skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree that YC being the first to try out this format may give them more experience credit than anyone else. But YC do not control the brand, It does not guarantee success more than it does with let’s say TechStars, if that was the case Google would not be ahead of Yahoo.
What Is The Right Age To Start A Company?
Just read it (page by page). Excellent. Wow, Steve Jobs meets Willy Wonka (without the charisma). He's not charismatic; he's a superconducting magnet.
Of Words and Variables
Jobs is an effective leader. But here's an innocent question from my inexperienced 20-year-old self: I wonder, how many marriages or families in general have been torn apart as a result of Apple's highly driven environment?

If your manager is asking you to work harder, it's easy to forget work-life balance. Sometimes, it even feels good when your manager requests you work late. I once almost became addicted to the feeling of "being heroic", which caused rather severe problems in other aspects of my life.

As far as I've heard, Apple engineers put in a lot of overtime. All that said, are the results worth the pain? Is it worth it to build fantastic products at the expense of others?

I don't know. Personally, I'd say "yes", because nobody is being forced to work for Apple. But it's easy for a company to become somewhat evil by pushing that logic too far.
I'd wager that YC companies are statistically more fund-able or exit-able than other similar stage startups out there. They've been through a round of screening, chosen and mentored by successful entrepreneurs who do it for a living--it's certainly a leg up.
The backup strategy, in my experience, is the first or second thing you need to be thinking about when you set up a server, service or anything IT-related.

The first thing I ask when my boss tells me to set up something new: how are we going to back that up?
"They've been through a round of screening, chosen and mentored by successful entrepreneurs who do it for a living", so do TechStars companies and others.
Why file2hd.com rules
The other day someone posted link to academic earth.com , which is a great site aggregating some of the best university lectures available. However, a lot of times the flash video feeds are choppy crap. No problem! Just feed the URL you want to file2hd.com and then you can download it directly!
There is at long last now a 64-bit Linux build of Flash 10 beta. http://download.macromedia.com/pub/labs/flashplayer10/libfla...
> Isn't that gasoline engines that have a narrow range of near-peak efficiency?

Nope. Read the wikipedia article, especially the last paragraph of "Reliability". (Part of what's happening is that diesels have a smaller overall range, so even if the "90% peak" ratio is bigger, the width of the range is smaller.)

Also, diesel engines' fuel consumption doesn't vary as much with load as do gasoline engines'. (Again, see the wikipedia article.) This makes diesels especially good for hybrid use as it means that they can drive the generator "for free" while the car is being driven with the diesel running at less than full power.
LuaJIT is x86 only, so it's not quite apples to apples.
Why not just secure all of the domains?
Correct. I think we're comparing two different things. I was talking about YC-style seed-stage funding vs other startups. You were talking about YC vs TechStars. Apples and oranges. No disrespect to TechStars, that's just not what I was talking about.
Torvalds:  Linux and OpenSolaris a tough mix
I don't know Lua, but this is the first time I've heard Lua and Ruby equated in terms of expressibility/flexibility (i.e. "high-level"?). Is that a particularly relevant comparison?
This is why it's so important to take some simple steps to ensure that you don't bork your site. For my production sites, I usually have the following setup:

* Replicated Database with one slave in a separate data center just as disaster recovery (not a performance thing with the separate data center). Heartbeat for the slave(s) in the same datacenter so that it stays up.

* Nightly backups offsite. Used to be rsync, but recently thinking of using tarsnap for the ease of it (and S3 puts it in several data centers).

* Files stored either in a MogileFS setup or S3 in multiple data centers.

It doesn't have instant failover to another data center, but the offsite DB slave should mean no data loss beyond a second or two. Ma.gnolia is a decent sized site. Maybe they did have a decent infrastructure and it will only be a little while before they've gotten everything back. Of course, after the fiasco with the blog site that used RAID as their backup system, I've started to think that many people don't take data as seriously as it needs to be taken.
One data point is not enough to dismiss the idea that YC has a better brand name. I would have to agree. Having a better brand name does not mean no other company will ever out do you, it simply means you tend to have a head start out of the gates. Personally, if I had a choice, I'd ally with YC. And I think my perception of them is 90% about the Brand image they present and their track record. That is branding is it not?
I don't know what's going on with Ruby's 'fasta' implementation, but I'm pretty sure it's not x86 assumptions that cause Ruby to use 231x the RAM.
I wonder how it would compare with Ruby 1.9 (released today)?
... allocation/deallocation is really expensive ...

