skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You're the one who complained there's nobody out there doing what Twitter does "in an interesting way". Twitter is pretty much the lowest common denominator feature-wise, plus killer branding, plus momentum, plus an open api that lets other services treat them like infrastructure. What, exactly, would you think would be interesting, if not differentiating features like these other sites are trying to offer? I mean, are you really complaining that nobody's stepping up to just to be ignored for being an exact clone?
"Prove to me that the public works contractors will produce more jobs than the private sector would have with the same capital."

Japan's experience on public works spending as a recession stimulus is mixed:

"Economists tend to divide into two camps on the question of Japan’s infrastructure spending: those, many of them Americans like Mr. Geithner, who think it did not go far enough; and those, many of them Japanese, who think it was a colossal waste."

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/06/world/asia/06japan.html?_r...
You're changing the subject a bit from micromanagement of smaller more specific interests to infrastructure, which I would expect more people to agree should be regulated, and especially in the case of dams and freeways, should be government backed.
I was just thinking the same thing. I really want to try building this. Anyone want to work together?
Upgrading to DreamHost's Virtual Private Server service is only $15/mo and sounds like it would guarantee site stability.
Mostly because every other Macbook air owner I know experiences overheating and random shutdowns multiple times a week:

http://blog.weatherby.net/2008/07/cool-air.html

http://paulstamatiou.com/2008/03/20/review-macbook-air
I should probably listen to this advice myself. And thank Gary and other people who're trying to open my eyes.
All in all great advices for someone like me who's only just getting started.
World Oil Production Peaked in 2008
I think this is another "In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not." issue.

In theory, theoretical questions are great. In practice, they are fidgety little things that must be asked precisely correctly to have the same "correct" answer that the interviewer has memorized and are frequently botched, almost invariably involve a "gotcha" answer in such a way that honestly I do not want to see a coder actually code, and have a laser-like focus on an aspect of the job that in most cases will involve less than 1% of your job, no exaggeration.

I've done some algorithms work at my job, but in all my years it has always been replacing O(n^2) or O(n^3) solutions with O(n) or O(n log n) in very straightforward ways. Had I chosen an O(n log log n) answer, it would have been wrong for being radically more complicated.

Basically, my problem with the puzzle questions is they show a misplaced priority. You could be asking gotcha puzzle questions (that, by the way, I've probably already read and memorized the answer...), or you could ask the interviewee to write a script in their favorite language to count the words or whatever, and learn both everything the puzzle question would have taught you and whether they can code.

This may be a side effect of the fact that I refuse to spend eight hours interviewing someone. I want it done in less than half an hour unless there's a good reason to make it go longer (which does happen). Puzzle questions are a waste of time in that context. I guess if you're planning on wasting a candidate's entire day, you can afford wasting time on puzzles. (I have read the science that says we make decisions on the hiring issue far faster than in eight hours, which matches my experience, so why sit there and fiddle around all day when the decision has been made?)
Wordpress code is amazingly awful, but Wordpress is also a general-purpose blogging/publishing platform meant to be installed anywhere, be extended by plugins and themes, and serve the needs of many, many people. If you write your own blogging platform that does just what you need without worrying about drop-in installation, plugins, themes, or anyone else, and you don't end up with a "pretty nice reduction in code", you're in sad, sad shape.
What, exactly, would you think would be interesting, if not differentiating features like these other sites are trying to offer?

I don't know. That's the problem with trying to compete with Twitter: it can't be done. Anything you add messes up the design.

I wasn't complaining: I just don't think there are any Twitter competitors. Twitter does something so simply it can't be competed against effectively. FriendFeed can be improved, both feature-wise and design-wise. Twitter can't.

