skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think it's interesting to relate this thread to Fred Wilson's "Why Early Stage Venture Investments Fail":

"Of the 26 companies that I consider realized or effectively realized in my personal track record, 17 of them made complete transformations or partial transformations of their businesses between the time we invested and the time we sold."

With this in mind, I think the most important factor is tractability. Can you build it quickly to test your theory? If your theory is off-base, can you quickly shift? I think Fred is a fairly discerning and successful investor... It's interesting to note that 2/3 of the successful teams that he has invested in have been WRONG about their initial product direction.
Don't forget the hackers and painters.
When economies 'de-industrialies' industry does not decline in absolute terms. Just the opposite is true. It's just that we became so damn good at manufacturing that with competition and all that - that we do not need so many people in the factories.

People have reacted to those market pressures and got into services. And so the share of industry went down in relative terms.
"You don't have to write a novel and explain that you are adding 2 to variable i"

Better yet, don't name your variable "i". Name it something like "PartCounter" or "CustCtr". Then you won't have to write many comments. Your code can be largely self-commenting.

As a general rule of thumb (IMO), never name any variable with less than 3 characters and never allow one variable name to be completely contained within another (Ctr & CustCtr). Being able to find every instance of a variable (and nothing else) with a simple editor global search will save you much time and headaches over the next n years. (Oops, I just violated my own rule.)
They started from a pretty low base. By the way the famous Asian Tigers and Ireland had fantastic growth, too. Not to forget war-torne europe and their Wirtschaftswunder.
I think you're selling yourself far too short on monetizability. You could have a model where ad-supported games are free to make (i.e. YOUR ads), or where they could be ad-free (or contain their own ads) for paid subscribers...

Monetizability: Very High
China getting rich does not mean us getting poor.
MySpace sounded like websites, too.
That limits the amount of information they cat extract about paths. But you still get a lot of snapshots.
I think participating in a community like this also requires learning so that might be a bit too overwhelming to learn to program, learn to use sourceforge and learn how to participate effectively in an open-source project...

Also, I think it's important not to rely too much on others for acquiring knowledge.
On my personal wish-list of reforms is an incredibly high (say, 90%) tax on short-term capital gains for real estate investments.

The whole justification for the mortgage interest write-off (which is otherwise just a gigantic government handout to property owners), is that it promotes home ownership, the family unit, etc. The problem is, there's no equivalent dis-incentive for short-term speculation on property, and what was intended to be an incentive for family home ownership actually helped to fuel the ponzi scheme that is effectively driving families out of their homes today.

If short-term gains on home sales were taxed at very high rates, it would basically be impossible for "investors" to flip homes for short-term profits. A huge incentive for speculative price increases in the housing market would be eliminated.

(Plus, no more stupid TV shows about house flipping. It's win-win!)
Everything, the names/code/look of the final program is natural and easy on the eyes. Plus there are a LOT of useful libraries available.

PG calls it the Python Paradox, ESR says that it was so natural that he was able to make a useful GUI while still learning the language, IIRC Spolsky called it part of the 2.5 languages that are safe to use in the business environment.
Please tell me that you are joking.
Of course, but for a certain period, those will be different people. That's massive change. People don't like change generally.

I'm not saying it shouldn't happen, or that it won't. All I'm saying is that the type of disaffection these types of changes create usually creates a short period of misery while the power (no pun there) is shifted to the new order.

Every technological change of this magnitude has resulted in political fallout. To suggest otherwise is hopelessly naive.

Not everyone is able to see this as opportunity - most will see it as a threat to the status quo they enjoy.
Joking about what?

$3000 says that regulatory hurdles are put up all over the place by governments before the first one gets installed. That will happen mainly for the same reason there are tons of regulatory hurdles in place for Hydrogen powered cars. There is a lot of power that will need to be shifted before this becomes a reality.

You can barely drive a segway on the sidewalk, you think you're going to be allowed to install a nuclear reactor in your basement?
API's count a lot too. You'd have to look at two equivalent bits of code and see what things look like.

Still, though, you can do some interesting things with interpreted languages, like eval()...
This is somewhat relevant, although this article/discussion borders on things perhaps best left to other sites:

http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2007/12...
New startup idea: Take whatever USA-specific startup ideas are on the web and reimplement them in Canada.

Works for any values of location and alternate_location.
Joking about the depression coming about because of a new technological invention.
Ah. It's definitely an interesting problem. Hopefully you'll get a chance to test anything you come up with.
Where would you begin?
Evolutions Are Stupid (But Work Anyway): http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/11/evolutions-are-.html
Hmm, that wasn't my intent, but I can see how you read that.

I was looking at the depression from a social pov rather than economic, which made sense in my head at least.

