skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Nice work, guys. Looking forward to seeing you around YC.
Explosions In The Sky - The Earth Is Not A Cold Dead Place

Post-rock is nearly ideal coding music.
If you go to a school whose physics department is helping NASA with something, and you have a job there, you can work on NASA robots. I knew a guy who worked on the Mars rover when he was 19 or 20.

He was super-smart, but that probably goes without saying.
This does not seem like Hacker News
(Social) Power to The Email Inbox!
"Bugs are always about a lack of good information"

Wrong.

Bugs are the result of either:

- not knowing what you're doing

or

- knowing what you're doing but releasing prematurely anyway
What annoys me is not the wasted space, though. It's the principle of it. You're imparting information in the readers of your comments that has no other purpose than to serve your ego. When I read a comment, I only look at who wrote it when the comment is something special. But you force me to know that John wrote it. Why? Do you think you deserve a special place in my (and everyone else's) mind?

But that would be fine, if you didn't try to pass off your personality defect as an ideology for everyone to follow, as you did in this thread. That was what sent me over the edge.
Definitely -- Tortoise is an old standby.

The name "post-rock" feels a little absurd to me, though.
Flip a coin.

It doesn't have to be a balanced coin: I like Ruby, so my coin was biased toward Rails. Ergo, I learned Rails, and will probably go on to play with Merb and Camping.

Meanwhile, very smart people assure me that Python is nice, and I hope to learn it before I die.

The important thing is to just get moving. Deciding between Rails and, say, Drupal is complicated, with lots of technical, marketing, and business factors in play. But RoR, Django, and the gang are so much alike that the decision comes down to that simple coin flip.
Electrelane!
hmm, gamers use "QQ" (due to the resemblance of tears coming from eyes), often in the context of "less qq, more pew pew" to communicate a lack of empathy.

Wikipedia has an entry for the term "computer rage": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_rage , which seems to have a certain amount of acceptance in the academic community, but it doesn't seem to have the ability to catch on (not going to say the m-word, not going to say the m-word...) the way "road rage" or "workaholic" do.

Notice that discussing ways of reducing this frustration are not part of the discussion.
The Funded Founder(s) To Unveil Themselves Tonight (Updated)
apparently if you take smalltalk or a lisp dialect, cut the performance by an order of magnitude, remove most of the really interesting metaprogramming features (leaving pretty much just a crass eval function), and all of the awesome interactivity and incremental development functionality that make systems like Squeak and SLIME such a joy to use, and finish by making it vaguely line-oriented, you get a language that makes people go gaga.

go figure.
> It's a MANAGEMENT problem.
> Because big business is either too dumb or too lazy to articulate their business problems well enough to get a solution.

Thus arises the management consulting industry.
I just uploaded this today to share to a friend. Prepare to laugh a lot:
http://kirigin.com/music/dc.html

I've been listening to Timbaland's "Give it to me" and "The way I are" for about 2 weeks straight. Normally, Autechre, Tool, Boards of Canada, AphexTwin, Radiohead, and NIN populate my playlists.
Besides the overall mission of the startup, it is also relevant to have an ethical workplace. Of course the two go hand in hand, but it is so important to stress sound business practices - the ends and the means.
"My Red Hot Car" is one of my favorite songs. Gotta get the extended version though.
Actually, I find talk of music coming up a lot in programming circles. People need to focus. Music helps them do that. Headphones as an isolation & concentration device are key to my development setup.
Really? Who was it? I was in the same group.
why do people call him egotistical? is it because they are offended by his intelligent and well-rehearsed writings?

this is like the movie idiocracy where luke wilson gets called "faggy" because he has a command of the english language.

i think pg defends him so (puts him into yc, puts him in reddit etc..) because aaron has a good balance of intelligence and doing things well. he's a good weapon for anything intellectual.
Sneaky is right.

It's good to know that the HR industry is trained to be a giant pool of snakes right from the get-go.