The cost of allocating memory in .NET (and probably other GC environments) is basically equivalent to the cost of incrementing a pointer, which is to say, basically free. The reason is because the .NET garbage collector periodically "packs together" objects in memory, so the memory allocation algorithm essentially becomes:

result = _freeMemoryPtr;
_freeMemoryPtr += numBytesToAllocate;
return result;

... in other words, since objects in memory are periodically "packed together" by the GC, there isn't a lot of memory fragmentation, so the allocator can simply allocate from the end of the heap. It doesn't need to try to find a "large enough free block" within fragmented memory, because memory isn't fragmented.

At least, that is my understanding. I could be wrong because I haven't investigated this thoroughly yet.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garbage_collection_(computer_sc...
I know the Rails team has worked hard towards getting 1.9 compatibility, but what are your opinions about using this on production servers? (I'm kinda edgey myself, it's why I ask.)
pwnyoutube.com claims fair use:

"PWN!" is a frequently used word on the Internet, the meaning of which clearly makes the words "PWN! YouTube" a parody.
Which in-turn, is now an idea magnet that pulls the best deal flow from around the world. I don't think they are the only ones that are capable of doing this tho.

ycom also seems to be more consumer focused, which is what most of the techblogs cover because it brings eyeballs. consumer exits are often big pay days, but more importantly to me at least — the most fun to work on. B2B is often a drab. lol

i think some of these incubators should not forget the enterprise play either. Austin Ventures had A/V Labs awhile back, but I don't recall much about its success.
Of course; Get a native JIT'ed version of ruby going, then you can make a fair comparison.
I'm planning on burning time on building a full failure solution. Records snapshotted at least daily and any single node/service can die entirely and there is an exact, tested manual recovery checklist or automatic rollover option in place for each permutation.

This runs counter to the more cavalier "release early, polish later" advice I keep seeing. Maybe I am doubly freaked out because the things I'm storing are not easily recovered or re-imported by the users themselves or any kind of algorithm/redux.
it's because the ruby implementation of "fasta" computes the entire result in memory and then prints it out; the lua one prints as it goes.

so, i'd take it with a huge slab of salt.
Personally, I would hav just done Lua vs Ruby instead of LuaJIT vs Ruby.

Results look almost the same ;-)

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/benchmark.php?test=all...

Lua is generally the fastest scripty language, ruby is generally the slowest. Ruby is much more general purpose though -- Lua is very optimized for embedding.
It's going to take a lot more to really save Fannie Mae :)
Unlike say...JRuby?
“You were talking about YC vs TechStars. Apples and oranges.” Ah, That is disrespectful to TechStars they are in the same business and it is exactly what we have been talking about, read the thread again.

I’m one founder who has great admiration for YC, but I just don’t think they have the key to startup success. I think this should be clear in all HN readers mind despite the hype around here. Ultimately it will serve the startup world very well that YC get competitors, because no matter their commitment they will not spot all future success.
If you look at any site which you consider has a good quality design, there's one big difference that it has to your own site: it uses images.

Lots of images.

That's the key to good design that most engineers don't understand.

Yes, there is elegance in Google, reddit, news.yc, etc, and yes, you can go way overboard with really bad image picks. But if you want to go for something other than 'minimalist', you should find a good personal collection of (non cheesy) stock photos, subtle patterns, gradients, edges, icons, and corners. Get some simple photoshop retouching skills too.

Seriously, learning how to use images effectively will take your design skills up to the next level.
This story has been killed so no one will read this, but I can't help but respond.

