skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
All the discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=477879

Also posted:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=478433

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=478264

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=477885

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=477862
All the discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=477879

Also posted:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=478433

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=478137

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=477885

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=477862
We have a simple business policy - we do not sign NDAs.

I am not aware of any situation where that has lost us work - you can usually point to sufficient flaws in any given NDA to show that it is invalid in practice or that you as (say) director (is that vice president in the USA?) of a business you would be in breach of trust to your own company should you sign it.
Drug Intervention Colorado 
Drug Intervention Colorado
whoa, it's the guy that made grabup -- love that application (amusingly I emailed them a few months ago asking to advertise (paid) on their site -- never got a reply)

great story, will be sure to track his blog and progress. Great to see awesome projects from fellow brits :)
But existing emulators are usually specialised and themselves prone to becoming outdated. KEEP is intended to be the "first general purpose emulator", designed to be migrated easily to new computing platforms.

Makes no sense to me. Why not just optimize your emulator for x86 and emulate that, should it ever go away?
Where comes the notion that it were to be either this or that?

Why not use a relational database for data that actually suits the relational model, and an object/hierarchical/keyvalue database for complete entities that are often mapped to objects in code? Just put each kind of data to a storage that makes sense.

If you start with a RDBMS, there are plenty of options of how to store the objects. You can just use plain files in the simplest case. Or a good dbm style database. Or if your objects are mostly read-only you can keep the data in the RDB and cache the big joins. Or if you're really stuck with the RDB only you can even store the key-value pairs in the RDB: just make a two-column table for run-time data and keep it separate from the actual relational data. Or keep everything in the RDB but make a live copy off the RDB when the user logs in to keep the runtime data accessible and then unpack it back to the RDB lazily or when the user logs out. There are pretty much endless possibilities depending on your business and search needs.

Ain't easy but non-trivial databases never are.
Canvas:Text is only available on Firefox 3.1, AFAIK.
http://hg.mozilla.org/labs/bespin/
I agree that when I am absorbed in a task, time passes quickly. But I'm not sure it's a measure of productivity. An evening can be over too quickly if you fill it with dinner and a good movie.

However, waking up always catches me by surprise.
I've found that the best definition for "startup" that I've come up with is that a startup is a business that seeks a future liquidity event. A web company that is one guy's lifestyle business selling tv stands isn't a startup any more than a small family owned restaurant. But a restaurant chain like Chipotle is a startup -- at least, until they were bought by McDonalds.

Thus there are startups in and outside the tech world.
Be careful leaving the future of your app open to user feedback, especially when it comes to feature requests.

A good talk on this topic (by 37signals' Jason Fried):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4H8RB24ZfRo
Programmer productivity can be measured.

In Peopleware DeMarco and Lister explain the Gilb Measurability Principle by what they call Gilbs law:
"Anything you need to quantify can be measured in some way that is superior to not measuring it at all."

That does not mean that it will be easy, cheap or perfect, only that it will be better than not measuring.

Tom Gilb:
"Sometimes, it seems difficult to identify satisfactory scales of measure. Often, the only ones that can be found are indirect, imprecise, and have other problems associated with them. From my point of view, these problems can be tolerated. The specific scales of measure, and meters for measuring, can always be worked on, and improved over time. In all cases, an attempt at quantified specification is better than vague words."
IE8 Blacklist: forcing standards rendering opt-in
The recession's unexpected winners
> hate advertising and won't use any site with it.

Wow, that excludes a pretty large portion of the internet. No Google, no Yahoo, no online newspapers, not many 'blogs'...
I love ads. And the cash they make. I don't think they cheapen a website at all, and you'd be hard pressed to find that many websites without some form of advertising.

Try them out, and see if they work, and see if your users find them useful, or horrible.

Also do the maths - how many Pro accounts would you need to sell to make the same amount as sticking a couple of adverts up?
I've been using a javascript based editor for this:

http://www.heclbuilder.com

It seems to work ok, although it's not as full featured as their system.

As for me, though... they will pry Emacs out of my cold, dead hands.
The 90's comic strip "The VC" on NDA's: http://www.thevc.com/strips/strip05.html
What the hell?!

This is what counts as front-page material? Here is a question for cringely: maybe the chart is only designed to show subjective differences and the people who made the chart concluded the scaling by diameter instead of area was a better option?

And based on this flimsy evidence you denounce the entire fscking industry? Does that make any logical sense to anybody who has spent more than a nanosecond giving any serious thought to this?

How arrogant can you get.
So i was wondering what would be a good way to collect users' reactions and requests?

Check your email.

No, I don't mean right now. Well, sure, actually. Check your email right now. And every 5 minutes while you're awake for the rest of the year.

When you get an email from a user, reply to it. Get into a conversation with your users. Find out who they are. Tell them what features you're thinking about adding next, and ask for their opinions.