My advice: At most companies that I'd work for, the HR person carries very little weight. If you get any questions that you think are "sneaky", ask why they're asking.
Philip Greenspun 2.0
George Kirbye, "With Angel's Face and Brightness". From The Triumphs of Oriana, compiled by Thomas Morley.
I think you'll find that the stuff Django does behind the scenes is quite clear, with very few exceptions. The basic parsing of HTTP requests is dead simple, and although the code for the ORM is hairy in places, what really matters is the SQL it generates, which is pretty clean. And like somebody else said, there's nothing that says you have to use the Django ORM.

One of the nice things about Django is that it's just Python. You can always look at the import statements in a module to see exactly what code is being run and where it's coming from. I've never used Ruby on Rails, but I have the impression it can be opaque in this area. ("Just create a file named makeasite.rb and put the single word 'create' in it, and Rails will do the rest!")

Personally, I'm vehemently against "magic" in a framework / programming environment, which is one of the reasons I love Python -- and one of the reasons we don't have a lot of magic in Django.

Let me know if you have any specific questions.

Adrian (Django cocreator / core developer)
One hundred prisoners and a light bulb paper that includes O(n log(n)^2) solution for n prisoners [pdf]
Tetris is Hard, Even to Approximate
No reason to knock the 'magicality' of rails. It works for some people; And since it is only code at the end of the day, you can always get to the bottom of the magic if you do a little digging.

While we are on the topic, I have always wondered why the Django team insists on being an MTV (Model Template View) framework..don't you guys think just conforming to MVC would make life easier for people new to Django?
(This is a serious question)
Pretty cool. Ok, it's now on my list of frameworks to try :-)
TheFunded founder steps into the limelight
Ditto on CodeIgniter.
Thank you! That used to have a permanent spot on my playlist ~5-6 years ago and I had completely forgotten about it. What a gem.
http://aaronsw.jottit.com/howtoget

Submitted for evidence.
Mogwai, Terrific Speech 2
Time.

We discovered that we were generating so much data that Rails and MySQL wouldn't cut it. We need to rearchitect our backend in data warehouse + MOLAP terms, and ActiveWarehouse is too young to bet a company on. So, time to learn a new platform and rewrite everything. :P
Are you looking to join a startup (as an employee) or are you looking to do a startup (partner)?
Haha, Internet Explorer quirks. Almost done actually, doing some touch-ups here and there, and then launching an invite only beta early January.
The entire soundtrack to The Fountain is pure excellence. The Last Man is my favorite track off that album, after Death is the Road to Awe. Very haunting and beautiful.
The Kinks - This Time Tomorrow
Stephen Wolfram: On Starting a Long-Term Company
Mysteries: TheFunded's "Ted" is Adeo Ressi
Tupac Still Ballin. Whooooo.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Gw0z87x-Ds
I don't claim that my personal definition should be canonical, but when I see posts that violate it, I'm going to speak out, and you should do the same. ESR said it better than I can:

Odds are you'll screw up a few times on hacker community forums -- in ways detailed in this article, or similar. And you'll be told exactly how you screwed up, possibly with colourful asides. In public.

When this happens, the worst thing you can do is whine about the experience, claim to have been verbally assaulted, demand apologies, scream, hold your breath, threaten lawsuits, complain to people's employers, leave the toilet seat up, etc. Instead, here's what you do:

Get over it. It's normal. In fact, it's healthy and appropriate.

Community standards do not maintain themselves: They're maintained by people actively applying them, visibly, in public. Don't whine that all criticism should have been conveyed via private e-mail: That's not how it works. Nor is it useful to insist you've been personally insulted when someone comments that one of your claims was wrong, or that his views differ. Those are loser attitudes.

There have been hacker forums where, out of some misguided sense of hyper-courtesy, participants are banned from posting any fault-finding with another's posts, and told "Don't say anything if you're unwilling to help the user." The resulting departure of clueful participants to elsewhere causes them to descend into meaningless babble and become useless as technical forums.

Exaggeratedly "friendly" (in that fashion) or useful: Pick one.

