skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Chat startup Chatterous (YC W08) throws gauntlet down against proprietary closed chat widgets
Sure, I'd pay that much. YMMV.
Also, if you establish residency you save about 15 grand a year.
Among other things, that would have solved the Great Depression, World War I, and Germany's hyperinflation in the thirties. Also AIDS.
You do see the ones that frame, btw.
California is also one of the worse states to incorporate in. I've set up an LLC in Utah (where my sister lives), and it took a few hours to go from 'zip' to 'Utah LLC'. Everything was do-able online, and I even got all my federal tax information (EIN).
Excellent article...can't wait to take a crack at that new API
While I can't answer the actual question, I can give you my best guess at what the future will hold.
In short, I think WIMAX will eventually come out of hibernation, allowing for cities to be covered by ubiquitous access. This, in turn, will hopefully lead to hub-bridging between cities, which basically will transform the internet from being the scale-free network it currently is into the scalable network it should be. At that point, current ISPs will be forced to dramatically alter their business plan, because it is impossible for them to keep their current business plan with a non scale-free network.
The leading Scala web framework, Lift (www.liftweb.net), was made by David Pollak, an early Rails adopter.

Lift tries to take the best of Rails but it is far from a port.
this comment is unbelieveably snarky, if it were anyone other than joshu I have a feeling they'd be at -4 right now, not +4. Would you really say "want a medal?" in person. I doubt it.
It uses Mechanical Turk.

http://blog.wired.com/business/2008/12/amazon-proves-i.html
Well done. A creative solution, well-implemented.
Can you add and remove slots from a closure? Names in closures are bound at the time that they are created. There is no instance_eval in Common Lisp.
Tech startups hire students on a shoestring through Ottawa program
Microsoft's Lauren ad faked say bloggers
Wow. I studied University using this guy's OS book. Definitely a visionary and pragmatic.
David Brooks: Good summarization of all the literature on financial collapse.
Here is his own summary:

"The conclusion was inescapable: the problem wasn't Perl or C++ or Java,
it was me. I just wasn't a very good programmer any more. Lisp's power
had made me complacent, and the world had passed me by. Looking back, I
actually don't think I was ever a very good programmer. I just happened
to have the good fortune to recognize a good thing when I saw it, and
used the resulting leverage to build a successful career. But I credit
much of my success to the people who designed Common Lisp."

Yeah. I can attest to that. Many non-lisper friends have learned to do very difficult things while I personally remained ignorant of them because I never needed them. This is analogous to how being a fortune 100 CEO is bad for your health compared to being a day laborer; you no longer sweat and work your muscles, you no longer get the necessary daily vitamin D from sun rays, your hands are not as manly and rugged, etc.

Yeah, but then you can afford a chartered JetStream to fly you to the Bahamas for 2 hours of Jungle Gym and back.

Ron Garret just wishes 37Signals to fork SBCL and get us Lispers some hype :-P McCLIM windows with rounded corners FTW!
His story is almost sad - but in a good way I suppose.

I'm going back through my undergrad CS classes and picking up scheme and lisp again, and I'm really enjoying it this time through. I feel retroactively angry at the linguistic kludges I had to work around in other programming languages before.

That being said, there's always room for diversity. Knowing different languages will either reinforce your opinion of the superiority of your preferred programming paradigm, or it will shed light on a new way that you can hope to incorporate into future development. Either way, you end up the better for it.

"The state of C++ was so horrific back then that they were
forced to go back to Lisp because they just couldn't get things to run in C++ even though they tried very very hard." But I'm sure they were much richer for the experience, with several new connections in their brains about how to approach problems with a different set of limitations.
I did pull that out of my ass, but Nitro and V8 perform polymorphic inline caching. Many execution paths are inlined as machine code -- java won't be any faster for these execution paths.
And, of course, there's Twitter's useless implementation of auto-shortening, which occurs after you submit, thus the 140 limit applies to the original URL.

Most useless "feature" ever.
It's not just Mturks.
From the horse's mouth "For fun, we'll also use a community of real people to find product matches on Amazon.com." @ http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?ie=UTF8&...
Suppose someone created a completely new system, which did NOTHING that the old systems did BUT could be learned quickly and easily, had tremendous power and fullfilled a new or existing need. Then, that system would be adopted in very short order. Ruby-on-rails is far from ideal but it shows the principles. Maybe the users of older approaches would poo-poo it but that wouldn't matter.

Systems that attempt to be an incremental improvement on existing system with large user bases are the least likely to be accepted.

The problem one can see with ACADEMIC research is that this research has lost interest in easily grasped and used method, systems and approaches.
Why is it that management consulting jobs seem to be regarded as some sort of wonder-job that guarantees success? It's certainly a great field and definitely helps, but I think whether or not you can become a management consultant after your stint at an Ivy is hardly the measure of "success" and "impact" that the author of this article connotes.

