skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This metaphor doesn't work as well as it seems. Architecture firms don't personally build the buildings they design. It's probable that someone dealing with "the semantic web" and fitting in with "new media" companies actually should build websites.

Even if they're only working on the back-end solutions, having a poor website is more like an architecture firm having a terribly designed office which undermines the customer's confidence.
With no less than 3 favorable mentions of .NET? Do ya' think?
I think Java is the new Pascal... :)
Relative to the other languages mentioned, I think the only significant way Java is similar to Cobol have is that common conventions require a lot of typing.

Consider an example from the programming language shootout:

Java:

public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception{
int sum = 0;
StreamTokenizer lineTokenizer = new StreamTokenizer(System.in);
while (lineTokenizer.nextToken() != StreamTokenizer.TT_EOF) {
sum += lineTokenizer.nval;
}
System.out.println(Integer.toString(sum));
}

Ruby:

count = 0
l=""
STDIN.each{ |l|
count += l.to_i
}
puts count
Do not forget that, especially in the startup's case, graphic is a continous process; the design is constantly improved, new usability problems are found every day etc.
Everyone needs critics, it helps create drive. IMO.
and planned economy is superior, too.
In related news, black is becoming the new white.
Anything related to the concept of infinity tends to be hardly understandable in an "emotional" or "intuitive" way. We can just apply the rules of logic and accept.
Scaling MySQL at YouTube
I dare to bet with you. Give me the exact number.

We did research into Ruby/Python/PHP and none could help us more than Java.

You know, Rails/CakePHP/Django/TurboGears are not silver bullet.
The Hobbyists Part 2.
FreeDup (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=89078) can work better than either of these when you have lots of small files which are rarely updated.
My silliest yet...

#TODO:
I don't think that Java programmer was up to scratch, although admittedly Java won't get as short as Ruby. I would count that readline construct of Ruby as kind of cheating, though. It's a specialized feature that doesn't say much about the brevity of Ruby in general.
Snorting a Brain Chemical Could Replace Sleep...
I don't want to code in Java anymore, but I haven't found a better alternative yet. Did not like Rails.
Cheating would be putting an open paren at the top of the file, a close paren at the bottom, and implementing it in Scheme as

(apply + (read))
ThruDB: Faster and Cheaper than SimpleDB
It isn't only the language, it's the libraries and the programming community.

If you write the kind of Java that other Java programmers appreciate, you'll soon end up with lots of files full of long lines.

Ruby seems to encourage brevity everywhere.

I say seems because apart from a few Capistrano configurations I haven't done any practical Ruby programming. I have however written more lines of Java than I want to admit.
Interesting write-up. The stack is implemented in Thrift (Facebook's framework) and can be deployed on S3.

Tobias Lutke also has a post about this.
http://blog.leetsoft.com/2007/12/28/futuretalk-thrudb
Transclusion made easy - New Purple Include Release
Quote "It means that you can include and display fragments of one HTML page in another without copying and pasting any content."
try the Philppines. Most BPOs are going there and they speak American English (since it used to be a former American colony).
On a related note, it seems to me that if you can "drive a new approach to social networking and solve key problems holding back the advancement of the semantic web," you ought to be able to create a site whose visual structure doesn't collapse entirely when the text is enlarged a few sizes? (apologies from a guy with 20/50 vision, pre-correction)
I just got back from a business development trip to China. China programmers are cheap. Their monthly salary is $1,000 for the top of their graduating class programmer. Their work ethic is impeccable. Unfortunately, their english is not. This is where Indian outsourcing shines, their english language skills and eventual ability to meet spec is 10-15 years ahead of the Chinese as a society.

Although there are some other incentives to outsourcing in China. I was told that in some major cities like Xian, the Chinese government is offering free office space and subsidizes the salary of each of your employees if an american startup or company decides to hire employees there. Xian has particularly good tech schools (they would be like the UW of China), but they have 50% white collar unemployment.

engineering school ranks: http://www.asu.edu/chinainitiatives/documents/unv_rank_eng.p...

