skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The time to join FB was back when it was a harvard thing. If you join them now, you're jumping someone else's train, and you aren't shaping the company, you're just a plug compatible engineer.
Dawkins gives another viewpoint in his book, "Climbing Mount Improbable" with his explanation of the evolution of the eye. You can read an extract here ~ http://www.simonyi.ox.ac.uk/dawkins/writings/climbingmountim...

For the Dr Who fans out there Lala Ward did the Illustrations ~ http://www.richardwho.com/collections/collection15.asp
Informed comment on peer reviewed literature
use of an 'aggregation' button. an interesting concept - i hope it works out
Well....

1. Facebook does has a great Social Network and the chances of people moving elsewhere is unlikely because they have developed a critical mass. Millions of people are already invested in Facebook. Fads are easy to change. Its not easy to opt out of Facebook because your friends drag you back. I cannot go and join another network because none of my friends are there.

2. You say the social OS is poorly executed but you have to remember its early days and I am eager to see how the integration of Parakey will change Facebook. You are right when you say there is a lot of app crap, however slowly but surely I expect better more useful apps to be developed as Facebook become more professional. Its a fun social network at the moment but I've seen my friends profiles change significantly since joining megacorp. Their profiles are now like resumes.

3. The Privacy-Invading Ad Network pisses me off. But because of number 1 (above) I think its one of those things that will be accepted as a fait-accompli. Us guys and girls in the tech community may start a fuss, but Facebook now has millions of members. We can be ignored and if the majority of people don't care, I doubt Facebook will change things.

Conclusion - Its too early to tell were Facebook is going (they probably don't even know). Somethings about it may piss us off, but the tech community's influence in Facebook will wan.
Why we have to wait for Android on the Neo 1973
Rumour: News Corp to buy LinkedIn
"You, too, can build exciting dynamic Web content with Bourne Shell Server Pages."
This guy has been doing some very nice hacking on Android, and writing about it:

http://benno.id.au/blog/
1. FF, just installed AdBlock Plus (yep, took me quite a while to finally be pissed off by ads)

2. IE occasionally for pages that require it, there still is some (at least partner pages on some SW sales sites)
well we don't have to do that. Though this isn't the same test as what you propose. This guy has compared many different web frameworks. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6297126166376226181

I think the reason the LOC count is significant is because it means that there is less code for one to look through to figure out what is going on. Fewer lines imply that the solution has high level abstractions. Each one of the examples you mentioned is one construct in lisp (if you use libraries).
Amazon.com: Customer Reviews: "A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates"
I'm nX 1 too

;)
One Man Who Gives Thanks Daily
Are you reaching for your potential?
Are you reaching for your potential?
Moebius Transformations Revealed [Video 2:34]
1. Get lots of users

2. ???

3. Profit!

I'm wondering how dangerous the police state aspects of it are. The fact that I've willingly told somebody "who all my friends are".
The Princess Bride.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093779/

Go watch it right now.
Net gridlock by 2010 study warns - What do you think?
Safari. It's a workhorse (at least now). Everything else is just for testing.
Ask YC: Who uses Amazon EC2 or S3 here? What are your experiences?
Hi. We're just getting a new startup off the ground and are looking at our options. Currently we are running 4 webservers, but are looking at Amazong EC2 and S3. What are your experiences? Financially how does it compare? What other similar services are there? Would be interested in finding out :) Thanks
1. Get users (done)

2. Get investment money (done)

3. Lure developers on to their platform as sharecroppers (done)

4. Get more investment money (done)

5. Starve existing (and possible) social networks of users through network effects and platform lock-in (done)

6. Get more investment money (done?)

7. Hold out long enough to get at least a partial exit for founders. (working on it)

8. Implode
" However you represent it, you still need a way to say that you want a 1px border, a certain font, links that get bigger when you mouse over them and so on. There's a whole model there which can certainly be abstracted into something else, but that something else won't necessarily be simpler (it will, however, be non-standard)."

