skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
First I just want to point out that there are many different levels of being rich. I know PG said this in one of his essays somewhere, and I have said it on this forum too. And it is true. I know this isn't what you were asking in reply, but there are certainly different levels above Level 7 (in my original scheme) that are just higher levels of monetary attainment. And that is what motivates some people to go from say Level 7 to Level 7a, i.e. they see 1M vs 10M vs 50M or whatever as different levels.

But if I understand your reply correctly, I think you are saying, what is beyond all those monetary levels? That is, assume you reach a monetary level that is enough for you financially, what is beyond that? (This is why I just stopped at Level 7 in my scheme btw.)

Having achieved some degree of Level 7 myself, all I can say is that startups are what I like to do (at least for now). I want to start all over again and climb up the Levels because each level is rewarding to me its own right. A different project brings different users and solving different needs, and I guess I just like that. So in this scheme, I guess I think of it sort of as a reset for myself; not a circle exactly, but a new path.

Other things beyond Level 7 are charity, prestige/celebrity, and doing things with bigger impact. Steve Jobs is obviously a celebrity, and I would assume he sees that as part of his success. PG seems to be in the bigger things category, hoping that YC will really change the world in a big way. Maybe he can jump in here and speak for himself though. I remember an article on here a while back (but can't find it right now) about what people do after exit events. It had these categories, but it was a little more thought out, if I recall correctly. Maybe someone can provide that link.
Databases: One Size Fits All - A Concept Whose Time Has Come and Gone
I don't think any particular language causes brain damage like some more strongly-opinioned people would say. But some make it easier to write nutty code. It doesn't mean everybody writes nutty code.

Just like how being surrounded by junk food predisposes you to poor dietary habits and possibly in consequence, heart problems, it's not impossible to eat healthy and stay fit.

Shunning the environment/language/tool is understandable, but equating it to the root of the problem always involves some exaggeration. The NASA code released not long ago had GOTOs in it and I don't think it costed lives.
He could be good at that. All he'd have to do is call the Saudis and they would buy him as a personal favor.
In addition to a search string, XPath or CSS selector syntax could be nice. (Think: JQuery.)

Should be easy to implement as a Greasemonkey script or FF add-on.
Just wondering, but why the bias against SSL?
Mental problems. I jest not. All (financially) successful people I know have serious mental problems. It's that special little fire in the belly that keeps you warm all those hard, lonely nights until you make it. Plus the extra voices in your head keep you company late at night. Oh and sexual frustration. Sublimation is a powerful tool if used properly. How many sexually satisfied folks with hot girlfriends who tend to their needs regularly do you know who are part of startups? None? Think about it. Your startup is your mistress. And professionalism. The ability to wait until after you've hit the jackpot to write that article about what a jackass your partner is, but to use the tension as fuel until you do so. Delusions of grandeur helps.
I don't get this at all. Please elaborate.
Good point! But playing devil's advocate, "IBM!" Touche!
Well, if you can change the way people behave, you're beyond success. You have the ability to literally change the world. That's god-like. That transcends success.
Why not? I'm not implying that grades & honors definitely correlate in any way with whatever it is you are looking for in applicants, but they could.

Additionally, it may be the case that overall you have noticed that attending an elite school has no correlation with success in your program, but that doesn't mean an identifiable subset of elite school candidates do not as well. For example, suppose GPA doesn't correlate by itself, or even a high GPA at an elite school. Yet maybe a super-higher GPA at an elite school does, or Phi Beta Kappa or whatever.
Ha Ha Ha Ha. So hilarious.
The whole exchange is great! Keep on reading the subsequent messages. Here's some interesting parts:

"
The fact is, that is exactly the kinds of things that C excels at. Not
just as a language, but as a required mentality. One of the great
strengths of C is that it doesn't make you think of your program as
anything high-level. It's what makes you apparently prefer other
languages, but the thing is, from a git standpoint, "high level" is
exactly the wrong thing. "

and

"And if you want a fancier language, C++ is absolutely the worst one to
choose. If you want real high-level, pick one that has true high-level
features like garbage collection or a good system integration, rather than
something that lacks both the sparseness and straightforwardness of C,
and doesn't even have the high-level bindings to important concepts.

IOW, C++ is in that inconvenient spot where it doesn't help make things
simple enough to be truly usable for prototyping or simple GUI
programming, and yet isn't the lean system programming language that C is
that actively encourags you to use simple and direct constructs."
Thank you. This is exactly what I was wondering about and wanted to know from someone in the know.
I'll check it out. To use organization behavior speak, I'd bet that culture is to knowledge workers what systemic design is to routinized labor. That being said, I think there is a lot more money to be made from designing systems than from designing culture for three reasons:

A) Everyone knows about the importance of corporate culture for knowledge workers. While different businesses might require different best practices, there is still going to be a lot of overlap between different companies with "good" cultures. WHEREAS few people know how to design efficient systems for routinized labor, and the systems will be very specific to the company.