Basically, the point is the kind of massive shift in power required here would need something many times more society altering than a depression to achieve anything meaningful.
Is this a joke? Would you really feel comfortable with a nuclear reactor in your basement?
Of course, that's everyone's reaction (mine too at first). It looks like a joke language along the lines of Unlambda. But stop and think for a minute. Could you write a program this powerful in 40 lines of anything, let alone 40 lines of Unlambda?

Readability is relative. Is Java readable to non-programmers? Would a Java system of equivalent power be as readable as those 40 lines of K, to someone who knows both languages? Look into it more deeply and it turns out that what you're dealing with is not a joke or unreadable at all. Rather, it's an unfamiliar but highly sophisticated programming subculture that is organized around the principle of succintness-is-power.

The product this code is based on (kdb) is an incredible piece of software. When I played with it a couple of years ago, here is what it included:

- one of the highest-level languages around, which is also blisteringly fast
- a relational database that scales to terabytes and is thousands of times faster than Oracle
- an ANSI SQL interpreter
- extensions to SQL for fast processing of time series
- a web server

... and god knows what else I'm forgetting. The entire download at the time was 384 Kb. That's right, kilobytes. How is that even possible?

kdb is the ultimate niche product. Hardly anyone has heard of it, but it makes millions (a couple of years ago the licenses cost $60K per CPU). Who would pay that? Wall Street, because it delivers performance that mainstream products can't touch. Take a look at http://kx.com/company/customers.php.

The guy who created it, Arthur Whitney, has been working on successive versions of this for 20 years. He was a protege of Ken Iverson, the inventor of APL. He also worked on Lisp implementations in the 80s. So what he's doing here has deep roots in two of the richest computing traditions.

One more thing. After using kdb for a while I realized that this is not just an engineering tour-de-force: it's breathtakingly beautiful. What a genuine pity it's locked away from most hackers in a highly profitable but impenetrable niche.
You mean, just like all those Gatorade employees in the movie Idiocracy? :-)
Have y'all ever BOUGHT car insurance?

It IS priced by the mile, approximately-- you have to tell them where you drive and how often, including the approximate distance to work if you commute, and your insurance is priced accordingly.
How do you guarantee no queues and short wait times when it gets very crowded?
lol, yeah, kind of like that I guess.
> Yes, they should have known better than to take such stupid loans

I don't think enough emphasis has been placed on people taking responsibility and paying the price for their stupidity.
Alex Martelli on the similarities and differences between Ruby and Python ("What's better about Ruby than Python?")
> I do not want to wait five billion years.

You're darn well gonna wait -- and LIKE it!

Fortunately, it takes significantly less time than that -- no more than three and a half billion years. Haha, and you were worried!
> Where would you begin?

Begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end: then stop.
I learnt PHP, albeit briefly, before I found Python. The things that quickly and totally converted me, in a few words: elegance, efficiency, pragmatism, fun, style, community, libraries (not necessarily in that order).
Inclusion of every new post or exclusion of every post from a particular website at user's discretion. Regexp based? Just to prevent the site from effectively becoming an RSS reader.
Bill Clinton on Social Entrepreneurship
The first 10 min of the interview is about social entrepreneurship and how Internet affected non-profits and corporate social responsibility.
Try and get lots of people to use it - then you'll have to scale it. Otherwise it's a bit imaginary. :)
I really enjoyed this article. I have read David Allen's book, and honestly, I don't have that much going on to implement GTD the way he describes it. This article mimics a lot of what I have distilled GTD to, only that I maintain sub Someday/Maybe Project lists like "Books To Read", "CDs to listen to" etc...

And yes, the weekly review is really that important...:D
"Please tell me this doesn't run on gas! Gas explodes, you know?"
If we all took that attitude, we'd never get anything done.

The process of discovery is hands-on, learning by doing. You don't know all the rules at the outset, or all the definitions, or even know what you don't know. You find out as you go along. Thus it has been for every great invention from sex to agriculture to post-it notes to landing a man on the Moon and back to on-demand porn.

The real requirement is that we have some way to test it; that we can do, e.g. by conversation. To cop an example from quantum mechanics (which I know nothing about), we don't have to understand why it is like that in order to make predictions with it.

We don't need a clear and unambiguous definition of intelligence in order to tell that other human beings are intelligent. Likewise, we don't need one in order to start trying to create an artifice that impresses us into thinking it also is intelligent.

This was quite impressive, and on the right track, seemingly:
http://hci.stanford.edu/~winograd/shrdlu/
Technology is eliminating the false value applied to a photograph because of the cost in money and effort required to get one. What remains is the value of the moment that you are capturing, which is the true purpose of a photograph.

