skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are probably more than 50 "decent" virtual machines in production use, many of them open source. Anyone who completes a graduate-level course in language and compiler design should be able to create a decent bytecode-based VM, and should be able to make a good start on a simple JIT.

Here, in no particular order, are the ones I can think of off the top of my head:

* Tamarin
* OpenJDK
* Squeak
* Parrot
* Python
* Self
* SpiderMonkey
* PLT Scheme
* CLisp
* V8

(...etc., etc.)

The problem is not a lack of VM designs, implementers, or experience. It comes down to two factors:

* Ruby is a weird language, compared to most -- it wasn't so much designed as composed (in the sense of art/music). Normal compilation, optimization, and type-safety rules just don't apply, so even clever VM hackers are sort of left scratching their head when it comes time to optimize or deal with harder problems like serializing closures.

* The Ruby community is deeply bifurcated into two mutually-suspicious subgroups: the Rails users, and everyone else. Rail people hate (or at least mistrust) backwards-incompatible innovation in the language itself, because it breaks Rails, and (at least some of) the other group resents the Rails guys for holding the language back.

If you don't believe me on this second point, look at Ruby 1.9. If 1/10th the energy went into testing and patching new Ruby releases as goes into a minor point-release of Rails, we'd all be running nice, fast, bytecode-compiled Ruby scripts with full Unicode and fiber support. Instead, we're stuck and 1.8.6 for anything "serious", because it's the last release Rails supports well.
That's a tough question, since they are the two languages I detest the most. I'd go with python/django, simply because it's better than php/mkdir.
So he has an opinion on this subject, big deal. How is this any different than a guy writing about "Java sucks" or "Ruby rocks"?

I suspect the only reason you objective to this "political slant" is because you disagree with it.

And to be fair, although he is obviously pro-gay marriage, the article was actually fairly tame in terms of promoting it, or condemning the opposition. It's a lot tamer than most anti-gay marriage writings I've seen.

And is there any fault in pointing out that places prohibiting gay marriage (especially in America) tend to be more religious?
automakers must be liberated from CAFE fuel economy laws that arbitrarily dictate what kind of cars they must sell, forcing them to sell millions of small cars that have no chance of profitability given consumer preferences

This is baffling. 'Consumer preferences' lead to lots of small cars being bought every year, most of them just happen to be made by non-US companies. The profit margin on smaller cars is smaller, as well (luxury cars have the largest profit margin), but I don't believe that Toyota or Honda are losing money on every Corolla or Civic sold. They also seem to be doing OK in meeting fuel economy laws.

The real question is why US automakers don't make competitive small cars. One answer is the cost of labor in the US, but the other answer is that US automakers don't have a compelling process in place that continuously refines a small car until it does what the market wants. Look at the aforementioned Civic, for instance. Its original form came on the market in 1973, and its current larger form in 1996. Even the 70s version had a high build quality and was renowned for its reliability, but every subsequent iteration has, arguably, been refined and worked on to make it more and more palatable to the American market (the European Civics are different, FWIW).

Now look at US car makers. Which small US car has been marketed under the same name since the early 70s and refined every few years, meeting market demand and giving consumers what they want? US auto makers seem obsessed with re-badging and re-marketing their cars every few years, often to cover up memories of unsuccessful or embarrassing prior launches. The worst example is perhaps the Ford Taurus, which sold bucketloads in the full-size sedan segment in the 80s and 90s. So of course Ford took the Taurus out of their segment in '04 and replaced it with a smaller AND a larger sedan (the Fusion and the 500). Imagine Honda discontinuing the Accord next year and replacing it with a larger AND a smaller sedan (rather than making the Accord a bit larger, which they did last year... and five years ago). To nobody's surprise, the 500 flopped and was hastily renamed back to 'Taurus' for the '09/'10 year (there were some technical reasons, too).