The thing is, is that really what people who are building applications need to figure out? Yes, they probably need access to changing these properties, but the vast majority of what you are doing when you are writing an actual application on the web is far more complicated then setting a few class properties on some divs.

It isn't so much about compressing this, as it is about throwing out this broken architecture. HTML/CSS are great technologies for page layout. In fact, I have a perverse love for them which I am unable to explain, let alone understand. But they suck when it comes to dynamic, application like behaviors. We need a new technology. And yes, while it won't be a w3c or whatwg standard, if its open source, who cares? I, for one, am tired of relying on browser manufacturers to get things done.
If your founders wouldn't rather have equity than a salary, then your startup isn't getting their bet... and they have the inside info.

What a way to put it. Genius.
If an entrepreneur goes to work for an established company, he ceases to be an entrepreneur.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Anews.ycombin...
Happy Thanksgiving
Somebody had to say it.

For all the USA brats out there (myself included), Happy Thanksgiving! It's that time of year when we put aside all feelings of angst and guilt and celebrate all the things we have by eating too much and putting up with our relatives. What more could you ask for? Oh yeah -- and we're supposed to be thankful.

The Great Pumpkin is pleased.
Rebuttal: http://www.savetheinternet.com/blog/2007/11/20/suckered-by-a...

The complete study: http://www.nemertes.com/internet_singularity_delayed_why_lim...
There still has yet to be an application that takes advantage of the real value of the Facebook platform. Current applications are all about virility and simple fun. While there's nothing wrong with that, the social information about Facebook's users could be utilized for so much more.

Facebook has a chance to be the "source of truth" for the social graph. When you sign up for a new service that has a social aspect, the service could use the Facebook API to learn if your friends are also on the service. For example, what if when you signed up with Twitter, it figured out if any of your friends were already on the site? The future of the Facebook "app" is really a concept that could stand on its own, but instead leverages Facebook so its users don't have to re-create their social graph.

Of course, that means that sites that are "Facebook-driven" would require people to create accounts on Facebook -- at least to take advantage of the social aspects of the site. Depending on the site, that may matter a lot or not that much.

In terms of monetization, I think that Facebook still has yet to reveal their full advertising strategy... the new Pages system and SocialAds are pointless, because they add no real value to the consumer. It's all just glorified spam. They really missed the mark big time, because just because I bought a new digital camera doesn't mean I give a rat's ass about friending Sony.

However, if they could leverage the demographic and interest-based information in a user's profile, and use it to drive very good targeted ads, they could have something special.
I'll bet the 300th employee at Microsoft and Google disagree.

This is like giving a reason for why stock X is overvalued. Time to buy it was last year. It can't possibly go any higher.
I think thats a bit of a fallacy (and I also think this guys video is a bit of a waste of time...).

More abstractions can be nice, but don't mistake it for less code. Its still code somewhere, and that can lead to much more subtle and hard to find problems if you don't understand exactly what's going on. Of course, some environments are bigger culprits than others, but its something to keep in mind.
30 Excellent Blog Designs
Macpaint for the web written in Erlang & Erlyweb
Couldn't your Point #1 also be said of MySpace before?

The problem for Facebook is that the cost for the users of switching to a newer social network site is practically zero. A little bit of time to create your profile, but no real significant costs.

If 3 of your most significant friends from FB emailed you about a new, free, social site, would you ignore their emails, or would you go check it out and maybe join them? If you joined them, how many people would YOU attempt to drag over?
So your premise is that there is a race to own all of my friendships, and FaceBook can be the source of truth for that?

I understand the premise, but I'm not drinking the coolaid. I have all kinds of friends -- personal friends, professional friends, friends from school, friends from work. I don't want to be mixing those guys up inside of one big FaceBook bag-o-social-goodness.