B) Routinized labor scales much more, so creating good systems gives you a lot more leverage than creating good cultures.

C) Knowledge workers don't create wealth in predictable patterns. With the best culture all you can do is make it more likely that someone will create something of value. But with a good system you are actually increasing measurably increasing your yield, just like finding a better catalyst for a chemical equation.

edit: Of course this isn't to say that it isn't possible to design systems for knowledge work also. Public schools are an excellent example of this. (Although, strictly speaking, schools are designed to be like factories so maybe not.)
But they are still being mentioned in the same sentence, which is probably a first for any American President.
Homeschooling doesn't have to mean preventing your kid from socializing with other kids. Most zip codes have a large enough home schooling community to provide plenty of similarly, and for that matter, differently, aged kids to interact with.
and so this article merely says, "Mainstream languages that come pretty close to Lisp are brain-damaged and you'd have to be a particular breed of crazy to use it for anything."

Wrong. This reddit comment nailed it: http://programming.reddit.com/info/2mm0n/comments/c2mo30

Erik's argument is that Perl incentivizes The Wrong Way, and disincentivizes The Right Way. It's not about coercion, it's about incentives. "it's not that perl programmers are idiots, it's that the language rewards idiotic behavior in a way that no other language or tool has ever done."
--jemfinch
Oh, not biased at all. Just mindful of the additional overhead and computational load it places on the server. It can be very significant, as the paper below indicates:

http://www.bsc.es/media/389.pdf
As a business, I tend to think success has to have SOME connection with revenue/profit... Unless you want to bet your success on your ability to sell a profitless venture.

I'd say when you have customers who want to keep being customers is a pretty good measure of success. Customers are the people who pay the bills... So if you have a free service, it means advertisers who are reaching an audience they care about and getting a good return on their investment.

I find the emphasis on 'users' to be a bit too simple, and decidedly not very bubble-proof. It's probably also important to qualify who your users are and how much you know about them. 100,000 users that you have no information about aren't very valuable.
Does that warm and fuzzy feeling pay the bills every month? =)

In all seriousness, I agree that having happy clients is a strong indicator of success. But for myself, success is more than just being at the front of the pack.

Success is having the satisfaction of knowing you put out your full effort (and then some). Success is personal struggle and personal growth, regardless of the problem or project.
Ohh, let's spice up the Leaders page. Those are (I know how hard they are to earn) hard earned karma points. People should at least get to show their web app if they are in the leaders section. Or change the colors. Either way, it's a point of pride among those on it. Or let's increase the size of the Leaderboard to reflect growing YC traffic, or have a 'Most Karma' this month.

Anybody listening?
It was better the first couple hundred times I heard it.

Jamie Zawinski's from 1997 is the most famous in modern times:

"Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know,
I'll use regular expressions." Now they have two problems."

But, it dates back even further to a "D. Tilbrook" from before 1988:

"Whenever faced with a problem, some people say `Lets use AWK.' Now, they have two problems."

There's an XML variant that had quite a lot of popularity in the early 00's.
I've noticed a TON of comments anytime someone posts "Just launched my startup... Feedback please!"... Just as a counter-example.
Because the ranter was pissed that his favorite language was not very viable commercially, and a language he strongly dislikes was the most popular language on the web, with many job opportunities. Bitterness colors his logic.
Two reasons: First, everything has context and time is often a big part of it. Setting that context up for people is helpful. Second, this site is entitled Hacker News and this is not News. While people will argue old things should still be included, and that's fine, I think old things should at least be marked as such by putting the year of publication next to them.
I'd love a free link without nofollow on the leaders page. I'm not sure that it's actually a good idea to have rewards for the highest karma, it seems like a bad idea to make the karma overly meaningful.
I just read the whole thing... Linus basically says "I wrote it in C so idiots like you wouldn't (and couldn't) contribute".

Which is mean spirited and kind of an asinine thing to say, but so awesome at the same time.
Spez had mentioned, off-handedly, that there tend to be painful bugs in the main web.py distributions:

http://programming.reddit.com/info/14v8a/comments/c14y1i
No earth shattering news here, but discussions have comments and news links don't have as much. When someone asks for help understanding something by asking a question, the community lends it expertise. If more questions were asked, more discussion would proceed.

- my 2 cents
Sorry to suggest that you were biased. Bad diction on my part. I didn't mean it like that.