In a way, I hope Twitter stays the same for as long as possible. Tumblr used to be ultrasimple in that same compact way. Now they've added a ton of features I really dislike, and I'm strongly considering switching to something else if I can find anything decent. Twitter will lose focus if it does anything else. (As it is, things like that new recommended people list is pretty garish.) That makes monetization tricky, though.
Because everybody is already used to telling time in a certain way, and doesn't want to take the time to learn a new one, put in the effort to learn a new one, or deal with the initial wave of missed meetings and general confusion that would result as larger portions of the population moved to a different way of telling time.
It depends on what you're working on. I do a fair amount of machine learning and couldn't get by without quite a bit of calculus, probability, combinatorics and linear algebra.
> If anything, Obama hasn't been doing enough spending on projects that will be putting people to work in the next 1-2 years.

The CBO says that growth would restart by the end of the year without the stimulus. If that's true, why do we need additional spending afterwards?

Note that Keynes said counter-cyclical spending while Obama's spending establishes a higher baseline. (The only significant savings is for Iraq after Bush said that we'd be out.)
TBH fairly small - but there is a difference between profitable and being able to get hold of some capital (beyond the seed funding of YC). You might well get to that stage (no - you should get to that stage :D).

Is there any reasons the GF cant come to the bay with you?

EDIT: cheeky but does the GF have any hacker skills to become a cofounder?
What problem does it solve that UTC doesn't?

Its time unit (1 beat := 1000th of a (mean solar) day) doesn't have any nice relation to the units of time with which people are already very familiar (seconds, minutes, hours).
I think one of the things that makes twitter successful is it's lack of features. I'm on friendfeed, I was on Pownce, neither of them stuck. Friendfeed comes across like a 64-track mixing console with a builtin patch bay; it's got features and it does stuff. It feels like Pro Gear, but it's mostly built for readers not senders.

Twitter is as close as my phone. It removes most of the barriers to publishing, and the limitations help to make it predictable.

Could twitter's functionality be replicated; yes. However none of the fast followers seem to be able to stick with the simple feature set.
When making a website, you should be thinking about...

... how sweet it is to not be on shared hosting anymore.
Most people only have to worry about time zones when they go on holiday, even in the internet age, so they gain nothing.

It forces people to give up familiar concepts of hours, minutes, and seconds, for no good reason.

It forces people in some locations to get used to the date changing during daylight hours (big change if you are used to the date changing at midnight, after or just before you go to bed).
It mentions Facebook?

One distinction this article never fleshed out is the difference between memory caching and memory as a System of Record - this is mentioned very early on, but then the rest of the article seems to be a mixture of these techniques.

Not sure I'd be keen to use memory as a SoR at this stage. You leave yourself vulnunerable to bugs, and deployment would be a nightmare... So - given that - If you want to snapshot some kind of consistent state, then I don't see why you wouldn't stick with disk for the moment.
One4Ten: Submit one business idea, get ten business ideas back
I agree with mjgoins.

If you are motivated to do some self learning, here is a link to a course offered at UMD on Discrete structures: http://www.cs.umd.edu/class/fall2006/cmsc250/note.html

Check out the "Notes" (lecture slides), homework, quizzes, exams (all of which have the solutions posted).

Also, check out the syllabus and you can find the readings in the textbook:
Discrete Mathematics with Applications by Susanna Epp. (Google Shopping: http://tinyurl.com/d99nb9)
Yeah, the new version of haproxy has been shown to be able to hold up on a 10Gbps connection with no problems. We're using 1.3.15.2 with a couple of patches from the experimental version.
What a terrible, lazy article.

Twitter doesn't need to add lots of largely unnecessary features (or "innovation") to their site. What it needs, and what their team is presumably working on, is focusing on ensuring that their core functionality works correctly and keeping the whole site up and running during their explosive growth.

The fact they're willing to rely on leveraging 3rd parties and providing the core tools to let users innovate should be considered a good thing and other companies should model themselves on Twitter's openness and willingness for co-operation.