Right now my FaceBook friends are people who contacted me on FaceBook and wanted to link up. That's fine. But I don't go looking for others, and these same folks will be using some other app five years from now and they'll be inviting me to join it. I know, because I've been through several generations of this: classmates.com, MySpace, ICQ, AIM, GMail, etc. Everybody wants to make viral apps, which means everybody is constantly infecting each other and soon there's a new prominent infection going round. Won't be long until somebody out-FaceBooks FaceBook.
UK Hacker News meetup confirmed for Friday November 30th
Hi I've emailed the final details round to everyone who replied.

Should be a great night - there are 25 people coming from various parts of the UK, some bringing demos of their projects.

To those who weren't able to make the 30th we'll hopefully do another meetup in the New Year. Sorry you weren't able to make this one.

If you didn't see the earlier thread (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=80970) and want to come just email me (founders at songkick).
the truth:

http://chimprawk.blogspot.com/2007/11/social-network-transit...
You make a fair point....

but Myspace never had the effect of Facebook because the social aspects are limited. The tie-in is not as string as Facebook and how many of us actually had a myspace page we updated regularly when Myspace was big? The privacy aspect of Facebook has prob been the main difference between the two companies
Japhire - free, open source data abstraction library for PHP
Yahoo works with Sony BMG to let users upload and edit music videos
Database Optimization for Rails Apps
The reporting application I'm working on does a date-range select against a table with ten million rows. It took over two minutes to execute. I cut it down to around two seconds without significantly changing the application. Here's how.
incremental upgrades

Of course -- I was concentrating on security-related aspects, since that's what he seemed interested in.

Build the mechanism to handle individual file updates.

Even better, distribute binary patches instead of downloading complete files -- this can often save 98% of the bandwidth. My "bsdiff" utility (http://www.daemonology.net/bsdiff/) is one of the standard tools for this purpose and is used by FreeBSD, OS X, FireFox, Sophos, and many others.
I agree that the Facebook site itself is nothing special, but the data that they control is. The next class of people graduating from college will have had Facebook throughout their entire tenure. It's likely that Facebook will try to evolve to follow them into their professional lives.

I also agree about having different kinds of friends. However, it would be pretty simple to categorize friends as colleagues, acquaintances, etc. It might insult people in the beginning, but if it was part of the system, it would become second-nature.

Apps that are viral for the sake of virility are a waste of time. They might be fun for awhile, and they might make their creators a little bit of cash, but Vampires and Werewolves will never have a sustainable business model. However, software that leverages the information in Facebook and the virility of the news feed will gain a leg-up on the competition.
I wasn't making a note about "listing keywords" per say, but rather making use of them in natural ways throughout your resume.
I'm waiting for the movie
Microsoft admits recently discovered Windows 2000 flaw exists in XP too
There's nothing wrong with being a top-flight employee and helping build something big, but by the time a company has reached a size where two pizzas aren't enough to make everybody full the company has started to settle, the culture is beginning to congeal and the BIG decisions have been made.

If you want to build something insanely great that works the way you think it should you have to pioneer and risk the arrows.
I use S3 to store all the high and low res images for JPGmag.com and they have performed amazingly.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=56825

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=73791

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=80647

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/amazon_s3_exceeds_9999_...
I am. S3, SQS, and EC2. It's incredible from a cost perspective. I highly recommend you look into it.
In All Fairness, Internet Explorer Still Stinks
What a giant letdown! Not only did this POS app force me to register, the UI looks NOHTING, and I mean NOTHING like Macpaint! It's made in Flash and has ONE TOOL! have you ever seen Macpaint?
Sudoku is easy to do. That aside, these challenge-response spam ideas have been floating around for years and years. Still no good implementation...
IBM making 'agile' moves
Mac OS X Leopard:  200+ Productivity Booster Keyboard Shortcuts
I use Safari for 99% of my browsing. For dev I use FF because of Firebug. Safari's just feels light and it's faster than anything out there.
I use s3 for backing up stuff and some graphic storage for a couple of my websites and love it. I use SGBPfox for firefox.
a testament to the patience and persistence of researchers in the early days of RAND.