The auto industry must also be liberated from the Wagner Act

There are car production plants on US soil that make perfectly good cars, using non-unionized American workers. The auto industry is already liberated from the Wagner Act.
like the idea.

i'm definitely a believer that the "restaurant/food reviews" space is underdeveloped. Yelp and Citysearch have great reach, but I feel like its not giving me what I want.

Check out: http://www.dishola.com/
buckpost -- great point. the site's actually all about providing restaurant info (i.e. when you click "bite"). however, I have it as a feature that's only enabled after you've signed up... my bad for not making this apparent.
You bake one cake, and nobody calls you a baker.

You mix one drink, and nobody calls you a bartender.

But you fuck one sheep....
marriage isn't about giving birth.
Virtual F# Book Club- Still Accepting New Members
is this a minus or just a way to seperate these two things like in a headline or title? (sorry, not a native speaker. these little things sometimes irritate me)
You know, people would do this less often if they generated less public attention. Ultimately, it's up to the person to save themselves, and if they choose not to, that's their choice.

Plus, we should start calling suicide for what it is: cowardice and selfishness, instead of fawning over the poor souls who didn't receive enough love and attention.
> Maybe each particle should have its own entry

Premature Databaseation...
Yeah, it's like trying to ban guns because of the Columbine shooting. That sure helped the students at VT.
> severing the relationship with these dealers.

That's actually hard to do - there's a myriad of state and federal laws that make this all but impossible. It cost about a billion dollars for GM to deep six the oldsmobile brand, buying out old dealers franchises, etc...
Congratulations to the developers. I suppose this might soon become the most visible Erlang application out there.
Can I know your choice of language in web programming, and why?
www.nonhackernews.com
If you have thousands of cars from hundreds of car companies your local garage will have parts for a dozen of them.

There are products which lend themselves to 'the long tail'. The repeated failure of niche brands like DeLorean and Bricklin may indicate that cars are not among them.
If you have a spare money and you want to invest in a company check HN everyday for "Review My Startup". Out of the few dozens that launch here every year, I am sure you can find a good investment (with enough due diligence).
FTA: Plus you have the difficulty of evaluating a "great" programmer in an unfamiliar language. Most people would agree that Linus Torvalds ... is a great programmer. But take him out of the Linux "C" world and make him try to get a job programming Java, and likely he would suck, at least initially, and maybe even be fired for being terrible.

To believe this, you would have to wildly underestimate the value of having a great sense of program design. Not 1 in 10,000 programmers could design something as elegant as Git. It wouldn't matter if he wrote the whole thing as a bash script or a Java program using one big singleton class. The theory of the program, which drives its implementation but is larger than it, is what makes the program (and the programmer) great.

Incidentally, the author is also clearly unaware of some 'facts' about Linus:

http://www.linuxscrew.com/2007/10/28/fun-chuck-norris-vs-lin...
on a serious note, chrome is a very ambitious project, not just a browser. people should look into it and gears before making any judgements about what it will or will not "kill".
Is this a consequence of the broken "What's Hot" ranking at the iPhone App Store combined with the NDA? Perhaps there's more profit potential in the horde of greedy wannabe iPhone app authors than in the AppStore customers?
We have two spin off sites by mattmaroon and nickb, respectively:

www.nonhackernews.com

www.newmogul.com

I've been trying to direct off topic posts to these forums. I think that's more constructive than complaining, b/c it also helps to develop new communities, and it is the community that provides the real value. I'd rather see a concentration of off beat news, or financial news, posted and discussed by passionate people in the know, than to have them trickle through the regular HN feed.
When you have a bug in your code it is unlikely to lead to real people dying; this is a distinct possibility for code that helps control multi-ton pieces of metal bombing around at a mile a minute run by poorly trained operators over incredibly varied conditions and terrain. In systems control software the key to reducing defects is having a good process and sticking to it without exception.
I've never really seen the appeal of franchising. You get a packaged business, but then the franchiser has you by the balls forever. Plus what I've read suggests that most franchise owners barely eke out a profit. Car dealers are probably better off, since they have service revenue independent of the parent company, but they're still dependent on a single supplier.
So let's say a certified investing company emerges that will take the small investments of people like us and combine them into large rounds of investments. They do this in rounds saying that after 6 months or so, they'll sit down with a company that has had interest shown and work out deals that can be voted on by the people interested in investing.

