skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm suprised to see all the negativity about ExtJS. There is one aerea where ExtJS is much better than JQuery: visual widgets. JQuery UI lags far behing ExtJS. ExtJS offers a large array of widgets, with a consistent look.

It should be mentionned that you can replace the ExtJS base library with JQuery, so you get the nice ExtJS UI widgets + the JQuery DOM interaction.

For websites, I use JQuery. But if I build a web application that looks like a desktop application, ExtJS is much better at it.
The Failed Understanding of the Information Age
In the article he claims EC2 is $27/month. Was there a recent price reduction?
Yes, but the payments on a loan of that size are laughable. $70,000 at today's rates is $375/mo ($4,500 a year) for a 30 year. You could rent it out for a couple of years and pay off the loan free and clear.
"And those who are selling you that it's the end of the depression are those who sold you the whole Ponzi mess in the first place. Shame on them."

I hope you don't include the Economist.
List of Programming and Web Development Scripts
> Everyone thought battleships were invincible until they turned out to be exactly USELESS with the advent of good carrier-based airplanes.

Except that battleships didn't become useless with the advent of good carrier-based airplanes any more than bombers became useless with the advent of good fighters. Carrier-based planes just meant that battleships were vulnerable to a another threat. (They were already vulnerable to other battleships and submarines.)

Battleships are still incredibly useful for dropping lots of ordinance on a target that isn't too far from water. They can take damage that would sink other ships and still fight. They just can't launch planes to protect themselves, but they can be paired with ships that can.
You don't think the nice Mr Soros might have a personal financial interest in bank's share price dropping do you?
What do you mean break even? Take in $80,000 in rent? I'd say buying the building and taking in more money every month in rent than I'm paying on the loan is more than breaking even. And that's day one.
Ah... I wasn't aware that loans were that cheap or easy to get.
Your point seems valid. Why not pack it like this:

"It's hard to optimize bacteria. You get your bacterium juuuust right, and then you get it to multiply and by the time you have a tank full, their genome has already drifted."
yeah, I replied to your other comment above. I didn't know the loans were so cheap.
ARM: Heretic in the church of Intel, Moore's Law
Wow. Looks like a mockup built in Photoshop more than an actual service. I'm not sure what the target market is for this, but if I'm in it, they did a poor job.
Revolution Money Raises $42 Million For Alternative Payment Service Nobody Is Using
It very well may be a dead cat bounce, but employment always lags in a recovery.
I'm probably more entrepreneurial than theoretical. But I'd likely be so deep in debt when I get of college, that I'd have to work for a while before doing a startup.

Anyway, I think the quality of students matters quite a bit. Does CMU attract the more academic kind and Stanford the more startupy kind? Are you saying that the CS research done at Stanford is not as good?
You should probably consider truncating long domains. Maybe if it is > 7 characters, truncate to 7. Something like that. It would run the risk of collisions.

It may be worth also allowing users to suggest the shortening of the url the first time a domain is submitted. Just truncate ycominbator to yc etc.

I love this idea and if you decide not to pursue it, please let me know as this is something I would eagerly work on.
From Bubble to Depression?
These broken clocks had reasoned arguments to justify their claims, similar to their claims as to where the bottom is. That's different than just being a pessimist.

Also, it's overly optimistic to presume those predicting this recession were just lucky.
If this article wasn't from a reputable source, I would have simply dismissed it. So many things sound wrong.

I studied economics, but not business. Since when do business schools work with complex mathematical models? I thought they were just the place where 'soft' skills like leadership were trained with lots of exercises, in a practical but completely unmathematical way. Surely they would not study agency theory?

I don't think studying economics affected my greed or my guile, and I never had much of either. It did brainwash me in another way. Economics is the religion of the invisible hand, and I really did believe that if you just let the market do its magic everything would fall into place. There is this belief that greed will make you do something useful in order to get paid. For me this has never meant that 'greed is good'. My interpretation of this was that the market will reward you for doing useful things.