That link isn't working for me, but, from experience, I really don't think using SSL just for authentication will hamper your server resources that much.
Thanks nos`. Are you still using Pylons? And templates? Would you recommend MochiKit for js lib?
I also put this on the features page, but I think separating submission karma from comments karma would also be a useful expansion. Perhaps a few columns of leaders using different metrics would work. For example, top leaders, top submission leaders, top comment leaders, and then maybe some time ones, like upcoming comment leaders, etc.
"Wrong."

Very concise. And it's always good to back it up with the assertions of some random dude on Reddit.
You're welcome!

Forgive me if this is obvious but there is one corner case worth mentioning with the Fu Cookie approach. The Fu Cookie authenticator expires. Be sure to consider what happens if this expiration happens in the middle of some complex user-operation. Ideally you will save the user's state, reauthenticate and then automatically resume the interrupted operation. It is possible to do this all using cookies or hidden form fields rather than maintaining a data-structure (or closure ;) ) on the server-side. If you do use cookies/form fields consider HMACing the operation-state data in the same manner that you HMAC the Fu Cookie authenticator.
When is the right time to "light the bulb"?
There are ways to get rich without working hard: most of them are all about taking a big risk. Gambling, robbing banks, that sort of thing.

But as pg said, working hard is necessary for doing something great.

Greatness seems to require a very focussed hard work, though. You not only have to work very hard, but on exactly the right things. Simply putting in long hours coding probably isn't enough.
Actually, I went with web.py after all. I blame temporary insanity. That, and web.py was easily understandable without a whole lot of docs to go through, and I wanted to get something up quickly. We may yet rewrite in Pylons, but it's low priority, as web.py is working for us. (We also have practically zero traffic though.)

For templates, we use Mako after having previously used Cheetah, same as the rewritten Reddit. Mako is a very well-done, well-thought-out library. There were some things that Cheetah had a lot of trouble with (like unicode support and fragment libraries) that Mako handles without breaking a sweat.

For JS lib, we eventually settled on jQuery after having tried out Prototype, YUI, and Mootools (never used Mochikit, sorry). This was largely because that seems to be where the momentum is these days. Also, jQuery has a very elegant selector + plugin architecture and a growing collection of plugins. And it's the first JavaScript library I've seen that's intimately aware of namespace issues and tries to balance ease-of-use (no silly YAHOO.widgets.slider.SliderThumb chains here) and not-breaking-anything. This has been a major issue at my day job - we use several Prototype-dependent libraries and they all seem to be incompatible with each other, along with any other JS libraries.

On the downside, jQuery is still fairly immature, so you may have to write some widgets yourself that are provided with other libraries. That's changing quickly though, since many people are writing plugins now.
I actually assumed the same thing. The computational load is intense in the handshake process, but then not really much more so afterwards. But if every user is re-authenticating each time they log into the site, the server can fall flat on its face very quickly. The issue is compounded if the client has a connection timeout. As the server load increases and response time starts to exceed the defined timeout, the client sends more connection requests, increasing server load exponentially. Its like a snowball effect. Check out the graphs in the paper from my previous reply and you'll see what I'm talking about.

I like mdakin's proposed solution b/c it apparently alleviates the need for a connection request each time the user logs in. At least until the cookie expires.
<i>"pick one that has true high-level features like garbage collection or a good system integration, rather than something that lacks both the sparseness and straightforwardness of C, and doesn't even have the high-level bindings to important concepts."</i>

That's a straw man. There are garbage collectors and "system integration" libraries for C++. The language doesn't lack for high-level bindings, but it also doesn't force you to adopt a paradigm. This flexibility is C++'s greatest strength, as well as its greatest weakness.

Personally, I find it more than a little ironic that a huge amount of the complexity of C++ comes from its insistence on remaining backwards-compatible with C. Linus may love the "lean system programming language", but it sure does bring a lot of ugly baggage to the C++ party....
Linus basically says that C++ has "inefficient abstracted programming models". Looking at the STL, you only see some very basic abstractions: vectors, lists, hash tables, sets, and others. These are very well tested, and extremely optimized. Anyone writing a decent amount of code will undoubtedly run into a situation where they need such structures.
The assertation is backed up by a quote from the original post by Naggum. I said "wrong" because you somehow missed that part of his post. He was not saying that Perl is wrong because it has some of Lisp's features. He was saying that it is wrong because it allows shitty work. In fact, it encourages it by making it harder to write good solutions.

