skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Are you questioning the relative merit of reverse http, or of the ability of the server to update the page?

I'm failing to see the advantage of reverse http over long polls, even though I am completely sold on the difference that having server push would make...
Because Fried makes a big deal out of "not doing functional specs' when he's, essentially, doing functional specs, just not calling them that.

He's opposed to BAD functional specs, which is fine, but too many people read his title and decide it's OK to skip to writing the code first.
Maybe it makes some sense in server apis?

I don't know. I'm sold on using long polls in conjunction with actors...
I'm a grad student. Ramen profitable to me is for kings and queens. I'm jealous of all of you.
Aside from the good stories, I like knowing that I can read intelligible, mostly interesting comments here. Sometimes I just don't want to hear quip after quip.
And that is exactly why I have never even signed up for reddit, stopped using Digg, and get anxious/annoyed when its a slow news day on HN and my frequent refreshes don't provide new, interesting information.
Sometimes decent solutions come from not being at one extreme or the other.

Not always, but sometimes.
Think how different HN would be if the comment pages updated themselves in real time as people commented?

Or a bug tracking system. Or a newspaper. Or pretty much any site, really.
The google description of the site is:

Yonkly - Create your own network
stephp elmagnifico domnanou wmshaxpere yonkly eibrahim venturedig troygoode eonian ... domain yonkly chinese sbepstein allenwang allenwang1981 rmarley ...

I'm guessing that these are usernames of your users, but I'm not sure why they're being used as your Google description. See if you can fix this and replace it with a description of what Yonkly is, and I'd bet your search engine traffic will increase dramatically
House Bill Will Ban Open Access to Scientific Publications
Unruly teenagers? Come on. I can't be the only one who gets tired of the petty, smarmy anti-Reddit talk. It's just another site; we're not cults. And we're also not the old farts telling the "unruly teenagers" to get off our damn lawns, are we?
I moved from reddit to hacker news for the sole reason that this place is a bit more...er, sparse. Every other article on reddit is either "upvote if..." or a long pun thread.

It's a nice change to come here and get away from the 4chan-ness of other sites.

They can hate on the boring-ness of HN all they want, the simplicity of the website, and the inability to downmod for absolutly no reason is a just reason for coming here.
That's an oversimplification, since not all assigned addresses are used.
No offense, but making surreal numbers in code seems a bit pointless.

Yes, both mathematics and programming, like any other user interfaces, are built on abstractions, and yes, we benefit by making those abstractions elegant: namely, few, small, orthogonal, and flexible (in the words of the article, "Elegance consists of building something out of a small core of representations that scale well. It is not enough that they be simple, the complexity of what you build must not grow uncontrollably as you try to solve bigger and more complex problems."), but surreal numbers are much easier to understand without looking at a bunch of extra verbose syntax of a programming language. There may be some value in implementing such a thing personally if you're trying to make sure you understand what surreal numbers really do and how they really work, but reading someone else's implementation just gets in the way. I definitely recommend Conway's book. It's loads of fun.

Incidentally, just about every other user interface also benefits from adopting these "elegance" principles (GUIs, hand tools, political systems, etc.). They are among the essential axioms of design, and any designer should keep them always in mind. I think I like the version in the "Zen of Python" best of any wording I've seen.
Updated the front-page: http://snipd.com/

Thoughts?
Can you please elaborate on why being good at RoR is being in a situation with no logical way out?
A lot of Sachin's article is reminiscent of Mark Cuban's Economy post:

"The one thing I know with certainty is that at no time prior to starting a company did capital gains or income tax percentages ever impact whether or not I would start a business. As any entrepreneur will gladly tell you, you have to have income before you are taxed, so how much you pay on your earnings is a good problem to have, and a better problem is how much you have to pay on capital gains.
What has impacted my decision on whether or not to start a business is the amount of paperwork involved and the local, state and employer taxes involved. Its complicated and expensive to start even the smallest business in the real world."

Obviously just an anecdote, but it's amazing how much paperwork and BS is involved in setting up a simple small business.
It would have been helpful for me to have read that context rather than the weird insult. That only seems to escalate the confusion caused by his title.
I flag this because the website has a sex content!
> I would be sincerely interested in this topic, if you would like to go there. :)

Sure, do you blame consumers for buying clothing products that were manufactured using sweatshop labor? No, because the consumer had no intent. You blame the company that operates the sweatshops.

Do you blame civilians in Africa or the Middle East for the atrocities committed against aid workers? No, because the starving civilians have no intent of hurting aid workers. You blame the corrupt governments that perpetrate the atrocities.

Your argument when it comes to drugs rests upon the combination of current legal status and some moral presuppositions. I think the question of moral acceptability is orthogonal here. It is empirically true that people will purchase and use drugs, no matter what your moral sensibilities tell you.

