skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Erlang's syntax is not really a problem for me either. There are part of the semantics I dislike, but the syntax is not hurting me that much.

Erlang's primary problem is that it currently can't cope with the things people try to throw at it. I've seen people opt for better string handling, but string handling isn't the force of the language. It is almost domain specific as a language.

Personally, I don't think Erlang is the answer to the "multi-core-problem" either. There has to be a nicer way than threads-on-steroids ;)
The Google timeline
I already mentioned TechStars hit rate, as far as I know it: "has actually produced a couple of winners now", in the form of two small acquisitions.

YC has had a couple of pretty big acquisitions and five (I believe) small acquisitions. More importantly, I think there are at least three or four still on-going companies that will be very large successes for YC. I won't name them, as it might imply that I think others won't be big successes or it might start a flame war over "no way that blah blah idea can generate significant revenue, no matter how many million hits they get", or whatever.

And the "at this stage" bit was in reference to the fact that about 50% of the first batch of YC founders are now rich, by a reasonable definition of "rich". Each batch since then rolls off a bit, in percentages, but the bets are getting bigger and take longer to play out (our company, for example, would not be for sale for a low millions acquisition offer...but the vast majority of the exits for YC and TS companies have been in that range...and I know that a few other YC companies are also looking to build larger companies than that).

Anyway, by any metric YC has a lot of successful companies in their stable. Traffic for a few YC companies is just through the roof (Scribd, Justin.TV, Weebly, Reddit, Disqus, probably others). A couple of others have really impressive reach outside of the usual Web 2.0 set and into the "real world" (Loopt, in particular, though Inkling Markets is everywhere, too...my dad has used Inkling's product, and he just got broadband for the first time last week).
I like it, but if I think for the reasons why I like it, it is probably because this site looks more like an encyclopedia than an actual search engine. It basically brings up the summary of the respective wiki page.
From the article:

What’s going to replace oil?

Why replace oil? It is relatively dense, we have 70,000 years worth, and it is rechargeable.
It seems logical, but the problem with basing executive compensation on company performance is that, in a public company, it just incentivizes the executives to chase quarterly profits at the expense of medium- to long-term goals. This means that executives will do anything they can to pump up quarterly numbers, especially if they know that their tenure at the helm of their company is fairly finite.
Ask YC: Please review my startup too :)
the problem of choosing a good leader hasn't been solved by humans yet.
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The thing about being a contrarian is that you end up wrong sometimes...possibly a lot of the time. I think we still need them, though, to keep us questioning common wisdom. And ESR, for all his flaws, is still an interesting character and a useful member of society.
it is now a fundamental human desire

I didn't claim otherwise. we are adaptation executers, not gene survival maximizers. this is why it is so important to keep in mind how changes in our environment can have unintended consequences. witness the dual rise of food processed heavily with sugar and degenerative diseases such as diabetes.
The primary purpose is to lend credibility.

I thought the primary purpose of YC was to instill morale.

http://www.google.com/search?q=+site:www.paulgraham.com+%22y...

Morale is tremendously important to a startup—so important that morale alone is almost enough to determine success.
Acid3 seems to be the ultimate pipe dream. It could be 5-10 years before the majority of Internet users are using browsers that pass it.

Maybe the version of IE released with Windows 7 will pass (IE 9?), but there are still people using IE 6 on Windows 2000, 7 years after IE 6's release (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer#Version_6) and 8 years after Windows 2000's release (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_2000#History).
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Last night’s episode of 90210 has me scratching my head a little bit because as the show progresses, some things get better while other things get more perplexing. There were plenty of moments that were just . . . strange.
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Kenley was a big, giant jerk, Jerell won his second challenge in a row, and we finally said goodbye to straight guy Joe.
What's your vanity rank?
Amazing collection of free fashion games for girls 
This site is cool, it has the coolest collection of free fashion games. These games let you dress up your favorite teen celebrities such as Ashley Tisdale, Myley cyrus and many other.
I was thinking more along the lines can these people starting a "YC Clone" bring real investors who might invest on "demo day". I should have said that, but it all comes down to credibility (on many different levels, the process, the people running the process, the founders, etc).

It seems to me, and I may be wrong, that the YC system has an extra bit of credibility that can be spent even if a person isn't successful with what they built in YC they can build something new and still have a better then average chance.
In general, we'll moderate comments only for civility. They have up and down arrows, so I expect the community to take care of quality that way. That often seems to be the case here, where a comment will be buried under an avalanche of downvotes.
Slinkset is maybe not an original idea (corank is pretty similar and was around first) but it's a good one and very well-implemented. You don't make money by being original. You make it by being good. Allowing people to start their own sites trivially (not counting some goofy domain issues I had, I think NHN took me 10 minutes or so to set up) is a good idea, and one that has been popular since before the first bubble.
Automating Git Bisection for Rails Apps
Dogfight 2 - Feedback request
Hi Everyone,

We just released our sequel to Dogfight (previous discussion at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=95578), and we'd love to know what everyone thinks! I'd especially like to know whether people think that it's a solid step up from Dogfight 1.