How would this be fundamentally different from a public stock exchange, except that investments would be much slower than the instantaneous trading we can do now?
HN: post is offtopic?  Don't complain, redirect
We have two spin off sites by mattmaroon and nickb, respectively:

www.nonhackernews.com

www.newmogul.com

I've been trying to direct off topic posts to these forums. I think that's more constructive than complaining, b/c it also helps to develop new communities, and it is the community that provides the real value.

I'd rather see a concentration of off beat news, or financial news, posted and discussed by passionate people in the know, than to have them trickle through the regular HN feed and have the discussions filled with "!HN" posts.
i remember seeing damien on news.yc back when i first joined (that's how i initially heard about the couch project). congrats!
What this seems to be saying is that the iPhone apps that are not popular are no longer making money. Someone who has some not popular iPhone app should tell what's really going on there.
I agree. But you can't claim that "men and women are interchangeable", when for some things, they are clearly not.
The university where I work has provided a forwarding option for a long time now. And just recently started offering Gmail accounts instead of using the university's servers. (I know several universities are doing this to cut costs.)
Maybe there should be a kiva like website where people can specifically make loans and/or buy shares in startup companies.
well get down witcho bad self then
Tesla Roadster 0-60 in 4 seconds which is not bad but go with KillaCycle LSR Electric Motorcycles which goes 0 to 60 in .97 seconds yea less than one second quarter mile in 7.89 seconds @ 168 MPH.

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2008/11/electric-motorcycles...

http://www.killacycle.com/2008/10/24/new-world-record-at-ban...
Twilio looks very impressive and we are seriously considering using it. Has anyone written an app with it yet or looked at the competitive landscape? Ribbit?

RB
How would you construct the DB?
They really even had that as a poll?

Amazon aggressively opened up their architecture to the community as a key business strategy. I remember well all the clueless reporters interviewing Bezos and constantly looking befuddled at why he would do such a thing. Now it seems obvious.

Google has arguably even greater architecture, but they keep it under tight wraps. I can see why - they probably don't want to risk losing focus on their key revenue streams.

That's one of the key differences between Amazon and Google. Amazon seems to be incredibly good at diversifying their revenue streams without losing focus. Amazon launches new services and, for the most part, they take off and flourish. Google does a few key things really really amazingly well, but I've often seen their acquisitions/pet-projects die from neglect.

Sometimes I wonder if those differences are because of the way the companies are organized. Amazon seems more of a benevolent oligarchy, and Google seems more of a developers-paradise-soup.

I'm sure there are other factors at work - which are the most relevant?
i'm just looking forward to be able to customize the CSS, (That will be one fine day) and upload a favicon (like slinkset just did!).

also now i'm being told that i have only completed 77% of my goals. but i'm never going to put ad-sense on the site and i've told my friends and casual aquaintences a bunch about weebly but i'm not going to spam anyone's inbox so it looks like i'll be staying at 77 - which is a lucky enough number (outside china anyway) so i dont really mind too much i guess.
Well apparently the SEC is not going to like that.
There is room for many browsers in this market.

I switched from firefox to chrome. I still use the former for development because of firebug and the web developer extensions, but chrome is my default.

FF 3 killed itself on my pc. It operates as the slowest piece of software overall. Yes I've turned of the phishing protection. Yes I've changed profiles. It's still a resource hog. It's still full of bloat and crap that I just don't need to read stories on hacker news, check the weather and read my gmail.