From http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
IBM's Blue Cloud Is Tipping Point for IT
I think the best idea is to go to all the meetups that happen in Vancouver and talk to the people.
The H. Paul Rockwood Memorial Lecture: A New Kind of Science - Stephen Wolfram
Of the ones I've read, I think e-rage has the best chance of actually catching on.

You should send it to Dr. Knuth.
"With this amount of noise in the signal, it's hard to tell good hackers when you meet them. I can't tell, even now. You also can't tell from their resumes. It seems like the only way to judge a hacker is to work with him on something."

(From http://www.paulgraham.com/gh.html)

I wonder what the reddit guys think of aaronsw.
Rebuttal to Stallman's Story About The Formation of Symbolics and LMI
Kaskade, Steppin' Out
lanej01 - good Q. I am looking to join a VC funded to somewhat established startup.
> No reason to knock the 'magicality' of rails.

The problem with relying on magic is that you won't know what to do when it stops working.
Vince Guaraldi, Linus and Lucy
Do you happen to know of any that have a good reputation?
Yet another YC style incubator
I _also_ switched from web.py to Pylons. One of the biggest reasons was a horrible security gaffe that Aaron made -- he recommended doing sessions by pickling the data and directly storing it in a cookie, which is a perfect candidate for exploitation. If he could recommend that on the web.py mailing list, I don't want to use any other software that he could have made security mistakes in.

Aside from that, Pylons is just a better design. Routes, Mako, and SQLAlchemy are an incredibly powerful toolset, without being overcomplicated.
I thought that one was pretty tame.

"And what did he talk about? A screwup by a restaurant he went to. And how the host worked hard, overhard even, to pacify him about it."

...

"Cooling out marks is how institutions persuade people to accept things they think are wrong. The con-man convinces you getting stolen from is OK. Your job convinces you it's OK that they're corrupt. The restaurant persuades you it's OK that they're incompetent."

So, if someone at a restaurant makes some kind of mistake, and the host works hard to make it right, it is important to not forgive them and go on holding a grudge, because that would just make you "the mark". I think that's the moral he's putting forth here.

And furthermore, you should hold the same kind of grudges against inanimate entities, like "the economy".

"Did the economy cheat you, fire you, stick you in some crappy job with a crabby boss? Listen, the motivational speaker explains, it's not the economy's fault."

So, remember, the Economy is out to get you! I don't even know what this means. Corporate CEOs, sure. Congress and the President, sure. Illegal immigrants, I suppose you could argue a case there if you really wanted to. But anthropomorphizing the economy seems a little off, to me.

Obviously, Aaron is a guy with high intelligence and substantial skill. He played a part in a successful company at a very early age, has contributed some highly praised source code to the open source community, and is still ambitious, idealistic and involved in a lot of things. But reading his blog makes me think he's also a little wacky.

But, as pg pointed out, thank God I didn't have a blog that the entire world could read when I was in my early 20s!
Erlang for Python programmers: Part V
Too bad. I'm in the Southern Gulf Islands in the really early stages (planning and prototype development) and I'm looking for a partner (or two).
For the sake of balance, I thought this was really good:

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/decenttodo

How to write software that people want is something Aaron knows about and he expresses himself well on that topic.
I would upmod this twice if I could... once for the talk, and once for the WolframTones site.
Ask news.YC: developers how do you get beta testers?
Once you get a product out how do you get beta testers? <p>I wanted to know because I'm thinking about starting up a company that allows developers to submit a program/webapp in beta. After submitting the application, the community submits feedback.<p>I wanted to know what kinds of feedback would be important or insightful for developers. Additionally, is there an appeal for this sort of application or do beta tests generally happen in private groups? I started thinking about this after I created an app and had only my friends who had limited time between classes to test it out. And then the research students have to pay people to test out their products.
lets talk by email > [k s j h a l l a] gmail ... :)
By popular demand, we have now removed the cleartext password email feature. :D
Ug, I hate that use of the word hacker. He may have also been a hacker (which gave his chops to crack stuff).
There's a distinction between me signing messages and me not being anonymous. My lack of anonymity is guaranteed by the user name I chose plus the fact that my profile links back to my personal web site.

