skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, if I was to predict the future I would say that we will see new browser architectures that will allow new types of code to be written that are not currently possible. I think web browsers will be more like a VM that can run any kind of code compiled to them instead of being forced to render only HTML and JavaScript. I would take a look at the things about web development that people currently complain about and would venture to say that some smart people will get together and address them.
The whole is more than the sum of its parts?

Or you should be casting to float ;)
A Quick Tour of F#
I don't hate facebook. I probably spend 3-5 hours each week on the service. I do, however, question its long-term sustainability, given the path they've chosen and the decisions they make.
Good job Scribd. I aplaud your seriousity and maturity you are showing(even if you guys are really young), yet you can have fun also. Honestly, your page and everything you guys said, makes me think your company is a good place to work for.
Unlike the Xobni video, which raised too many eyebrows, you guys seem to be say the right things, and having the right attitude.

I am not looking for a job, but if I was, I would have applied for you guys.
Crazy problems? ;)

But you are right - C can be used as a higher level version of assembly.
just this morning, I searched my yahoo email account for an old airline itinerary using their search button.

my results page was rendered entirely in spanish. I have no idea what might have caused this bug, but fortunately the buttons are all in the same place.

I suppose there's a chance I might have hit some errant button on my keyboard...
I'd strongly recommend making at least some sort of visual wireframe, whether it's in powerpoint, on paper, in dreamweaver, etc. Chances are you have a general idea of what you want the first version to look like, and showing the developer what you have in mind will both make it easier for him and make it more likely that he'll make what you want.
i guess that makes the 1.6 billion YouTube acquisition a bargain, which is now counting 250 million visitors per month...
Nice little tool, but what we really need is something like this for XEN, plus more options.
I have used at least one.
"A lot of the features are designed to make it easier for the compiler writer."

That kind of scares me. Who cares how hard the compiler writer's job is? A compiler is written once, whereas the programs that the compiler compiles (hopefully) comprise a much larger body of code.

That said, the article sure made D sound like an improvement over C++, with many of the same benefits. Of course, getting rid of the preprocessor seems kind of strange... I've used quite a few macros in my C code. Even the crappy macros you get with C (as compared to, say, Lisp) are certainly better than none at all.
> PG admits that with so many applicants, the choice becomes increasingly arbitrary.

No no no -- PG was very insistent that YC's selection process is specifically NOT arbitrary. Where do you find anything he said to the contrary?
Screaming for a web 2.0 ish management tool as well... think google map route management with mashed-in plots for aid stations etc...

Unfortunately, I don't know enough about setting up a marathon...
Probably something that hasn't been invented yet.
Yep, After reading detail and checking their site - I am tempted to apply for this job but I won't because still I am not at a stage to decide between own startup vs joining startup.
Video Game Shown to Reduce Stress Hormone Levels
I totally disagree. C is definitely *not a good language to learn to program in. I actually think that programming should be learned the other way around.
It's great for the people who founded Facebook, but personally i don't understand Facebook's valuation other than the networking effect. To me it's ridiculously overpriced. I wonder if that would make me less suitable to be a startup founder.
Your profile says Lima, Peru... a lot of people live in Miraflores so...

But, I'm American, my mother and grandparents are Peruvian.

Do you have AIM or email?
Scribd allows adult content.
I agree that int a[10] feels more natural, though if the brackets are empty my only preference is that the language pick one or the other. Don't make "int[] a;" and "int a[];" equally valid syntax, but totally different semantics.

My main point is that this is a relatively cosmetic issue relative to the ability to use 'foreach' syntax instead of iterator objects and while loops.
Willow Garage - A Robotics Startup
Yep, we need that detail. I still don't get - how and when my points are increasing.
Usability Cookie - Did Hamilton lose the F1 Championship because of bad user interaction?
C++0x addresses those things -- foreach etc.

