skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why do they keep saying things like "$1-per-watt"? What does that mean? $1 per 1-watt maximum power production? $1 per 1-watt/hour maximum or estimated output?

A power plant has a MW rating, like this:

http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/nuclear/page/at_a_glance/reacto...

About 810 MW/reactor. If they are rating a cell at 1-watt maximum output, it is probably dishonest unless they are accounting for clouds and nighttime, etc. What is the cost of infrastructure to maintain energy at night? Are millions of flywheels or batteries cheaper than a power plant?

It's weird how the NYT will spend 9 pages on baloney, but only give something like this a tiny article.
Tk looks kinda ugly, if you're a stickler for those kinda things. If you want a prettier one, albeit less features since it's new, check out Shoes for Ruby by the venerable _why.

http://code.whytheluckystiff.net/shoes/
Cute. Had to pop over to ActiveState to download TCL, but that worked pretty good straight from the REPL-like fxri prompt.... (Now I just need a library for doing transformations with bitmap images.)

Thanks.
What an interesting article. I'm not big on the ins and outs of the domain name thing, but Schilling sure seems like an interesting chap.
why don't you get a virtual dedicated server with a plesk desk and buy your domains from godaddy or something. Your save a bomb
CNN Throws Old School Smackdown on Digg  
This company ended up on the front page of Digg and a few days later were featured on CNN.com. Check out the stats to see how CNN brings the pain!
If it were a technical person buying the domains, that would be a great way to go. The way our process works is that these domains are purchased by a very non-technical person and they are automatically provisioned. That's the most important part of this entire process.
Looking at this one...

Installing GIMP as directed did not load GTK to the Common Files directory... and the path was not added to the environment variables.

The instructions say "(I had to reboot after this, but then I don't know anything about Win32)" and "On windows under emacs with slime, the gtk window does not popup."

This does not give warm fuzzy feelings.

Ruby appears to be the way to coding happiness just based on this... ;)
One of Groovy's stated aims is that any .java file is also valid groovy. It's a strict superset in other words.

... which is, in a word, retarded. I like java, but, if you're gonna start over, please, oh, please, fix some of the things that need fixing but aren't getting fixed because of backward compatibility issues. You've got a blank slate, use it!
Does Bidding Hurt Competition? How do you feel about bidding to fulfill services?
Several business owners have told me that they refuse to bid on services because they do not want to compete against "bottom feeders". That is, those businesses that will make the lowest bid, no matter what. I think my experience can help address this issue. Here was how I decided who to choose from 17 bidders.
Not sure why you've been downmodded, but I think you point's a pretty good one.
As a follow-on to my original post; if we can't find something that's adequately easy to use, we'll just end up rolling our own system to do this.

Does anyone have a recommendation for a good company to use for a domain registration API? I know Joker & Tucows offer them, but I haven't used either, and I'm open to suggestions.
Hell No.

If you have to ask, you have your answer.

Now, will Digg be sold for $300M or something equally outrageous? Possibly.
No Joke!

My favorite was this little gem:

"Bigger is just something you have to live with in Java. Growth is a fact of life. Java is like a variant of the game of Tetris in which none of the pieces can fill gaps created by the other pieces, so all you can do is pile them up endlessly."

Doing Java for the day job has made this painfully clear to me. Trying to refactor and get more DRY is a lot of effort.

And this was just hilarious...

"Plus everyone will spit on you. People who don't habitually spit will expectorate up to thirty feet, like zoo camels, in order to bespittle you if you even suggest the possibility of using a Lisp or Scheme dialect at your company."
Only if she was a bit older heheh... I do see your point, but I still think you'll be surprised to see how many important, and influential people are actually on fb and use it... also LinkedIn is def a more professional place but you don't always want to spend your time with your bussiness connections and in the office, sometimes there are other ppl in your so called social graph that you would like to socialize with and have fun ...and for that you def have to come to fb and not linkedin
I totally agree that this is not a LinkedIn killer, but if FB is able to eventually get everyone on it, then this could be a LinkedIn killer...nevertheless this is a much needed feature
That's optimal only if your opponents also act randomly. (Or in the absence of any information.)
Only thing I'd add is that a mentor can help a lot, though they can be hard to come by.
One of the best writings from Yegge and it makes perfect sense. One of the reasons I always admired SQLite for example is that it has a self-imposed limit on size and thus complexity, and the author keeps adding new features, but still manages to stay within that (strict) bound.
A long time ago I started naming mine 'ii' or some variant of 'index' for exactly the reason mentioned (wouldn't confuse search/replace).

