skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I would say there are a few factors responsible for this. First, Jeremy Kemper got hired by 37signals which seems to give him a lot more time to work on Rails.

Next, around the time of the move to git, the existing Rails core team was shuffled a bit. Older members were retired (http://rubyonrails.org/core/alumni) and more active contributors (Josh and Pratik) were added to the team.

Then you've got the Merb merger which brought in Yehuda who works full time on Rails now, afaik.

If you look at http://github.com/rails/rails/commits/master you'll see commits from Josh, Pratik (lifo), and Jeremy, while http://github.com/rails/rails/commits/3-0-unstable shows commits from those three, Yehuda, and Michael Koziarski (who is still quite active).

Not to mention Rick Olson and all the patches from contributors, which now make their way more easily into core thanks to the streamlined contribution process and more active 'gatekeepers.'

So fresh blood, more time, easier to contribute, and exciting new ideas would be my guess.
How will YC funding 20 more startups per year encourage more startups to go public?
Wikiid: Can Wikipedia make a Wikipedia page notable enough to avoid deletion?
The forward digit test is a memory test. The backward digit test is a staple of IQ tests and correlates pretty well with the whole. I think the article used that because it was the best data available.
Unity3D!!
Questions / Feedback:

* Who's the target audience for this?

* Why are you launching in eight cities when you don't have critical mass in one or two yet?

* Bright lime green: why!?

* Street addresses don't make for very interesting / differentiated headlines. Have you thought about alternatives? Can you require a picture with submission that you can thumbnail?

I think the main piece of UGC that would really add value to listings are tags. Not for stuff that's already captured in the listing data, like "1 bed", "2 bath", etc. but for more subjective ratings. del.icio.us-like shading of tags to show how many people had tagged a listing with certain qualities would be awesome.
it was refreshing to see that the .NET regular expression engine was written entirely in C#

Pretty awesome that he can do this sort of digging in his language of choice.
Ask HN: Increasing Karma Implies Decreasing Variance?
Using # of posts / time period as a proxy for variety (big maybe), does Robin Hanson's question withstand scrutiny using HN posting data?
Rand still does insanely stupid things. At the end of ACoS he runs off alone to kill Sammael & nearly dies half a dozen times before Moridin(!) intervenes. That retinue of Aes Sedai was probably the best thing to happen to him. He nearly died numerous times without them in APoD. He would have died at the end of winter's heart if he tried that alone with Nynaeve like he originally planned. He'd never have left Far Madding.

The other two also do stupid stuff (well, Mat more than Perrin), but it's easy enough to argue they shouldn't be running around loose either, not this close to the end. They have no real protection.
HN is simple, but it's written in Arc/Lisp, which I don't know, so customization and maintenance would be difficult.

reddit is a possibility, because I know Python, but I felt it was quite large-scale. Maybe I should look at the code properly, though. Thanks!
No it isn't. Everything I've heard suggests that chess players tend to peak around their mid-30s, and then you have Viktor Korchnoi, who won the Soviet junior championship at 16, was playing for the world championship at 50, and was rated 85th in the world at 75. His 78th birthday is coming up next week.
How about this:

1. The YC founder-investors probably lost 30% or so of their wealth in the recent stock market decline (maybe they did better, maybe they did worse, but they probably feel poorer).

2. At the same time, YC has continued to improve their deal flow and develop connections in Silicon Valley, so they are turning down better applications than they used to.

3. Other VC firms are continuing to notice YC and compete. If YC can remain the top seed firm because of its founders' fame and network, YC will be poised to dominate seed investment for many years, as lower-tier seed firms spur demand but have their most promising prospects sniped by a YC now able to fund and advise a larger pool of companies. Just like top-tier VCs like Sequoia get access to better companies while lower-tier VCs lose money.

Whether it's a good idea really depends on the average quality of the deals YC has been turning down. If YC rejects are increasingly good, expanding the funding pool and accepting more startups makes sense.
What Jimmy Fallon...Yes Jimmy Fallon... Can teach Newspapers
Technololgy Companies. We Hate You.
Bringing back 'live commercials'... The way to beat Tivo.
It won't be any extra work. We already pay a lot of attention to all the investors in this deal, because they are the biggest investors in YC startups. In fact, that's how they were chosen.
I think it sucks that something like this doesn't work. I'd love to be apart of it, but even the groups I've been apart of are only good for a little while before they start to fizzle out. It's a shame actually.
Why would you stay far away from bbPress? I really like how simple it looks&feels, and how one just needs PHP+MySQL to get it going. (I'll look into the Drupal forums.)
I'm sorry if I seemed pedantic. It was not my intention.
I took "all" literally because I thought that it was important in that context. The problem was pointed to be heat and I thought pointing out that heat is the result (and directly proportional with) the inefficiency of the design (friction mainly) and power drawn, would be useful. It thus seemed that increasing efficiency and/or reducing power requirements would be a nice way of solving that particular wish in the original article. Therefore I thought that assuming heat was unavoidable was not a good/correct idea and tried to argue that. The tone was already set to "let's make wishes".
If you want to argue that all energy goes to heat in the end... irreversibly even, I think you move to a different level altogether.
Kudos for ensuring "truth-in-advertising" even when it's someone else (me) doing the advertising for you :)
Make the recession work for you
Because of the recession, money started to be the limiting factor. We didn't feel like we could prudently expand when there might not be any more returns for the next several years.