There's clearly a market for some sort of a fixed C++ but not the Java/C# way. D tries to fill the niche, but it doesn't give a feeling of elegance or otherwise of something really new and unseen before.
New iPhone Dev Center
Get Symfony Installed in 20 Minutes on Vista
This article is for those running Vista with a need to get a quick Symfony development environment going.
Poking the bear: It's not as hard to build a startup in New York City as you've heard....
Design Lesson - Don't try to be original, just try to be good.
I think it was a good submission, so you did the right thing by posting it here. It sparked some good discussion.
I really wanted to mod this +1, Funny and remembered this isn't slashdot.

But to be fair, I used to do the same.
I think one of the big problems is that the buyers don't know how to buy software. Users like new versions with long bullet lists of features-- and they buy 'em.

On the plus side, if you actually create simple to-the-point software, your users are probably a smarter breed of cat (read: less support costs?).
15b isnt too too expensive really

broadcast.com was once worth 4b, amazon.com is worth 40b

heck the value of google has INCREASED 50b in just the last 6 months

facebook is a VERY important site. where else can I go on the internet to place ads targeted to a location AND interest. An insane percentage of those under 25 have fb accts, and the whole next generation will be locked into fb as they follow their older peers.

facebook has the internet on lock
Dot Com Deadpool Fund
"[IRC] is the geek equivalent of being stoner, by the way, with roughly the same effect on cognition."

That's hilarious b/c I've been in previous lives, both a stoner and an IRCer, and I can't believe I never thought of this.
I believe E will be even better then D.
Good point. But I think the metaphor is still awful. Try to a herd pride of lions.
Fools! Single celled organisms colonized America four billion years ago.
There might be nothing to fix. PG did say they didn't understand some of the applications, they didn't get the "big idea" that the application writer was trying to convey. You might just rephrase your idea and make sure your programming team looks highly qualified.
If Adobe AIR and Microsoft Silverlight continue to gain traction then they could begin to replace AJAX-style implementations for feature-rich web sites.

The key word here is could.
yes, we are, but that position is likely filled. please email matt.brezina at xobni
I went ahead and sent them an email, this vc firm gives you a reason when they say no. Fred Wilson seems to be a polite and down to earth guy just to take a random email from someone he doesn't know and give it some thrift.
Of course. You miss my meaning. Scribd = 1 (ie. cool company doing good things), and 0's being unsuccessful attempts. We're allowed unsuccessful attempts. I sure have a couple under my belt. ;-)

I understand what point the Scribds' are trying to make, but knowing their history, I just thought I'd call them out on their white lie.
Comet.
Has anyone formed an S Corp and then converted to a C Corp later
It might just be easier that way if in the short term external financing is not necessary. Has anyone done this before. Are there any problems ?
-- does it take time to revoke the S election or cost a lot in legal fees ?
-- does it have problems with founders stock vesting or with taxation on founders stock if 83b has already been filed in time ?
-- any stock pricing issues if the conversion from S to C happens at the time of external financing?
-- Any other problems ?
I made it through 10 pages of this book and finally said "THIS is a NY Times bestseller?!" And tossed it down, never to be opened again. I'm glad a critic agrees. The world is round Mr. Friedman, and your metaphor is flat.
cglee probably meant to say "Columbus discovered that the world is round part", which is what the article says, essentially. Matt Taibbi is a smart guy, and he probably didn't mean to say that, but considering how arrogant his tone is, it's still rather embarrassing.
Ok. This comment will be a little over the top, but here goes.
I'm actually getting sick of how MS releases products. I never used to care enough to think that having everything under the sun covered was a problem. I think in the end, Microsoft's enormous technology and feature base will be what does them in.

To use Silverlight as an example, I think it sucks. It's bloated and I don't get it. I'm tired of playing catch up with MS technologies and all the freaking featues they pack into them. I mean: ASP.NET. ASP.NET AJAX VB.NET 3.0, LINQ, F#, C#, J# (being retired), VBScript, VS 2003, VS 2005, VS Team Foundation, Windows Workflow, Windows Communication Foundation and Windows Presentation Foundation. Seriously?