Although I often try to avoid using counters at all via foreach or recursion.
New Business Models for Anyone Selling IP
Great article loaded with ideas,
Yeah - so far there are about 3 clear leaders (30-40% higher than the others). I probably need to run the ads for another two weeks before I know for sure, though.
I work on about 400K lines every other day in eclipse, no issues. Of course things are broken down into modules, maybe that helps a bit.

I don't like eclipse at all, but I don't understand their complaints. Maybe back in 2003 that was a problem.
The value of virtual goods are strongly tied to the virtual world they are associated with. Facebook gifts only matter because Facebook matters. WoW gold only matters because WoW matters. The key to selling virtual goods is the virtual environment where they matter and can be made artificially scarce without pissing anyone off.

There's not enough information in that article to evaluate the virtual goods market. It sounds like this is more like a 3rd-party virtual-goods service and not actually a game itself, which is something that has been around for quite awhile.
"Facebook Killer Feature" - means a feature Facebook developed, meanwhile...

"LinkedIn Killer Feature" - means a feature that will kill LinkedIn.

Confusing. Yet another reason never to use "killer feature" or "_____ killer."
Me too. the new ECMAscript looks like it is prescribing some sort of class structure (of course you are free to do the prototype thing if you need to).

I guess its a balancing act, I like havign the power, and I am happy to discipline myself.

Sure, it may have trouble scaling for large teams and codebases, but I don't wnat to work with large teams or codebases.
Anyone knows if Firefox passes the same test?
640K ought to be enough for anyone!
Firefox 3 will, current versions do not.

Opera and Safari have passed the test for a while.
I think what they meant was that most people "think" that rock is the most likely move and therefore choose paper.
RedHotPawn has been fun for my friends and I.

One of my favorite features is one that we're also implementing for Chron X- The Game sends an email everytime your opponent makes a move.

This allows you to play a game slowly over time if you want, or play at the same time for hot and fast chess action ;)
Brooks' Mythical Man Month records that flow charts were somewhat helpful for grouping low-level machine/assembly instructions together into higher level units conceptually. But with the advent of better languages like C, the need for flow charting went away.
Fundraising from... you - Need $5,000 from 500 people, each giving us $10.
https://www.fundable.com/groupactions/groupaction.2007-12-19.5536225936

We really need to finish this project and we need $5K from 500 people total, each giving us $10.

We're a 2 man startup in Palo Alto. We're looking for angel investors for a while but can't really get connected or referred. It's been more than 8 months since we started working on it. We're close to a private beta, but we can no longer work full-time on it. We just need to get a day time job again to pay rent and food.

With $5k we can go full-time again for 2~3 months and finish beta much, much faster.

Since we're asking money from you, we have our executive summary, resumes, and a 5-min presentation movie available for download.

- Presentation Movie

http://bookvair.com/pitch-qt.html

- Executive Summary and resumes

http://bookvair.com/bookviar_files.zip

- Project Page

http://bookvair.com

We'd also like to invite contributors to be our first group of users, and give them special deals when we roll out book swapping features.

I understand it's not the "normal" way to ask money but we're willing to try every way possible to make our website go live.

If you have any comments, critics, feel free to post. They are as valuable as money donated.

Thank you very much.

Merry Christmas!

Leo & Jason

sayaww@gmail.com
I'll give you $100 if you give me $200 first.
Microsoft bought this in 200,000,000 is it worth it?
Those essays (especially the ones written after Viaweb and before YC) can be inspiring if you're stuck in a cube at Big Company, Inc. and neither your managers nor your fellow programmers are interested in doing anything else with their lives.

