skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Is anyone making money with Twitter API? Are they still in this recession?

The chance they will have success charging for their api is low. They might still report success since it's in their interests to do so.
Not so long ago, free software barely had browsers that were acceptable to the mainstream. Now it does. It'll get to Access, it just takes time. Free Software still has a lot of ground to make up, but it is gaining ground on proprietary software.
Seedcamp (Europe)
I kind of liked the idea of this article, but it lost me and I skimmed to the end. I feel deeply alone at times, so I can't agree that solitude is lost.
while it is true that you cannot accurately display Pantone on screen, Pantone colors are essential for getting things printed correctly & good graphic (print) designers know exactly how their screen representation might differ from the paper prints.

I agree that the gimp is functionally good for many users, but right now it's caught in a weird space splitting 2 markets rather than committing to one. if it is intended to be a complete alternate to photoshop, great, make it so. you can start with the list above, but there are many other features beyond those that are similar but not the same. if the intent is not to be a replica of photoshop & rather to provide a photo editing tool that covers a wider market (that maybe doesn't need Pantone/print integrity) that's fine too - but then they've got a lot of work to do in making the experience friendly to that wider/non-photoshopper market.

I don't think the parent was spreading FUD, rather, i think gimp needs to be more clear about setting expectations. maybe it's just a me-problem that doesn't apply outside this anecdote, but i've tried to get convinced by gimp many times through many versions and it's always hit that uncanny valley that inspired too much fear, uncertainty & doubt to become part of my everyday workflow.
could you please post the link to the digg article?
cacti is pretty useful for graphing, just pings snmpd on each server, and can do cool custom stuff
Did someone make a spreadsheet of available programs on HN earlier? I thought I saw something along those lines back in the day.
I don't see what the big deal is.

Evidently not. Whereas I am a photographer and I speak from having evaluated GIMP for my own use (and I'm hardly a high-end fashion or advertising pro, I do a few weddings a year) and found it lacking. It's hysterical claims that free-X is a perfect substitute for commercial-Y when it's simply not true that do the most harm to free software's credibility.
There is a difference between them and YC: YC requires you to have an idea, DreamIT just wants ambitious hackers and business people. In a way they have found a way to be even earlier stage than YC.
I'm interested, although this overlaps with GDC.
You might be right, but claiming that SQLite (a fine piece of software that I often use) is a substitute for Access in the here and now is unreasonable.
Why monads have not taken the Common Lisp world by storm
Advice: Just finish it
Groovy has no library. It's basically an alternative syntax for Java. I like the way many of Python's libraries work (even though they are incredibly inconsistent)
I think the Lisp + functional programming + concurrency primitives shows a lot more about what kinds of problems Clojure is trying to solve than the fact that it runs on the JVM.
The thing that made me doubt.

"What about work to sequester carbon dioxide?

That is a waste of time. It's a crazy idea..."

"So are we doomed?

There is one way we could save ourselves and that is through the massive burial of charcoal[aka sequestered CO2]..."
Nuclear power is not an option. There are about three companies in the world that have the know-how to build a nuclear power plant. And they are already at the limit of their building-capacity.

Also, some people argue that the nuclear fuel resources are rather limited and will support even the existing plants for less than 100 years. For a significant reduction (10%-20%. No idea if that is enough to fight global warming) of CO2 emissions, it would be necessary to build at least three times as many nuclear plants as there are today.
The biggest problem with one vote per IP is that you block pretty much all AOL users.
The quality of a program like YC depends on two intertwined factors:

- who is running it, so they provide real value from real experts

- the reach they have, so that the applicants are top-notch and you benefit from interacting with other rising stars

In the case of DreamIt, it's a bit of a chicken and egg problem. If no one has heard of you, no matter how great your coaching will be, you end up with second rate projects and there's not much you can do to make stupid ideas fly. And once you are known for a batch of mediocre projects, none of the smart entrepreneurs want to join your program, and you are stuck.