Windows Workflow in particular is extraordinarily huge. If keeping a program in one's head is important (and it is), then it's not going to happen with Windows Workflow.

As I get more comfortable knowing what I want to code and how I want to code it, I'm finding myself just wanting to use stuff that gets it done in the path that is the most natural to me.

Silverlight? No, thanks.
XJAX
What a fine example of Winner's Curse: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winner's_curse
I can't get Roy Fielding OR Cake out of my head
Web metrics are hard
I think the phrase is 'fraught with error'.
Unfortunately things don't pan out well when moved out of the lab conditions and into the real world, with kilometres of twisted, rotting copper buried in the ground in awful conditions.
i cant believe you posted your cell #.

get ready to change your number.
this isn't justin.tv
People like 37signals and web designers should stop talking which software sucks. Especially Enterprise software.

This group of people have no idea or whatsoever the requirements of an enterprise software. All they know is how to create a beautiful websites. I'm not saying that sarcastically, I like beautiful websites.

But this group of people judge the quality of the software from the UI perspective; if UI == sucks then software sucks. They believe that a wonderful UI == best quality software. That may be true but it's a wrong generalization.

Not to mention that web-designers and 37signals NEVER work on any enterprise software. They simply work on small projects because it's their specialty.
Sounds like $240 million a small price (for Microsoft) to pay to beat Google at something.
AJAX is not a framework, others build theirs based on it. Anyway, it will be hot for at least 5 years so it doesn't really matter what will replace it.

Until then, the next version of XMLHttpRequest should somehow provide a way for the server to send a request to the client, not needinng the client to make requests all the time...

Or maybe you should be asking what will replace or make better the DOM?
If you worked for a YC funded company, probably it could help you get funding from YC itself if you left at some point and needed it...
I wish all jobs ads were like this.
What your startup can learn from...Wal-Mart?  It's still okay to hate them, though.
I've always viewed Wal-Mart as a fossil that would be harder to turn than an aircraft carrier. But Wal-Mart has actually made some smart IT decisions that we can all learn from; big or small.
That sounds eerily reminiscent of Java applets.
It doesn't matter. Really. Just do something. Anything. What you learn (about everything) from the doing will be way more important than any (temporary) technical skills you acquire.
There's too much to worry about; besides, being efficient isn't an issue when you are a beginner. Better to learn with a language that hides the low-level details so you can focus on actual programming.

In other words, I think that you should learn first how to teach the computer to do stuff and only after having done that for a while should you try to understand how the computer interprets the instructions you give it. Of course, you could take the very first steps in any language (except maybe Intercal), but once you get to strings and the like, C is more likely to make it more difficult instead of easier.
He repeats the misconception and goes on to build an argument on it. I can't see how he could not mean it. But then again, later he argues that the 'earth is flat' argument reverses "2000 years of human thought." (?)

Hilarious critique anyway.
I've actually grown weary of the whole browser/css/javscript crap that I have to deal with to make things work... I've been playing with Flex lately. It's a step back in some ways, but it is nice in others. Feels more like thick client development than thin client.
Future of science: 'We will have the power of the gods'
Birds good at adapting are found in a larger range of habitats than those which aren't
Reverse-Interviewing for CS Jobs
I thought everybody are trying to make S Corp because it's more "advanced" (if I can say so). Why should you reverse it?
I was in a software startup in Texas almost 15 years ago, which underwent a conversion from S to C, for the purpose of seeking external financing. Fortunately, I was not a shareholder at the time.

As I remember (and this is second hand knowledge, so take it as a cautionary tale):

The company's assets (software products and training materials) were assigned a market value by an independent accountant. The market value increased each shareholder's basis in the company, for which they were ultimately liable tax-wise by their percentage ownership in the corporation in the year of conversion to C corporation.