I went on to do useless things anyway, but it took me some years to be proud of it. And having lived through a few bubbles I don't find the market so magic anymore.
They're asking where you're going with the company, without wanting to get drawn into incremental improvements. Say you built a website that analyzed your social graph on facebook and showed you who your most connected/least connected friends were. Suppose you stopped there, or started iterating on more metrics (who's added the most friends in the last week?): then your website feels like a feature, and not a long-term business; it's too easy for facebook to implement the same feature set if you ever generate cash.

But, if you can explain how this feature is just a trojan horse, and you're going to go across social networks, or introduce a dating service, or implement some sort of real-world trust/recommendation system, somehow building long term value and competitive advantage; then you look more like a business.

They're just asking how you plan to get there, or just to help them understand ways that you could get there.
Good credits, and somebody will be happy to lend you money.
wow, they charge no interchange fee and only 0.50% for transaction processing and settlement. i have a similar idea (a new payment system/credit card) but was thinking to charge about 1% processing fee... need to recalculate my fee and rev. est.
Are you saying that the CS research done at Stanford is not as good?

At the undergraduate level I don't think this matters much.
Aside from the goodness of the CS department, which I consider equal at these two schools, you should think about the total college experience. IMO Stanford has better weather, a better campus, better looking students, better non-CS departments, better surrounding environment, etc.
Graphs are the new hashtable - this is a great feature. Much of the interesting things being done now are done with giant graph structures.

BTW, it's so lame that PLT Scheme is going in the opposite direction. They had the same excellent notation for a long time, but now since they forbid list mutation* they are useless.

(* Yes, I know you can explicitly use mutable lists, but they don't work with the huge list library, for example SRFI-1, and there's no literal syntax for them, so it's like using lists in a language that doesn't like lists. Useless.)

Actually, I wonder if there's a better syntax for graph literals than this? That would be valuable.
reserved instances: http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2009/03/12/amazon-...
This is the first I've heard about Chef. I've spent some time with puppet, and it looks like Chef is trying to fix a lot of the pain points. Particularly, getting rid of that awful external DSL and using straight ruby.
Stanford wins because of the weather
It reminds me of Rich Dad, Poor Dad.
I would assume that if a VC got the reputation of taking ideas and pushing them to other groups instead of the originators, it would kill their credibility. And without credibility, no one is going to go to them for funding.
Break even is just barely making the payment on the loan. Repaying the loan - a 30 year mortgage - in 3-4 years is not only good, it is astronomically good. Because at the end of three years you have $25K gross/yr, and you own the building. When you own it, you can sell the building and make $75K (or whatever its value then is) in a lump sum.
Excellent article. Seems a tad lengthy at first, but very well written, and presents some interesting ideas.

One problem with that idea, however, is that it's quite hard to keep 10, or even 4 ideas growing in parallel. If you're able to do that, yes, your chances of success are higher, but most of us struggle to push even just one idea along, let alone pursuing half a dozen businesses simultaneously...
It seems clear that Microsoft’s stance on the Mac’s sales growth is that there’s nothing wrong with Windows or right with the Mac, but rather that there’s something wrong with Mac users.

So by declaring that they do not like mac users, where does Office for Mac come in? What about mac users who are contemplating switching to Windows? (they must exist, surely?) Aren't they going to be put off by this sort of negative advertising?

So the target demographic of these ads is existing Windows customers, to try to persuade them not to jump ship. Desperate.

(note: I haven't actually seen these ads, I don't think MS advertise on Austrian television)
Why 3d movies hurt your eyes and make you nauseous
World's Best Programmer is... [w/ Challenge]
Beware the Perils of Caffeine Withdrawal
That depends. If the building has been so broken-down that it will cost a lot to put it in rentable condition (e.g., people came in and stripped out all the copper wiring while it was foreclosed and abandoned) or if there simply isn't much demand for rental housing in Las Vegas right now, then the investor can still lose money on this deal.
Probably not a good idea. Already, his problem comes up as the second (and several subsequent) Google results for "stockart".
you just talked about it
Proposal for Canonical Short URL Auto-Discovery
> I know the conventional wisdom is "Quit Now!", but I like to eat.