(sorry can't find the link for the government program right now... that tip was given to me by a senior partner at a private equity firm... I'll try to find it guys. although, I would much rather recruit top grads from #1 universities than save a few thousand dollars a month by setting up operations in some average place with subsidies)

So I am definitely looking into China or India for my startup. But, I would not recommend going to China unless you or one of your co-founders speaks chinese. The major problems as other people have noted, are quality control and communication. Otherwise, your outsourcing has just about as much success as saying that you plan to move to Hawaii and live off the ocean by asking dolphins to fish and pick up sunken treasure for you.

I think a great startup idea would be to help American companies utilize idling chinese programmers by providing middle management, oversight, and translators (and job training + good pay for your Chinese employees).

I've met a couple guys our age in China (25-26) who have already sold their company for $20-30 million (US dollars) and walked away with $6-10 million. All they did was copy a popular idea in the US like Pandora or Last.FM, hire some cheapass programmers for $1k a month a pop, clone the idea completely, sell it to a larger company. These guys probably sat next to you in class at Berkeley or UCLA. I also know of a few US startups that already finished a Series A ($7 mil) and have a majority of employees outsourced to China. Solo founder.

more info if you guys want it
i still don't really get xobni :-\
Even if the rant seems to be about nothing (who seriously cares if someone wants to make another text editor? let them make whatever they want), you have to admit the quote used as the YC news headline is great.
1. Amazon Web Services continue to gain in popularity.

2. Google, Yahoo, etc will all continue to ignore the developers using AWS services and focus on end-user applications.

3. But.. familiarity with AWS services, apis and procedures will become the new skill headhunters will be seeking. Amazon will offer an "AWS" Certification.

4. Microsoft will announce (but not deliver) competitive services to AWS.

5. Meanwhile, we'll see plenty of GNU/OSS projects interoperate and compete with AWS as well.
In other news: AOL was still maintaining the Netscape Browser

Whodathunkit? I had no idea that software was even still used, let alone actively developed. I guess I don't get out much...
Wow. It's not so good.
My computer also doesn't care if I put a space between each concatenation operator, but I do. :)
We've (Virtualmin) outsourced two tasks so far:

Translations. We met a great guy in China via Elance for the Mandarin work. We've also worked with people in France.

Artwork. The new Webmin logo was done by a guy in Romania, I think. Met him on SitePoint via a logo contest.

I considered outsourcing some of the JavaScript work, since it's not our core competency (we build system administration tools in Perl/C/Java), but given that UI is so important I opted to learn JavaScript myself. Our first hire will probably be someone very strong on UI and web technology, though I'm getting pretty comfortable with it lately.

My previous company frequently outsourced, but never to China. I regularly hired my current co-founder (an Australian), and I worked with folks in Germany, Romania, Pakistan, Ukraine, Tunisia, and the US. Some experiences were positive, others were very negative. I wouldn't suggest outsourcing without some solid in-house expertise to judge the resulting code. I had a lot of trouble with really bad security practices in many outsourced projects. If I weren't a developer myself, I would have merely have had to trust that since it looked like it was working it actually was--when in the case of a couple of projects all of the "login" work was being done client-side. I even had a Firefox toolbar project come back with SQL being generated on the untrusted, unauthenticated, client-side in JavaScript (inserts, deletes, the whole shebang).

In short, if you aren't a developer, or don't have one on board, outsourcing is potentially rife with pain. That said, Digg and MySpace were developed by outsourced labor, and Mark Fletcher is a big fan of Elance. I dunno that any Chinese developers were involved, though.
Spoiler Alert: Wanted: Master Software Engineers
solution to the Wanted: Master Software Engineers puzzle
Anatomy of Software Collaboration
Snore. Basic fact checking 101 (for MIT!):

http://www.google.com/search?q=microwave+power+transfer

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microwave_power_transmission
I think it's doable if you're a smart coder and can find an equally really smart coder in China, India, etc. that's on the same page. Easier said than done of course. But if you can communicate well with the individual, make use of various tools, and can develop a long-term one-on-one relationship you should be able to save some time and money. Win-win for both of you.