We are probably going to invite more startups to interviews, and we definitely hope to accept a higher percentage of those we invite. And yes, we're going to encourage YC alums to help the other startups. They already do a lot, but we're going to set up more ways for this to happen.
It seems difficult to maintain an audience in a site like this without marketing. It's not a site people would be so eager to tell everyone about, as it might make it more difficult for them to register the good domains first. Perhaps the subscription should just be so expensive that it could be advertised? Conversion rate would have to be amazing though, considering how much competition there must be for terms like these.
where's the silver line? surely that generates plenty of hate.
The postmortem

http://www.zedshaw.com/blog/2009-03-16.html
Looks like twitter only. But I think there might be a niche for this kind of watchdog - branding. Better than surveys.

Don't know about monetization, but certainly solves a pain!
I noticed he didn't bother to cancel is wacko internet account.

And he wonders why things are so bad...
No. The deal doesn't give them any special rights or access to the startups. So nothing changes in that respect.
Hopefully it isn't too late.
Gazaro Rates Gadget Sales Based On Historical Price Data
If you're shopping around for a TV, computer, camera, or other consumer electronics gadget, you may want to add Gazaro to your online toolbox. The service, which is free but requires registration, tracks items that are listed on sale, then rates the sale price by comparing it to the item's pricing history. It's an easy way to quickly scan a list of current sales and see which ones are actually good deals.
I used to hate MBTA until I moved to London. The system is much more poorly maintained here, and the fact that it's bigger is no excuse. Only in London will you hear an announcement like "All lines except the Northern line are operating with severe delays." On top of that it used to be twice as expensive per ride [1]. However, it is in human nature to complain about everything. :) [2]

For example, if you happen to take the Circle Line or any of the lines it shares tracks with, it is common that the train would stop 1-3 times between stations, because of "traffic" ahead. Something like that would be very rare on the MBTA, even on the Green Line.

[1] Now it is 1.5x more expensive, only because of exchange rate fluctuations. The cost has not changed in terms of average British income.

[2] See fmylife.com
Thoughts on our hn "soft-launch" (chuwe.com)
No! Companies like YC don't go public, and even if it were an option, I wouldn't want to do it.
some non-comedy cartoons that I have enjoyed for their escapism: afro samurai & death note.
The Secret Ingredient To Cooking Authentic Italian Food
Let's see, if I remember well they invested about 80 000$ in reddit (there was a second investment from YC if I'm not mistaken). So from this, they maybe took 10-15%.
Reddit sold for about 12 million dollars, so that would mean about 1.2-1.8 million: 2-3 years of yc investment.

Of course those numbers are pure speculation and it wouldn't suprise me if I'm completely mistaken...
"he" is stuck with wacko internet account because he lives in a place where you have 2 options: dial-up, or wacko.
* Who's the target audience for this?

The target audience for this is people that want to evaluate the value of an MLS listing. For instance, I see a listing I am interested in on Redfin/Trulia/Zillow, and search for it at Reyalitor. In the comments I can see that somebody has visited the house and it really does not have 3 bedrooms, or there is mold, or in their opinion it is overpriced. Or positive feedback such as a nice view or a good floorplan. My friends and I discuss houses we see online but there is not a good medium to share this information online.

* Why are you launching in eight cities when you don't have critical mass in one or two yet?

Honestly this is random, but I could scale back to Seattle for now.

* Bright lime green: why!?

I need to get some css skills

* Street addresses don't make for very interesting / differentiated headlines. Have you thought about alternatives? Can you require a picture with submission that you can thumbnail?

I have thought about a picture or being able to get a screen grab using ajax. It might get tricky to require a picture since this would result in copy pasting content from other websites. I'll investigate

I think the main piece of UGC that would really add value to listings are tags. Not for stuff that's already captured in the listing data, like "1 bed", "2 bath", etc. but for more subjective ratings. del.icio.us-like shading of tags to show how many people had tagged a listing with certain qualities would be awesome.

That sounds like an interesting feature. I will look into it.

Thanks for the great feedback!
Yep just like all of the .net user groups around here.
I live in India. Although it's not really hard for me to get a plane ticket to America, your reasoning I think correctly sums up everything.
I get the impression that Rushkoff does not know much about Economics, nor Finance. I do agree that Wall Street was making way too much money and that this new gilded age had to end sooner or later. However, I do NOT agree that the collapse of the financial services industry would benefit the United States.