Someone (Perl) can be beautiful (Lisp features), but that doesn't change the fact that they wear dirty clothing (ugly syntax) and they smell kind of funny (ugly solutions).
As far as I can tell if a warm and fuzzy feeling pays your bills, you are probably going to jail.
It's funny because they're all accurate. XML is an ugly beast, regular expressions can be amazingly obfuscated. I don't know about AWK, but I'm guessing that it's as ugly as Perl.
What's A Good Name?
5 Suggestions on naming your business or organization.
Set a goal. Reach it. You are successful at that. That is the broadest def you can get.
Four Concentric Circles of a Web 2.0 Name
These ranters never actually show you any perl code that is particularly ugly and compare it against some lisp/python/ruby code that solves the problem more cleanly.

I'm sure that there are areas where other languages' solutions are much cleaner than an equivalent perl one, but can anybody actually show us one? Especially a lisp one.
A lot of the comments seem to focus on influencing the lives of lots of users. That would pretty much cut out the entire Enterprise startup category wherein a few 1000 IT admins are enough to take a company to profitability. Of course, employees of the company end up becoming indirect users. As to what defines success, the following quote works well for me:

"When all is said and done, the journey is the reward."
- Randy Komisar
That's not what he said. He said "I wrote it in C because C was the best language for the job. It's also nice that C discourages idiots from trying to contribute.".

He's right on both counts. I've always found using tools designed for smart people to be an effective way to cut down on the number of stupid people attempting to work on a project, but the main advantage is getting to use a good tool instead of a bad one.
I stopped listening to linus after he layed into gnome.
What's your autism quotient? (link updated)
The Art, Science and Business of Recommendation Engines
Is this really the best that's out there?
I'm off Bush.
Great post. I've been up against the Enterprise Architect syndrome and sadly I've lost. It really just kills productivity, in addition to innovation.
Will learn to program first.
(Indeed, it makes me want to apply just for the process! I have an open-source idea, didn't PG say he could monetize anything? It would grow in use as word spread (pretty sure) but ultimately wouldn't get that big and would be hard to make anything off of.. sigh).
There are no titles here.
The only concrete assertions I see there are that regular expressions are error-prone (fine, if you really think so, don't use them), and that data in Perl aren't s-expressions (I'm assuming that's what he's ranting about when he's implying that all Perl is good for is massaging input formats).

So pretty weak: CPAN is the supreme, far-and-away, no-other-reason-or-language-comes-close (at least in 2000) to use Perl.
To the contrary, what angered me ( yeah yeah, I also didn't realize it was a parody ) was the over generalization and the possibility that someone actually thinks like this.

That being said, I could see the statements being true to an extent. Probably even a greater extent that I'd like to admit. Its just the generalization that gets me... I think you'd get much the same reaction from people if you replaced "the poor" with, "the mexicans", or "the blacks", or "the rednecks".
"The assertation is backed up by a quote from the original post by Naggum."

An ill-informed rant from a crank is not the same as "backed up".

"Someone (Perl) can be beautiful (Lisp features), but that doesn't change the fact that they wear dirty clothing (ugly syntax) and they smell kind of funny (ugly solutions)."

We all have our preferences.

While you can quote your favorite usenet crank from years ago, I can quote one of my favorites about Lisp (doesn't mean Lisp isn't a great language for many tasks...this quote just makes me laugh every time I read it):

"Lisp has all the visual appeal of oatmeal with fingernail clippings mixed in." --Larry Wall (larry@wall.org)

Smart people can disagree on many things. Programming languages are no different.
Yeah, he hardly seemed like an enlightened CEO... exactly the kind of person I want running my competition.
MobileChat: Filling the iPhone-iChat gap and Open Sourcing The Code
Good article indeed, especially coming from the sometimes-hysterical folks at TechCrunch.

The phrase "walled garden" comes to mind. Facebook is undoubtedly the best social networking site on the web, and I don't see why it won't continue to get better in that regard.

Their move to become a web platform, or a web OS, or whatever other buzzword is currently in favor, is a little rockier. I think they're taking the idea of an OS far too literally. A web OS won't--and shouldn't--look anything like a desktop OS. Being a web platform is about facilitating interoperability--precisely the opposite of measuring success by the number of apps that people have written for your proprietary platform.

(Is it too obvious that my startup is working in this area?)
pg wrote a few in an essay. (And, unremarkably, though I'm going to remark on it anyway, Perl stands up as well as any other mainstream language to the onslaught. Perl 6 does even better, though I think one of the biggest side effects of Perl 6 is going to be a huge influx of Haskell coders because of Pugs.)
Yeah, "it serves you ... better" ... reminds me of the Mauve DB dilbert (it has more RAM).
I agree it wouldn't matter much---to the startup. However, if the fees ICANN and VeriSign charge for registration rise from .25-6.25 dollars to 50 or perhaps 150 dollars, the squatting industry would get seriously injured. New startups would get more normal names, making word-of-mouth easier. www.justine.tv would belong to justin.tv instead of a porn site.