skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
most recent startups aren't building revenues, they compete for eyeballs. friendfeed, twitter, youtube, slide... there's hardly a case for an IPO
if you are writing brainfuck code, I doubt you are going to use emacs as your environment. More likely ed or cat...
Indeed it's a luxury only because we've socialized the cost of the externality.
Biking safety is more about your individual experience and ability than it is about having a critical mass of bikers (unless of course the critical mass is majority - as in Amsterdam).

In his book, J. Forester quotes a statistic that roadways are 2.6x safer for bikers than bike paths.
Based on this study from Kaplan: http://www.bikexprt.com/research/synthesis/corvallis.htm#kap...

How you ride your bike also depends on your personality - and how much you want your ride to be a videogame... Check out this video of a guy biking through NOLA:
http://www.vimeo.com/1918279

From my experience, paths that are physically separated from car's roads that are shared by pedestrians/roller bladers/joggers/baby strollers and bikers on it are not the safest place to be on a moving bicycle. The movement of a pedestrian is not predictable - they might suddenly stop - do a 180, cut in front of you, stoop to tie a shoelace. The skill level of some of the bikers on a path may be beginner (e.g. they do not understand the importance of riding predictable e.g in a straight line). If I do ride a bike on such a path, I'm riding slow and constantly saying 'On your left'. Predictability is very important (see this article about crossing streets in Rome) http://www.worldhum.com/how_to/item/cross_the_street_in_rome...)

Marked bike lanes that are on the side of roads are much safer. You still have to watch out for opening car doors and random-walk pedestrians (again!) but you have room to do evasive maneuvers.
I'm really impressed with the online team at LJWorld. It still surprises me that great work, like Django, came out of a relatively small town in Kansas.
Good question.

I wonder if we'll see a shift from what pg advocates, to what DHH advocates?

Small steady profits vs. high growth and buyout.
Actually, I've just worked it out, you could host around 1.02 billion small (50KB) images in 50TB. Quite a lot, but for a photo site like flickr, thats only 12 million 4MB original photos, not including the smaller versions. (well — thats still a lot of photos, but I bet flickr swallows that many photos every week...)
Startup Riot 2009 - Atlanta Startup Pitch Day
Vijay The Venture Capitalist
Party? What party?

Oh, you mean the "We need to raise zillions to build our start-up, kthxbai" party?

Never joined that one.

I think the recession will be great for my start-up. It helps companies be more efficient and cut costs, and in a recession, that's exactly what they want.
Right now, email continues to be the dominant information distribution app inside companies. One thing about it is that you can make sure something gets to someone else. Attention inside companies is key.

The new social apps inside companies are getting better with managing "attention hooks". You get notifications that someone has replied to you, commented on a blog, edited a doc, directed a microblog message to you. Key word RSS brings content to people as well.

Long term, email becomes less a primary communications and info sharing app, and more a notification service. Content and conversations are saved and searchable, which doesn't really happen now with the email inbox.
i can see articles like this, and other chicken little articles and notices applying to big-funding startups, but what i haven't seen is how this applies to the little guys. me and my partners launched very recently (and were reviewed here, flowmingle.com for the curious), and we are currently unfunded. we're in the very very early stages of seeking funding, but on the scale of bubble money we're not looking for much -- just enough to move the servers to EngineYard and get a few ad campaigns out in a few major markets to start building a user base.

so in our case, i have a day job, and that job helps support the crew, both of which live very lean. i have the highest expense set (and the most experience, and can generate the highest salary) so i'm the one who works.

what does this mean for the little guys? is there still money out there for people who don't need a dump truck full, but still have a phenomenal idea?

these are the questions i'm looking to have answered. someone want to write that article?
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I'm talking about the drought in 2008 ( as compared to 2007 )
I don't get it. All these kinds of arguments make the assumption that humans are purely rational beings. They're not. Human beings are emotional, and if they're convinced emotionally that the AI should not be let out of the box, they won't let it out, even in the face of overwhelming rational arguments.