The truth is that the U.S. needs the financial services industry to serve as the economy's lubricant. Ultimately, an efficient marketplace benefits us all.
This deal explicitly does not include any provisions for anyone to get an early look at the companies.

That said, anyone who speaks at YC dinners obviously gets an early look at the companies in that cycle, since the point of the dinners is to introduce the startups to these experts, and you will notice that 3 out of 4 of the investors already speak at the dinners:

http://ycombinator.com/w8speakers.html

So the investors didn't need to do this deal to get an early look at the startups, because (along with all the other speakers) most of them already had it.
People don't seem to post about it! If they did, I'd be catching it.

Besides the fact that it takes a really long time for it to arrive, I haven't had many problems with it.
My thoughts exactly. It looks like YC's operating expenses will be around $1M to $1.5M per year, depending on what their overhead is. Paul's explanation (increasing investments by 50%, no special access for Sequoia) doesn't really explain why the deal is for just one year's worth of extra capital unless YC is close to broke or Sequoia has absolutely nothing else to do with their money.

Actually there are all kinds of possible explanations but none was given. It is interesting how a press release designed to shine a positive light on both companies can easily have the opposite effect.

As far as YC's past performance goes, I don't think you'll get much information about that. The near-term prospects for YC companies being acquired look much worse than they did this time last year. The ones who planned on using tiny classified ads as their sole source of income are probably the worst off. It seems to me that the ones most likely to succeed are going to be the ones that operate more like "lifestyle businesses" that are frequently derided in discussions here. Considering that, it is pretty risky to bet the future of the business on any deals happening soon. Maybe that is why they decided to take $2M now while they can get it on good terms.
yep...another reason against "secret" banking. Privacy is good, but should be limited to within the bounds of non-criminal behavior. In his "confession" he talks about the vast amounts of money sitting in Chase Manhattan Bank. Noone can park billions in a bank without the bank CEO knowing about it and closely monitoring what the depositor is doing (or not doing).
Do people really buy the "it's because bankers are evil" line? (I'm oversimplifying I know).

If you'd been a highly conservative/prudent investment manager a couple of years ago - well - you probably wouldn't have had many customers. People were happy to throw money at people that promised these huge returns. That's how they got to the position they were in.

Not to say there isn't something to answer for - some things went very wrong, and some people crossed the line in a very significant way - but if you don't look at the root causes, you're not really addressing the problem.

I've worked in financial services for a decade. There are a lot of dubious people in the industry, and a lot that are purely driven from self-interest (this was colloquially thought to be good as their self-interest usually meant bigger returns).

... But, I've also met people that are in finance because they love it. These people are really an inspiration. They really want to build genuine wealth - to enable people to do great things. It turned me onto the power of the market and economics.

All you need is the right intent, and it's up to everyone to drive that.
> It can be looked at both as metahumor and as a piece of postmodern art.

I think this is more of a recursive humor than metahumor.
This makes me really happy. It's a great example of showing how a recession can re-establish an innovative drive. With both large and small companies cutting back, this is a great time to start your own company. I've been thinking and writing a lot about how innovation in Silicon Valley feels like it's floundering. Hopefully, this encourages people to start building cool things if they aren't already.
The main goal I have is to be able to figure out what it is that triggers the most ire. People will always complain, but something like this will let the MBTA prioritize appropriately, not just based on what a committee decides is most important.

Re:the tube: The older a system is the more complaints. The london underground is the oldest system in the world, and one of the reasons for traffic is the tiny horrible tunnels that they are constantly trying to prevent from caving in. The MBTA is America's oldest system, though it isn't really plagued by antiquated anything anymore.
We have no idea what our performance will be. It could take 10 years to know something like that, and the median YC startup is about 18 months old.

If you add up all the valuations of the companies we've invested in so far, I'm pretty sure we're doing well on paper. But I don't even know how well, because I've never done it. It would be so misleading; I'd rather just wait till I have real data.

In the meantime we're operating on a hunch that YC is a good idea. The evidence so far does tend to confirm that hunch, or we wouldn't be so eager to expand.
Heh, didn't notice you were also the submitter. Sorry. I feel for you, but seriously, no other options? Wow.

Could I ask then why you bought Norton? I've installed avast on my mother's machine and haven't heard from her since, and it was free.

Also, as much as I hate the phrase "buy a mac", I'm convinced that all non-tech users should be using one of these machines.
'Do you have good weather? Do people live downtown, or have they abandoned the center for the suburbs? Would the city be described as "hip" and "tolerant," or as reflecting "traditional values?" Are there good universities nearby? Are there walkable neighborhoods? Would nerds feel at home?'