I assume then that Obsidian Portal hasn't provided enough income to sustain yourselves?
Let's take the Rails approach: you don't need a non-relational database.

If you're smart enough to know why this isn't true in your case, and you need to step outside the recommended framework, great. Your application is in the unusual 0.1% (but are you sure you're not in the 1% of the 99.9% that's just made a mistake?)

The problem is, all the big names like to name-drop interesting projects, and people assume that Amazon is built on SimpleDB, or Google is built on BigTable, or LinkedIn is built on Voldemort, or Facebook is built on Cassandra, when in reality none of them really are.

Odds are, you're not an Amazon, Google, LinkedIn, Facebook, and the odds are even more against you being in that sliver of functionality where they're using this cool tech.
> I listened to your music. I followed both your links. It's mediocre at best.

You're of course entitled to your opinion ;) But Mick Jones of Clash fame disagrees with you. My manager is in negotiations with him, along with the guy who produced a few Pink Floyd records, to produce our EP -- recording sessions are slated for mid-June. And it's most certainly going to be a notch above a Logic gig! I'm really excited about that, actually. The Signals will soon be broadcasting on all frequencies!

Plus, I'm booking the studio for three weeks, 24 hours a day, which means I'll be able to get my talented friend Ollie Ipkins in the studio -- something which would be totally prohibitive for him. His music is lovely; I've provided a link above. Even if you don't like my music, listen to his, he's the UK's answer to Ray LaMontagne!

So unlike the chattering classes here on hacker news, I'm actually putting my money where my mouth is. I invite Paul Graham to do the same and drop USD 50K on the business model that saves the music industry; from his comments elsewhere, he seems to think it's a very easy task indeed that is only hampered by the record labels being staffed by utter morons. (The fact that Guy Hand's hire of a tech honcho from Google, had zilch impact on sales, either eludes or fails to interest him).
well-said. an opportunity to study for free at a top-tier university in boston is an incredible one. i went to tufts undergrad and just finished an MS in Computer Science there as well. i was definitely in a similar situation as you when i initially applied to colleges (strong application, but didn't get into the ivies), so i wasn't sure how appropriate tufts would be for me. my concern was ill-founded, as there are plenty of students there just as academically intense. OP, feel free to shoot me an email if you have any questions i could answer. email is in my profile.
I'm just curious, why is Soros more likely than any other commentator to want banks' shares to decline?
From the article:
"With a reserved instance (you pay for a whole year in advance) the price is $325 or $27/month. But that doesn't include Data Transfer, EBS, Elastic IP or S3 costs. Got that info from https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/#pricing"
Solution to the God-Einstein-Oppenheimer Dice Puzzle
FriendFeed’s redesign combines publishing and IM better than Facebook or Twitter
> Divorce in America or Europe is not easy...

Yeah, sure, to Americans and Europeans.

Lots of women (and thus men) live in countries where they are unable to divorce, or able to divorce in only a few very specific and constrainted circumstances... otherwise, tough shit.

And if you want to think about "tough," think about Syria, where apparently the man has legal guardianship of children post-divorce no matter what, even if the kids live with their mother, she cannot make any decision about their lives (such as which doctor to see).
Good concept, ripe market, wrong name.

Paypal is short and to the point.

Democracy Player vs Miro

Revolution Money vs Paypal

Pay a couple grand to a top notch marketing agency to come up with a better name.
You had better have a lot of capital. Introducing a a new product into a space where network effects create barriers to entry requires significant cash.
> If you really, really think it's worth it, pirate Logic Studios and pay for it once you've made enough money.

Great -- now you're suggesting that I rip off programmers!