Blaming the consumer is a fruitless effort when it comes to actually promoting better health and safety in society.

This argument could just as well be used to claim that our government is acting immorally by continuing to enforce policies that all evidence suggests promote violence.

In symbolic terms:
government:drug laws == consumer:drugs

We can fix things on either side. Moral arguments are irrelevant -- we should fix whichever side yields the most productive result.
I really hate to be an asshole about this, but I took a look at your pricing model:

- $0.30 / GB of bandwidth

- $0.30 / GB / month of storage

From what I see, you could host this on AWS and be "profitable" with just one customer, right? I mean, if your definition of profitability includes only your variable non-staff costs, which seems to be how you're defining it...
I went through a similar though process recently when doing some language work.

Another slightly more traditional representation down this (slightly reductionist) track is to use two symbols - TRUE and FALSE. Then numbers are simply lists of these symbols (i.e. you use lists to represent the bytes/bits/whatever).

I say reductionist, but it's still tempting as it increases how orthogonal your language is (which goes towards the simplicity/elegance/scale angle discussed in this article).

You can apply similar logic to other firmly-established types such as strings - which can be lists, but are generally more efficient as char* arrays.

In the end, I decided that whilst this approach was great from a purist perspective, I was actually working against my target platform. The reality is that the CPUs I'd be ever likely to target are designed to work with numbers. So I made the compromise not to rail against that (Whereas the LISP machine pictured in the article is almost a vision of another, alternative reality).

One alternative I've considered is putting in lazy evaluation. Things will work as numbers, but as soon as you call a list operation, it promotes it to the list form... Although to be honest it hasn't come up yet, which is somewhat of a surprise, so I'm not sure if I'll ever get around to that.
Started doing web app development consulting to learn the ropes shortly out of college with my cofounders in Nov 03. Started the design for buildasign.com in July 04 as one of our hopeful projects to turn into a sustainable business (a product rather than service business is what we were aiming for). Soft launch and slowly increased advertising starting June 05. Got our first manufacturing garage space in Nov 05. Paid ourselves for the first time in January 06. Things went well from there.

So I was full time for 2 years before getting paid beyond a just-survivable amount from consulting and hosting.
Great article, really helps
OCaml, anybody?

Best of both worlds.

My school is currently considering a switch of their first year curriculum (comp sci) from scheme and java to scheme and Ocaml. They teach java using functional concepts, and java isn't too keen on being used functionally.
> Yes, every one-off comment on a social news site should be proofread and edited at least 15 times before actually posting it.

Actually, yes, every comment should be proofread. Writing that contains typos, or is just inelegantly written, is harder to read and understand. When I write something on HN, it's likely to be read by a hundred or more people. So if I take 100 seconds to get my post right, and that saves each reader 1 second, it's a win overall.

To to otherwise is to proclaim that one is sloppy and careless, and that one's time is more important than others' time.
Thanks for the info.

I guess you probably have the unpaid overtime issue in gamedev everywhere. You're technically not allowed to make someone work more than 48 hrs/week in the EU but I routinely worked 60-70 for weeks to months. (I guess not forced, but you know, the usual persuasion tactics)

My impression is that there's more of a workaholic ethic in Japan though; the programmers I worked with grudgingly put up with it but went straight back to 40 hours given the chance, whereas the guys in Japan seemed to work all hours regardless. No idea whether that extends to programmers.
Here is the startup:
http://tinyarro.ws/
And here is the guy: http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=thorax

I hope this is the proper answer!
Definitely better. I'm still not a fan of the color scheme, or of the little people-boxes, but this is cleaner and more concise.
Alright, there's no need to repeat ourselves. I'm a numbers guy. For me, any argument needs either a straight logical step or some type of numbers to back it up. I respect your approach towards things, because I know it works also. (I just don't like it, because it needs experience.)

So I'll say you did make a good number of good points, and seen from the angle you are approaching it at, what you wrote is a good essay.
How to create a "fair and balanced" video game experience
Just to clarify. Is this the number of days after launch? Or is there some magic I don't know of that is making people earn money they day they started up?
1. I'm not sure what the numbers in the green box indicates. Are they upvotes from users indicating that the question is a good one? Are they the number of replies? The number of views? Perhaps frequenters of social voting sites may know this but even sites like digg say "87 diggs" in the little box.

2. Make the concept of the money pot more prominent. I think its the most important piece of information to display. Try to rework the layout to put it at the top, perhaps next to the logo.

3. Consider asking more questions with your account, then looking up the answer online and answering it. Consider it your personal notebook of business info. I haven't thought about this rigorously, but I would at least give it thought. It would make your site seem more accurate.

4. Users don't want to answer the same types of questions over and over. Consider making a startup 101 page that tries to lay out the very basics of startups that some people seem to be asking. Then users can just point people to that page.
It won't.