All the above sounds like Richard Florida and his Creative Class stuff. Not sure I buy into it all, but guess where he lives now... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Florida
You'll never succeed at selling if you can't recognize that the world is full of people almost entirely unlike yourself.
This is something that Joel Spolsky has hammered on repeatedly, regarding employee motivation - http://www.inc.com/magazine/20081001/how-hard-could-it-be-si...
How did you advertise your site?
Not really, no. I wrote a lot about it while I was there actually, in a notebook, but it was stolen on a train. Have any particular questions?
Despite Recession, More Than 50% of Marketers Increase Spending on Social Media
Nested Model Forms are a timely addition. When I was learning Rails, I always kind of assumed forms could work more like this. More information: http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2009/1/26/nested-model-forms

The 2.3 release seems to go a long way to limiting the amount of configuration required for all sorts of these slightly-bothersome tasks, which is really nice.
That's fantastic news; thank you, Paul!
Macs are cool, and if the old folks in the park where mom lived all had Macs, I'd be buying her one. I'm hoping that she'll get a lot of support from her peers - especially since I'm 1200 miles away.

Norton was probably the worst choice on my part, and it came from habit. I've used Norton for a long time, and it has a good reputation. But you're right: there are much better options for security software.
I see one major problem with your project, and that is that Google returns good results for the types of queries you are struggling with. For example, http://www.google.com/search?q=django+tutorial

Are you sure that we need a vertical search engine? It seems to me if I put Django + other words into Google, I have myself a vertical Django search engine.

Do you have some examples where Google fails?
What sorts of things? Do you mean experiences, or opportunities, or...?

I know for certain I've missed some experiences, but I think in the same time I put myself through a ton of unique experiences. I never went into an office job, so I definitely missed the whole office politics thing as I always worked directly for the person who hired me because I went into construction jobs. Although, like I said that gives completely unique experiences; I worked with a plumber who was putting his three kids through private schools because he could afford to, whilst one of my friends was taken out of private schools at 13 because his dad, a surgeon, couldn't afford to put him through. I'd been taught by society to believe plumber = bad job, when really the plumber was making better money and living a better life with better hours than the surgeon.

So I'd say I did lose some experiences, but I'd say the experiences I did get were far more valuable to me because they're less societally recognized. I know I missed a couple of good opportunities, as I was looking for jobs at a newspaper at 17 as an intern because I had enough experience.

However, again I got different opportunities and experience for not doing that. I've been married for like 6 months now and I'm currently immigrating to Canada, which is definitely a unique process, probably the mental equivalent of dropping the soap in a jail's shower.

Incidentally it would no doubt help me when I get published as I'd be aiming to sell first into the US market and second into the UK (where I was born) and the USD and the CAD are closely tied, where as the USD to the GBP could butcher my earnings. Selling second in the UK would more than likely protect against the percentage loss you get from international distribution rights. IIRC you only get 2/3 the percentage in foreign countries of what you do from the original country of publication, but sale-for-sale (when the economy is good in Europe) I could get it doubled on the exchange rate, so I'd still be making 4/3's of a sale in the US. This is one thing I'd have never thought of when I was younger, that the country you live in could drastically affect how much money you make as a writer.

So I guess in some ways I'm lucky: I got that motivation early enough to be able to develop a good system to handle that stuff.

I'd say you're lucky to have had the experience, some people are utterly crippled by any form of criticism. So it definitely gives you good prospects if you deal with criticism well, because any novel probably goes through a dozen people who are being critical of it before it ever gets to the hands of someone who reads it and likes it for just being a good book.
Do You Need to Be a Developer to Found a Web Startup
If a minority is fairly successful (low crime, high achievement, etc...) it makes sense to increase immigration from those countries.

The reason the "model minority" label is bad is that it's designed to help the human mind draw racist conclusions. Like the one that you appear to have just drawn.

The logic seems to go something like this:

A. The average Indian-American in the United States is more successful than the average member of Group X.

B. Therefore, smartness and success must have something to do with being from India.

C. Therefore, if a person is from India, we should give them a preferred immigration status over someone from another country.

But C is explicitly racist. It discriminates against (e.g.) a smart and potentially successful African, or Mexican-American, or American Indian by holding him or her responsible for the "average" success and test scores of an entire U.S. ethnic group. (As if the woman standing before you were somehow responsible for the test scores of every other U.S. resident who looks like her!) And it ignores a very, very obvious alternative theory: That Indian-Americans living in the United States are successful "on average" because the "average" person of Indian descent lives in India and can't afford to move to the United States.

Another problem with the "model minority" label is: Who designs this "model"? The editors of Forbes? I note that, this week, winning a spelling bee in English is a "model" behavior, whereas hairstyling, short-order cooking, psychological counseling in non-English languages, installing ceramic tile, picking strawberries for minimum wage, or volunteering to serve in the military are absent from the list of American civic virtues.