And who is the author to call the staff "lazy" because they aren't focusing on what he wants or because he doesn't directly see what they're doing?
Linux and open source developer tools you should not overlook
Heh, no. But that would have been funny. Actually, teej reminded me what it was -- under heavy load, the load balancing algorithm would completely break down, and put all the traffic on the first few app servers on the list, and nothing on the last few.
I'm really appalling at maths, and yet I love programming, and have been doing it full-time for over 10 years now. I came to programming very late in life, and almost had to claw my way into the industry. I was almost 30 before I even touched a PC.

There are the very odd time when I suddenly realize I need something from my school maths education (which was before 1978), and then I have to search out that stuff (e.g. geometry and trigonometry) and finally find a use for it.

I know I would be a better programmer if I understood maths better, but then I believe almost everyone would be improved by a better understanding of maths. I'm sure that studying programming will actually make some areas of maths more relevant for you.

It all depends on the kind of programming you want to do - in some areas I guess not being a mathalete might be a great hindrance.

I'm pretty sure it will be frowned upon to mention any particular language here, but Hypertalk really doesn't feel much like programming. Maybe it's because my speech patterns have actually started to resemble Hypertalk. Hypertalk lives on in http://www.runrev.com/ . (I have no connection with them other than as a user of their software.)

I wish I was in your place. I'd take every opportunity to learn maths, but I wouldn't let my maths ability/disability get in the way of my enjoyment of programming. It's a fantastic buzz, and I never grow tired of it (well, sometimes I do get a little frustrated).

I'm not sure how many people have listed any books for you, but this is the maths book I used when I followed a 1 year course in computing:
http://www.amazon.com/Schaums-Outline-Discrete-Mathematics-O...
Sadly, interoperable standardised protocols tend not to get public mind-share these days.
Yeah, that was it! The load balancing algorithm completely broke down under load.
I think the idea above of asking your GF to help could be a good one. Maybe she has hacker skills. Maybe she has other skills which could really help your startup - business, sales, visual design. Any and all of these could really give you a boost.
Ashley Tisdale | Ashley Tisdale Funny Pics
> The user will then read the paragraph and enter its contents in tuple form.

This has been tried before. It didn't work very well. Is that good enough? If not, how are you going to do better? (Note "My project can't succeed unless we do better" doesn't imply that you will.)

> Of course, lawyers do a lot of other things, but for the sake of this idea let’s consider lawyers are paid $400/hr just to tell you what the law says.

Since they're not, how is this a useful exercise?
How much energy goes into making a bottle of water?
Working together could also ruin the relationship, as the qualities needed for a good co-founder are different than one for a good GF.
Process management is done with a custom tool. In theory we could have a dynamic number of apps, but in practice it is static. Occasionally we have to take a few out of rotation, and haproxy handles it just fine.
Having built a couple of scalable systems of my own (personal project one running on 5 machines currently and 2 works ones running on 50 machines and 17,000+(client)/15(server) machines respectively - though note those last 2 are not websites) I can say safely that the easiest option is to go with a cloud provider. :)

It's a pain to make sure you monitor loads and tweak the availability as things grow. Whereas with Amazon (who I would 100% recommend having recently played with them) it is pretty much all automagical :)

One of the things I used to do when I was a more naive programmer was attempt to reinvent the wheel. Take LiveMeta. I got distracted for at least 2 weeks writing a javascript/php visitor tracking system (and it was damn good :D) . But the thing is - it's not what the site was about, it was an incidental feature (solely for the developers too!) and in the end Google/Clicky provided enough features.

I traded one cut and paste of the Google Analytics code for 2 weeks I should have spent on the other parts of the project.

Same applies here: dont give yourself work. If the project is going to need to scale fast ebough to require cloud computing/scalable architecture pay the bit extra to have Amazon do it for you. 3 years down the line you might decide it is time to invest in your own network - but right now I doubtthat shouldbe your focus. :)
Classic failed argument. Service isn't implementing features that are visible to you, so you argue that they aren't doing anything. Sorry, designing highly scalable systems isn't always about whizbang features. But that's the thing: The whizbang feature is that it all works and stays online, despite their 700% growth.

