking about Nitrogen (the Erlang web framework featured in the demo above.)

As I said to my wife, "I feel like a teenage girl at a Jonas Brothers concert."
Bill Gates, is that you?
Still, there is the big advantage that you can build a prototype almost for free.

As we build, this point still amazes me. If you're willing to put in the time and effort, the cost is not prohibitive. Build in spite of the VCs, not because of them. If your product is good enough, users will force them to find a path to your door. And, of course, you still have a day and a half:

http://ycombinator.com/w2009.html
"Last year you had to be prepared to explain how your startup was viral. Next year you'll have to explain how it's recession-proof."

In my experience, what's true of investors here is also true of potential co-founders. It's so much easier to get other people to work with you if your project is in a trendy field or appeals to the dominant logic of the afternoon. And it's really really frustrating.

/end rant
MS and Apple happened to come along when the microcomputer was really starting to take off

There are very good waves to ride right now. For example: Cloud computing, IPv6, Energy Saving, and moving everything out there to AJAX.

All of those will obsolete other technologies and most will save money.
The saddest thing here is that the primary driver for this isn't true malevolence. There's not an underground of fascists working to make fascism happen.

This is just bureaucrats trying to cover their asses. Collecting more data is something that you can measure and point to.

Look we collected all of this!

Never mind the fact that the real difficulty is in distinguishing the noise from the signal.

And the more data you collect the harder that gets.

Never mind the fact the CIA was watching the 9/11 guys cross from Canada into the US, and called the FBI and told them.

Never mind that there were FBI agents who were trying to get someone's attention because they knew there was something fishy with all those guys taking flight lessons.

Never mind that clearly the problem was not a lack of data collection.

Never mind all that because doing the smart thing is hard and proving you're doing something by being smart is impossible.

But data collection is easy and it's easy to prove you're doing all you can.
Breaking compatibility is easier now than it will be in the future. In ESR's "The Art of Unix Programming," Stuart Feldman explains his decision to use tabs in make:

Why the tab in column 1? Yacc was new, Lex was brand new. I hadn't tried either, so I figured this would be a good excuse to learn. After getting myself snarled up with my first stab at Lex, I just did something simple with the pattern newline-tab. It worked, it stayed. And then a few weeks later I had a user population of about a dozen, most of them friends, and I didn't want to screw up my embedded base. The rest, sadly, is history.

Beware the argument that life will be harder tomorrow, or even for the next year. Sometimes that's better than living with your mistakes for 30 years.
Why is everyone saying "fail" all of a sudden?
Email Management With GMail?
How difficult is it refine Thorium?
Why America Will Remain the Superpower
Is there any privacy in hosted email?
The easier it looks, the harder it is. If clean aesthetic was that easy, there would be more Apple's and fewer poor attempts. But there's not.

That said, let's see some links to your work. :)
The learning curve is quite steep. The best advice I can give you is to unlearn what you know about imperative programming and make a concerted effort to understand Delegates and Notifications.

The classic example is when people try to use a NSTableView and ask "how do I send it the data?" This is the wrong question. The view will ask its delegate for the data in a cell by calling a method you implement in your own class when it is ready to display it. It's a really elegant way to do it, but it runs so counterintuitive to the typical pattern of bossing around a bunch of objects like you're the supreme object master or something.