The biggest problem you'll ever have with collecting feature requests is the people who have great ideas but are too polite to bother you with them. If you can get those people to see you as a friendly human rather than as a faceless business, they'll be far more likely to send you their ideas.
Keep in mind that you don't have that much time. More than one RoR bastard will know about your website soon and frankly it takes only couple of weeks of fulltime developement to produce a service like yours.
Teamwork 4 Easter egg search
FORTH-like language kernel designed to be embedded into applications
heh eclipse and netbeans cant keep up with my typing most of the time, and even emacs has problems with undo / redo in large files
Y Combinator putting on special event called AngelConf for would-be investors
Y Combinator’s AngelConf Teaches Would-Be Investors How To Get Started
Municipal Bonds That Predate the Bronx Are Maturing Now
I like it.

One thing: I can't find a way to delete my account in the settings panel.
So microsoft would still like to operate as if it could rule the web the way it rules operating systems?: by fiat. And responds to outrage and outcries by tweaking its fiats?

Firefox, Google Chrome, and even Apple cannot help but be pleased at the continued MSIE machinations to abuse power.
Yes.

I currently am working on a web-app using cherrypy for my client, who has some small knowledge of PHP.

He's a great guy, and I love working with him; however, he likes to make suggestions, normally involving some way he could implement something in PHP to help out, and the suggestions invariably would add a lot of unnecessary complexity when a simpler solution is already available.

Not that his ideas are bad; they're almost always good ideas on a high level, but just really bad fits as far as implementation details go - normally of the "Yes, we can just kinda glue all this different stuff together" type, which is fine sometimes, but since we're using python there tends to be readily available solutions that don't involve all the overhead of gluing stuff together.
Good idea! This seems like the type of thing that will really help stimulate the economy and help liquidity start flowing again.
How about adding a rate-limited amount of "bigpoints" to the voting system?

E.g. each user would receive one "bigpoint" per week. The bigpoint could be given out to any story/comment and would count like 5(?) normal votes. Unused bigpoints should not accumulate (or only to a small backlog of maybe 2 or 3).

I imagine this might help to make the extra-ordinary content stand out more.

What do you think?
I think its really great of YC to run a free event for this stuff - kudos to them, and good luck.
You might also want to consider whether today's "browser specific" will be tomorrow's browser-specific. For example: there was no Google Chrome a year ago. Nor Safari for Windows.

But be ready to add style sheets for mobile devices. ...or whatever evolves next.
Microsoft bounty for worm (Conficker) creator
Nokia 7500 Prism (Unlocked)
Great work, but ... looks like an example of completely missing the basics of the customer needs. Do we really need good design to start taking shots? Think about us already missing a year of pictures. Sorry for making it sound sharp.
Copying stuff well is not so easy.
Thanks for sharing, very candid and interesting.
All the discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=477879

Also posted:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=478433

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=478264

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=477885

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=477862

and possibly more by now.
This may sound paranoid, but I don't want to enter my Google passwort on a site that I have been forwarded to from another site.

I tried logging in to Google and then to login via your site, too, but Google still asked for my password.
Furniture Resources in Fort Walton Beach 
At Furniture Resources we offer discounts so low on home furnishings our manufacturers will not allow us to advertise these discounted prices. We offer only the finest quality interior and outdoor furniture brands with in-house decorating services available. Let us furnish your home or resort property and save.
Great story Jon, I really enjoyed the read and found it quite inspirational. The launch video at the end with the music was classic, especially the 404 at launch and the music running out!

Best of luck with the site, looks like a lot of hard work has gone into it.
I've often viewed NDA's much like patents, they don't offer you any real protection. They only offer mild discouragement to someone attempting to capitalize on something you created or invented. An NDA (much like a patent) basically just gives you a strong edge should you choose to pursue something legally, YOU have to determine still if that battle is worth your time and money.

The above being said, it is still a good idea, IMO, to use NDA's (they're basically free) and patents when/where appropriate.
Microsoft bounty for worm creator
Changed to 100 by February 2009.
Then again writing tests can be just as unproductive as writing getters and setters. Maybe that is one reason that it has become so popular (makes you feel more productive)?
Please read: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=150864
As they note below the tables, their statistics are skewed compared to most sites. Most sites will see most users using Internet Explorer, with Firefox a distant second.

And even on their figures, more than 1 in 6 visitors use IE6. That's a lot of people to drop support for.
I assume such a hypothetical company would become a huge Fortune 500 company selling their database technology at a very high price!
Maybe the 300-strong staff will not only attend to the "needs" of the 600 programmers, but also run an offshore casino and an offshore brothel in parallel. After all, 1 staff member for each pair of programmers should leave a lot of the staff idle, right?
Ask HN: Please review my app - LoveLogger.com: World's First Pair-Blogging Platform
I am launching private-beta of my app LoveLogger.com : Pair-Blogging Platform, where ONLY a pair of users can register to blog together. The two can share their interests, experiences, difference of opinions, memorable times they've had together or just about anything the two can blog on.