I hate cronysm, but who you know matters so much and makes such a big difference, it's scary.
Wish I could go but the company is sending me to DrupalCon the month before. My company is looking to hold a jQuery UnCon sometime in April though, so we'll be eager to see what sort of response JSConf is getting.
A Folding Language
They still have the default Drupal favicon up there! hahaha, no wonder they are begging for hackers...

They need to hire a copy editor "We each founded, built and successfully sold one or more business."

Seriously, the videos on this page are all quotes from very very young kids.
http://dreamitventures.com/node/16

All those videos talk about how great everyone is and wow, it's so awesome and look around, this is totally terrific,

EXCEPT! They never say WHY! they never talk about anything quantifiable. Sure, it's fun, and exciting and great, but are they going to help you get your product to market? How much of your equity are they going to take for it? Was it worth it?

No one has talked about any of that. These guys seem like marketing scamsters and I'm highly highly skeptical.

I would suggest any young entrepreneur come here to HN first and get help before going to those guys.

Back during the dot-com boom, I saw lots and lots of incubators like this, idealabs, et all and they were largely a big waste of time. They were fun though!

If you're looking to have "fun" these kinds of shops may be the place to go, but if you are looking to be productive and build something valuable that is going to make a lasting impression on the world, I suspect these guys are a massive waste of time.

It seems from the videos and the marketing mumbo-jumbo that they are preying on the young, passionate, and inexperienced minds that would be better served somewhere else.

All the portfolio companies are Web 2.0 me toos, mostly boring, and short lasting "features" -- not real products that improve the world around us in any substantial way.

I can sense a bit of "anger" in my tone here. I feel a big sense of "these guys are not good" when I browse around their site...

But that's just my intuition and intuition can be wrong, so whatever.

http://dreamitventures.com/node/6
anthillz is trying to get out of technology what human relationships are for. Go meet people in the real world.

Beanstockd? It was a blog and they are trying to build a company?

Drop card? Why would I waste my time putting my personal info into a shady startup just so i can text my contact info to someone when i could jsut hand them a business card?

ugh... these guys are so transparent.

Look at the videos! They just got some kids up there to do a presentation on a screen in front of a no one so they could add these vimeos to their site to make it look legit.

Watch the interview best one, there's only one old guy there and the startup is okay, but is it "worth" anything? probably not. Any motivated person isn't going to need them and i can't see anyone paying for it...

There's nothing new or novel about any of their startups...

They're marketing hope. They are behind the times, you want to work with someone /ahead/ of the times.

Look elsewhere first!!
I need books that I can’t buy, I drink beer that I can’t sip
It can't possibly matter which one is smarter. We need more of those, that's it.

It helps if the media will portray either as a hero or role model for kids. So in that regard, Einstein was more of a success. Those guys started vocations. There is an exponential effect when your life inspires people generation after generation.
Steve, it's a thoroughly delightful story. I read the whole thing (well, I did skim a couple places - I've got work to do), identified with large stretches of it and enjoyed all of it. It captures the feeling of being completely enraptured with computers when you're a kid. Brought back some memories for me.

"Here" has been slow lately. I'm glad somebody posted your thing.

By the way: why on earth wouldn't you put this stuff on your resume? Don't you know there are employers out there who actually get what it means to be a born programmer, which you obviously are? Not everything out there is Oracle Forms - even within your 15 minute commute. Raise your goddamn standards :)
Sharing Is Creepy
Writes about how Steve Yegge's concept of a very expressive "folding language" relates to his own programming language, Ioke (he quotes someone saying that Ioke is an infinitely-foldable language). I still do not know what Ioke has over LISP, especially one like PLT Scheme.
Yes. How many systems 'jump' to universality when they start getting powerful is one topic of David Deutsch's upcoming book The Beginning of Infinity. (BTW it happens in other fields too, not just computing.)