It'll probably be another case of Powerset or Cuil, lots of hype by the company in question that is impossible to live up to.
Key security issues when running on AWS
DVCS and DAGs, Part 2
> No offense, but making surreal numbers in code seems a bit pointless... There may be some value in implementing such a thing personally if you're trying to make sure you understand what surreal numbers really do and how they really work, but reading someone else's implementation just gets in the way.

I'm not offended in the least.

Above and beyond any reasons I may have for writing such code myself, putting code into my essays serves a very important purpose: It makes a personal statement about the balance between code and ideas. There are already excellent sources of information about mathematics and programming languages. For example, the post links to both Mark Chu-Carroll's blog and Paul Graham's essay.

I agree fully that my own writing is far less useful than either of these sources for learning about mathematics or about the design of programming languages. But I must soldier on trying to make my own personal point, and in this case the point includes a certain amount of code.
Not only writing the code first, but write with the idea that because they're "agile", their code is somehow easier to change 15 times as the complete understanding of the functionality emerges.
I'm not sure I agree totally with Paul Graham's antonym choice -- the opposite of hapless when dealing with things might be named "resourcefulness", but when dealing with people "steadfast" might be closer to the feeling you want. Things need to be moved around, but when dealing with people often the most important action is to stand still -- to find a position and refuse to be knocked over or pushed around. This might be part of the reason it is so hard to find a proper antonym. It might also be why it is so hard to do.

Anyway, my fiancee asked me "of all the people you've ever met, who would best fit the 'not hapless' description the best?" I answered without hesitation "Sergey Brin."

Oh, he said, disappointed. "I mean someone who might be available to start a company with."

This observation would tend to support Paul Graham's thesis about the qualities you want in a founder, though.
OLX.com is JUNK, period
there are 10 other sites than craigslist that kicks its tiny butt like sulekha.com, backpage.com, kijiji.com, locanto.com, oodle.com, siftin.com, vast.com, ...
Interesting.

I still think you can get around this with active vs passive. I personally have had investors use LLC's who have less than $5mm in assets, but we set them as an active investor. This was done by an attorney with expertise in the area.
Cuil not so cool any more
I agree that times have changed, but this seems a little too far, even if it is just a rule of thumb.

Also, there's a tendency for these types of rules to become self-fulfilling prophecies.
I'm surprised Hacker News is so quick to jump down tarsnaps throat.

Profitability, heck, revenues is a freaking achievement, and we should be congratulating him -- not arguing over semantics.
The Positive Economics of a Marijuana Tax
Yes, I've thought of this before.

But I'd rather deal with loans than equity if the equity doesnt also give expertise. The type of quick equity fund you describe would likely have to offer convertible debt (ie lending) or force the risk of being crammed down regularly. And without the expertise, there is no downside for the entrepreneur to screw these $500 investors out of their money regularly.

So if you are already lending (convertible debt->equity) then how is this different from microlending?

Regardless, I see your point about flexibility, I just personally cant see it as all that much more useful than microlending for either side.
I've always been under the impression that you can get the health benefits from wine without drinking alcohol. Resveratrol is found naturally in foods like grapes and peanuts. So you won't be missing out on any health benefits if you don't drink.

Resveratrol Concentrations:http://lpi.oregonstate.edu/infocenter/phytochemicals/resvera...
chubby, short, boring, badly dressed, poor, always late, glib, irresponsible

Please... just stop describing me
It would make more sense to tie this rule of thumb to a measurable index (i.e. the Russell 2k or a Technology ETF) rather than just pick an arbitrary number. Both are down about 50% from a year ago.
Though the processes sound similar, the scope and details each is emphasizing are different.

Spolsky: "feature"

Fried: "app"

Suppose either is designing GreenfieldGloryApp - he might start with a one-page vision statement. He might then make some very high level mock-ups of scenarios. Maybe they would even be done in HTML. This is where they diverge: At this point 37signals would start building. Fog Creek would iterate 'specs' many times further by drilling down to feature or feature-set level functional specs. Each feature-level spec would start with a vision statement and then be fleshed out with mocks and "detailed descriptions".
Why should we? Why should free agents be incompatible with money?

[Perhaps we'd get private money, though.]
Ask HN: Authorize.net Vs Zuora Vs Aria for Subscription Billing
I know there have been multiple discussions about subscription billing and I have commented on it as well- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=198672

We currently use Authorize.net's ARB platform for our subscription billing but I keep hearing of the "new" services such Zuora and Aria. And both of these new breed of services don't seem to be bucketed in the same category as Authorize.net's ARB and Braintree etc...