It was very ugly, as the current shareholders' basis went from almost nothing to a significant number, on which they had to pay taxes, but with little options to liquidate their shares to pay the gain in value.

It caused much consternation, gnashing of teeth, and bad feelings among the owners of the corporation--to the point of causing some founders to leave.

I don't know all of the details, or whether the approach they took for the conversion was a good one, but I did learn that you have to be very careful about how this is done. You absolutely must seek competent professional accounting/legal advice. And, you must communicate to the shareholders every detailed step of the process.
Debugger Support Considered Harmful?
This (http://gears.google.com/) has a lot of potential. But only time will tell what new technology really makes a difference.

Trying to figure out what is the best technology and then learning that is a great goal but I think it's more important to learn a variety of technologies and be ready to adapt quickly to new things.

Learn HTML, the document object model, and Javascript (while those do change the change is slow because of the huge installed base.) Unix is going to be relevant for a long time. Relational databases have been around since the beginning of time (Jan 1, 1970) and aren't going away any time soon. If you're good with the fundamentals then you'll be able to adapt to anything else.
If you'd asked this question ten years ago, the 'answer' would have been Java applets. Yeah.

Unless web browsers somehow become obsolete in the next ten years, you're looking at an evolved version of what we have now. HTTP, CSS, XHTML, and JS have plenty of room for improvement. It takes years for the standards to be worked out and longer for browser support, which is never 100%. Add a few more years for developers to take full advantage of the new capabilities.

What we'll have in ten years will be another iteration or two on what we have now.
I'm not sure what you mean by "advanced".

An S corporation pays no taxes on its net income. That net income flows through to the shareholders according to their percentage of ownership. Consequently, each shareholder pays taxes on the income via their own tax returns at their own rate.

A C corporation pays taxes on its net income. The money distributed to shareholders (dividends) are then taxed again on their own tax returns. Thus, you can get a double taxation effect on monies distributed to the shareholders--once at the corporate level and once at the personal level.

However, I believe that companies choose to become C corporations because S corporations are limited in the number of shareholders (35, I seem to recall) and all shareholders must be US citizens. Additionally, since the taxation occurs at the corporate level, individual shareholder's taxes are much more isolated from the effects of undistributed net income.
No need to watch the video... the title says it all.
Isn't Java an adequate alternative to C++ for nearly any purpose?
No offense, but I would have posted almost the exact same "advice" as a sarcastic joke.

If you follow that advice, make sure that you don't make the mistake of thinking that you can build the real service on top of whatever the guy from craigslist throws together.

I don't think you'll have much luck unless you can find one or more coders who're as excited about your idea as you are, and who you respect enough to treat as equals.