There's some significant upfront investment though, just like hiring any key employee, and you can't hire someone the day after you realize you need the extra hands. Really doesn't work like that. Think long-term. Think partnership.

It's whole new challenge apart from your typical day job. Interesting one though.
Funny you use this example, because using line input is thing from the past. For me it's a "smelling".

I often see people demonstrating their point with line input or regexes, both of which are misused 90% of the time.

I'm convinced that ruby leads to shorter code at equivalent behavior; however I'm far from convinced that size is everything, because of various remarks of Donald Norman in his excellent book "the design of everyday things". For example: "place constraints in the world and not in the head", so if the constraint exists, it should be visible (which doesn't imply java type system, we can imagine something shown by the IDE that would not be code).

Apart from the language war, there is a community war. I don't use many "normal" java tools, because I feel they are dumb. But I feel there is a strong base of low-educated people in the new java-critics community, people that can only count lines, repeat the leader, cannot create new thinking by their own. And this is not new, a few well-intentioned leader get spoiled by dumb masses is common thing everywhere.
But this is tragic, because where java (and C#/.net) represented a progress hover the mainstream C and C++ by using explicit typing and collection the last technology in interpretation and GC in a single product, and removing explicit pointer manipulation, python or ruby are nothing new, they are basically old tech languages, with old tech (if not dumb) interpretation. O'caml and Haskell (and the "new" bunch of logic/functional language like clean, curry etc.) did propose some innovation.
O'caml did propose a new balance for generics and side effects ("weak types"), an interesting GC, some new type systems, Haskell proposed some interesting optimizations (massive rewriting thanks to laziness) a new compromise for mixing laziness and side effects, Concurrent Clean too, with its "unique" types.

The main problem with languages is people, and it has nothing to do with the line count. Because if you count the lines to make your language choice, then you can't criticize your boss when he manages by headcount chopping, when he imposes the new fad of the moment in the project etc. because you entered his system.

In my last job we divided the codebase by 5 without changing the language, we mainly trained people (management and ourselves the "newly hired" included) and removed stuff (because shit does not only come from development). Doing shit is not a language problem, it's a people problem.
did you try O'caml and Haskell stuff ?
Heh.. it's not even 2008 and already we have ThruDB: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=93297
David Winer's crack at bringing internet media to your TV
Ask 37signals: How do you process credit cards?
what do you mean?

making semiconductors is a ton of math, theory, and layout work. are you talking about actually using masks to do the doping?
I have to agree with kingkong here. Organized Horse Archers cannot be beat by any pre-gunpowder army. People like to the label the mongols as "The Horde." But a Mongol Army of 25k consistently beat armies 5 times its size. It basically comes down to the fact that they have faster horses than you, and their composite bows have 150% the distance of even the English Long Bow (and can be fired from the saddle). If your army had these two qualities, what would you do?

The downside is that its hard to defend the empire that you've conquered using horse archery.

Alexander the Great reputedly defeated Scythian horse archers, but he left no records as to how this is was achieved. He probably used his companion cavalry to chase the horse archers against a river or into a forest. Like what the romans did to Hannibal's father. I think the Egyptians were able to beat the Mongols ONCE but only with superior numbers and a lot of preparation.

Anyway, it is USUALLY true that winning a war is about who's side has stronger will to fight. Who said that? Xenophon?

But tactically, horse archers that always run away cannot be beat. They rain arrows down upon you, burn your farms and supply lines, and taunt your huge 200,000 man armies out to be crushed in a simulatenous attack on all sides by 5 different columns of Horse Archers all arriving at the same time. They are will-breakers. Like startups picking away at slow thinking corporations.

This is similar to how the Athenians eventually defeated the Spartans by never engaging them in close combat and raining arrows and spears on them. Tactics. Not exactly the bravest thing, the Spartans would have called this Womanly fighting.