While waiting for that new book, I recommend reading his previous book The Fabric of Reality.
Stuff changes. How long has copyright law been around? Are we supposed to believe that the entire human race was doing it wrong before us?

I'm not against copyright. I'm saying this is a shift of historical magnitude that no RIAA or MIAA or WTFIAA or for that matter anyone has the power to stop. Like anything, its effects will be both good and bad and depend on your point of view. For example, the record industry may consider it bad that they have less money for plates of cocaine in the boardrooms where they've swindled countless musicians out of their life's work. Personally I find that one rather pleasing.
Monit has been very useful to me as well.

I also use capistrano's command: "cap shell" to easily type the same command on all the servers.
You're right -- the teleportation aspect should almost be secondary. I think the reason the article got stuck with this headline is that it attracts eyeballs (hey, it got me interested).

The more "hacker" relevant section is the surprisingly accurate section on quantum computing. If such a computer could be built, it would mean a breakdown of pretty much all current crypto algorithms.
> "... decay into anarchy."

Anarchy != chaos. Pet peeve #472.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchy
This is a great link, really great, and yet I fear it's inadequate to the task of explaining the situation to a nonphysicist. [1] It makes use of both (a) bras and kets and (b) a Zen koan. At this point we have abundant experimental evidence that these things don't help most people.

---

[1] Not that there aren't plenty of physicists who need help, too.
> It has serious issues which make it not often a realistic choice, but it has a clarity and consistency of design that linux will never know.

Fail. Reality is crufty.
Would it not have just been more useful to have looked up the source yourself?

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/323/5913/486

If you're wondering why science writers don't normally link to the paper, often they have pre-embargo access and there's no live link at the time of posting. They should still give the DOI though.
Do you care?
That can't possibly have a legal basis. Two words is too short to copyright, patents don't apply, so you're left with trademark.

I didn't think a company can come after you for using their trademark to refer to the product the trademark covers.
... at least their site looks better than it did last year.
The Mother of All Demos -- The mouse, the window, and hypertext
Since this was covered by Fox News, we must assume that these were creation scientists transporting matter using the power of prayer.
My long-held theory is it failed for lack of a blurb. When you visited the site, it was hard to figure out what Plan 9 was exactly. Digging into the documentation produced a link to a gzipped .ps file, and after installing Ghostscript, then Ghostview, then some fonts, then uncompressing the file and viewing it, one could read an academic paper describing in arcane language some problems of interest to file systems theoreticians. This state of affairs continued for years. Not surprising at all that it failed to get much traction.
I'm not saying you can find almost any programming book on Scribd but someone could have said that and I wouldn't accuse them of lying.
My impression is that PG et al. require an idea as a way of figuring out who can think of reasonable ideas. They don't require you to stick with it, so primarily they're looking for good people. Requiring an idea is just another way to try and sort out the wheat from the chaff, even if the idea in question isn't the final one used for the startup.
While working as a web developer at a Fortune 500, we had these same sort of issues. Web sites would go down and we'd get a call from someone trying to use it. This was 10 years ago...

To learn about and fix these problems before the customer, some interns built a scheduled web site poller that would check the response for error codes and timeouts, push the status to a database and send an email to subscribers.

They built it, knowing very little about programming or anything, in just a few weeks and reduced our customer calls dramatically. We were aware of the problem and resolved it reducing customer complaints substantially!

Anyway, that kind of thing is very easy to build, just go do it. Monitor at the application level for failures, most errors at the infrastructure level bubble up anyway so you can catch them at the end point.

Now, if you want to do scalability projections or monitoring of non-web apps, this won't help...
Quality site. Really well done.
Gary Vaynerchuk is ambitious
Gary: "I absolutely believe I am going to own the Jets."

Gary's father: "There are much bigger things to come…I think he has a very good chance to replace Oprah."