It goes without saying that I have too much respect for what I do, both in the programming and music domains, to break the law. It's wrong, and as you mention I can afford to pay, so I will. It's a question of principle for me; how can I expect people to do the right thing and pay for Spotify or iTunes if I don't follow my own dicta?
US refuses to release docs about the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement it is negotiating
Our Sentiments, Exactly
You're right; nobody would ever suffer long-term anger and resentment at decisions that somebody else made for them; it doesn't make sense. It was out of my hands, so I'm totally okay with it! That's why teenagers and their parents get along so well, why women didn't really want the vote, and why working in a bureaucracy is so good for your mental health.
Why not post directly to the site so we can take a look and decide? Why the middle man?

http://beta.friendfeed.com/
"Dead Cat Bounce"...you took the words right out of my mouth :)
All good points. I agree with the overgeneralizations, and usually just skip right over such simple statements.

Sounds like if you edited this comment, toned things down a bit, and added a solid conclusion, it'd make a good blog post. And a good starting point for informing discussion.

Hope to read that soon!
Not if you are doing it right. The article context is unit testing a dynamic languages vs a static language, saying that you have to do more testing with a static language. If you do thorough unit testing, the difference isn't all that great. The article implied that unit testing doesn't need to be as thorough with a staticly typed language, That is just plain wrong. You may need to do some additional testing with a dynamic language, but overall you come out way ahead. Python instead of Java, you come out way ahead. Python framework vs a full Java framework, the difference may be 5x or 10x.
I am an avid haXe user. It has static inferred typing with a "Dynamic" type, "untyped" blocks, and casting, all of which work more-or-less as advertised: the type system gets out of the way when you ask it to, and the rest of the time you get nearly-free type-checks. Sometimes it needs a little bit of annotation to help it along, but on the whole it's very handy for refactoring code.

In fact, I'm sure my iteration time goes up in haXe because I see most errors at compile-time. The ones I don't see are logic and uninitialized values.

ed: I mean time goes down, not up. Progress goes up.
@safetrick: good point about mac prices for a mac pro! The office one, work would pay, but then sooner or latter I'd have to convert at home too, which is no joke. Now, how is Mac OSX for VNC/remote desktop stuff? And how hard it is to do a hackintosh?
He did make more than a billion dollars shorting the Bank of England...
The truth behind the bank panic (hint: it's fraud)
An episode of Bill Moyers Journal, in which William K. Black exposes how the banks, rating agencies, and especially the government engaging in widespread fraud is the prime mover behind the current bank panic.
That's the thing: adjust yourself to this model. My mindset is that if you're planning on paying the programmers, if you think your music will earn you enough money to pay for Logic, if you're that starved for money - and only if you're that starved - then get it, because you can't pay for it, and because you might be able to pay for it in the future.
No doubt Mr. Soros has decided how to invest his own funds, and will presumably jawbone so that the market moves in the direction he anticipates, but that does that make any of his statements factually incorrect? He has a pretty good track record for calling market turns that other investors miss, so my friendly suggestion is to analyze what Soros says and only disregard it if you can prove it wrong. (How would one prove Soros wrong on this assertion?)
...in a growing economy.
How come his counterparties weren't smart enough to trade the same way he did?
What can I say? I wish you luck; that opinion was mine alone, and I stand by it, but if you hit it big chances are I'll come across your music again.
HTML to PDF Converter Online - Now Even Faster
How can one find these contracts?
EntityCube
Original title: Smart people may be less stressed.

Article "thesis": Stressed people are less smart.

"Stress hormones over time are widely known to interfere with memory"
+1.

Think like an investor. Imagine this startup got as huge as it possibly could get and gobbled up a few adjacent markets. Could you imagine it selling to Google (or someone else) for $1B? $500m? Has there ever been any M&A activity anywhere near this market of consequence?

No doubt that there is a business here, but I think most investors look for a larger TAM as well as a market that is getting ready to blow up (or starting to).

http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/06/the-pmarca-gu-2.html
(good reading on the subject of startup markets)
Ask HN: Good online magazines, anyone?
I am a magazine junkie; I am a magazine connoisseur. I love to read well-written features on tech or culture or music, if there's substance I'm happy. New Yorker-esque.