Signing messages was unrelated to anonymity, it's a years old habit that I started on Usenet and continued in online forums like this one. I don't claim that signing messages is part of the ideology I was talking about above. If I did I wouldn't have stopped.

It amuses me that you choose to describe it as a 'personality defect' from behind an anonymous account here. If we were standing face to face would you describe me signing messages in that way?
Masochism: Write to 1 Master DB / Read from Mult Slave DBs with Ruby on Rails
Broken Social Scene - You Forgot it in People
"I remember, I'd just had my twentieth birthday. I'd just gotten my Ph.D. And it looked like my plan to "be a physicist" was going just great."

I had to stop reading there as I became ill. (23 year old that hasn't passed quals)
I started with this whole web framework thing writing my own crappy code in perl. I found python, loved it, and immediately started learning django (the 0.96 version.) I quickly became dissatisfied with the limitations of the framework as my apps grew in complexity. This was somewhat in part due to new additions like newforms that were not yet completed or fully integrated. Currently I'm using the pylons framework and I am absolutely loving it. It sounds like if you are even 'considering' writing all the code yourself, you should really pick a framework akin to pylons or web.py in your language of choice. Ruby, Perl, Python, it's really all the same...
I don't really look forward to any time tracking program that uploads my stats to a server. I guess Google will buy it, if you have success, as they want to know everything about everyone. I don't think anyone would want the government or Google to know your habits so well that they can make a profile for you...
Sorry for the double post, but I would also like to add that SQLAlchemy and Mako templates were more of a deciding factor than anything else for me to use pylons. Pick the things that you will absolutely not be reinventing (templates, orm, etc) and find where they play best together. Do you like your templates simple and with very little logic? do you like them in xml? do you like 'magic' orms? Also another thing is note how this app will be deployed. If it is purely for fun and learning, this isn't an issue. Otherwise, read up on how easily different frameworks play with apache mod_python, fcgi, scgi, etc. because limitations in that area aren't easily mended. I did have to wage a bloody war to get pylons running fcgi on my shared hosting server. Now the war is won the solution really isn't that hard/complicated or obscure. It was just lack of good documentation that needlessly killed hours and brain-cells. I'd recommend looking for as much documentation in these areas. If you can't find it fairly quickly, chances are you will be paying for it in the future.
We've had some interested Linux folks, but only about 5-6% of our users are Linux folks. 35% Mac, the rest PC. It's on the list, but not super high. :-(
Do you know of any great applications built on top of CMS? I don't.
Privacy is certainly a concern... But with Google storing every search on a server and every single email on a server... Well, I know someone could do a lot more damage to me with my gmail inbox than a sea of app usage data.
It's still in beta! :-) If you didn't think it was much of a beta, you shoulda seen it from THIS end. <grin>
You can't say strife without mentioning Gonads... and Strife

http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/weeee
The Lord Of The Rings OST
The departure of two co-founders has made it take several months longer than I expected. All the same, I should be launching in the next week or so.
Non-startup related chores that really can't be put off. That and a thorny technical problem that would be solvable if I could get a few days to focus on it, if I didn't have these non-startup chores.
What are the chances of one succeeding with moonlighting?
No, I probably wouldn't, and our discourse would be poorer for it. Anonymity guarantees honesty and impartiality. Face to face, why would I want to make an enemy out of you, when I could make a useful acquaintance? It's not like I get paid for pointing out the truth.
And we're supposed to respect assholes like this?

It's good to know there are employers who waste valuable interview time wondering whether the guy with the funny-sounding name with a great track record and a degree from IIT is a (gasp) Hindu! A god-damned heathen Hindu! Jesus H. Christ, we do not hire heathens at this here company.
Wohoo! Someone who gets the idea of a state machine framework. Check out my effort at building one of these - datamagi.org. This is quite interesting actually - if you look through the change history at the top of the page you can see I've been using one of Fowler's books as a reference. Previous to seeing this article I had not known of any prior work in this area.
Too much time spent on a certain social news website :)
I put "if you want to beta test, send me an email" onto my website and blog, and people started volunteering.