For people like me who want the browser to stay out of the way, chrome is appealing. For people who would prefer their browser to be their operating system, Firefox will continue to be their choice I'm sure.
I wish that were possible, it would be a great thing. However, what you are describing is essentially a public offering, and the listed companies would be subject to all of the associated regulation (SOX included).

The loans would be legal however. This kind of sucks - I can loan 5K to a startup, but I can't become a shareholder. There has got to be a way to 'hack' around this.
Rails 2.2: i18n, HTTP validators, thread safety, JRuby/1.9 compatibility, docs
I understood his point was that in marriage (without the stuff culturally connected to it) they are. And this sounds valid to me.
Presumably it would be easier (and cheaper) to kill a brand while bankrupt than while trying to stay solvent. Dealers might be more amenable to changing brands or state laws if the alternative is to go out of business entirely.
SEC Gives Facebook The Greenlight To Go Beyond 500 Shareholders Without Going Public
Microsoft has been worried that Google will use it's massive cash reserves against them for a while now.

It seems that has now happened, Google will pay manufacturers to include its browser.

Will that pay off for Google though?

Perhaps in the long term, by improving the infrastructure of the web?
This is a new idea but the market is extremely small. None of the those applications are that difficult to replicate. I might be willing to pay for some OpenGL app with a lot of documentation but I don't see this really turning into a good business model.

Even an OpenGL app is pushing it, there is already code from Apple freely available and you can download the code from TouchFighter 2 in some places. I just don't see this filling a need.
Voip solution VOIP Solution
Don't think that the article was the best written, but here are my 2 cents on the subject as a recent transplant..

I moved to the bay area recently. I couldn't agree more - as a tech entrepreneur I absolutely love being in the valley.

If you already know everyone you will need to know, you don't have to be in the valley.. but if you do need to network, you can network about 10x as efficiently in the bay area.

If you are building a business or technology where there is a lot of precedent, you don't need to be in the Valley. But if you are doing something innovative, you need constant feedback from the cutting edge to define and position your company effectively.

Customers? Funding? both could come from anywhere in the country, but if you need to attract either a customer or an investor with a heavy tolerance for risk, the valley is the best bet. Its in the culture.
I'm trying to imagine what good solutions to this problem would look like. Under the current paradigm, you could have a large public company that served as a holding company taking stakes in a large number of small ventures based on some sort of vote or 'internal market of shareholders'.

Another model that could be brought forth with the current legal framework is for the government to provide a set of validated reporting apis, and accounting models that anyone would be free to use, and which so long as you didn't deviate from them would let you comply easily and cheaply.
Ask YC: Apple sent me a takedown notice - what should I do?
Apple recently sent my wiki a takedown notice regarding content a user contributed. The backstory just got picked up on slashdot: http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/11/20/201246&from=rss

It's the policy of the wiki to embrace free speech where-ever possible. Does anyone have any experience fighting this kind of stuff? I don't even know a lawyer that could advise me on what my rights are as a host and/or how much it would cost to contest it.

Slashdotters seem to think the letter isn't legit (http://tinyurl.com/fakedmca), but obviously slashdot comments won't sway a judge.
How about a variable loan: one that would return the profits and/or sale of the startup as interest?
And this is why hackers should not make comments on mechanical and electrical engineering. Especially web hackers - who have absolutely no regulatory (nor moral, usually) concerns when it comes to the safety and reliability of their products.

I consider myself a hacker, but I am a mechanical engineer by training. I've worked in car plants, and I think I'm much more uniquely qualified to speak on this subject than the blog author.