My thoughts exactly. I first encountered PG's essays at a time when I really needed his brand of encouragement. They persuaded me that I wasn't 100% crazy to think I could start a company. Still haven't switched to Lisp though. =)
I've been experimenting with some 3D JavaScript stuff too:

http://tlrobinson.net/misc/3d.html

This is very very alpha and probably only works well in Safari and Firefox (but the menu might not work in Firefix, sorry)
In order to compare apples to apples, electric power analysts use the (maximum, I assume; or maybe average) cost per unit of power that can be produced from a given technology. This lets analysts not have to account for the operational efficiencies of the powerplant, solar cell, etc.

As far as cloudy days/nighttime, most of the energy use occurs in the afternoon and early evening, when everybody comes home and turns on their stoves, washing/drying machines, TV's, etc. This corresponds to the average peak solar production. So these solar cells would, if they find widespread use, get rid of the need for "peakers", which are peak generating units, and are the most expensive in terms of the cost of energy produced.
Maybe people won't spit at Scheme on the JVM after they see another web site using it successfully.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=91206
Funny, I always use (seconds+1)%3...
Hmmm... this might become a good way to raise money. I wonder if it's possible to make it tax deductible unless the company becomes successful and pays "dividends"?
My nephew is pretty good with computers...
Whatever it is, it's a killer LinkedIn killer Facebook feature!
i would not suggest a company called logogenesis. they are cheap, but you get what you pay for.
Objective-C is less offbeat than it seems I think, but its hard to argue with the fact that its definitely not mainstream.

Nevertheless, great language, and great libraries. Cocoa+IB make GUI work incredibly easy.
have you played a video game recently? games like tony hawk, etc that tie in sponsors like Jeep
thanks for the help -- any more ideas keep 'em comin
Yeah, there is definitely money in this market. 200M seems perfectly reasonable as a strategic buy and I would be surprised if they don't have respectable revenue.
that's cool, I'll give that a go :) thanks
IE Still Dwarfs Firefox in Browser Market Share
> If anything, the celebrity around PG signals a deep desire for good, honest mentors.

I agree with the second part of this point; in regard to the particular subject, hopefulness that said subject will finance one's startup is an integral part of it.
This is great news for developers, thanks.
I once considered selling equity like this as a kind of micro-IPO but it gets messy with non-accredited investors and all that.
That sounds like something to score brownie points.

In reality, with their millions, there's nothing stopping them from re-Lisping it.
(Not even time considerations -- when they were in negotiations to be acquired, they didn't do any development for months [1]. If you can get away with spending that much time not developing before you have money, you can get away with doing a rewrite after money is no longer a concern.)

[1] "We must have stopped doing real work for six months." --
http://aaronsw.jottit.com/howtoget
What happened then? Some thing went wrong?
Now they must realize how important it is to force-upgrade everybody to IE8 via Windows Update mechanism.
It was impossible to do it in a way I was sure was legal without any legal budget. If it wasn't for that, I think it would be a great way to raise money.
"On-demand software generated revenues of about $3.7 billion in 2006, with sales projected to rise about 32 percent annually for the next few years"

Once all of the excitement of Web 2.0 and social networking settles down, THIS is where the future will be. The market for good business software as a service will be virtually unlimited. Let the land rush begin.
Someone like fasthosts.co.uk is what you want then. They have reseller accounts.
I just hope there's an easy way to run IE7 and IE8 side-by-side. Opening a virtual machine just to do IE6 testing is a pain.
Ugh.

Nothing like reading a critique from somebody who doesn't know what they are doing and using some technology as a straw man.

UML class diagrams are good. UML class diagrams are love. Leave my UML class diagrams out of this! (grin)

I'd go with the bigger point that engineers never met a helpful tool that they couldn't eventually overengineer and beat into something that people loathed.
Halting State by Charles's Stross (http://www.amazon.com/Halting-State-Charles-Stross/dp/044101...) explores what happens when some crooks steal all the virtual goods in this kind of company. WoW meets NUMB3RS in an interesting way.
Firefox 3 beta 2 Arrives with More Speed and Fewer Bugs
Here are some examples of the work we've had done via the contests system at sitepoint.com:

http://contests.sitepoint.com/contests/3313/entries/200711.j...
http://contests.sitepoint.com/contests/4358/entries/272610.j...
http://contests.sitepoint.com/contests/2241/entries/130440.j...
http://contests.sitepoint.com/contests/2275/entries/132753.p...