Besides, we already know that camera technology killed the art of painting.
Soaring on Ridgelift: The Valuation Trap
Second that thanks.
That was expletively amazing. I didn't expect to watch more than the intro but couldn't stop. That's an intersection of CS and HCI cleverness raised to the level of art.
Someone should make an indie film out of this.
Google's Norvig Is Down On Natural Language Search
No, I have not researched those things. 'No' was not a very useful answer, sorry.
I don't think it's fewer, I think it's that they're less likely to be at fault.
Intelligent Design does it in 6 days!
New? I've been thinking about this for years!

One of the problems though is that Canada's biggest market is the US. 35 Million people doesn't bring a heck of a lot of VC.

If you go Canada only, you need to modify your objectives.
We don't need a clear and unambiguous definition of intelligence in order to tell that other human beings are intelligent.

The problem here is that not every human being is intelligent and yes, we are actually trying to define intelligence through IQ tests, for example.

Likewise, we don't need one in order to start trying to create an artifice that impresses us into thinking it also is intelligent.

So when you need accounting software you say: "write me something that will be as clever as my accountant". Is that the way you formulate tasks for software engineers?
This is really cool in a semi-futuristic kind of way.

It also makes a dilema for users. For example I don't want to use a bot, but I also want RP stories to get their fair shake, but if everyone else is going to use a bot, then I have to also.

Hmm, I suppose there's a Nash equilibrium there :-)
kn0thing -- when do we get tags, working search, and good recommendations? :-/

Fortunately these things aren't crucial to having a good time on a social news site.
Ok - I am using the session to speed up performance - by keeping around an object that is central to a user's workflow for just about every request w/o going back to the db for it.

Are you suggesting that going back to the db each time is more scalable, or that I am better off using some kind of method level cache?

Honestly - just wondering - any good articles on what you are discussing? I guess I just don't quite 'get' it - not having worked on an application that scaled to the point that session access was the bottleneck.
And painting killed the art of photographic memory.
Just wrong.
> Other than the fact Linux has a cool name, could someone explain why I should use Linux over BSD?

No. That's it. The cool name, that is. We worked very hard on creating a name that would appeal to the majority of people, and it certainly paid off: thousands of people are using linux just to be able to say "OS/2? Hah. I've got Linux. What a cool name". 386BSD made the mistake of putting a lot of numbers and weird abbreviations into the name, and is scaring away a lot of people just because it sounds too technical.
Join the war, here's your weapon (http://politics.reddit.com/info/639vp/comments/?already_subm...), well at least if you're on the RIGHT side.
Why would Google not be be able to experiment on the world?
Let a thousand Mules bloom
I completely agree. Microsoft is being hypocritical.
Reboot once a year!? Who has time for that! I've got a few redhat boxes that just celebrated 900 days!
Find someone around you who can program, and somehow get them to mentor you. It's less intimidating, but rather equivalent, if you ask them if they could be available for questions every now and then. I think many people who really like to program will be happy to help you out, as long as you do your homework and show respect for their time.

Ideally, you'd work in the same room as your mentor, but it should be enough if you can meet once a day or so. A longer feedback cycle, or mentoring remotely through the net, is less than ideal, but anything you can get is better than being on your own.

Ask them what language they'd be more comfortable helping you out with. Start playing with that language. For that, follow other advice in this thread. Don't expect to be spoonfed.

If you get stuck in something after giving it a honest try, ask. Every now and then, show them what you are doing, even if you have no immediate problems. Chances are that they can steer you into better ways to think about problems, simplify your code, etc. These are insights that only come through experience. They are often hard to explain out of the blue, and hard to internalize so that you can put them to use later, when explained in abstract terms. They are best communicated in little doses, while commenting on actual code that addresses actual problems. Ideally, your code and your problems.
Tracking Apple's Leopard: It's pretty fast
Factual Error Found On Internet
I say you shouldn't work on an Open Source project unless one just HAPPENS to catch your eye. You'll be more motivated and have more fun if you work on something just for fun, even if you're never going to release it. Go write some video games or something. :)

If you do want to work on an open source project, you'll probably want to start with a small isolated task, so you won't have to understand how the whole behemoth works and can focus on just the parts you have to interface with.
Yes. :) Not a very useful answer, sorry.

Seriously, my advice is to search the PTO site. Unfortunately that's not very useful either. Just too much stuff.
Hackers and Painters (on Google Books)
http://www.google.com/patents

What you need to do is read ALL of the patents for anything similar to what you are doing. You need to hope that you find patents for things that are similar enough to imply that your idea is also patentable but that no one has actually claimed what you are trying to claim.

This takes an extraordinary amount of time to do which is why lawyers charge so much money. But you can definitely do it yourself, if you want.
and, as always, take other people's rules (of thumb) and guidelines with a grain of salt. there's almost always someone who will argue the opposite, all, or part of the time.