Don't you just love this?
What's happening with HURD anyway, on that note?
25 Years of Macintosh in photos
sounds like the term "cloud computing"
How to Destroy Your Twitter Brand in Minutes
John Resig did a writeup on how it works (and the author makes an appearance in the comments):

http://ejohn.org/blog/ocr-and-neural-nets-in-javascript/
Safari (safaribooksonline.com) offers a good option for reading widely at relatively low cost. They have all the O'Reilly books, many Addison-Wesley and Microsoft Press books, and recently added some Apress titles. Alas, Safari has almost nothing on Lisp. You can download Practical Common Lisp and On Lisp elsewhere, courtesy of their authors.
yeah, you can use facebook connect to get the school networks associated to a user. might help simplify your reg process.
I am after both of these but also I need a way to aggregate a lot of log files and perform actions like "If there was no log entry X in the last N days send an email" or "If system A wrote N entries to database and system B did not process any in time T perform some action or raise an alarm". I would guess a kind of aggregating of events and running scripts based on what happened. All the systems could be modified to log to an additional place if needed.
How to Choose Chart Types (pic)
Not so much naive, as crazy.
AlphaLab in Pittsburgh
Confessions of a TED Addict
http://mamp.info
Silicon Valley entrepreneurs still thinking big
s/Scribd/gigapedia/g
Steve Jobs Giving His First Big Demo (Video)
Wired was earlier by 3 months: http://www.wired.com/techbiz/startups/magazine/16-11/ff_face...
Why have a desktop with icons and gadgets that is usually hidden behind app windows?
There must be a better way.
I don't really see the connection.
OK, slightly different occasion, but the same principle ;)
XamlCruncher for Silverlight
Go to a better school.
He doesn't need books he can't buy. Information about Computers is ubiquitous online.

> I have a growing interest in the LISP language and the only book I could find here was LISP

Is he joking? Is Google banned where he lives?

http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book.html
http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.001/abelson-sussma...
http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/
http://www.paulgraham.com/onlisp.html
Or don't go to school. School for CS is a complete waste of time unless you're looking for a pedigree.
When the Education Bubble Finally Pops:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=432743
Just because one thing's more abstract than another doesn't make it more profound.
Don't worry, once you hit level 20 you can multiclass.

It actually looks like their model is that they find three strangers with different skillsets and put them together in a team. It's an interesting idea, but it seems like interpersonal problems down the line could be a pretty big problem.
Here are a few questions.

Have you ever read SICP (online)?
Have you ever read The Practical Common LISP (online)?
Have you ever read any e-book worth 400 pages completely?

I guess not.
Shotput in Atlanta
Treasuries Plunge, Led by 30-Year Bonds - Did the Bond Bubble just pop?
Can you say more about Gigapedia?

The site seems fishy: there's little info unless you register (which I have not yet), and registration requires a Google account.
Looks like the current front page, not the best stories of the week..
Well, the successful person is the one who reaches the goals he sets for himself.

If your goal is to become rich no matter what, you can become very successful as a drug baron.

It looks like you're confusing successful and respectable.
You can't change the way lookups happen at runtime in Lisps. In Ioke (and Io), you can modify the proto chain as the application runs. You can also add and remove slots of objects. You can't add and remove variables from a closure in any Lisps that I am aware of.
that article makes Gary sound like a kid...if someone read it w/o that first bit where it says he is 32, they would have thought the article was about a 16 year old
Google ready to pursue its agenda in Washington
See if your local library has a subscription to Safari Books Online.

For example, Boston Public Library's hidden gem is that anyone in Massachusetts can sign up for an E-Card for free. From there, you can use their electronic resources, which includes a huge number of databases, as well as Safari Online Computer & Business Books. It's brilliant.

Though admittedly it's a pain in the ass to read on the computer.
Thanks for the feedback! Hopefully a substantial pot of bounty cash will accumulate, making it more appealing to bloggers and web publishers.

AS
Thanks for the feedback - its a big help.