Each of these designs cost between US$350-$700.

You can judge the quality for yourself... in our opinion they're excellent for the price.

However, the contest process is time consuming and it does take a bit of practice to understand how it all works and manage your contest in a way that delivers the best possible result.
Interestingly enough, I played in the World Series of Roshambo a couple years back. In the second round I put what Gavin Smith calls the worst beat in the history of the sport on him. It was best of seven, and he got me down 3-0. On the fourth throw I balked, which is a permissible stall tactic. After that I had a feeling he was going rock, so I threw paper. The same happened for the next three throws and I moved on to the next round.

I've been told by a few people that if you look very closely, you can see me throwing paper on the ESPN coverage.
Google Poaching Beacon Partners For "Universal Activity Stream"
I guess I should mention that there may be something to the argument that you'll probably want to end up with RoR or Python/Django at some point, so maybe you should start there. But at the same time, if you're not familiar with OOP or MVC, or even basic DB programming, it might just be overload.
Amazon Web Services Blog: Make Money Fast - Introducing Amazon DevPay
Interesting to see real stats. I think it has become fairly common knowledge that generalized Digg traffic is pretty worthless.
Microformats are Awesome, Now Put Them to Work for Your Site
great example.
Startup Math: 1 + 1 = 1/2
Look on the Bright Side, It Could Have Been a Nested "If"
... and Duke Nukem Forever will be released.

The end of the world must be near!
Only $5000? Why not use a credit card and keep all your equity?
Man, I really hate pop science. What will those crazy scientists do next!
OK... I read your executive summary and I think $3.99 is way too much to pay to swap a book. $3.99 can get you a book at a used bookstore.

I understand that you are trying to make the best site for book lovers, but then the real challenge for all social sites is getting users. How do you get users?
What a great story. Here is a guy who took advantage of closed doors. Should be an inspiration to everyone. Now get back to work.
I'm pretty happy with (mt)Grid-server, it doesn't automatically setup the FTP or send the e-mails, but you can setup accounts that work for every ftp (for your designers) and setting up accounts is quite simple, There is a limit (100) but there was some small fee to add 30 more (maybe 3$/month or something) All of that for 20/month + 15/yr per domain is pretty darn good.
I was on MT's gridserver for a while but was really unhappy with the latency. All of our sites felt slow to load. Plus they had an unacceptable amount of downtime.

We switched to slicehost, which is great, but you'd have to roll your own reseller interface for them.
Erlang: A New Way to Program That's 20 Years Old
Geeks everywhere got excited recently when they heard that SimpleDB might be based on Erlang. Why? Is Erlang the next big thing? Probably not -- it's a 20-year-old language that some programmers find weird.
I can recommend http://nimbupani.com
Ask YC: Data structure or Algorithm selection for a problem?
data structure or algorithm which one is more important in solving a problem

and how selection of both is important in solving a problem
Any hope of application/xhtml+xml support for IE 8 as well?
Do you think Opera's filing a complaint with the EU against Microsoft had anything to do with this announcement?
>That's optimal only if your opponents also act randomly.

By choosing the random strategy you force your opponent to do the same and you have a draw. It is optimal, in this sense.
http://browsers.evolt.org/?ie/32bit/standalone

I use that, and it works well. Evolt has archived versions of approximately 7835987345 different browsers.
If you want to give Ruby a try and you are building a small app. Check out Shoes:
http://code.whytheluckystiff.net/shoes/
Something doesn't add up.

Steve is hoping for a 50% - 75% reduction in LOC. In other words, he hopes to compress by 3 or 4. In other words, a mere linear reduction. Is that worth a complete rewrite?

Remember the lesson of the Mozilla rewrite? http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html Rewriting does nothing for users.