So, any good links?
Single-celled paramecia may communicate by "seeing" photons emitted by other paramecie
Yes. Tons.
I have a Revolution card. I got $50 off at Buy.com a year ago, so I signed up. Haven't used it since. The rate was absurd -- about 27% for a guy with a good credit score. So, I think they're just transferring the cost from merchant to consumer, at least for those who keep a balance.

I don't use the card because I have other cards with good "rewards" equal to a percent or two of purchases. If a merchant charges me the same price for a widget no matter what card I use, why wouldn't I use the one with the bribe? The obvious solution for merchants is to offer a percent or two off the normal price, but the Visa/Mastercard cartel requires the same price to be charged to consumers no matter if a Visa/MC is used or not (IIRC). So, Revolution would have to have market penetration close to Visa/MC to convince merchants to opt out of the cartel's grasp. Unlikely to happen without a lot more than $42M spent in marketing.

So, while I hope somebody disrupts the current state of affairs, I don't understand how Revolution thinks its going to pull it off.
Pixar's gender problem
I am interested in the prospect/rumor of Ext being acquired by a company like Adobe.

Ref Adobe rumor:
http://www.sporcic.org/2009/04/ext-core/

On the other major topics above...

If you want an enterprise level Javascript framework, then ExtJS is your answer. When major web-app companies like SalesForce use ExtJS for core functionality, you might turn and ask yourself are YOU missing out on something because you are stuck in the past looking at licensing?

Respect the past but, quit complaining and get out their and DO. Think about the time an energy you wasted trying to remind everyone of some indirect pain you experience while a start-up company discovered their positioning within a tough market.

I for one will continue to use ExtJS and Ext Core for my clients commercial applications because I want a company I can rely on and not bet my customers success on some 3rd party plug-in developer to always be their to upgrade or update there jQuery Form or LiveGrid plugin.

I do want to note quickly that I use jQuery on my front-end websites and it is a great core library for websites. It just can't make the jump from web to web application.
I think it could be pretty useful, if search engines did not simply return a list of results, but rather took content from a number of useful documents and then assembled a document that essentially summarized the result - with links to the source documents.

Generating a person profile based on the person's footprint from all over the web seems like an interesting application of that idea.
Tiny business idea..
I just got an idea.

I would really like to get some of the articles on web pages I have bookmaked but newer actually read, as a printed version.

I would be willing to pay for it.

And I'd might like to get a book with a title "best of hacker news in 2009"

You're welcome to steal my idea.
Amazing anecdote. Do you have the source?
I'm afraid you're correct. I wish people would just pick up and read a history book. The Great Depression didn't start overnight. People have this misconception that things just got really sh*tty one day after the stock market crashed. Reality proved to be different. Things got a little better, then a little more worse. Rinsed and repeated until the Dow Jones lost 90% of its peak value. Couple this with a severe drought, the U.S. calling in its WWI loans from Europe, and a couple of other protectionist decisions, and you had yourself a depression.

Wishful thinking got us into this mess. And right now, we may as well view the stock market like a slot machine. It'll pay out a little, drag people in, and then take a lot of their money.

The other problem is that when lots of people start focussing on aggressively paying off their debt in bad times, it actually ends up temporarily hurting the economy. This is precisely what happened before the Great Depression. Why? Because they stop spending the money, and instead give money to big banks which do nothing but hoard it because the banks have lost paper money on the stock market. As the banks look to replenish their stock piles they largely refuse to loan the money out again. In a way, it's like chemo therapy in that the treatment for people's financial ailments might actually be the thing that kills them. But eventually the huge swaths of cash that the banks build up from debt repayments will come back into the market and there'll be a surge in investment activity, but that won't happen until the banks themselves are comfortable on their own feet, which is far from the case right now.
ArsDigita had an "university"