Here's the straight dope: We need more engineers. Real innovators and builders, who can create real value with their own hands, and not through meetings and Powerpoint Decks.

And if higher SAT scores mean that people can build things that really solve problems and are valuable, then hell yes there is impact. I suspect there's less correlation there between SAT scores and success than whether you got that great job out of college.
For sites like this (and Digg bar, Facebook bar, etc)... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framekiller

<script type="text/javascript">
if (top!=self) top.location.href=self.location.href;
</script>

Adding this to my personal site right now..
We're adding a little something to this month's sales contest. As you all know, first prize is a Cadillac Eldorado. Anybody want to see second prize?

...

Second prize is a set of steak knives. Third prize is you're fired.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104348/quotes
Assume you're willing to use a computer. Still no real good solution.
Ask YC:  How do you get your press?
Just curious. I'm seeing people get press on places like the NYT, Business Week, etc... For those of you that have gotten that type of press, how did you manage it? Any tips or tricks?
The Guy Who Edits Ask-A-Ninja On How To Do Online Video Well
Am I missing something? Isn't Mechanical Turk the community of real people? Or do you think "we'll also use..." means that they're using something else? I didn't get that gist from the full quote:

"After you send us a photo, we'll store it on your Amazon Remembers list (similar to your Wish List) in the app and in your Lists at Amazon.com. For fun, we'll also use a community of real people to find product matches on Amazon.com."
David Brooks is one of my favourite columnists and I still wont sign up for an account to read his writing. Call me stubborn if you'd like :-p.
Wow. This is an amazing idea. I really hope it works out for him.
I guess there is a real market niche that ycombinator flushed out-

namely, Impedance matching between -

a) investors with too much cash and too little time for small startups

b) startups who don't need or want large amounts of cash

You'd think it would be more efficient to cut out the middleman, but I guess the aggregator / 'broker' serves a valuable role, as a retailer.
You may be right that that it's mturks only for product searches.
Wake me up when we have a robot that can design and build robots.
Good point. My son majored in EE&CS at Berkeley. IIRC you cant transfer into CS from L&S. You might find yourself in the position that you go to Berkeley and cant get into CS. My info is 10 years old, so check it out.

Also Berkeley was very heavy into the Computer Engineering side of things. Be sure you like EE and hardware.
Any explanation that ignores the central role that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac played in the crisis leaves a lot to be desired - and can hardly be considered a "good summary" of the financial collapse essentially since they were taken over quite early on in the crisis.

Can we also blame traders and financiers for mispricing risk? Definitely - but let's also be clear that government influence through GSE's like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and poor government regulation played a central role in this. Further, as for leverage, high corporate taxes give companies large incentives to borrow to fund growth. What about the role the Fed played in keeping interest rates low and the credit bubble going? Sorry, I really can't see how this summary can be considered even remotely "good".
Mind you... it might be much better use of time than jobhunting.

but then you'd have to seriously compare with Open Source contribution - a faster way to learn, smarter people to work with and more social benefit...

OSS work likely has even more commercial potential...
Let's have a TV show, I think in the US they are called "American Idol"? In Germany we have "Germany's Next Topmodel" and "Germany's next Superstar", both concepts could be easily extended into a show that portrays the making of a HackStar.
Comedy Network Work Around for Canadians
Most hacker Canadians have a rough time trying to get into the conversation when The Colbert Report or the Daily Show does something interesting (like interview Jim Cramer, or lambaste a politician) because the video of the show is uploaded to Comedy Central which is unavailable to Canadians. Once The Comedy Network/CTV (both Canadian only) feel like it uploading we are fine, but this has taken days at times.

Buying a server in the United States and redirecting the traffic just to watch 2 shows hardly seems worth it, and finding it on torrent sites is difficult (because it is so easy to get it for free on the internet anyway) and may get your broadband turned off/slowed.

I have, however, discovered an easy way to get in on the discussion (read: watch the video) without having to wait for incompetent Canadian providers:

Wait.

I don't know why it works, but if you see the screen on an American site that says "This content is available at Comedy Network for Canadians" just give it 10 to 90 minutes (I don't know the exact time because I always get impatient and go off to do something else) when you come back ~viola~ you can see an image on the screen that you can play.

Anyone know why this is?
Many Americans have this idea that "all forms of commerce are allowed". They aren't and never have been in any society.

It is government's (society's) place to put limits on people's behavior. That is the primary purpose of such systems.
U.S. drug policy is horrible.
Say your time is worth $80/hour, and you can get away with the $7/month github plan. Doing it yourself, if you spend more than ~5 minutes/month on admin, it's not worth it.