I'd like to know what the 500k lines are doing. It's a game. Are there numerous classes representing physical object types and character types? Could these be expressed as data, or in a domain-specific language, or using an embedded scripting language like Lua?

I'd prefer any of those three solutions to rewriting the whole app in a scripting language. If the codebase does contain a degree of data-as-code, it's better to factor that out.
If you to do something a bit different XUL might interest you. If you want to do it fast C# is probably the best tool for making simple GUI applications available.
To quote Hofstadter: Mu.

Particular algorithms operate on particular data structures; a binary search on a sorted list makes sense, while a binary search on an unsorted list is meaningless. It doesn't make any sense to have one of "a good algorithm" or "a good data structure" without the other.
OK, but the the domain-neutral component can kiss my ass.

Or, rather, my colleague's bastardized version of it. When in doubt, stick another moment-interval in between some green stuff to make it look "right".

Then again, I live in BPMN these days. Or, rather, in limbo between BPMN and UML Activity.
The world's most fantastic, imaginary server start-up
http://philweavers.net
Did you find the latency was with dynamic pages, or the static files? I have some stuff on Mosso, which has a lot of latency problems, but their speed issues appear to be limited to dynamic pages & MySQL queries.
That's pretty impressive... How did Kawa Scheme treat you, if I may ask? I have always been a little curious about Lisp (or Scheme) implementations on the JVM (clojure included) and figured you might be a good person to ask...
It felt slow even with static pages with no database hits. On slicehost, static pages seem to load instantly and there was also something of a load time with Mediatemple.
I'm one of those quarter-million people who have an account on Wyvern, Yegge's game.

All maps, game objects, and NPCs/monsters are in XML, though ones with odd, specific behavior also have a corresponding code file. I'm not sure about races, but it doesn't make much difference, considering there are around twenty races and thousands of maps, objects, and monsters.

Wyvern is wrought with fair-size bugs (e.g.: hydras and other monsters with multiple attacks can kill players multiple times at once) that have been around for years, despite multiple attempts at fixing them. He had complained frequently enough about the difficulty adding major features with the codebase's design. It certainly would do something for the users.

If you want to see what those 500k lines are doing, check out the API docs at http://web.archive.org/web/20060820070049/www.cabochon.com/a...
The BPMN and the "diagram until you puke" UML guys are just beating the heck outta the art of communication using a diagram. It's such an easy concept, why do folks have to go and keep adding more and more stuff until nobody likes it anymore?

I completely understand the gist of the article. Diagramming is supposed to be a tool for communication, collaboration, and discussion. But instead it becomes some kind of tool to control the universe. Sometimes I wonder if we only need about 1-5% of all of the tools we use. The rest is just overkill.
Introducing Fraxi, the Ning of Pligg
Not only that, but its in a useful form in the most common client platforms today (browser, and flash ! - of a fashion).

In many cases javascript is fullfilling the promises of lisp. Complete with REPL on the client platform itself (firebug, for instance).

May not be what you expect, but its there, its its not too shabby.
I would love to use scheme, especially on the JVM. But its a bit like going nude on a beach. Don't really want to be the first one in the crowd to do it.

Hmmm.... did I just type that or think it ?
What annoyed me was his complaint about if (a = b) ... - yet I believe every other dyn language does that perfectly validly.
No. Better standards support has been on the IE roadmap for a while. They aren't exactly breaking any speed records doing so, but this is consistent with the direction set by IE7, IMHO, and what MS has been publicly saying for quite a while.
Is YC still planning to open source their angel money paperwork? If so, when?
I'm very happy with Kawa Scheme. It's very fast. It's stable, and has everything from R5RS that I care about. The only drawback is it's so good that I don't experience enough pain to push me to update to new versions. I see on the mailing list all the good improvements, but I'm still stuck at Kawa 1.7.
I'm willing to be the trailblazer on this one.

Help me succeed. Find some people who have a lot of photos that they can never find time to organize for sharing. Point them to my site. When a popular site is using Scheme on the JVM, you using it isn't such a far-out proposal any more.