The sacrifices of the 1000 dice-throwing monkeys are not forgotten.
Toronto Lisp Meetup!
Taking place on Thursday December 20th after 6pm at The Fox & Fiddle on Bloor:
http://maps.google.ca/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=...
http://bloorfox.com/

Free Wifi! $3 drinks on Thursday! Common Lisp, Scheme and Smalltalk users all welcome :D

edit: Perl, Ruby, Python, Java, Haskell, and OCaml users curious about Lisp are welcome too.
Somebody had to say it.

Sure, and why not a jerk?
ec2 + s3 is awesome. saved my but a lot.
Hmm, we're talking in the same general space but miscommunicating on details, so this discussion may need to wait until you guys can provide specifics of what you're working on. But let me try to clear up a couple points.

The thing is, is that really what people who are building applications need to figure out? Yes, they probably need access to changing these properties

You answered your own question. Yes, they need this, along with a lot of other things. That complexity is intrinsic to making a web app and therefore is hard to completely abstract away.

Of course I do not exaggerate the importance of div borders. My point was that even the sexp your colleague cited as a counterexample contains a lot of information - not just browser nastiness or crud, but useful information, which any model you try to replace HTML/CSS/JS with will still need to represent.

It isn't so much about compressing this

When I said "compression" I didn't mean it literally, as in gzip, but metaphorically. A good abstraction is a kind of logical compression inasmuch as it replaces a complex, detailed model with a simpler one that contains the same information. It does this by throwing out non-essential details (like duplication). Now, if your goal is to build a general abstraction ABC on top of HTML/CSS/JS, ABC must be much simpler in order to justify its learning curve and the fact that it's nonstandard. (By "nonstandard" I simply mean unfamiliar.) That means you're going to have to find a lot of "noise" to throw out. My skepticism is based on the fact that I don't see a lot of such noise in the general case. A thing can be messy and yet still difficult to abstract over. But I'm not saying it can't be done, and good for you if you can do it.

The approach we take with Parenscript is more modest, I think. We're not building universal abstractions for web apps, just for our own. That means we can abstract away from anything we don't need, whether or not it's needed by others. That and the fact that Lisp gives us a homogeneous way of representing all the HTML/CSS/JS pieces are two very big wins. Is it enough to get non-Lisp-geeks to use it? Probably not. But I don't think that's why most hackers take up something like Lisp in the first place.
Is the social graph Web 3.0?
Ask News YC: Making connections
Hello!

In an effort to meet new people and make meaningful connections for my startup, I'm looking to fly out to California a couple of times in the next three months.

I'm wondering where I'd go? Conferences? Hacker news meetup (when's the next one?)?

How do you make connections? How do you promote your startup other than on the internet?

Let me know, maybe I'll meet some of you guys :)
Tim Berners-Lee: From World Wide Web to Giant Global Graph
I'm looking forward to it. See you guys there.
I give that guy credit for some mad persistence.
I'd give Jared 500k any day
newer versions of jquery also allow you to clean up the one global variable it adds, afaik, moving it to a location of your choosing. it's very clean.
Ask YC:  Catchy name for Facebook app that takes lies as input and produces hot app ideas as output?
This app will be something like the ESP Game -- that is, a game with a purpose.

Users will be asked to lie to their friends as part of the game. The output of the game will be app ideas along with their virality estimates.

I'm having a hard time trying to come up with a name. Any suggestions?

The app is aimed at two groups of people -- those who want to play the lying game and those who want to take advantage of the most promising ideas generated to build new apps.

Would something like "The Lying Game" discourage people from adding the app? The lies being told are supposed to mislead you as to the purpose of the app. So giving away the purpose in the app name / description may discourage people from adding the app (or it would at least skew the virality estimates).