( i for one will continue to name my counters i :-) )
"whether you need to or not"

<bowing>
you are the master
</bowing>
"94% of Americans have never tried an online productivity suite"

In 1991, 94% of Americans had never tried a PC productivity suite. They must have been doomed, too.
The Power of the Digg Effect
The only problem we're running into right now is getting SSL to work on portable aserve running on SBCL on Ubuntu. (Our potential workaround until we have time to update aserve is to run huchentoot for the ssl login page only, as it is very noticably slower than aserve. If anyone out there has aserve running with ssl on SBCL - please let me know.)
PHP is probably a pretty good place to start. I built myself a couple web apps with it years back, having never coded anything previously that wasn't on a TI-82. It's a good introductory language to web programming.

I'm now spending my time on RoR, and I don't think it's a very good language for starters. It's just too much to learn at once.
http://helma.org/ is one.
What Google's 411 really is: a service for training a speech-to-text engine
There is one thing that PHP has going for it as a first language:
You can do "cool" things with it almost immediately. It is like making an animated drawing back in the day in [whatever version of] Basic.

Most into tutorials start "this is an int, this is a char, this is a variable, etc." Before you even get to anything interesting you are already dozing off.

With PHP, however, you can hack together your own blog/website show it to your friends and say "I made this." The ability to say "I made this" is the best feature of any language, but usually it is a pretty inaccessible feature for the beginner.
Yes, given a history of testing. I don't want to be the guinea pig, but the simple fact that it's nukuler isn't an issue.
But, its got what plants need !

(Brawno I think they called it).
pg: Are any translations of this book going to appear soon? Not that I care in the language for reading it myself, but I'm very curious about whether it's going to appear in libraries in Argentina (that it would if there was a Spanish translation) anytime soon.
Let's see, this guy doesn't use (and doesn't even look like he's aware of the existence of) backquote, and he thinks watching out for variable capture, multiple evaluation and other well-known hazards with well-known solutions is hard...

Never criticize that which you don't even understand the basics of, I say.
I like the sentiment of the article. Disruption is good for our society, but at this point I'm not sure anything is going to be enough to save us from ourselves, short of a technological elimination of energy scarcity.
Python is more consistent, and it has a limited set of core concepts the language was built around. Secondly, Python was designed to make it harder for you to write unclear or bad code. While the code is less forgiving of mistakes than PHP, you can't help but improve on your personal coding practices after using the language for a while. Finally, Python's library support is better if you want to do anything other than web programming.
Hardware support is added to Linux sooner than BSD. More pre-compiled binaries are available for Linux. Also, it can be a bit harder to get applications up and running on BSD.
Online Legal Help for Small Businesses
Every small business is faced with a host of legal challenges, from forming your business entity to defending yourself against lawsuits. Here I will present some of my favorite free or low cost resources to help you navigate the legal minefield.
Seriously. Online productivity suites are, what, two years old now? (Writely launched in October 2005.) If good software takes ten years[1], we're 20% of the way there.

For god's sake, people, have some patience, and enjoy the bleeding edge while it lasts! In 2020, complaints about the performance of online apps are going to sound as quaint as my complaint about my first hard drive does today. (I paid $400 for 80 lousy megabytes in 1990. I can barely even type that, it sounds so unbelieveable now.)

[1] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000017.html
SHRDLU was a toy program that was not on the right track.
If you are having problems with SSL, just use stunnel or use Apache's SSL with the ProxyPass and ProxyPassReverse directives. Has the added advantage that it is then trivial to split SSL encryption/decryption off to another machine if needed.
PG on why Reddit switched:

"Incidentally, the last straw, I've been told, was some bug in CMUCL
threads that kept making the system crash."

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/574d19d5e7...
I'd also like to add that becoming an active member of a forum helps a little bit, as long as you only use it as a last resort.

For a first project, I'd say, just don't give up, think of something you want to make and dont stop until it's done.
Does Twitter do enough?
Most IP attorney's will do quite a bit of research themselves. If you, or your university, have access to it, IBM's Delphion is an excellent resource (not free system).

I think your question is too broad and needs to be refined.

If you are looking to patent a software algorithm, the approach to research ideas would be very different from that for particular plants. As a general tip, search by patent class http://www.uspto.gov/go/classification/

Alternatively, search the pending applications of a large company in the field you are researching. For example: http://appft1.uspto.gov/netahtml/PTO/search-adv.html

And in the query field type:

AN/google

It is from the pending applications that you can look at 'prior art.' Prior art is the list of the patents and other materials upon which a patent relies. Here is a software analogy: If a patent is source code, prior art is an <include> directive or a <lib> call. Only by mastering the existing libraries can you produce new code. Look at some source code. Then examine the libraries/include files. And then start tinkering around on producing your own source code.
Ask YC: Coming up with a name
Pretty sure this has been asked before, but how did y'all come up with your startup name?
1. Read SICP

2. Do the exercises

3. In parallel, choose an open source project and join on that

4. Share with us your experience