Another thing to consider is that with a site of this site and activity level, any minor change has to be mulled over quite a bit before implementing. There's question of whether or not people will accept it and of how it will be implemented at scale. You can't always take the Facebook approach and upheave your entire website every few months.

And complaining about searching not being on the home page? 2 seconds in Google gets you: http://blog.twitter.com/2009/02/testing-more-integrated-sear...
Seriously. Lazy staff? That's ridiculous. The author's obviously never worked at a startup before or he'd know most everyone at even a slow growing startup works really hard and wears all kinds of hats. With Twitter's phenomenal growth I can only imagine.
Xuggler 1.22 Released
Never underestimate the power of an open API

"We built an API. 2000 pieces of software are capable of sending updates. Summize was the most important one" @ev #TED
>> "Sometimes not having extra features is a web site's primary feature."

It's also a great way to ensure minimal leverage to make money. At least they saw the good sense to buy summize.
I'd guess that to only be true if the tech isn't also a nerd.

Nerd-to-nerd communications usually run at full duplex with compression on.
I really don't buy the author's argument for more features.

1) He claims that there are all these features they could have just dropped in. But none of the features the author describes seem like hit-me-over-the-head obvious features. I can live without "...tab-completion, threaded conversations, better URL shortening, marking of new tweets since last visit, in-line pictures, @replies from people one is not following in the main stream or groups yet..."

2) He states: "...one would think they’ll focus on enhancing the experience of using and developing Twitter apps, which in this case it means implementing OAuth. Yeaaah…wrong. OAuth has been made available just recently (before that, only selected developers could try OAuth) and is still in beta."

But I wonder if the author has ever tried to implement a working, scalable OAuth system. It's a major pain in the ass and by no means a panacea. HTTPS + HTTP Auth is much more straightforward. I don't even think I would call Google or Flickr's OAuth systems perfect yet. They still have huge usability gaps that the end user has to get over (redirect to log in), let alone the technical issues that are likely lurking behind the scenes.

Overall it seems like the author is focused too much on the idea of features for features sake and not whether Twitter has found a niche and done well limiting their service to meet the needs of that niche.
I think we're arguing different things. The article claimed was that Twitter had no competition and so was getting lazy. The op pointed out competitors. You said they weren't really competitors. I said, "no, you're wrong, they are" and added two more to the list for good measure. Now you seem to have switched to arguing whether they're successful competitors; I agree, they don't seem to be (maybe FF to a degree), but just because they haven't taken off like Twitter, that doesn't mean they aren't competitors.
No, please don't do this. I've worked on both sides of tech support, and simply saying "FizzBin" or any other silly phrase doesn't give either party any actual information about the other's knowledge.

I use Firefox -> FizzBin
I am a Firefox developer -> FizzBin

I know what an ethernet card is -> FizzBin
I advised IEEE on ethernet communications -> FizzBin

I am a brilliant electrical engineer -> FizzBin
I am a brilliant electrical engineer that doesn't understand software at all and I have a huge chip on my shoulder too -> FizzBin

NO.

The "geek handshake" is far simpler, and more informative. When calling, tell the technician everything you've already done to diagnose / troubleshoot the problem, using whatever terminology you're comfortable with:

"Hi, I'm having a weird problem with this DSL connection, it's a new connection and I've got a sync/no-surf on the modem. The VCI and VPI settings look like they're correct, they're 0/35. The computer can connect to the modem just fine. I have no DNS and no ping to a known good IP."

If the technician then says, "OK sir, and have you tried restarting the computer?", then you know you're dealing with an idiot. Escalate it.

If the technician says, "OK, well I can get an ATM ping to your line so it looks like a faulty unit, we'll ship you another one", then you're done.