If you don't believe me, just consider how many religious people there are in the world (and many of them are very smart).
Do it! For any road where cars are going 35-40mph or less, I'd much rather take my chances with the road. If you're a decent biker you're going 15-20mph so you're from cars' perspective you're going < 20mph and very easy to see and avoid. For pedestrians, you're much bigger AND much faster, and there aren't well-defined rules, so you're very difficult to deal with.

On the sidewalk, you have a narrower, less predictable path, pedestrians, curb cuts, more frequent bumps, plus you're basically invisible to turning cars when going through an intersection. Visibility, road quality, and avoiding pedestrians are the biggest benefits to riding on the road.

For reference, I've bike commuted in Tampa, Provo (at the University), Stockholm, Chicago city and Chicago suburbs)
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If you do not have shower facilities, a reasonable proxy is to wait until you've stopped sweating (usually 10 min. post-ride) and clean up with unscented baby wipes in the bathroom (and if needed, use a travel bottle of shampoo to rinse sweat out of your hair). The rule is try not to pack what you can leave at your destination (towels, clothes)

Most bike commuters I know bring batches of clothes to the office and/or wear sweat-wicking business casual (Nike's golf apparel or cheaper). Hopefully you might be able to store a suit/pants with a colleague? They discuss and dissect bike commuting on Bike Forums endlessly. http://www.bikeforums.net/forumdisplay.php?f=20
i can see articles like this, and other chicken little articles and notices applying to big-funding startups, but what i haven't seen is how this applies to the little guys. me and my partners launched very recently (and were reviewed here, flowmingle.com for the curious), and we are currently unfunded. we're in the very very early stages of seeking funding, but on the scale of bubble money we're not looking for much -- just enough to move the servers to EngineYard and get a few ad campaigns out in a few major markets to start building a user base.

so in our case, i have a day job, and that job helps support the crew, both of which live very lean. i have the highest expense set (and the most experience, and can generate the highest salary) so i'm the one who works.

what does this mean for the little guys? is there still money out there for people who don't need a dump truck full, but still have a phenomenal idea?

these are the questions i'm looking to have answered. someone want to write that article?

(xp)
You may need to add a 'global' statement or something similiar. If you are going to mutate a variable in a function Python assumes that you want to create a new variable in that scope.

Generally I do not mutate variables as far as possible, so I have not hit this problem myself, yet. Perhaps there is someone more knowledgeable about Python to step in.
Please have a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pollard_rho

"The rho algorithm is based on Floyd's cycle-finding algorithm [...]" (which can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floyd%27s_cycle-finding_algorit...)
No FTP support, but that's insecure; what's wrong with using SSH? And there is documentation on the Git website (and in the source tarballs) on how to set up an HTTP-hosted repo, and even how to set up for a WEBDAV-enabled push repo, although I've never attempted the latter.
Like I said, it does not fold.
Marketing Your Startup Using Affiliate Programs
This was a major eye-opener for me as-well. I jumped into various python modules and was amazed at what I discovered. Like the easter-egg hidden away in "this.py":

http://pastebin.com/f25f08f20

(Couldn't figure out how to get code formatting to work properly)
When I've seen people unicycle (I'm a 2 wheel man), they go faster than a power walk but slower than a run. Plus, they're smaller and more maneuverable than a bike so they're much easier to take on sidewalks and around pedestrians. Pretty similar to a Segway.

Pedals drive the wheel directly (no gears), so to slow down or stop you just pedal slower and then hop off.

Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicycle) is pretty fascinating, including these notable unicyclists: Adam Corolla, Donald Rumsfield, and Claude Shannon!
On my unicycle (24") I am as fast as a jogger. So more like 15 km/h than 15 mph for me.
I was going to ask what the big deal about this was then I realized I was confusing it with the much-hyped Espresso.. http://macrabbit.com/espresso/
Ask 37signals: How did you come up with pricing for your products?
a company that wants to use amazon as their CDN with amazon's delivery service doing the heavy lifting? who could use the price tier to offer a discount to a smaller company who didn't need that much, perhaps? if a company could wrap that service in an easy-to-use interface and could offer a discount from lower-tier pricing, it might look like a thin-profit and low-maintenance business model.

anyone deciding to do this, based on this comment: i demand a beer and sammich as tribute.

now, if amazon could only stay online ...
What if the AI cures cancer and refuses to share the cure unless it is given a tiny, tiny bit of access to the outside world.
Important Criteria When Selecting a Web Design Firm
But it's not a global variable, it's scoped within the closure. So, this means Python doesn't have lexical scoping?
I agree.