If you've publicly described what you're building and you don't have beta-testers beating a path to your door, you're probably not building something which people want.
Brijit: A Digg For Dead-Tree Media
Wolfram gave a really great talk - you can hear the audio here: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Ycombinator-StartupSchool/~3/...

(For anyone new to the site, you can get all the available Startup School talk mp3's with this feed I put together awhile back: http://feeds.feedburner.com/ycombinator-startupschool )

Ask PG: Speaking of Startup School, could we get the official video/audio from the last Startup School? I used my own poor audio for the last Startup School in this podcast feed, but it'd be great to replace it with the official video that was taken. Thanks!
Legacy system
True hackers code their Web apps in x86 assembly.
History and design of the PowerPC processor
Some Open-Source Advocates Find Google's Android a Sinister Threat
i guess you wouldn't like to hear that his first quantum physics publication was as a teenager?
i read somewhere that when Feynman first met SW, he said he was amazing.
yes, using mathematics in marketing is an imperative. the rate of change of user demographics should be a critical piece of your daily round-ups....
I'm picky about my post-rock, but I like Jesu a lot, Neurosis occasionally, and Pelican OK. Most of it is just too vague and meandering...but records that lack lyrics (or identifiable ones, anyway) are best for my productivity.
Any Trouble - Where are all the nice girls?

I just discovered this old Stiff Records act from the 80's, and love several of their songs. I likes my rock and roll obscure.

Earlier today I was listening to the new record from the New Pornographers.
Congrats. I liked the looks of your project when you posted it several months ago here. I'll look forward to meeting you guys at one of the YC dinners.
Well, if the target market is professional designers (where by professional == getting paid), Photoshop pays for itself in a day or two. If the target is complete newbies, then their competition is not Photoshop, but a whole series of cheap/free/comes-with-the-machine tools, like Picasa, iPhoto, Photoshop Elements, etc.
GPS Helps Cities Catch Goof-Offs
Right. Now, you have two options:

- Make snide comments.

- Figure out why that's so, and what can be done about it.
Ask YC: What to do when VCs think opportunity/market is too small?
Hi all, I've been a reader here since the beginning but never posted. Anyway, my question:

1. I am the 100% owner of company X, several others are involved, but not full time.
2. X has generated $100K revenue in FY1 and is $60K since new fiscal 7/1.
3. I have not paid myself a dime yet, because I can afford to live off savings and business needs the revenue for R&D, marketing, etc.
4. X is the recent winner of a major CA-based business plan competition - $100K prize.
5. VCs are sold on the pitch -- product, team, competition, IP, everything. They like it.

The problem is this: Even with a $4.4B one-time revenue and $1.6B recurring annual revenue market, they think the opportunity is too small. Due to the revenue X is generating, capital needs are much smaller because each customer added means substantial revenue. However, the market is not as small!

To quote one VC: "If we put $1M in and we realize a fantastic return of 20x, that's still a small bet for us. We chase bigger opportunities".

So I'm thinking angels are a good idea, but the angel groups seem too process-oriented: several months to get considered, lots of structure, very few deals invested in and usually not over $500K. Further, I'm hearing that Silicon Valley based angel groups are highly biased towards local investments -- X is run out of Los Angeles.

My quandary is: how do I raise a smaller amount of capital from smaller funds or angels, at a fair valuation given current traction, without a lot of network to start with?

I've gotten introductions through the competition we won and VCs, but things haven't panned out substantially yet. Disclaimer: I've only been at it for a few weeks and lots of avenues still cooking, but I'm just looking for YC advice on fundraising related to smaller capital needs.

Any comments ?
It sounds as though any strategy can work as long as you're serious about it.
As silly as it sounds, I don't remember his name. He was a friend-of-a-friend, I think he only mentioned it to me because I had NASA patches all over my backpack. If you're really interested I can ask around.