I've used this for years.
I think my hatred for Harry Potter isn't completely because of the fact that I hate the series. I believe it comes more from the fact that the English school system proposed placing it on the national curriculum's book list and were planning to remove either Of Mice and Men or The Lord of the Flies. Thankfully they completely changed this, allowing teachers to teach whatever books they want as long as they were established texts, which included Harry Potter.

I believe the rest of my distaste for the series came from when the books were initially released. There was such hype over a kids book and in my free time I was reading many of the sci-fi classics, and when I finally got to reading Harry Potter it was just an extremely campy version of Ender's Game. I believe even Orson Scott Card (who's a fan of Harry Potter) pointed this out when J.K. Rowling targeted her own fans for the Harry Potter lexicon for 'stealing her ideas'.

I'm fully aware of all that's wrong with the Twilight novels, but it never really bothered me and I've generally avoided books written in first person. However, I came from the UK so I never read or heard anything until I was ambushed into reading it by my (then fiancee) wife, I'd given her like my favorite book of all time to read The Strange Life of Ivan Osokin and she gave me Twilight, which wasn't exactly a fair trade: 200 page book at like 4x5 vs 500 page at 5x7. Then, of course, the movie came out and her friend just happened to have extra tickets for the opening night. I believe that's the easiest I've ever been tricked.

Although, rather ironically, I believe I've contributed more money to Rowling and the Harry Potter series as I have watched most of the movies and eventually actually paid to see the most recent one, and I've yet to give a penny to Mayer.
We don't know all your details. You know your life better than we do.

Is she willing to find employment and pay some of the bills if she lives with you? How fast do you have to pay off your loans? Have you looked to see how good a living situation SF affords you? It's an expensive place.

I agree with menloparkbum: Apply either way. If you're accepted, then decide further.
Erlang/OTP R13A has been released
Fine, I'm not arguing with any of that. That doesn't mean these sites aren't competitors with Twitter, it just means that they might be losing.
Thatcher. I'm only half joking.

The sad pattern is that because of special interests, inefficiencies grow to a point where you have something like a revolution.

Then there's revolutionary reform and the cycle starts again, I can think of Britain and Sweden off the top of my head. Two states that were big and bloated, slimmed down and then started bloating again.
The cost savings from requiring user assembly are much smaller than the market loss from limiting your market to folks who are willing to assemble.
What makes people cheat? [video]
A: 2000 times more than the energy required to produce tap water.

Another interesting fact from the article: ". . . world consumption of bottled water has increased by 70% since 2001 to 200 billion liters in 2007."
No - You'd be self-employed, with no income.... Yeah - I know - it's a distinction that I wonder about every day.

YC hand out a cheque when you accept their offer. That's it until you secure other funding or revenue.

Doing a startup is a (significant) lifestyle choice. So if your GF is on board with that, and is happy a part of it, then just apply. If not, then you've got some bigger issues to wrestle with.
Is there any way for existing customer to get a discount on signing up for another year of hosting?
Clang vs gcc Blender rendering comparison
I second that. In fact, dive in now before your mind gets used to other ways of thought. Explore different schools, don't take one programming paradigm and only stick to it (e.g. don't do one of php/perl/python/javascript only till you hit your 20s.)

This is purely personal experience, but I find people who started programming early have a better "sixth sense" at getting algorithms, data structures, and design right. It's like solving crosswords, you read a description and the word/concept comes to you. Like the reverse of looking up a word in the dictionary, but with a fuzzier input! :)

I've seen late life, college usually, programmers have hour-long meetings to get to something others get in seconds.

Many, perhaps most, competitors in programming contests are 15-25. Most started programming very, very early.
The East Germans were incredibly well educated. Yes, their physical infrastructure was far behind West Germany's, but reunification should have been profitable almost from the beginning.

Reunification should have been like the end of WWII but with less damage and more and better help.
Just to clarify... one founder gets $10,000.00, two founders get $15,000.00, three founders get $20,000.00. It's clearly stated in the FAQ... what hope is there, if you can't even read the terms correctly.