We've put as much effort into polishing as we did into Robokill, but obviously the scope is much smaller. It will be interesting to see how this does!
> The objects are an interesting touch. Not sure how they'll work out in the grand scheme of things, but it's an interesting idea.

Erlang already has objects. They are just called processes.
Trying to bolt on a class system on top is just going against the grain.

> Single assignment? There are certainly some good reasons why Erlang is what it is, but perhaps this language might make it easier to do other things with Erlang as well. For instance I would never use it for sysadmin type tasks as it stands now

You would not use C or Java for sysadmin tasks either. You would not use Ruby to write a 3D game engine. Erlang was not designed to be a general-purpose language, much less a scripting one. Right tool for the right job...
In my opinion, it can be called startup because if it will really take off, it will basically require constant maintenance, because the users will always bug with something. In that sense it's a business/startup.
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The layout fails on Google Chrome. It shows the "Simple Assignment Tracking" etc. chapters each on separate vertical space, and "Partner Up" goes below "Sign up" and "Take the Tour"-buttons.

Yes, I blame Chrome and not your site.

Update: I find the images on http://soshiku.com/tour a bit too big -- the page is really big right now (i.e. lots of pixels). Lots to scroll even on a 1920x1200 resolution.

An me nagging about such small detail proves that you overall design works for me!
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Amazon seems to be the Internet giant who's doing the most things right: innovative and focused. A great bookstore, with a great electronics store, a great innovation with the Kindle, and a top-notch cloud computing service which seems to just get better and better. And they listen to their customers! And the handling of customer reviews in their stores is so much better than that in Apple's App Store it's disgusting.
Douglas Rushkoff: Financial Melt Up
"The combination of these problems [storage and transmission aren't 100% efficient] means that household energy conservation is mainly a way for wealthy Westerners to feel virtuous rather than an actual attack on energy costs. Household conservation slightly decreases the maximum capacity needed locally where the conservation is being practiced, but has little impact further away, where demand has to be supplied by different plants."

Errm...doesn't the fact that transmission is less than 100% efficient just multiply up the gain? If I lose 50% of power sending it to a house, if that house saves Y kwH, I need to generate 2Y less kwH? i.e. the worse the transmission %, the more effect I get from efficiency at the point of use?

Or did I miss his point?
In a public company, the pressure to chase quarterly profits exists anyway because of the shareholders. If company A does something of questionable morality or risk, but it nets their shareholders a lot of value, it gets hard for the executives at company B to say 'no' to the strategy, even if they know better.

My suspicion is that this is why some companies start out as good and are later perceived as evil. The game changes once you have legal fiduciary responsibilities to shareholders. It seems to me that it can get very hard to defend your strategy of not maximizing profits when others around you are raking it in.
Ask YC: How bad is the economy?
Any finance hackers here?

I'm very scared of what is going on. I have decent savings (about a year's worth) and a good job with Cisco (company got acquired recently) but I'm afraid of what is going to happen.

What can I do to protect myself?
10 Books + a lot of practical experience. :)
How to get Windows 7 for free?
The really impressive thing is that this is the work of a 1 person startup
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I'd like to propose another definition of vanity rank: How many consecutive results from Google, starting from the first result, refer to you. I get 21.
Yeah, they don't like that!
How the U.S. could make money off the bailout - from Forbes mag
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Wall Street Rescue Deal Blocked
In McCain's words, "the economy is sound".

In my words, the economy is heading for a long-drawn recession due to a much needed deleveraging, albeit a drastic one. The world was too flush with credit in the past decade. The financial system is currently fubar with the credit market virtually frozen at this moment. Banks don't trust each other. The Chinese government has instructed their banks to stop lending to US financial institutions. The Feds are currently keeping the financial system on life support. Expect the side effects of the credit contraction to trickle down to the real economy very soon. More company failures, more layoffs, higher unemployment rate etc. Buffett wasn't exaggerating when he said this is an economic pearl harbor. Which is why the Paulson bailout plan will prove to be very crucial.
My opinion of him isn't too high. He likes to brandy himself about as some sort of hacker hero, but in truth, he's not really contributed much to OSS. Combined with him standing up a packed audience at my college without even bothering to call and cancel, and general nutjobery (see his rants about guns or mysticism) I'm somewhat less than a fan.