But not all is lost. There are ways around that. Ever heard of Put-Call-Parity and similiar relations that allow for the creation of synthetic products? (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Put-call_parity and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_options_position)
Innovation is recession proof!!

Good luck to all those entering their product/business, wish you the best. Now go show wall-street who MAKES the market.
I was infering from the title of the post. I agree with you about the non-descriptive startup name.
Python 3.0 fixes this with the nonlocal statement. However, you are correct that this doesn't work in Python 2.5 and earlier.
A Timely History Lesson from the Weimar Republic
> Incidentally, Fortran, for all its other ugliness, has the best for loop I know:

How is that better than Python?

for i in range( 1, 100 ):
print "Python!"
Second Life Architecture - The Grid
Exactly. Enough already with the shadenfreuder. You get the sense that they're enjoying all the doom-saying.
personally, i'd kick in the affiliate revenue if and only if the customer lasted for three months, since your first month is free. bonus/customer in line with your tiered pricing, continuing revenue ftw.

also, clean up your website some. it's not awful, just looks a shade shy of professional.
I think the recession will be great for my start-up. It helps companies be more efficient and cut costs, and in a recession, that's exactly what they want.

BINGO. Exactly. As long as companies are in business, they need to cut costs, and more than ever in a downturn. Startups should be able to thrive in that environment.
I really love the way Allen's shining a light on the underbelly and back corridors of the Web 2.0 world - especially on his Twitter - http://twitter.com/centernetworks

That said, I'm starting to realize that networking and social connections are what make the world go around. The world doesn't work on fairness or ideals. People get into positions because they're friends with those in power or can use their connections to "grease the wheels." Even organizations and events that claim to be fully democratic rarely are.

Seth Godin's new "Tribes" schtick seems to say that people like to form together into "tribes" that then support each other and the leader(s) of that tribe. Whether that's a tribe of Seth Godin supporters, a tribe of NY tech elites, or a tribe of higher-ups on this very site, it doesn't matter. People are going to stick into tribes, people will brownnose, and people will use their contacts and networks to get an advantage. Is it really worth exposing if it's going to always happen?
I modded it up - we're the ones who have to fix it. :)
If we didn't read other sources and (especially) aggregators, how would Hacker News continue to thrive?
Should be fixed - give it a shot. There was an edge case we missed.
Young Internet stars wait out the crash in Cyprus, make video
"You wouldn't be wasting those 120 minutes on stuff that wasn't making you happy; you'd replace that stuff with other stuff that made you happy. Pretty straight forward."

As a talented procastinator who is occasionally lazy, this is not always the case for me. Many times I will spend my time doing things that make me happier in the short term but less satisfied in the long term. Articles like this do a good job of motivating me.
Tcl is extremely straightforward once you figure it out:

http://antirez.com/articoli/tclmisunderstood.html

'for' is a command that takes 4 arguments:

{set i 1} - eval'ed once at start time.
{ $i <= 100 } - an expression that is checked each time to determine whether to continue
{ incr i } - eval'ed each time
{ ... the rest ... } the body is eval'ed each time.