With the advent of gunpowder, artillery, and combined arms. You can't pull this off anymore. Thank god.

Lesson: Mongols only fight pitched battles they've already won.

Although for us startup guys, the point that PG might be impressing is that, its the company with the most determination that wins. Not the one with the most money/people.

kingkong here is implying that tactics and adaptive thinking is the key, not just having a hard head and tunnel vision.
Downvote me, he's still a moron.
You pay, one way or another, to get publicity - it's not automatically a result of success or innovation - which is what many regular people think it is.

And this is why it sucks.
# Locked and loaded. Data structures assembled. Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of multi-pass rendering.
Trust me, if you were planning to ride on the language you learned in college, you've got a rude awakening coming. :P

Ideally the classes are trying to teach language agnostic principles and techniques.
Great idea, with one serious problem though. Xobni data are useful mostly to infer social relationships. You can get the data you need only for smartphones, which are small proportion of all phones. Social data are useful if you don't have big inherent holes in that social graph.

So you need to target smartphones and can't use the social network effect. But you can still add big value to the phone's owner.
anyone have a link to the video?
he probably means outsourcing your design/foundry work to taiwan, then manufacturing the chips in china. management you keep over here. typical of a company like Marvell (not the comic company you nerds! :D)

also because semiconductor "startups" have higher capital costs than your typical software company.
YUI has a small unit test framework that I use.
Also http://www.thefrontside.net/crosscheck can be used to emulate browsers.
If you cannot change your language, change your language
Why Rubinius Matters to Ruby's Future
I don't think that Ruby code will do what the original poster at the language shootout thought it would, as it's not equivalent to the Java code above it. If it were correct though, you could improve it by being more Ruby-like and doing it like this:

puts STDIN.inject {|sum, next_number| sum.to_i + next_number.to_i}

. . . or something.
that ruby code looks awfully verbose. you probably want

puts STDIN.inject(0) {|sum,line| sum + 1}
That was unfortunate. But the community did jump in and tried too help. There was no one else saying or doing anything weird. Anyone can do something stupid. It was stupid and mean.
Ask YC: Redo the Leaderboard
It never resets. So its utterly meaningless when we're trying to catch the charismatic people with 7000 points.

The point system should encourage participation. If we reset the point system every quarter (3 months) or every YC funding cycle, and then give permanent awards to the leaders, then all of us, leaders or laggards, have more reason to participate positively.

Or, instead of awards, we can tack permanent bonus points onto each user. #1 place gets +20 bonus points. Starts the next season with an automatic advantage (like racee qualifiers).

nickb (100+53) 100 is permanant.. 53 is current quarter.. total 153

Keep things fresh.
That post is stupid, and the author comes off like a condescending know-it-all.

(1) If someone wants to write a text-editor, what's it to you? There are countless independent software projects, the vast majority of which are developing new versions/implementations of a pre-existing concept. Look at mail clients: there are hundreds, and they all still basically suck, IMHO. The fact that there is clearly an audience for this style of editor suggests that there is something valuable about these editors that is not found in older editors (I don't use them, so I don't know).

(2) Text editing is a fundamental activity; if we could improve its efficiency by even a few percent, that would be enormously useful. Developing a slightly better solitaire game, say, is far less useful than developing a text editor that makes people (even a small group of people) more productive.

(3) The griping about runtime size is inane. "You're bitching about 22MB language runtimes. Stop doing that. It's 2007.", one could say. If you need a very small editor, there are already 10+ to choose from, and a dependency on a .NET/Java runtime is otherwise not a big deal.

(4) As for the evidence-free claim that the people using these products are analogous to "script kiddies", and that the "real authors" don't use them -- well, not sure any further comment is needed.
I only did some small exercises with Ruby and experienced a lot of problems that I never had with Java. But that was just because of the dynamic typing aspect I guess (and the mutable strings). It took me rather long to write a 30 line Ruby program. That doesn't mean anything, I was a beginner in Ruby and I am probably an expert in Java. I am just saying that I am still not convinced the brevity is the killer argument.

