skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's easy to get cocky about this if you've only worked on relatively small projects in languages like Ruby, but being so cavalier with larger codebases will blow up in your face. Yes, code should be well-factored, but it isn't, so be careful.

I think type checks should absolutely remain in production code. (If you're considering removing them for efficiency purposes, measure if it matters.) The ambiguity that tends to creep in and cause nasty bugs isn't "is this a polygon or a string?" (I mean, duh), but rather, stuff like, "is this measurement currently in meters or millimeters?". Working in a dynamic language and putting checks in the few places where it really matters is good enough, but it really matters. It may help to think of type assertions as comments about expectations and intent that are automatically checked.

Also, languages with type inference can be a good compromise. You get the consistency checking of static typing without having to constantly remind the compiler that it's still dealing with an int or whatever. (I like OCaml, but it's not without its flaws. It takes a while to get the hang of working with, rather than against, its incredibly thorough type checking.)
I used the flu to stop drinking coffee, as I figured I would feel bad anyway, so I might as well add the withdrawal symptoms on top.

However, I started drinking again after about a month :(
based on your profile I wouldn't hold my breath...pg tends to back teams that already have hackers.
Same, especially the logo styling.
Somehow I feel like this is just the beginning of the Posterous PR machine (just look @ Twitter these days). Something big; Good job guys!
>> "Ooo my same applications only .... online! Awesome, now what."

Ok here's a few reasons why this really is awesome for most people.

* OK, so I don't have to download anything, don't need to worry about spyware/virii/etc
* Cool. I can access my applications from my PC, my friends, my iPhone, a net cafe, the library.
* Ooops, my hard disk died. Oh well, all my data is 'safe'.
* Ooops, my hard disk died. At least I don't have to download and install tons of applications.

Not to mention the fact that those apps instantly get easy access to 'auto-update' 'share' 'collaborate' etc - they're easy to 'multi-userfy'

Desktop software will always have a place, just like not everyone uses webmail. But for the majority, webmail is just way easier for them.
Actually, just being able to keep more of the transaction should be incentive enough for merchants. All that's really needed is a high enough consumer buy-in to make it worthwhile to deploy.

Credit card processing fees are ridiculously high given how much of the risk is offloaded onto merchants and other parties.
I thought we might find you here...

Why are you not on IRC these days, btw?
Just a smidgen of searching before posting is appreciated. Especially when the original title is -identical- to your 3-day-old dupe. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=544808
And what exactly is so pernicious about an alternate view point?
I doubt Google is even making much money off Google News. The wire services probably believe Google is making all the money they're losing, but that is just not the case: the pie is shrinking.
You may want to photoshop the foot of 4th dude out:

http://www.tapinko.com/images/thedudes.jpg

:)
I like the design but I didn't "get it" when I first landed on the page. After poking around for a few seconds, I saw what you're trying to do.

Why not throw up an "about"?
Christ, man, you're one of the most active users here, but you're always so unpleasant.

Yeah, most of us will be rejected. No reason to be a jerk about it.
MySQL didn't need to do the best thing, it needed to NOT do nothing.
"HN killer" begs the question:

Is PG moving over to TechCrunch?

I'm surprised at how many "experts" STILL equate technology with community...just tells me how many still don't "get it".
Why baseball benched Microsoft Silverlight
This is exactly the kind of thinking that needs to be done. I'm impressed.
Probably before 9 pm pacific time.
That makes more sense; thank you.
Screencast not working for me (Firefox 3.0.8)
The Return to Attending a More Selective College [pdf]
There is being a jerk, and then there is being realistic. Yes most people will get rejected, but most of them fit your basic mold. I dunno about you, but I haven't heard of pg backing a single non-techie founder...have you?
In 2009, economics plays a bigger part than military strategy. Once the American cupboard is bare, however... All bets are off.
"10. We'll review applications and get back to you on the evening of 6 April."
I have no clue, to be honest. I don't know half of the YC companies that exist.