It could be you and your friend, you and your spouse/lover, you and your mom/dad/child, you and your siblings, you and your business partner or you and your student /teacher.

Please visit:
http://lovelogger.com/private-invite.php
and enter the activation code as ‘ycombinator’ to review my app.

I feel HN is the only place to get geeky and the most valuable suggestions. Thanks.
It sounds like you're really very confused ...

I'm no Computer Science major, but I've easily
wasted a lot of my time rewriting algorithms for n.

I'm not even sure what that means.

... tested a few out on my own ... in my browser ...
where n is 27. . .using 2^n, which is essentially
what a bubble-sort measures out at.

No, BubbleSort wuns in n^2. The difference is significant.

This is a bad algorithm, ...

No, it's only bad when the input gets beyond 10 or so, where 10 is not necessarily equal to 10. This is why O(n) notation is so important, so understand where the trade-offs occur.

2^27 = 134 217 728, which is roughly 130 MB.

No, MB is a measure of memory, and you're talking about measuring time. Further, the exponential example on your web page is not BubbleSort, it's Fibonacci. That is exponential, but the base isn't 2.

Firefox is willing and capable of running this while
it could even run 2^28 = 268 MB.

This is what convinces me that you're very confused about what is happening, and why. This stuff doesn't need a masters in CSCI or anything else. It's really very simple. It just sounds to me like you've read some bad tutorials, and done some irrelevant (although perhaps interesting) exercises, from which you've learned the wrong lessons.
"So why not write reversed_string = orig_string.reverse()"

reverse() does an in-place reversal of the original list and does not return the result.
Probably not all that much, in the big picture, where billions of dollars are the order of magnitude that things seem to be happening at, but it's cool to see in any case.
It looks like the submissions will be on the duplicate at
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=479689
Where is the Demo?
Quoting from:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=462448

I did an MBO 6 years ago and it was striking. All the people who were genuinely helpful did business on a handshake. All those who were ultimately a waste of time, space and occasionally oxygen, insisted on having everything in writing. It was a 100% correlation, and a real eye-opener.
Just to add something to this really interesting article, from what I recall about this case, no suicide note from the deceased was found, and according to what was reported from the mainstream media here in Greece there were some really suspicious entries in his diary, including a diagram of the system with some modules marked with questionmarks and one about "Something weird going on in the company".
Also he tried to hand in his resignation a few days before the suicide which was not accepted.
In retrospective, no one involved in that case seemed to take the right steps to track out the party behind the wiretaps.
It's not just one example, you can 'hurt' a website simply by making a huge list of links with arbritrary query string garbage so that google picks it up, eg:

http://domain.com/?dupcontent

http://domain.com/?blabla

What an app should really do is validate the arguments in the query string, remove any invalid ones, then issue a 301 redirect to the proper url.

For example:

http://www.google.com/search?q=someterm&unknown_variable...

redirects to

http://www.google.com/search?q=someterm

Of course that's like getting everyone's CSS to validate correctly :)

Edit: It is also why I prefer to sort my query string so that it can be deterministic and always be the same no matter what order the args are in.
Hacking perceptual psychology - Anti-Theft Lunch Bags
Joe paints a three bedroom house in three days and gets paid $300.

Jim paints a 5 ft by 3 ft watercolor landscape in three days and sells it for $1,000.

They both get their job done in three days. One covers far more area with paint than the other. One gets paid more than the other. Both of their customers are happy with the result because they paid for it. Who is the most productive?

Is it even meaningful to ask that question?

Doesn't it depend upon WHAT it is that is produced? Doesn't the WHAT have to be the same in both cases to be able to say which is more or less?

Perhaps before we talk about being more or less productive we need to identify what it is that we are producing. We should make sure its real, meaningful, and relevant to our purpose and that we are all talking about the same thing. Then finally, we must measure something that can't be easily inflated or faked. Only then can we talk about more or less comparisons and be saying something other than words without real meaning.

As I see it we have two questions to answer:

What is it that we are actually producing when we write software?

How can we reliably measure it?

We don't have good answers for either. Actually, I don't think we even have moderately good bad answers.

Isn't it interesting that a large and increasing fraction of the world's economy is based upon something we don't really know what is and can't actually measure?
Direct link: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7887577.stm

Also posted: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=479709

Yes, this post is earlier, but that post will remain current as it contains the direct link.

Comments are probably better directed there, as this one will stale out.
I dunno - the logistics of investing are hard and the sample documents are just a start. If you give people step-by-step directions and access to the right professionals, you may very well see a demonstrable increase in angel investing.