The statement that France was "spending tomorrow's money today and now it's gone" is ridiculous. In 2007, France's national debt as a percentage of GDP was 63.9% and the USA was at 60.8%. Both countries will be facing hard times in the future; however, neither are on the verge of collapse.

The economic crisis is global, and countries who had nothing to do with it (coughjapancough) are affected by it. It's pretty cheap to try to use it to pin France's economy as weak, when their system has worked well for decades. French people have benefited greatly from the extra service provided by government, and their government is quite efficient compared to most.

France chose a different system than the USA because their view of an ideal society is different. Both of them have been fairly successful; neither are utopian. I happen to support the French strikers who are opposing the recent changes, not because I think the old system is better, but because I like cultural diversity and choice, and I don't want the world to become homogenized.
Me too. It motivated me to spend the last 15 minutes looking into Lua.

Similarities: Block/lambda support and syntax, optional parentheses, control statements as block, prefix, or postfix.

OTOH, "how come Lua is not as widespread as say, Python ? I'd say the answer is this: there is no real standard library, and as opposed to Python, Lua doesn't come with batteries included." -- http://www.ivy.fr/blog/index.php/2008/03/17/83-kahlua-lua-on...
DRM makes game unplayable after 1/28/09
Not yet. Think about all of the gem/plugin dependencies which may not be 1.9 compatible.
Yeah, actually. Lua isn't as clean as Ruby (or Python, or your_favorite_language), but it has the advanced features you'd expect from a powerful scripting language: closures, coroutines, etc. Rather, Lua is like a really experienced prostitute. Not necessarily beautiful, but can do all the tricks and can get the job done efficiently and inexpensively.

To get started with Lua, I'd recommend PIL: http://www.lua.org/pil/
For what it's worth, JRuby performs a tiny bit better.

I think Ruby in general is less amenable to analysis/compilation than Lua is, so even a JITed Ruby might not do as well as Lua.
Having done a lot of both, Lua feels more pythonic than rubyish in many small ways. Objects are just syntactic sugar where self is the first arg (though unlike python, lua has the syntactic sugar to make it prettier to look at), etc. Interestingly, typical OO Lua is prototype based, not class based -- in that way it is more javascriptish.

Most lua codebases I have seen tend to be written in what I call an "imperative functional" style, where the language isn't purely functional, but functions are the most common means of abstraction.

It has proper anonymous functions, lexical scoping, etc so you can write very rubyish code (such as moonunit http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/httpd/httpd/trunk/modules/lu... and using it http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/httpd/httpd/trunk/modules/lu... ).
LuaJIT makes the Lua mandelbrot program run 95 times faster than Ruby's, whereas the stock Lua interpreter is only 17 times faster.

Better yet, LuaJIT is a drop-in replacement. There's no reason not to use it, as far as I know.
Quite obviously because there are so many.
Without some discussion of why Lua is faster, this isn't very interesting. Lua is known for being small and fast, so this benchmark shouldn't be news to most people here.

SBCL is faster still, averaging about half the speed of GCC and about the same as Java.
Don't build websites: develop the web
Foxmarks (Mitch Kapor's startup) adds suggested tags to Firefox bookmark sync
I wish Twitter allowed comments on tweets. Companies (like Magnolia) use it for important announcements / status updates, and yet there's no way to see feedback from the community.
I like the name. It's in Austin, so lots of stuff around there is called Capital something or other. This takes that trend and makes it punny.
Are you serious? Lua has an extremely clean and orthogonal core. It's got serious CS mojo. The "batteries not included" bit is probably the greatest detraction to Lua as a general-purpose scripting language.
That's what search.twitter.com is for.
Tool Tips: InCopy Galley & Layout View at the same time
Anyone know how this is compared to Beginning iPhone Development by Dave Mark? I was going to go buy that today, actually.
Bike sharing programs have failed dozens, if not hundreds of times already.

People don't respect property unless they own it.

This will be another boondoggle (with government dollars) like all the other bike sharing programs to date.
I've read that Hulu uses RTMP instead of HTTP.
Very true, Lua is optimized for being very small, fast, and portable. It optimizes for embedding, which means you cannot make assumptions about what you are allowed to do, so it errs on the side of very little.