Realistic is fine, but he's not saying "Do you think I have a chance?", he's saying "When will we hear back?" It's rude to answer a question that hasn't been asked.
Oh, and Santa doesn't exist.
I do engage in some `re-quoting' usually. In other words, a trade journal may reference some statistics from a report and I'll just use that quote. I don't know if that is really a good thing to do though.
True, ownership of the preliminary work can be faked. However, without intimate knowledge of file formats and graphics algorithms it would be challenging to, for example, come up with an Illustrator vector file that rasterizes byte-for-byte to the scaled-down logo images copied from his portfolio. (assuming the thieves copied the graphics directly and didn't think to make their own vector file first...)

It may even be enough for him to have a credible high-res, layer-separated Photoshop file; someone who does not have the skills to produce their own original artwork probably also lacks the skills to convincingly fake a high-res version of someone else's artwork.

(Not sure if this has held in court, but I'd bet it has come up before.)
If a kid asks "Is there a Santa?" you can tell him "No" and feel not-so-bad. But if he says "When will Santa come?", if your response is "Don't be silly, Santa doesn't exist," then you're being a jerk.
However, when most of the yeast are cooperating, it becomes advantageous for some individuals to cheat, and vice versa, which allows co-existence between cheaters and cooperators to arise.

It also means we're kind of stuck with the patent trolls.
The sidebar font uses the same blue as the facebook "Log in with Facebook" above.
(1) This makes me think that clicking these links will ask me to log into Facebook
(2) Overall feels like you're phishing for my Facebook username/password. You need to explain what your site is before anyone will feel comfortable logging into Facebook via your site. Furthermore, WHY would I log into FB through your site? Are you going to pull in my friends list and send them spam on my behalf? Are you going to post in my activity feed? These are all questions that a user will have and you need to be very clear about upfront.
I think Techmeme is the sort of site they want to shut down. Hacker News and Digg would be much, much harder.

The difference is that while Techmeme and Google news are only displaying the headlines and summaries, they are indexing the FULL article and making use of it to power their algorithms.

If they determine it that way, I don't see what the big deal is. If you want to use the Twitter API, you have to pay past a certain point. Maybe a year from now, if you want to index full news articles for your aggregator, you have to pay past a certain point as well. That wouldn't be too bad at all and would leave that act of linking safe and untouched.
While I don't condone anyone intentionally getting food poisoning, your post is exactly what my father did to quit smoking. He contracted a bout of severe food poisoning that was so bad he couldn't even smoke. He had been a pack-a-day smoker for decades. He never smoked again.
Don't be silly, YCombinator doesn't exist.
A Valleywag killer, yes.
There's nothing wrong with having a thread here for congrats and consolation. Right?
perhaps the only insightful comment from the entire rant is that "males are general, females are particular."

an exploration into why this seems to be upheld in the minds of most people would be way more interesting than her rant that Pixar must be sexist for thinking the same way as the rest of the human race.

Pixar is a company that tells identifiable human stories mostly with non-human living creatures and animated inanimate objects. Giving them "generic human" properties in order to appeal to the general human condition just seem like common sense.

In fact, I am way more disturbed by the fact that most male characters in recent stories are portrayed as weak, flawed and/or immoral, and that most female characters are the embodiment of kindness, good sense and smarts. There may be more male characters, but are any of them adequate role models for our male youth?
Convey to the users what the site is about. After a few minutes of trying to figure, I just didnt bother further.
My level of excitement goes up when I think that games can be delivered this way. See Quake Live.
I would think an objective understanding is all that is desirable or necessary. I can see a reason to elevate an objective understanding over a subjective one; the understanding is independent of the observer.

The subjective understanding is merely the personal perception of something. It is a joint property of the observer and the thing being observed. Why elevate the subjective understanding of one observer over another (insiders over outsiders, in this case) assuming equal information/rationality on both their parts?
How much can you charge for building a site for a small business? While that is probably more fun, I suspect "enterprise projects" for big companies pay way better.
The next title would be:

> OMG! Arrington is marrying Paul Graham!
Good luck, btw!
I'm kind of sick of the "kill Web 2.0" meme... it's easily as tired as the term Web 2.0.