Can you clarify what you are asking here ""What is the validation model for the Job Seeker eclipsing 3 months?"" - I'll try to answer.

Thanks

AS
Great feedback thank you!

AS
He doesn’t mention it much but I really think the problem with Higher Education is that people are starting to realize how useless it’s become. I'll tell you how I became convinced of this.

(this is kind of long for a HN post but it's a funny story)

I was having a discussion with a room full of college graduates recently. The meeting was about how managers should, when they have to order employees to do something, go in with the mindset of convincing the employees that the decision is wise rather than just dictate it to them. In the discussion I jokingly said something like "Don’t go all Lenin on them". They countered by saying they didn’t understand what I meant. After a short and very confusing discussion I said I didn’t understand how they could equate what I was saying to what was done in Communist Russia. They responded by asking what Russia had to do with anything?

At that point it hit me: They were talking about John Lennon. They had no idea who Vladimir Lenin was.

The reason this had such an impact on me (aside from the obvious) is this: I’ve long been convinced that universities simply don’t care about practical skills anymore. A Computer Science graduate, for instance, can often graduate without having ever written a line of html, javascript or css. But the one excuse Universities had was that at least they were still teaching culture. This incident dispelled that myth for me and at that point I had lost all faith in the current university system.

I still believe in education but I don't believe Universities are providing a good one anymore.
If someone made a Firefox plugin that converts the volume of text which has a appeared at a users screen for more than 10 seconds to A4 pages, I am sure a typical Internet user reads more than 100 pages daily. For example the Wikipedia article for "Common Lisp" in print view will be printed to 19(!) pages. And it appears so short. You can make notes in notepad (the real thing) if you like to think about the problem outside - notes are great thing by themselves.

You will have to do the exercises eventually and so there is no escape from the screen. I usually read a book about programming by executing the examples and solving the exercises while occasionally looking at the text for some guidance when I am stuck.. has anyone read a programming book which is ~100% executable (no cheating with excessive comments ;-))?
Ask HN: Proposal for Managing the Addictiveness of This Site
My partner and I were just talking about this business of how addictive HN is and how even certain industrious founders are struggling to balance it with other stuff. Turning the site off for a few hours a day seems a bit... heavy-handed. How about leveraging the power of shame instead? Here's our proposal:

Public Humiliation

1. You can go to the Profile page and promise to be off the site for X hours.

2. During the X hours, your username is colored differently to show how virtuous you are.

3. If you break your promise, your username gets colored RED to publicly shame you and reveal your weakness to the world.

You could do it without #2, but I like that step. I think it would feel more like a game to see who else was playing. Also, seeing lots of people keeping their promises would nudge me in the same direction.
Hmm. That's a neat idea. Although I have an American Library in my city. It has a one or two unique titles but I couldn't find anything for LISP and neither for Python or Ruby. It did have Code Complete.
Not included is what to do if your data is location based.

http://www.vimeo.com/1998080
Bezos spoke at Startup School last year, and I think a lot of people were struck by how aware he was about very technical details at Amazon (Web Services, specifically). What impressed me most, however, was that when one of his employees gave a waffly non-answer to a question from the audience, he called him on it (subtly and politely), and made the guy commit to a real answer to the question...and made him personally responsible for it (with a comment along the lines of, "You can email him for that information and he'll get it to you.").

It was interesting to see, and it struck me as one of the things about Bezos that can explain how he has been so successful with a "bookstore on the web" when so many other "X on the web" concepts failed. You can't control every customer interaction in a company that size, but in that moment he established a precedent for that particular group of employees (probably folks who don't deal with customers a lot, since they were tech folks from AWS).

What I'm saying is that Bezos has certainly drunk some kind of obsessively customer-focused Kool-Aid, and I think I would take any opportunity I could to learn from him.
I've never heard of them before today. Looking at the portfolio I couldn't find any startups there that I've heard of before either.
Twitterific is making money from it.