On the other hand, interfacing to C is the nicest of anything I have done, by a long shot, so the lack of batteries isn't that painful in practice. It fills a different niche than python or ruby, in its, it shines.
You're right; I should have said, "malloc/free is really expensive".
Since I feel bad about no one answering -

You already recognized that opening up is the trend. Using Facebook is really about the target audience that you're going for - Facebook users have particular expectations and habits online. You get the expectations of the user base by associating yourself with Facebook. This may be useful for a fun application, or even a social application, but beyond that and it gets complicated.

For instance, I wouldn't connect any business application to Facebook; linked-in is opening up their api and it may be a better market space for business applications (even though I dislike that crowd). A business application connected to Facebook is for the wrong crowd, and won't take advantage of the viral aspect of using a large existing user base. People also don't look for business applications on Facebook.

Think about your target audience first, and then go after them where they congregate.
Well, LuaJIT only runs on x86, and only in 32-bit mode. Though, the work-in-progress LuaJIT 2 is supposed to be easily portable to ARM or other architectures.
Figuring out a branching strategy
I love the "only 17 times faster" bit ;-)
"Jobs correctly predicted that attempts by the major labels to find a technological solution to piracy would fail. When it came to subscription music services, he said the public would reject them."

I think most people on HN have predicted the same thing. To create something like iTunes, presumably a huge army of lawyers was necessary. Not saying that other people could have been as successful, but it was definitely not something some guy in a garage could have done, because of the legal issues.
Huh, the first thought to my mind was "How many people have access to do that sort of damage"

How about tightening up their access control mechanisms next?

A contractor had root access to all 4k boxes?
This guy should read HN. He complains about problems with Yahoo domain renewal, and talks about how much better Google has their act together. However...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=453350
JRuby is not a JIT for Ruby, and it doesn't compile Ruby to Java bytecode. It's a Ruby interpreter, written in Java.
This brings Foxmarks closer to delicious, which is a direct competitor. Mitch Kapor talks about Foxmarks vs. Delicious here: http://blog.kapor.com/?p=28
Page For Page Scrape of Site Pirated and Posted on New Domain
See http://www.sothebyshomes.com/
I know a little about the Sothebys site, as the company I work for created it, and I wrote a fair bit of the Javascript myself.

The original site makes extensive use of js to load content, and anywhere data is missing on the pirated site, that's why.

What we can't figure out here in the office, is why they did it? How much of this is going on?
I like the idea of the offsite slave. I was also reading about another idea, forcing a slave delay to recover from oopses/corruption:

http://www.rustyrazorblade.com/2008/05/07/mysql-time-delayed...
Super Bowl Ads: Get Out the 3D Glasses
See http://www.sothebyshomes.com/
I know a little about the Sothebys site, as the company I work for created it, and I wrote a fair bit of the Javascript myself.

The original site makes extensive use of js to load content, and anywhere data is missing on the pirated site, that's why.

What we can't figure out here in the office, is why they did it? How much of this is going on?
Certainly. I didn't mean to deride anyone's work with the comparison. I meant, some of the implementation decisions seem arbitrary, and seem like they were made "for the sake of being different".

For example, Lua's use of two dashes for line comments, and --[[ and --]] for block quotes. That lets you remove the first --[[ in a block quote without causing the program to break, because the "closing" block quote is commented out at that point (because --]] is a comment at that point). But really, that's so different from other languages that it seems like a liability rather than an asset. That's what I meant by "not necessarily beautiful". It is definitely beautiful in certain other aspects, though.