Web 2.0 isn't a version. For O'Reilly it's a marketing term used to sell books, blogs, magazines, and conferences. For everyone else who took part in the infamous definition discussions it was a helpful prompt for talking about where the web is and where it's going. Really, though, Web 2.0 just signifies whatever we're doing with the web right now that is exciting and cool and different from how we used the web 5, 10 or 15 years ago.

Here's an excerpt from a piece I wrote at ReadWriteWeb last year entitled "There is No Web 3.0, There is No Web 2.0 - There is Just the Web" ...

"[The] versioning of the web is silly. Web 1.0, 2.0, or 3.0 is all really just whatever cool new thing we're using the web to accomplish /right now/.

...

Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 -- they don't really exist. They're just arbitrary numbers assigned to something that doesn't really have versions. But the discussion that those terms have prompted have been helpful, I think, in figuring out where the web is going and how we're going to get there; and that's what is important."

Link: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/there_is_no_web_30_ther...

So let's dispense with the "Web 2.0 is over, onto the next version!" meme and instead just focus on what the web is, what we can do with it now, and where we can take it in the future. </rant>
If someone is addicted to something, there is no way they'd be able to quit for weeks without a serious effort. And caffeine is not physically addictive at all, this is psychological addiction if even that. Also, caffeine is flushed from the system with about 6-8 hours.
Convincing the Body to Clear its Own Biochemical Waste
For Java, I had good experiences with Jobserve.co.uk (they are not only active in the UK).
Rev=canonical: url shortening that doesn't hurt the internet
Bob's Quick Guide to the Apostrophe:
http://angryflower.com/bobsqu.gif
You can't make good predictions based on a HackerNews profile, but let's pretend...

>>I am a 36 year old Rochester, NY based entreprenuer. At 25 I founded and bootstrapped a sales & marketing company to $9M in sales, 50 employees and >$2M in personal income.

If all we knew about this person was that:
1) They built a ~$10M company and earned more than $2M personally
2) They weren't a hacker

versus:

1) Some hacker

I would put bet person 1 would be a better investment.
Rubx: Twitter's Ruby shell
where are files saved to?
From the end of the article:

"Last month, a Motley Fool blogger suggested that Apple might drop the ARM processor in the next version of the iPhone, either for the next version of Intel's Atom, codenamed Moorestown, or if Apple build its own chip using the technology from its acquisition of low-power chip maker P.A. Semi Inc. last year."

Apple switching the iPhone to Atom is highly unlikely. They'd have to either scrap their entire library of software (running it under emulation would be unusably slow), and they'd probably end up losing out on power consumption anyway.

Building their own ARM is totally possible, though.
Yeah, [caffeine] withdrawal feels like being sick enough that I've done that, too. I always intended to start drinking again, though, especially once I learned that it was so easy to stop; I'm no longer concerned about moderate quantities. In the 90s I worried about whether I could quit at will; now I know it doesn't take much to stop indefinitely, so there isn't as much reason to. :)
I've been using friendfeed and Twitter for months, but just noticed that FF let's you edit posts after posting. I think I can credit that to the new UI.
I don't think they're always evil. Tinyurl started before Twitter, apparently mostly as a public service.
Step 1: clone pg?
Newspapers provide facts and opinion. The facts can't be copyrighted so anyone can repeat them. The opinion and the bias of any particular newspaper are noise not signal from the point of view of increasing the actual information you have. Its the internet killing the newspapers, by unbundling what most customers want; entertainment, celebrity gossip, sports reporting, from what "serious journalists" go into journalism hoping to do, investigative reporting, political reporting, policy analysis, etc. Most people don't give a damn about any of this, but the institution of the newspaper means the advertisers who pay the salaries of everybody on the newspaper get the (large) audience of people who buy the paper for gossip and sport and the (small) one who buy it for policy wonkery, so there's a cross-subsidy. There are also bloggers who are much better than the vast majority of what you'll see in the papers. The average quality is lower, but the sample size is enormously bigger, and the variance is really rather large so the opinion niche is also threatened. And some people will do it excellently for free.