People do not comprehend the kind of cash that a car company needs (and should need) to get into the market. Let me detail the process of producing your car's radiator motor (just the motor!):

- Come up with your awesome motor design (doesn't cost a lot, assuming you and your fellow startup partners are good engineers)

- Draft your designs (draftsmen around here are unionized, and paid a great deal for their work)

- Build a proof of concept. In fact, build several (requires access to a very extensive machine shop, and unless your founders are all exceptionally talented machinists, you have to pay unionized labour more money to get this done)

- Now build several hundred more prototypes. These will go through performance and reliability testing. This will require access to heat testing chambers, sound testing labs, strength testing machinery... you name it. Each of these labs can't really be rented, and cost tens of millions to build and staff. Each piece of equipment needs to be certified by the relevant safety and regulatory body ($$$), and you'll need several people on board full time just to document everything to the minutae required by the same bodies ($$$). Do you know how much a certified laser micrometer costs?

And that's just to get your first working prototype. You're already probably 8-digits invested by this point, and you haven't even yet built out the necessary infrastructure to mass produce your product. By the way, casting a mould for a single part (e.g. your motor casing) costs $200-300K by itself, so moving towards production is not cheap either.

Now multiply that by the tens of thousands of parts in your car.

People (especially software types) simply do not appreciate the sheer, ridiculous amount of effort (and money) it takes to keep them safe. This is also why I'm always wary of cheap goods, because I have seen first hand the difference between well-designed, properly tested products vs. not.

The car industry can never move back towards a tiny-startup model. Sure, there may be room for smaller players, but "thousands of startups" like the web model will never fly, unless you enjoy having your wheels fly off the axle as you drive.
The ideal version, I think, would be a way to invest a tiny amount, so you could diversify even a small (under $10k) investment. Even better, it could make it easier for a consultant to take stock in a small company as compensation, and could even make it plausible to grant stock in return for informal favors, introductions, etc.

I wonder if operating a shell corporation, with stock "accounts" controlled by individual members, would be a workable legal hack to achieve this. It would be fun to try and see.
If You Liked This, Sure to Love That
Yeah. Love it. Hope he keeps it up.
I do tech support part time for students at my school, and I have to agree with the parent. I'm astounded every day by how bad some people are with computers. We have normal email accounts here, and people still have trouble figuring out to use them. I personally think its a great idea (the first thing I did when I got to school was forward my school account), but I'll bet 75% of the people wouldn't be able to figure it out.
And this is precisely the way it should be. Everything when it comes to cars has to be meticulously documented.

You reduce the diameter of that bolt by 0.01", thinking it'll save the company some money, and be strong enough to do its job, and somebody will later come, assuming the bolts weren't changed, and put more load on it. And then one will snap, resulting in a horrific crash that kills everyone in the car. And then the company gets sued, and pays out millions in compensation, not to mention the guilt of having shoddy engineering kill someone.

Code is no less capable of killing innocent people.

You might think that this sort of bureaucracy stifles innovation, or reduces your productivity - but the fact of the matter is that it saves lives, not to mention documents proper liability, etc etc.
But it's also true that happy workers are more productive, healthier, less likely to quit, and thus will make the company more successful.
Insightful to the layman, but to any (traditional) engineer worth his salt it's just crazy talk.
StartupDrinks meetup next wednesday in Montreal
Great comment.

People (especially software types) simply do not appreciate the sheer, ridiculous amount of effort (and money) it takes to keep them safe. This is also why I'm always wary of cheap goods, because I have seen first hand the difference between well-designed, properly tested products vs. not.

What car do you drive?
I consider myself a traditional engineer, at least a traditional 21st century engineer... by insightful, I meant the "food for thought" insightful.
Erm...too late to edit it now, but that should have read POP3. Yeesh.
Yeah, really. It was a real bandwagon of righteous indignation.
Build Your Own Nuclear Fusion Reactor
Specialization Does Not Predict Individual Efficiency in an Ant
Official Google Blog: Our international approach to search
I'll always remember 'boot' fondly, before it was neutered.
Wrong. Congress shouldn't be investing at all. Seriously, the returns when congress invests and when private investors invest are so drastically far apart that I am continuously left wondering how congress can convince voters to let it continue.