Everything in Tcl is like that - it's extremely easy to figure out and there are no surprises. It's also extremely easy to implement. Here's Hecl's for loop:

case FOR:
/* The 'for' command. */
/* start */
interp.eval(argv[1]);
/* test */
while (Thing.isTrue(interp.eval(argv[2]))) {
try {
/* body */
interp.eval(argv[4]);
} catch (HeclException e) {
if (e.code.equals(HeclException.BREAK)) {
break;
} else if (e.code.equals(HeclException.CONTINUE)) {
} else {
throw e;
}
}
/* next */
interp.eval(argv[3]);
}
break;
NY Tech Meetup is just one venue. Build something people like and people will talk about it:

"Quotably- new website makes following twitter conversations easy" (from News.YC to twitter to TechCrunch in ~24 hours)
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=144253
I found Stackless Python while trying to throw together an idea for a massively parallel algorithm... worked beautifully and led me to django. Python's simplicity made me feel like I could hit the ground running, but I'd say the frameworks got me hooked.
Ruby's nice and compact too:

(1..100).each do
puts "Ruby"
end
Ha. All that code at the bottom of the file could be replaced by "print s.decode('rot13')" - I suppose it's backwards compatible though...
Well, it's shorter by five characters, and you can type it without touching the shift key.

Look, I'm only too familiar with the annoyances of Fortran, but let's allow it this one thing, okay?
Agreed, like someone smart probably said at one time or another: "I haven't failed, I've just found a hundred solutions that don't work".
thanks for your comments. I tried so hard to make the site look as professional as possible. Is there anything specific that makes it look "unprofessional"?
No time for no return.
I know, it was a joke.

I wrote an ed mode for Emacs once, though...
Web Design: On Essence
Web design is about emotion.
Pretend to be Barack Obama in the Chatbot Game
Check out these two Obama modes in the Chatbot Game:

Barack Obama Bot: http://chatbotgame.com/?cmd=chat_b&mode=obama

Be Barack Obama: http://chatbotgame.com/?cmd=chat_b&mode=obama2

Click "chat" to start chatting with the bot. Click "spy" to spy on people chatting with the bot.

In the "Barack Obama Bot" mode, you can pretend to be Barack Obama by submitting chat rules for the bot to follow.

In the "Be Barack Obama" mode, you can pretend to be Barack Obama while chatting with the bot.

The Chatbot Game is a bit like a social news site. To play the game, you submit chat rules, which you can think of as being similar to news submissions. Voting on these chat rules occurs during the chats. Spying on chats involving your rules corresponds to viewing your news submissions' comments. Your score corresponds to karma.
Do you think you can tell the difference between 3742 pixels per mile and 3218?

For reference, the google sats of my house have about 20cm pixels at maximum zoom, but they appear to have been upsampled or low pass filterd by maybe a factor of 3 or so judging by the noise in the trees. Possibly this will be better resolution, but there will certainly be less noise. My corner of the world is pretty grainy.
The article is mistitled. The question it actually poses is: "Why isn't Haskell as popular as Python yet?"

While I dearly love Python, I don't know enough about Haskell to adequately answer this. The article makes it sound like Haskell is doing all the same right things as Python -- although this apparently isn't paying off yet, so the article must be overlooking some factors.
No. Whenever I go on a tangent, I just make a copy.

I do AI, maybe that's the difference. Honestly, apart from utils.lisp, I wouldn't cry much if I suddenly lost all my files. Code is trivial, the important point is in the experience / insights.

I'll try it some day for sure. It's just not that appealing. It was the same with Emacs.
Well, yes, people will always do those kinds of things, but there is a question of degree. Having lived in Italy for a number of years, for instance, I'd say it goes on way too much there, and much more than in the US, even though it undeniably happens in the US too.

It's good to point it out when it's so blatant.
It's a good strategy, but it only really works the first time - you only need one public success to make the point to future generations. Since Eliezer Yudowsky has pulled this off more than once, (and at least on one subsequent occasion at significantly higher stakes), I can only conclude that he has used more than one strategy successfully - probably something he developed on the fly over the course of the two hours. I'm inclined to parse "There's no super-clever special trick to it. I just did it the hard way." as supporting evidence, but that's obviously a personal bias ;)
That's not a good idiom, because it only allows you to loop over small ranges:

>>> for i in range(1000000000):
... print i
...
python2.4(1261) malloc: *** vm_allocate(size=4000002048) failed (error code=3)
python2.4(1261) malloc: *** error: can't allocate region
python2.4(1261) malloc: *** set a breakpoint in szone_error to debug
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
MemoryError

Why attempt to allocate such a large list when you just want to do something several times?
thats the problem isn't it? Almost all of these venture backed startups have been pissing money away left and right. This credit crunch won't affect those startups that are self funded. The only ones that'll be affected are those with huge staffs which they can't afford in the first place
GCubiks - the new 3D Glasses
It's age and audience-specific, but it used to be you could make references to popular TV shows. With the net anymore that's gotten tougher. Movies are still a good staple for metaphors. As are stip-mall Americana-type references.