We need wackos like Stallman. He's a little south of sanity, but damn, he's slung a lot of code and really changed the landscape of technology with his idealism.
... and here are my 10 Lego sets that will substitute an Engineering Degree!

Degrees are not just about the literal content. They are three/four/five/ years of intense experience in a play pen where highly skilled people correct your every move and thoughts guiding you toward a greater understanding.
Too bad we don't live in a culture with base 12 numbers.
I prefer not to pay attention to pseudo-racists with strong opinions and few proofs. Give me numerical proof anyday over the type of race-baiting uproductively negative rambling that ESR seems to love.
Seems to send the message its ok to go bankrupt cause the gov will bail you out, so wth, lets do it!
What 'Deep Impact' might an asteroid make on Earth, astronauts ask
Stormpulse featured on Thrillist
Scott Berkun: Transcript & mp3 of 'The myths of innovation'
if no other choice sure why not? Not everyone gets into MIT, so it doesn't hurt to diversify your applications. And in the end run its better to have even a crappy state school over not going to college at all
"Programming languages are not like hand tools":

http://journal.dedasys.com/articles/2007/12/12/programming-l...

The key point is that yes, some things are better than others, but each language is a toolbox that is potentially capable of solving a wide variety of problems. If you can broaden the range of tasks your toolbox handles without sacrificing anything important, that's a big win.

Also:

> Erlang already has objects. They are just called processes. Trying to bolt on a class system on top is just going against the grain.

Did you read about the language? The objects are processes, so rather than bolting on something that doesn't work, it's providing an easier, more familiar way to access something that often requires a fair amount of boilerplate in Erlang itself.
well maybe the guy will have some honor and will do what the AIG ceo did and refuse the golden parachute
Can books substitute an MBA?
I haven't read the whole post yet but what I think he means is that if energy efficiency goes up locally there will be a bunch of power stations sat idling because it isn't efficient to send the energy long distances to areas where demand hasn't fallen. For example cutting demand in the US by 100MW won't stop a 100MW power station from being built in India.

It makes sense but only if you confuse efficiency and demand. Increased efficiency should decrease demand assuming all other things are equal. Surprisingly all other things aren't equal.
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Further to the post on "10 books to substitute a CS degree", have any of you come across the personal MBA programme? Of course, practical experience is required, but do you think such a scheme (experience + books) can ever be as good as academia + experience?
Pogue: "Google may or may not be evil, but wow, is it getting good at search."
Generator_tools: copying and pickling of generators in Python
Give me numerical proof

...Of what? Do you mean something like this?:

http://www.amazon.com/Bias-Mental-Testing-Arthur-Jensen/dp/0...

http://www.amazon.com/Factor-Science-Evolution-Behavior-Inte...
That's a really valid point. One thing to note is that most of the clones are started by VCs or people with strong VC connections. In my book that's a pretty notable difference. Entrepreneurs and VCs seem to often look at businesses very differently, and this, in some ways, seems to be a way to just get a stupidly cheap slice out of a big pool of startups.

One thing to remember when looking at all of these things:

The value they give is not in the money. $10-20k is laughable in investment terms. In my opinion YC is more like a ready-made board of advisors than a seed investor. The question really boils down to, for all of these accelerators, "Are they good enough advisors to give up 5-ish percent of your equity for?"

I think YC's proven itself there. I'd be interested to see what some TechStars alums have to say.
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I don't know if it counts as "vomiting" but it's how they feed the chicks, they regurgitate partially digested food.

Before you get disgusted: some humans will chew food in the month to feed to a baby. And pigeons can't chew.
Great to play free dress up games for girls of all ages 
Girls, no matter how old you are, toddlers, kids, or teens, this is the games site for you. This site offers tons of fun to play free flash games. You can dress up dolls or girls with cute dresses and accessories. Definitely a games site to check out.
How Friendly Will a URL Ever Be?
Someone could implement continuations-capable Python web framework with this. Tried to bolt it on top of Google App Engine, but Python runs in restricted mode there so it does not allow bytecode generation on the fly.
Download Greys Anatomy Season 5 Premiere -Dream a Little Dream of Me
Many of our readers have been expressed the opinion - in response to this week’s thought-provoking Grey’s Anatomy spoilers - that the scene first hinted at in the now-infamous promo takes place in a dream, or in Meredith’s imagination.
But - it's very incorrect, I don't agree that it enhances readability - and moreover it makes my blood boil.