With Rails I had a similar problem, basically I stopped trying it when I hit the ActiveRecords part, because I thought configuring the OR mapping through the hasmap sucked big time: I had to look up everything in the ebook (PDF sucks), whereas Java+Hibernate+Annotations is just a breeze in Eclipse. I am still tired of Java, but as I said in another post, I am not yet sure how to best replace it.

Also, I have seen a lot of very bad Java Code. Maybe it is also the new Cobol in that respect, too many not so good programmers have been let loose on Java and give it a bad name.

I personally don't think that verbosity is an aim of Java. What I usually aim for, though, is understandable code.
/ the bomb! /

just before an error-prone piece of code. My colleagues had a laugh when they found it. Since then, now I mark the "dangerous zones" with:

/*** here be ASTEROIDS ***/
I agree, not sure how easy it would be and if it would upset the people at the top.
Where to network inside campus premises
If they receive permanent awards. They get recognition AND they get motivation the next season to say interesting things.
Startup Bets Everything On New Year's Eve
Big Media Boosts Internet TV in 2007
YC bug: can't edit comment
I can't edit a comment just after posting http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=93343 There appears the link to the edit page, but the edit pages ends after the "text" label. The textbox, the button, etcetera are missing :(

My browser is Safari 3.0.4 ("Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/523.10.6 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0.4 Safari/523.10.6").
maybe you get out too much. this kind of stuff you can only pick up by staying in, spending a quiet evening at home with the missus.
I agree with some of what was posted but has the poster thought that the reason text editors havn't had much love is because there isn't much space to innovate.
Devils advocate or not, it's like saying you should only seek out opportunities that have no competition.
I support this idea. I'll make my comeback yet.
oic i guess they really like those startups or w/e but lol iono liek do you think theyll actually work i mean like google is going to buy those companies for a zillion $$$$??????

whod buy stupid web stuff on the internet, its only good for porn and myspace <333
Five Short Video Game Industry Keynotes
Another Google Flaw - Force Users to Subscribe to Your Feed
fair enough, I have worked hard for my massive 96 score and if I lost it I would be a little sad :p
JRuby or Rhino? Why not have best of all worlds.
How to Disrupt the Music Industry Once and for All
Here's the basic problem: you're writing a blog. Stop doing that. It's 2007.

This comment tries to be funny.
good point. i only have 70pts so i feel for this.

maybe the total accumulated points of all time are also kept. YC doesn't erase any data. its just writing a new database query.

old query: Points = "select count(votes) where user.id = 123"

new method: "select votes, date where user.id = 123" and do some heuristic magic in the model or results datastructure.
Poe on Programming
Karma Decay Function

Everyday everyone's karma gets multiplied by n where 0<n<1. (0.9 seems good)
I'm planning multiple lists ranked by different criteria. For now it will be off the Lists link at the bottom of the page.

The problem is not as urgent as you might think, though. In a site that's growing, you get a de facto karma decay, because a top submission gets more points than it would have 6 months ago.
Perhaps soon I will release my karmaBot (tm), it subscribes to the rss feeds of programming.reddit.com, techcrunch, and xkcd, and auto reposts all stories to news.yc

We will soon takeover the world! ! !! ! muahahahahaha
Had the same idea, but mine on PG's articles, too.
Stealing Content is Bad Enough, But Submitting It To Digg? That's Plain Wrong.
'also know of a few US startups that already finished a Series A ($7 mil) and have a majority of employees outsourced to China. Solo founder.'

I would be really interested to hear more about these, please share.
This looks an awful lot like Vim to me. Only it's not clear whether the zillions of plugins and syntax rules from Vim will work with this thing, or whether I can run it in a screen session for 6 months unmolested, or... well, you get the idea.

(Sure, people thought search was a solved problem and then Google came along and upended the world. But that's kind of the exception to the rule, don't you think?)
or they could just keep it and add this months top users etc and we are all happy :P
relax.