Things like this are why the Valley's so important. You'd think someone somewhere else would have done this, but noooooo. You just know that if someone else had done this, they'd have tried to make a buck on it. This is a completely altruistic move on YC's part - hell, they're setting up additional competition for the YC program.
The rise of functional programming might not be accelerated by the pain of impedance matching to RDBMSs. Converting between the relational and OO models of data is a time-consuming pain. If this is widely realized, it could give FP a boost.

>> Is the Relational Database Doomed?

Ah, linkbait! Sorry, no sale. Using a (pre-compiled) stored procedure to do a key value lookup will likely be about as fast as a lookup in a key/value DB. In any case, it's easier to add a key/value lookup capability to an RDBMS than it is to add efficient query capabilities to a KVDB.

The article focuses on scaling, which is rarely an issue. KVDBs win on simplicity and flexibility (no need to pre-define a data model) and a better impedance match with OOPLs. RDBMSs crush on querying, which most (though not all) applications need.
Year. But its the essence of the evolution.
Emergent Properties of Continual Automation
Oh, I agree it's really cool and all, but compared with job losses in the 10's or 100's of thousands... I'm just not sure that it'll make much of a difference in terms of "help stimulate the economy and help liquidity start flowing again".

But that's no argument against it, or saying it's not important; just that perhaps getting a few more people investing is not going to fix the economy overnight.
>> Underestimating the amount of work and the cost of failure in maintaining data integrity at the application level - for all but the most simplistic applications you will end up writing a ton of code that replicates what a RDBMS does, except slower, with more bugs, and less generality.

If I'm the first to explicate the underlying rule, can I name it after myself? Please? Pretty please with Lisp on it?

Doffing's Tenth Rule of Database Systems (with apologies to Phillip Greenspun):

"Any sufficiently complicated database management system contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of a good RDBMS."
The Complete Animated History Of The Internet
Could you let us know what tracker you use ?
I seem to recall reading an interview with SkinnyCorp (Threadless.com) where Jake or Jeffrey said they had once built but then scrapped a similar project.
While googling for that, I found http://www.flickaday.com
(Its Friday) The Evolution of a Programmer
Hey, I never got an activation email ... I checked my spam box too. Not there.
An interesting curiosity, this. Thanks for digging it up.
Well, in fairness, things haven't changed much since 1995.
Sure, but if we got funding, what would we do? We'd hire people.
Irony - I got a "Service Unavailable" from SO trying to view the post...
And while we're at confusion and beginners: at least

them = things[:]

looks different from

them = (list) things;

which in C-like languages usually does not make a copy of things.

Using slices may avoid fallacies like "I know that int(x) is something like a cast of x to int, so list(x) is like a cast of x to list, which does nothing when x is a list".
I'd suggest you put a sample animation of the type of result people would get on your site on the front page. I don't think the intro text "your life in pictures" explains it well enough, but if people see even just a 5 frame animation they'll immediately recognize the concept.
In fact, I'd stick the picture taking app on the front page and allow them to take a first snapshot before even signing up. Having the first picture there would provide a great incentive to follow through with the sign-up.

Also, if I may, and I know from experience it's harder than it sounds: It seems your concept got way more complex over time, when you really should have launched the simplest possible version as fast as possible and worried about widgets, following, minifeeds, comments, a proper logo etc. later on. Cool that you're online now though, good luck with everything!
Leslie Benzies, producer of GTA IV estimated costs to be $100 million.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/scotland/article382...

Maybe your friend was doing just a port on one of the platforms? That could be in the ballpark.
Document control - how hard can it be?
Richard Stallman on his experience in Cuba
Posted ten days ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=463851
> A lot of people agreeing with you means nothing.

Of course, that depends entirely on why they agree with you. Perhaps they have independently verified what you have to say, or otherwise arrived at the same conclusions, and agree with you because of that. The problem is the 'information cascade' when more people start agreeing with you just because "all those other people do too".
"Sharding" is shorthand for "MySQL's concurrent write performance is abysmal, let's spend more on trying to make it work than it would have cost to just buy Oracle".
So the way to figure out whether that means anything at a large enough scale to matter, is to look at how many angels might invest how much money. I honestly have no idea, but here are some random numbers:

10,000 investors invest 10,000 dollars each is 100 million dollars. You could vary that to 1,000 investors doing 100,000 of investment each. 1,000 investors each doing a million dollars would be 1 billion dollars. What relationship do those random numbers bear to reality? Has YC even spent a million dollars on all the companies involved? And there are several people investing in YC, so I think it probably comes out to less than a million a head, and they've been doing this for a while now.

The real impact of startups is not likely going to be in hiring in any case, but still, it's worth looking at some numbers to get an idea of the order of magnitude that we're talking about.