Also, if I were writing a scripting language, I'd love for it to be "like a prostitute". Even if nobody respected it, everyone would be using it.
I can't see a reason given that there are only adds on a few of the pages. Plus they missed a few with their global find/replace. http://realestate103.com/aboutus/termsandconditions.html
Just curious, what do you do? It's interesting that you optimize a lot of C/C++ programs... game development maybe?
"Fair" comparisons of the sort you're talking about are not useful when choosing a language. If I'm choosing a language for an application, I don't care if it's unfair that one is much faster than the other because it has a JIT compiler instead of an interpreter - I only care which one is the most suitable.
My guess is something cryptographic.
I'm sure, but luajit wins handily over all the scripting interpreters. I'm not much concerned with ruby in particular. I'm suspicious that luajit is constrained in features. I doubt you can dynamically load in object code for modules, for example. This makes it not quite a straightforward comparison to the other interpreters.
Is the Red Herring dead?
I'd account for dumb jocks under my 'understimulated brain' column.
It's a classic dilemma -- most people don't care about backups until immediately after it's too late.
I feel Beginning iPhone Development is good because it helps build your confidence so that you can work on getting through your own projects and Aaron Hillegass' book. This book seems more advanced, and I will go get a copy this weekend.

Aside from learning from $30-40 books: Building a calculator from scratch was recommended to me and is a great project that you can go from basic (accumulator) to nuts (Quartz rendering) on.
Short version: Elon Musk is Ozymandias.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozymandias_(comics)
MySpace CEO DeWolfe Jabs Back At Yahoo’s Bartz (Video)
"take some simple steps to ensure that you don't bork your site"

unborked[.com] is currently available.

A site dedicated to stopping all of the borking going on out there.

===

I think some cheap, simple sql dumps from the db, burned to an external HD and taken home would've been a good first step -- your data would be dated but somehow restorable nonetheless without the need for off-site, replicated, heart-beat monitored databases.

IMHO you really need an expert database admin (of which I am not) to get all of this up and keep all of it going; a caretaker who's only job in life is the maintenance of any and all persisted data.

On another note, backups are really useless unless you have actually tested the restores.
From reading the notice, I get the feeling that they don't have any backups! Not very re-assuring at all.
TED 2004, Kunstler Dissects Suburbia
I'd really like to store incrementals of my MySQL at S3. Anyone using something they really like? Or should I just break-down and do full dumps each night?
No FlowingData love?
Gut wrenching, for sure. To see your whole model explode, it's just not worth it.

If you don't have a backup plan -- close your browser, stop surfing Y!Hacker, and go write a shell script to dump your database and rsync to anywhere else on earth.
Architecture and urban planning are very close to software IMHO, being about form and function and complex systems. This one is a brilliant talk on that subject.
Is this an objective recommendation or do you have some stake in the company?
This entire essay hinges on the assumption that Microsoft's priced Windows (and Office?) inefficiently. Implicitly, it may also hinge on the presumption that the true dollar value of OS software is basically zero.

I'm not so sure on the first, and I know the second is plainly false. For the average consumer, the switching cost associated with moving from Windows to Linux is quite hefty relative to buying a new copy of Windows 7...
wget is your friend. I would have been making sites like this all along had I known that all I had to do was move to Poland. Easy Money.
Would be cool to have an API for this (just send it a URL and get back a list of tags)
It'll be a time sink. Why not do it as dirty as possible now and go back and tune it as time goes on?
> Even if nobody respected it, everyone would be using it.

By that metric, PHP is the scripting language for you. ;)

The double hyphen comment is used elsewhere. SQL comes to mind.
The sample I hear from about Harvard's undergraduate math program consists largely of participants on the Art of Problem Solving forum

http://www.artofproblemsolving.com/Forum/index.php?f=143

and those participants include many young people from various countries who have participated in the International Mathematics Olympiad.
Are both sets of code optimized?
It also runs counter to "do the simplest thing that could possibly work" and "KISS" and "YAGNI".

Doesn't mean it's a bad idea though. But if it's that good, make sure you announce it and market it as a significant feature...
If Microsoft ships Windows 7 for $99, how does this change the game?

I would go out and buy it immediately for my Mac's VM.
Way back in May 2007, Facebook reported using 200 16GB memcached servers, and suggested 32GB servers were soon on the way:

http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.web.cache.memcached/3224

Big, popular services don't skimp when fighting latency.
VC Explained To A 5th Grader