Google fails me for finding a citation, but apparently the precedent was set by cigarette advertising (for say, 25's).
Concrete Mathematics by Graham, Kunth and Patashnik

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concrete_Mathematics
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Detecting earthquakes with laptops
Gary Unmarried An early look
Jay Mohr moonlights away from his regular gig on Ghost Whisperer to star as Gary Brooks in this traditional sitcom. CBS has paired Gary Unmarried with The New Adventures of Old Christine, which creates an interesting dynamic
Californication Slip of the Tongue S02E01 Showtime
Its the season premiere of Californication, and it starts surprisingly. The show was very quickly renewed for a new season.
"... I'm very scared of what is going on. I have decent savings (about a year's worth) and a good job with Cisco (company got acquired recently) but I'm afraid of what is going to happen. ..."

Haven't lived through a recession before?

The most important things to remember: Reduce debt at all costs, make your objective to be debt free. Cash is king. With cash you can bargain. Live frugally while you have debt. If you have a job, train for the next one. If you have a job stick with it. If you are finding progression at work slow and thinking of another job, think before you leap. Probably the most important thing to remember is like booms, recessions end.

"... What can I do to protect myself? ..."

Don't spend what you can't pay in cash. As for protection, you can try but sometimes individuals are swept about like leaves on a stormy winters day. Adapt.
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Ralph Johnson (Gang of 1), Parallel Programming Patterns
for me, it was enticing enough to give it a try.

okay, Here's the first thing I tried, because I was actually looking for it:

try to search for: "mashable wordpress theme" ... FAIL!
you took me to search the mashable site for "wordpress theme" tags, which returned nothing.

however, when I searched "wordpress theme" ... SUCCESS, kinda.
What I was looking for displayed on the right, in recent news.

It's okay. I think something definitely needs to be improved here.

Hope that helps.

Good luck.
This seems to be related to laminary flow separation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_separation. The news article doesn't give too many details. Under certain aerodynamic conditions, the airflow separates from the barrier it is flowing around, forming "bubbles" of vacuum that increase drag considerably.

From what I know of aerodynamics, improvements in when flow separation occurs will not have much impact on fuel consumption. Flow separation only causes increased drag at low speeds. At higher speeds, the phenomenon doesn't occur - the problem at higher speeds is that the airflow remains attached to the surface, but flows turbulently instead of smoothly. The ideal wing has smooth (laminary) flow over the entire surface, without any flow separation. This has thus far been unachievable in practice. For all I know, this new theory might also address this problem, but it hardly seems like a revolution is in the works. We have a decent understanding of these phenomena already. It's more related to statistics than engineering.

The point with the rugged surface of golf balls (or turbulators on airplanes) is to force the laminary air flow to become turbulent. Flow separation only occurs when the airflow is smooth. So we accept an increase in drag to prevent an even bigger increase in drag.

Perhaps we could improve the aerodynamics of cars (cars move at low speeds), but I doubt that flow separation is the main barrier to better fuel efficiency here.
Ah, thanks.

Well, the demand generally increases over time, so efficiency just means you can delay building that next 100MW plant in the US a while longer - which is useful.

I agree with his basic point that "a dense form of energy is useful for transport". But he doesn't seem to have much beyond that.

He also neglects the point that turning power -> useful work done is more efficient for electricity from a battery, which is pretty relevant. And for fuels, is more efficient in bigger engines/power plants.

Wikipedia tells me diesel engines get in the region of 45% efficient, petrol 30%, electric 90%.

That's a lot of room for transmission loss.
I closed the browser as soon as I noticed the logo.
Sorry...I cant bring myself to look at another clone web 2.0 logo.

Good luck with the site though.
Buy microsoft and open source it.
Buy google and open source it.
Buy apple and open source it.
Spend the rest on hookers and beer for all programmers.
It seems that helping people is more and more in the air.
I have been working on such idea before google sent this appeal.
I am wondering how they will handle the finalist. Do they give you 10 millions and let's say 50% of the shares or do you become somehow a google employee trading your best idea for a jumpstart in the startup area without guarantees of what you will own?

William
Slow, but seems way ahead than other sites claiming to "google killers".

Nice work
What I found most sad about this is that in the entire post he didn't post a single link. Not one.

There is a lot of new technologies discussed and I for one would like more information so I can make an informed evaluation. This post doesn't provide it.
So you're saying here that you support the notion that people with darker skin are less intelligent than people with lighter skin color?
Absolutely. Demand is, to my knowledge, rising and showing no signs of stopping any time soon. The aim of efficiency drives are to slow this rise, not lead to the decommissioning of power stations.
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There are exceptions, youtube anyone?
I think that the advice "be careful who to marry" can be inserted to virtually any "bullet points" article. ;o)

This was discussed to HN before - one usually can't learn anything significant from bullet points blog posts (like this one).
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