But if it's a labour of love? Priceless...
I read it and wondered why stupidity vs. greed were presented as exclusive alternatives. They could both be true -- there was a lot of clubby legislation to benefit the financial community, and the models were wrong.
Get them to use an online time tracking/project management/invoicing application. I recommend FreshBooks, partially because I work for them and partially because they have a built in contractor section. If you connect your RSS reader to the homepage feed it should let you know when people are submitting hours.

Also, it should be free for you if you just have one project and are only using contractors. It is true that they could just leave it on for a while, but if they have to submit notes while they track time, it would be a pretty big pain in the arse for them to constantly fake things.
There's an alternative track at Berkeley for a CS major within L&S, if you're not admitted into the engineering school.

http://sis.berkeley.edu/catalog/gcc_view_req?p_dept_cd=COMSC...
"...I feel retroactively angry at the linguistic kludges..."

I can so relate to this - I was looking forward to hacking in Ruby after php / C++ / Java , but this enjoyment is muted as I've now had a taste of Scheme...

Ill bite my lip and do some Rails hacking aboard the Lear jet...
I'm planning on going into more detail in my next post, walking through some of the Python streaming mapreduce code. Is there anything in particular people want to see?
Scheme implemented in Javascript for both server and UI might be a sweet spot.

This -

"37signals DHH ports Rails to Scheme"

would have been my april 1st HN headline sweetspot !
"Wait, you're now arguing that the "loan sharks" are useful and helpful, after denigrating them elsethread?"

They are only useful and helpful in the absence of forcing banks to act like decent members of society. Fix that problem (which is very easy if you focus on corruption between corporations and elected officials) and you remove the need for the loan sharks.
Oh crap, I knew that!

Deepest apologies to Don Knuth, long may he live.
The only thing to take away from this anecdote is that libraries are the key to getting things done these days.

When you are writing a compiler, you are doing most of the work on your own. You don't need much help from external libraries. (Perhaps you need a compiler compiler, but that's about it.) When you are writing a web app (or something similarly "useful"), you aren't going to have much time to do your thing if you are reinventing an HTTP server, a request dispatcher, a component loader, an event handling system, a persistence layer, and so on. The reason the author's C++, Java, and Python colleagues were getting more done than him is that they were all building things on top of each other's work. The author was starting with nothing every time.

0 + 1 person's work is almost always going to be less than (everyone in the company's work) + 1 person's work. If Google used Lisp, he would probably not be "behind".
Really, it makes that problem worse. I've had it burned into my brain what a shortened URL looks like - short domain, short hash - so I can immediately recognize one and be suspicious of it. But looking at http://tinyurl.com/Do-Tiny-URLs-Suck, I may just click without realizing what it actually is.
I assume people will still know how to build their own radios, however.
Oops, sorry for the faux pas - I thought that it had a capital T - and no idea why I wrote libraries either. I meant VM, or even better, implementation. Sorry, I was tired, and now I've wasted your time defending against something I didn't even mean to say. I was also trying to agree with you about the unreliability of specific benchmarks.

I'll try to restate. You said this:

"There are Lisp and Smalltalk VMs out there that are something like 70X as fast as Ruby 1.8!"

That is what I was trying to argue with. I have never seen any proof, beyond a few cherry-picked examples of Ruby at its worst and Smalltalk at its (presumable) best, where anything like a 70x speed difference is observable. On average, ST (is that ok?) seems to be a mere 5x as fast (or so), coming in at somewhere between 5 and 10 times slower than C.

Ruby 1.8 is in the average case around 30x slower than C. So if Smalltalk can be 70x faster than that, then it is generally twice as fast as C, on average, in everyday use. This is not the case, as far as I am aware. I see this "Smalltalk is SO fast" meme again and again but it just doesn't seem to be grounded in reality.

Sorry for my idiotic error earlier, and for sounding like a PHB ..
Amazon.com Door Desk With a Twist
Facebook wants you to give credit where credit is due
I worked for a company that had close ties to BB and WebCT. Working with BB was always a nightmare - they were exactly what you would think from reading this page. WebCT were great to work with.

It was a sad day when the acquisition happened. Certainly one of the worst things that could happen for the students using the software.
I'm 25.
Whiteboard on desk top = brilliant. :-)
Did you take the GRE?