Also, does Facebook have a policy about deceptive apps, even ones whose goal is noble and could result in better apps? Strictly speaking, one could argue that it is the users who are being deceptive by lying to their friends.
Fools. I think that blogger ought to watch this...

http://youtube.com/watch?v=Isk88nT0sRY
If you're on OS X and writing your app with Cocoa, Carbon, or RealBasic, just use the Sparkle framework. You just have to maintain a RSS feed with the updates; it'll automatically check for updates, show the user the release notes to see if he wants the update, download it, verify the signature, install the update, and restart the app. It's simple to integrate with your app, too. Dozens of apps like Adium, Vienna, and TextMate use it.

http://sparkle.andymatuschak.org/
I think that "study" is a load of crap paid for by opponents of net-neutrality who need a reason to charge different prices for different types of content.

In other words, I think it's bunk.
Trade licks via USB
You've posted a few times on here about this app, but honestly you need to do a MUCH better job of explaining what it is if you want advice imo.
For each friend, the user needs to think of the best lie to tell that friend in order to get him to add the app. The friend would then get a notification with that lie.

For example, if one of your friends is into virtual gifts, you might make up a lie such as "X has just given you a virtual gift. Click here to see what it is."

But there is no such gift. Once the user adds the app he will learn its true nature and can send out lies of his/her own to his/her friends.

This is a game where the number of points scored depends on the number of friends (and possibly non-friends) that you tricked into adding the app.

If the app name / description reveals its true purpose, then the deception is only in getting the friend to click on the link in the notification. Users may then decide whether to add the app given that they know something about its deception. But this might skew the virality stats of the app ideas.
And, of course, while they mention how much the telcos would need to fix this "problem", they don't mention how much they are currently spending out of their inordinately large revenues to do so. But then, why actually use the money that people are paying you for bandwidth to support their connections when you can just throttle BitTorrent?
And not in Vista. And, so what? This attack is important to cryptographers. It's not important to you. Anyone who can exploit this problem can also backdoor your machine.
- http://superhappydevhouse.org/

- http://barcamp.org/
- organize a news.yc meetup
- make friends on irc, freenode, #facebook, #rubyonrails, etc, etc
- depending on how far along your startup is you could probably try to set up some vc meetings
ok MUCH MUCH better, I now understand what it is
If you plan to use a small, fixed number of servers and run them 24/7, then EC2 probably will not save you much. It may even be more expensive. The price advantage works best for tasks that need flexibility. Sites that alternate between high demand and low demand, periodic or one-off processing intensive tasks where a 24/7 server is overkill-- that's where you really see the benefits of EC2.
200+ Seattle Startups
Would be cool to put this on Goog Maps along with other global startup regions.
So any suggestions as to the app name and description? Should they preserve the deception?
you should just call it theApp or theGreatestAppEV4R

something generic
Why do you need to promote your startup somewhere other than on the internet?

My (completely accidental) approach is:

1. Spend four years being heavily involved in open source development (FreeBSD in my case) and gain a reputation for producing really cool software (both FreeBSD Update and Portsnap have elicited reactions of "how did we manage to survive before this was available" from multiple sources).

2. Announce that I'm working on a new project.

3. Watch as emails flood in from users of my earlier works who are convinced that whatever I'm working on right now has got to be the best thing since sliced bread.

Of course, I haven't launched publicly yet, and I don't know how many these enthusiastic people will end up paying to use my current project -- but it certainly won't hurt to have an established reputation for doing cool stuff.
I guess for the description, I could have something vague also such as "An app limited only by your imagination. Add the app to discover its secret."
Social aspects aren't especially more limited in Myspace. You have friend lists, bulletins, status feeds, and profile comments-- all of the most popular features of Facebook. You don't have "MySpace Apps" but people add stuff like quizzes to their pages and send questionnaire bulletins all the time.