So the newspaper business model is dead. Facts can't be copyrighted, opinion is available for free, cross-subsidisation is no longer viable, and across the developed world the newspaper reading population is trending down. There are bright spots, like India, but most 1st world journalists are screwed.

So an entire industry is thrashing around with two choices;(a) die (b) Find an alternative business model. As the biggest, most profitable pure play internet company, shaking Google down is a better choice than resigning oneself to death. As such if you're looking for someone to get mad at, someone to negotiate with as if they're the Internet, they're the best bet.
Not to mention, an ARM edition of Windows wouldn't be much good without either (1) a binary translator or (2) everyone rewriting their software to run on ARM. The OS does not exist in a vacuum.
Adam and I just launched our beta, and between that and the copy of Infinite Jest somebody mailed me I've had no time. It's all work, reading, sleep. I'll be back on eventually.

...creep.
Good eye...
Although a lot of cruft comes through along with useful updates, I will miss this. It is almost like Ubuntu's system update: a single, semi-serialized point of entry for periodic fixes and feature adds for things you have installed. I don't relish the idea of hunting this stuff down on an individual basis.
Newspapers print paper. They aren't in the business of making websites. Just like buggy whip manufacturers, they're a relic of the past.

Associated Press, which is a collective of newspapers, is in the role of MPAA/RIAA, because they believe that they have ownership of facts. This isn't the first time they got into trouble about their business model:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Associated_Press_v._United_Stat...
Hyperlinking words rather than including actual URLs seems like the simple solution. Every time someone pastes a URL into Twitter, it should be replaced with an <a> tag and the word "link". 4 letters, and no 3rd party redirect required.

URL shorteners are great for newspapers printing links on paper, but on the internet, we've had this long URL problem solved since HTML 1.0.
That's a very interesting way to look at the problem - algorithms like mine and Techmeme's do indeed digest the full article whereas HN does not. I had thought the primary issue would be whether or not the site provided a summary / thumbnail (as I see WindyCitizen does), not whether or not it scanned the source's bits.

Having to pay for my algorithm to access this data would be a big deal to me - I'm operating on a shoestring budget and I don't want to do that.
We did once fund a pair of founders neither of whom were hackers. One of them had majored in physics in college though.
I still want to know what childhood trauma the "execute all drug users" guy suffered.
I think (hope?) he was writing tongue-in-cheek.
Ask HN: How much documentation is enough?
I'm interested in how much technical documentation startups generate during the pre-launch phases. I'm particularly interested in YC invitees as they are in a very timebound context.

In my one-man setup, I generate enough documentation to sketch out the main user flows through the app; a broad technical architecture and a feature roadmap. I do not document detailed technical and functional spectifications, nor do I write detailed test cases.

I guess the question I am asking is whether I am storing a world of pain for x months / years hence by adopting such a lightweight approach...
I generally agree with you. You're right that the economic environment can make hiring harder. There are more people looking for work, but the average quality of applicants is probably lower on the whole. The "extra" people are those laid off, who will be weaker on average than the general pool, and a lot of the talented people (who have a choice) are staying put until the hiring environment improves.

This: In fact, ask the references for additional references.

... is actually pretty damn scummy. The candidate has no way of knowing who his shadow references are, and could get unfairly burned and left with no idea why. It'd only be morally acceptable if you asked the candidate for permission to call these second-degree references, but that would defeat the purpose of snooping.
Since we're talking about jdileo's profile, here's a question: why apply for something like YC? Yeah, I totally get that YC isn't about the cash. But still, couldn't you buy way more connections and press than the YC companies get?

Alternatively, you could take like $500k to Demo Day and sink $100k each into five of the YC companies as an angel.