Actually, I'm curious if GRE scores have the same impact as SAT scores at the firms that care about standardized test scores. Or the ACT, for that matter.
I am studying in UIUC now majoring in CS. It is a very good chance for you to transfer to CS major as long as you are doing good in all the science and math subjects when you are in college. Here, you will have the chance to study in the best building in the campus across NCSA - http://www.cs.uiuc.edu/about/siebelcenter.php ( I have 5 classes here every week even I am freshmen now)

Pros:

Startups? We have entrepreneurs like Jawed Karim(Youtube), Steve Chen(Youtube), Marc Andreessen(Netscape), Thomas Siebel, Max Levchin(Paypal), etc. (Geni, Yammer, Yelp, etc)

I am doing a startup right now with few of my friends. I am going to California this summer and I am putting my school on hold for next few semesters. One of my partner got into MIT before he came here. He decided to come to UIUC because the tuition fees in MIT was really too high (50K vs 13K). He thought that he made the correct decision after he worked on one of the project from MIT.

Cons:

The weather here sucks. It is really cold during the winter.

And, I am sure that Berkerley will have better "startup" environment. But, you will still see some startups around you in UIUC (My startup :X ).

(Anyway, I know Jessica Mah too. And, I can hook you up with people you want to meet too if you are coming to California this summer. But, do you think that networking really helps you to start your next big idea? Your skills are actually more important.)
In most places, the only high-speed internet ISPs are cable companies.

Seriously? There are very few places in the US that don't have DSL. And I don't think capping DSL is very popular these days; my ISP definitely doesn't do it, and I haven't heard much complaining from others either.
FWIW, Tucows DNS service is free. I pay for the domain reg's and email. They used to charge for it, like $0.25/mo or something, but then it became free. Woot.
On the employer side, honestly, I don't think we're big enough for our data to be statistically significant. I can say that we've had another record month of traffic & applications.

Despite all the doom and gloom, people are hiring.
Current (and all recommended):
GitHub
AWS (S3, EC2, ...)
Pivotal Tracker
Dropbox

Migrating away from:
Slicehost (redundant with AWS)
Lighthouse (redundant with Pivotal Tracker)

Already migrated away from:
Basecamp
Thanks for the great reply! I guess I'd only read about Hawking radiation with respect to black holes, and never considered its implications on a larger scale. Sounds like it has larger implications than I thought.

Were you citing a specific paper by Hawking (towing a wormhole)? I'd like to read more.
I take your message, and change the "Smalltalk" by any other language, and I get a generic excuse for any language.

You can take a prominent ruby website, they will never admit ruby is slow, they cache everything everywhere to do the trick and then blame the algorithm too. Where on a JVM/.net platform the guys could recompute the same stuff 300/s without even needing to think about it, and still having the IO as a bottleneck. The same algorithm would'nt even be necessary in the first place.

BUT there are actually great differences in execution speed (or memory consumption) in languages for the same algorithm.

When your language pales in the benchmark, then you have various choices :
- dismiss the bench as not "real life"
- rewrite the algorithm to bank on the strength of your language (for smalltalk I would bet on the GC)
- count the lines of code (readability is not an objective metric so you can kill it for free). "Yeah but mine is more maintainable".
- admit that this is one weakness of your language and learn other languages for the day you'll need them.

I'm not dismissing your experience (far from it, actually I tend to like "slow languages" too).
I've worked with smalltalk and some friend did crazy stuff with it performance wise, I did crazy stuff in java too.

But
- smalltalk have a slow message dispatch time
- ruby have slow message dispatch and no real GC
- java have too big memory footprint and is too verbose
- O'caml and haskell have unreadable type error messages when you play with inference. And they are statically compiled.
- etc.

perfection doesn't exist, live with it.
Different setup for different projects. Latest was all AWS: EC2 servers pushing out most static content to S3.

Also use EC2 for test and staging servers as then we only need them up for the actual test or staging period.
UIUC is very famous in Computer Science. I don't think that people will give you a job because you are graduating from a FAMOUS university. It is more on what major you take than what university you are graduating from.

Think of this:

EE from Yale or EE from UIUC? I am sure that a EE company will definitely choose the latter.
In UIUC, it is really easy to minor in CS as long as you are interested in CS.
Had a good time everyone; hope to see you all again soon.
I have no idea, but Canadians can watch The Daily Show or The Colbert Report at CTV's website.

http://shows.ctv.ca/video/
I should add that the clips are always uploaded the next morning. So it shouldn't take days for you to watch the clips.
kinda useless unless you don't like to put anything on your desktop. And then you have to avoid the area where you put your arms while typing etc. I think you'd spend more time trying not to get ink on yourself than actually making use of that whiteboard :) Better to just use a notepad.
That may be part of the point. I'm not privy to what the insiders on "on the hill" are thinking.

Another possibility is that folks in D.C. are scared that something worse than 9/11 is in the horizon. What could be worse?...global economic collapse. Is it real, is it FUD? Hard to say. But the "PIC" (people in charge) seem to be hedging their bets.

My apologies for sounding like a post from some other forum. Fear does seem to be a primary motivator these days.