For instance I had a project manager (I coach agile teams) that had obviously lost track of her project. She kept coming up with new ways of doing the work, and the team didn't respect her and wouldn't attend meetings.

I was trying to explain to my team what the atmosphere felt like. I finally said "She's like a little girl at Wal-Mart, outside on one of those quarter fire truck rides. She keeps spinning the wheel left and right, desperately going to put out the fire, but the wheel's not connected to anything. She's just frantically spinning away while everybody watches her and smiles" or something like that. It got the point across at a deeper level, I think.

When I teach coupling and cohesion I usually talk about people living in houses -- you want your stuff in your house, and you don't want all the structural members of all the houses connected together, etc

Leaky Abstractions? Gilligan's Island. No matter what the professor or Gilligan made with those coconuts, you just knew it wasn't as reliable as the real thing.

Hope that helps. Kind of hard to come up with stuff without context.
GCubiks, the new 3D Glasses, was shown in Los Angeles during the "Special Interest Group on GRAPHics and Interactive Techniques" convention. A device is being developed that could allow people to see three-dimensional images, including moving and speaking people, as a method of communication in a palm-sized machine.
We heard this before during the last dot bomb. given history, the best time to start is during bad economic times. Correct me if I'm wrong but didn't MS, Dell, and Apple all start during economically turbulent times?

You just have to survive the downturn. For recent winners (from the last dotbomb) I can only recall StumbleUpon being one of them. Anyone else remember any other old survivors and winners from the last downturn?
Assigning keyboard shortcuts to applications
Agile: Understanding Backlogs
It's an essay that contains code, but this is one of my all time favorites:

Peter Norvig writes a spelling corrector in 21 lines of Python:
http://norvig.com/spell-correct.html
It has. Just the syntax was a bit awkward when modifying variables of higher scope. See sibling comment.
Three Dimensions of High Performance
I don't know what that means, but it might be interesting to note that you're one of the first people to mention this phrase on the internet:
http://ri.ms/notime

(Edit: HN didn't like quotes in the URL, so used URL shrinker)
The %s are more or less standard. The thing is...you need to base the % on how easy it is for the affiliate to make money. I mean your microblogging site I can't really see someone making 100 sign ups in a month. So you need to give more. 37signals on the other hand has products that are a) popular b) easy to sell, so for them the % is smaller.
Sitting for very long periods becomes uncomfortable because you're not supposed to sit for long periods. The human body just isn't built for it. Get up and walk around the block. Buying a chair that encourages you to stay seated is the wrong solution.
Photos: Is This the MacBook 'Brick'?
Watch CSI Episodes
Imagine how easier and cheaper it would be if you could Download CSI Episodes . The reality is that you can actually download all CSI Episodes from the Internet at very High Speed
Watch Desperate Housewives Episodes
There are services that let you Download Desperate Housewives Episodes Free or even watch them online. There are hundreds of people using these services to Download Desperate Housewives Episodes Free so they can keep their favorite episodes.
Tomorrow it will be seven days, but the link will probably stay on the front page and you won't be able to change the title.
Is this for the summer session?
The O(N) one happened last week on an interview, I just smiled and let the interviewer solve it and I still got the job. Not sure what the point of the question was.
I see your points but let me just clarify that they don't have to get a 100 new customers every month... they just have to do it once and they get paid $3000 EVERY month. And if they get more, they make more or they could entirely stop marketing it and still make the $3000 every month.
MerbCamp webcast info released: starting Saturday, watch the talks live