Has anybody evaluated all these platforms and is using any of these services after the evaluation? If yes, your thinking on why is/was better for you would be great.
I like this a lot. I'm having trouble linking the colors shown in "Scheme Info" with the ones in the main display at right. Could you number the areas somehow? Or show the codes within the lorem ipsum text?
err, sorry, i meant the startup referenced in the essay by pg located here: http://www.paulgraham.com/fundraising.html
This is a really good idea, but sounds like a pain to set up.
"John Conyers (D-MI) apparently has a problem with this. He is pushing a bill through Congress that will literally ban the open access of these papers, forcing scientists to only publish in journals. This may not sound like a big deal, but journals are very expensive."

Who would have foreseen that academic journals had such lobbying power? I am disgusted.

Many universities are following MIT OCW's great example and making their lectures and course materials available online for free. Only a spineless, corrupt politician would try to go the other direction.
They're not quite contradictory. Number 1 is talking about the theoretical case where the economy reaches the maximum number of startups it can have, and number 3 is talking about the state of affairs now. At the moment, angels are the ingredient in shortest supply, but we are very early in the process.
The risk here is that if you screw anything up, you taint the company that issued the stock in ways that make it hard to get investment in the future, and that expose it to legal threats. I'd love to hear more about how you pulled this off, but my real point is, there's no "cut-and-dry" way to invest safely in a small private company through an LLC.
This ceases to be true if we enter a deflationary environment, as is reflected in the stock prices of annuity-issuing companies.
1. Your logo is pretty plain. Maybe make your logo be one of your buttons.

2. It would be cool to be able to replicate popular button styles of other companies, or at least similar to them.

3. I didn't see the undo/redo links until I was done. Maybe move them somewhere else, like under the center button?

4. Def need to make it easier to find colors you want. Plus more fonts like others suggested.

5. Can you automatically have it generate a "button pressed down" version?
I'm quite happy Apple doesn't take the mountain of bad advice the industry throws at it.
The relative merit.
The site preview options were very nice.
Voxli (YC W09) Targets Gamers With Browser-Based Group Voice Chat
Sorry because I misunderstood your question; Please forgive me, I am not a native english speaker!

Whatever, what is the point of your question? If you want such domain names, it's possible to buy it through Godaddy international domain names.

I have doubts that the name of this domain is written in "Arabic letters" but I am not sure but it looks chinese too.
Anyway, it's possible to buy domain names with such letters, and if you want me to write any arabic word for you that would appear in such shapes - like the arrow, I can try doing it for you. I am native Arabian, from Cairo, Egypt.
9 months
Actually this has started to become a problem for us. When we first started and had no reputation, the only people who applied for funding were people who really wanted to start startups. Now we get people who are attracted by the idea of "getting into" YC. And it can be tempting to accept them, because people who've been using this m.o. tend to have accumulated impressive resumes. But when we do accept them they often do badly, partly because they didn't really want to be starting a startup, and partly because real world users are a different type of test than they're used to.
I feel like we could have just added another byte to IPv4.

It would have been a very simple hack, which makes it more likely to succeed. Also I love the way I can remember IP addresses off by heart right now - that is almost impossible with ipv6.
San Fran considers pillow fight crackdown
I am a US/UK thing, so I feel like I'm in touch with how it's used in both places. Especially since it's mainly used in writing rather than speech.
yeah, its the day you officially launch
I believe pgpool also deals with timestamps properly.

Secondly, no one is forcing you to use SERIAL datatypes - the table locking is there for backwards compatibility. SERIAL is not the best performance choice for replicated servers, and there's nothing to stop you using another style of ID field.
Gerry Sussman: The Art of the Propagator
The most fundamental problem with natural language search engines is that the "natural language" part is more a limitation than a feature to me. Natural language is meant for people to communicate with other people and not with computers. I believe that a well designed keyword/tag based search combined with factual auto suggestions extracted from formal/semantic sources (similar to wikipedia) could be far more efficient for people to use and computers to run.
Gas taxes aren't the only taxes that come from autombile use.
and that one's time is more important than others' time

I do think this, though.

And anyway, if it costs you one second of time because someone added a space inside the word "playwright", perhaps you need to work on tuning your error correction algorithm. I knew exactly what the OP meant.
Having to install a plugin is kind of annoying, but Voxli is one of the simplest-to-setup, easiest-to-use voice chats I've ever used. Inviting someone to a chat via a URL is really convenient and I could really see this taking off.
Congrats on getting techcrunch coverage, you guys should do something with the heyzap guys, there are plenty of multiplayer flash games out there, and this would work together perfectly.
Calling All Student Entrepreneurs: Highland Capital Wants You
Or, hapmore.
> I would be all for a train that went from Vancouver BC to San Diego, or even further south.

We HAD such trains. Why will they make money now when they lost money before?

However, don't let me discourage you from building such a train, as long as you pay for it. If you're right, you get rich. If you're wrong....
I meant it's one of YC's additional mantras, not a mantra of one of the startups we funded.
congrats on launch
That seems almost reddit-like. Reddit is also (ostensibly) for news items of intellectual value... but look how that turned out :)