I just don't get why someone who had built that big of a company at 25 would go for YC. What am I missing?
Woh, I didn't mean to start a text brawl or be vague. My opinion is that royalty checks AREN'T required to keep music alive or vibrant, though possibly the industry aspect DOES require them. I have to hold up Jonathon Coulton here (http://www.jonathancoulton.com/). He loves his fans (who love him back) and doesn't require people to pay just to share his work.

BTW, sorry I pissed people off, it wasn't my intention.
Sure, it would make things hard for you, but again, if you were using any other sort of data, there'd be usage costs. The news folks are just figuring that part out now, while every tech-first company has that build into their business from the start.
There's already a rel=canonical element supported by the major search engines:

http://ysearchblog.com/2009/02/12/fighting-duplication-addin...
Q: What did you see in Flash that impressed you?

Bowman: You see several things. You see a high-grade product that's in some form on 99 percent of the browsers. You've got something that's got mass usage. Secondly you see with Adobe a company committed to the customer experience in video with the Flash Player. We see a partner that continues to invest in their product. They have the same desire that we do. They want the Flash Player to be the best thing anybody has ever seen and we want that. When you partner with people like that, it's not a philosophical discussion. We know where we want to be now how do we get there.

So once we filter out all the market-speak it pretty much boils down to that Flash has a better market-penetration.
Does physics majoring help start-ups? Were they a physics-central startup? Or is it just proof of dedication, similar to how a math major would be?
AT&T May Start Negotiating with Apple to Prevent Skype Calls over iPhone
My mom used to suffer headaches on days we ran out of coffee at home, so I vowed never to touch the stuff. That reminds me, I need some more to get through these integration tests ...
The facts can't be copyrighted so anyone can repeat them.

The AP would disagree with you, as they've got a number of old case precidents claiming that "hot news" is a property right, and that they own it.

http://www.mediabistro.com/webnewser/news_alert/90yearold_la...

I predict that AP, along with the other aggregators such as AFP and Reuters will fall in line with the RIAA to buy legislation protecting their obsolete business models.
It would be nice if they'd expand this idea to Google Maps. When I type in "123 bank street", it should show me 123 Bank Street in my local city rather than the one in New York.
Yeah, University isn't the right term for this, or this:

http://www.aboutmcdonalds.com/mcd/careers/hamburger_universi...
The New York Times announces a Real Estate API
It started because the newspaper industry is looking for new ways to mitigate declining revenue, IMHO. If the newspaper industry was doing well, we _probably_ would be hearing about how they're giving away news to drive eyeballs to sites -- much like how they operated as a newspaper, not a news organization who publishes to the web.

Craigslist and eBay are the two standouts who rang the knell.

http://news.cnet.com/Report-Craigslist-costing-newspapers-mi...

My understanding is for years, the newspapers gave news away for near free, subsidized by advertising and in the black because of it. Take out the classifieds and you've removed a valuable service to the community and a major revenue source. Now, they're reduced to news organizations. Their revenue has been declining. Aggregators are the current scapegoat and one of the potential revenue modes.

Fifteen years ago, I had five choices for daily print news. My two local papers, the USA Today, NYT and the Wall Street Journal. Today, each of them compete against themselves and a litany of other "print" news. CNN, ABC, CBS, and your local TV stations are now "print" publishers too. The competition is even more fierce.

The news industry as a whole changed with the internet. You no longer need presses and trucks or 100,000 watt transmitters to distribute news. The sour economy only expedites this shift. Some will come out as agents of change. Others will fight to maintain what they had. These are the ones who are trying to plug something that started long before aggregators.

edit: good read --
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=506483
HN is the aggregator, not the middle man, once an interesting story gets to the front page people in the community can start interesting debates.

So linking to other aggregators is like linking from HN to digg or reddit, being TC another one of them.

Good netiquette links directly to the source.
Not as an internet server, but many companies can't get rid of x86 Windows servers because they have (better: think they have) to run Windows applications like Exchange or SQL Server.