I've seen a few friends take coding jobs like the one you're planning to fill, and while they got their pay, the people who hired them never truly got what they wanted.
Not-AJAX.
I knew of one such instance where a bunch of MBAs outsourced their idea to a single Indian coder. He did a passable job, but the app was full of bugs. And that's when they realized that a .war file doesn't contain source code.
"Columbus's discovery that the world is round" What?! The review is just awful, goes on and on...
How so a step back?
You can't replace knowing what the code does and if the code is good code. However you can get passable demo code from anyone. I believe the poster was talking about a small spend to get a demo not build FaceBook with millions of users.
What a bunch of wankers. Buy a spider plant and hang it in your office, now you are "carbon neutral" you science-ignorant gits.
If I had to guess what would be big, I would guess that it could be some sort of push technology [read: not http in its current form] Currently it's difficult to create efficient multi-user systems on low bandwidth and high data rates, with RSS clients pinging servers every three minutes to check for new content and ajax calls every three seconds to check page changes and do autosaves, etc, that is a lot of undue stress on a server. Developers will start packing as much data into a single packet as possible, doing micro-optimizations, while somebody else is going to come along and re-desgin the protocol. It could still use XML and Javascript in general, with some other methods to accept data pushed from the application server(s) [bittorrent anyone?], and not the other way around. It could be huge...but alas, doesn't exist yet.
Doesn't Xen already come with tools to create VMs? If you find them too hard to use, maybe try Fedora's virt-manager.
Flex, undoubtedly, for more involved stuff.
Well, this might be true. But, polling every three seconds to see if your page has changed is just bad practice. There's plenty of discussion out there on the web on how to do this better.
randomest comment ever
News Corp got Intermix for bargain basement prices due to some good old fashion shareholder swindling. News Corp probably had nothing to do with it, but it was inarguably an artificially low price. Though even had they paid what, at that time, would have been market rate, it still would have been an infinitely better deal.
Did he really argue that you should do your startup in NYC because it's harder?
MSFT is letting their ego get the best of them here for sure. They'd be a horrible poker player, which I guess might be why Bill, while the richest man at the world, hung out at the $3/$6 tables.
Let's not pretend that Google wasn't willing to pay the same amount (or at least similar).
Device driver updates are causing Vista to deactivate :(
Apple Wireless Keyboard (invisible) LED - magnified 40X
There are indications that Google is changing their PageRank...
I'm not sure why you've been mercilessly downmodded, because in a roundabout way you are correct.

The obvious answer is that porn has an associated stigma attached to it that makes it a rather unattractive business venture to get involved in. If you are prepared/don't care about being painted with that brush, you get into porn production.

If you do care, or people you respect care, you avoid it.

NSFW is a lot more than 4 letters.
i mean, we're making a very specific page by page layout in conceptdraw.

it seems people have a lot to say about this, which is great. i'll probly put up a standalone discussion thread in a bit.

we understand it's going to be damn near impossible to find someone to make a perfect, usable product. that's not what we want.

we want someone to build us an ugly, barely functioning beta, just enough to get a few users on, in closed beta, to prove that it works and such. we just want a demo.
The User Experience Flip Mode
I'd suggest finding someone who is a good coder and if he is not interested in working for you, ask him for a recommendation. I am based in Bangalore and see first hand the horrific results that occur when people pick the cheapest person/team from a webpage. The best coders don't advertise on Craigslist

if anyone on YC News wants a reccomendation of good coders from Bangalore, write to me at my email id. (No you don't have to pay me, - I have enough on my plate already- and yes you should have an idea exciting to hackers).
in other news, animals good at hunting catch more food than those that aren't.
Facebook is the Pets.com of the new bubble. Once facebook fails the bubble bursts. They are paying for hype.You have to be able to make money to have a valuation of 15billion. Facebook made 50 million this year.The valuation is 300x their income. whatever ...i'm going to bed
Lousy troll.
It does? I think that actually makes it less clear what lists in Python are actually good or bad for. I think thinking of them in terms of a linked list in C is a much better abstraction.
It's interesting trying to watch a non-programmer try to learn a language like C, C++ or Java and try to figure out the reason for all the boiler plate code to get something simple done. They ask questions like: Why does printing "hello, world" require more code than "print 'hello, world'"?
Agreed. I think one of the easiest languages to learn at first would be Python. I unfortunately took the path of Basic, Pascal, Visual Basic, C++, Java, Python, Lisp and I wish I would have run across Python much sooner.
American kids, dumber than dirt
Elcomsoft turns your PC into a password cracking supercomputer
One of the big reasons a lot of code is written in C is because a lot of schools, especially in Europe and Asia teach C/C++ starting at the high school level. Even US schools used to do this until recently (a lot have switched to Java now). So it makes sense that a large percent of the open source software is written in C/C++.
Comcast shooting itself in the foot with traffic shaping "explanations"
I predict he'll be hit by an iceberg.
only if the company needs external financing. VC's can't invest in an S corp ...
That is simply insane. With advances in CPU speeds and multiple core computers becoming standard I wonder how much longer passwords will survive as a reasonable form of protection.