skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
one confounding factor is that software development, even more than programming, is a creative art with vague parameters.

I still remember visiting a music store and seeing this dude take a guitar off the wall and blow everyone away with his talent. The things he could do with his fingers were amazing. He was probably a better guitarist than Dylan, Lennon, and Springstein. He was certainly a better guitarist than Andre3000, who (I read somewhere) used G, C, and E minor as the basis for "Hey Ya" because they were the three chords he knew how to play on the guitar.

Unlike the musicians mentioned above, he was also available for private beginner lessons ;)
Computational Breakthrough: Faster Integer Multiplication [pdf]
"It seems to be one of those great ideas that sounds good but never catches on - a lot like BlueTooth."

wtf? I think it's safe to say Bluetooth caught on.
And the paper is available here: http://www.cse.psu.edu/~furer/Papers/mult.pdf
I think this is the best way to go. There's no reason that you should be scraping HTML from sites, when there might be a nice xml feed available. For instance, pricegrabber will only index your site if they have prices in XML.
Ask YC: when is the next round of funding?
I am curious to know when the next round of funding is, and when would the cycle start? My guess was sometime in March is the application dates and the cycle would start end of June in Boston.

For those that are interested to apply I believe it would be nice to have some solid dates to make sure it wont be missed.

I think any sort of guide lines for the future applicants would be helpful, in order to plan things right and as early as possible.

Thanks in advance
Thanks Sam, its nice of you to put in the time and type this up. And all the best.
I wonder if the focus/content of an undergrad program really influences the outcome for whether or not person x will be a great programmer.

Many great programmers began before university, and many didn't attend university at all (John Carmack immediately springs to mind).
What is "enterprise internet search"?
I have one 22 inch at home. During nights I can use this but at office hours (I mean normal day time) I should depend on laptop screen. I guess the optimal is 13.3 considering weight and screen resolution
Video Interview:  Robert Scoble, top tech blogger, talks about Europe and Video
56 - It has been and continues to be fun. I started in College in 1969 in a physics class. "There's a computer down the hall (IBM 1130, cards, FORTRAN). Go figure it out and analyze your experiments." Since then I have been learning non-stop. I got my degrees in Math, but have had to learn about programming developments for decades. The other fun thing is that I have had to learn about what my users are doing: pharmaceuticals, banking, electric power, genomics, among others. I'm so rich. Enough money, great family, ever stretching horizons.
In all fairness, I guess it depends on what you need to do. For the vast majority of the day to day coding, it involves more of the architecturing and creative and puzzle solving side that joel talks about.

However, if an abstraction breaks down, you'll need to have a deeper understanding of the innards, which a sound theory can only help the deeper down you go. I think this is even more applicable if you're using something based on math that isn't as mature of a technology (which means they're not a commodity and you'll probably have to fix it if it goes haywire), such as machine learning techniques or computer vision.

How often would that happen? Not very often. But when it does, and you have the background to learn, understand, and fix it, that'll make all the difference between you and the next guy.
I know this is ruby but might be worth a look. Will help you no end and no need for a web browser.

http://mechanize.rubyforge.org/mechanize/

might be worth a look
http://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/
Venture capitalists benefit themselves and a handful of other
people economically, while providing funding for services that
are -- in so many cases -- vacuous garbage. The tubes of the
internet are clogged with pr0n, but where is a single good site
for searching #haskell?

However, my point was a little more general -- it makes most
sense in connection with the bit about work and reward. Doctors
and lawyers are portrayed as civil servants in the article, and
this is used to drum up some sympathy for their relative
impoverishment (relative to VCs). Why don't they mention the
poor nurses?

Doctors and lawyers have
ridden the demand curve long enough; they now find themselves
contending with people who do even less and make even more, and
they complain. Reflection would have been a more respectable
response.
I thought Yahoo did accept it?
I meant to highlight the irony of doctors and lawyers, of all people, complaining about this fact. I am not a socialist.
One reason is that there's a very small distance between "I don't care if someone gets in here" (reddit, blog, etc) and "If someone got in here I'd be hosed" (bank, administration stuff, etc). OpenID can handle the former, but since people are using the same insecure password for all those sites anyway, typically, it doesn't matter. OpenID can't handle the latter, because (last I checked) making phishing easy is inherent in how OpenID works.
I'm 85 years old. Rocking out. Starting new companies. Life is good.
I just turned 0x20 good one in hacker years.
I was a homeless man two Januaries ago -- I lived in a van at the corner of MLK and Oregon in Berkeley. This wasn't a student project, either. I really just had no money, no friends who would take me and nowhere else to go. Thank God someone loaned me their van.

In the intervening years, many kind people tolerated me as I wormed my way into IT. Now I live in a house and, yes indeed, drink the wines of Napa and other places.
I feel so bad for doctors and lawyers after reading your post. Now think about how the poor sysadmins feel -- man, picking grapes is starting to look pretty good...
He makes a great point. Perhaps an apprenticeship more than a degree? I know friends in a neighbouring university where part of the course requirement is to work in industry at least one day a week. I've learnt far more working for 6 months in a startup than I did in 3 years of Computer Science.

The trouble is you might not know that you don't enjoy computer science until you've tried it. How would you advertise the course?

Perhaps Olin College could serve as a model for this approach [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_W._Olin_College_of_Eng...]
Comet is Always Better Than Polling
"	20 years or so screwing around with technology and business, in complete obscurity until fall 2004, when I became the "I built digg.com for $10/hour" guy."

Awesome. :) cheers!
I do not believe the article mentioned internet, but enterprise search is a big problem to solve. It is estimated that only about 20% of useful corporate data is stored in appropriate formats, i.e. databases. The rest is spread across thousands employee computers in form of word documents, text files, html files, PDFs, etc.

I have not heard of this norvegian company, but I have heard of startups tackling the problem of distributed search across "clowds" of enterprise PCs: each computer is running an agent and listens to a server for commands. A typical use case: a company is being sued over something, so a management may issue a command of searching for lawsuit-related keywords on ALL computers (laptops included) of all employees. The results can be collected, analyzed and even remotely deleted on all PCs.
"The young are beset by urges and desires; they love things that give them pleasure. People in their thirties and forties pursue security by amassing power and control, and this is what inspires love in them. Those yet older, having tasted of the evanescence of life, find it easier to love goodness for its own sake."
http://www.innernet.org.il/printArticle.php?id=562
So, try and find that which does?
Yup, if I was Facebook, I would join the Workgroup too if only to keep track of or keep good relations with a group that may affect my business. The article seems to exaggerate the importance of the move though.
Browsing Graphs
'The Problem with Wikipedia' (http://xkcd.com/214/) exemplifies a problem with browsing the web: You may recall where you started and some of the leaves of your browsing tree - but occasionally it would be interesting to view the tree itself.

Do you sometimes wish for such a tool, too?
Just Built It: Ecology Tip - Directory of the Aussie Clean Energy Economy
Perhaps the state of 'hypnotized' really feels like 'doing stupid things on command' because your brain tricks you?
Enterprises seeing Web 2.0 'explosion'
As if this Bill Gates needed a qualifier.
I hear that blogs on wordpress.com have great SEO from the get-go and can be custom domained too.
You want enough founders on the board to maintain control if things go sour.
Scoble: Half Man, Half Machine
Does anyone want to write a search engine? Python and C++. I thought we could analyze the links between pages and come up some kind of ranking algorhythm. We'd have to make the system widely parallel - but I think we could be breaking some new ground here.

Any takers?
You mean guerrilla marketing marketing?
Yahoo unveils mobile web platform
i think they might even use it for the inbox with the update to "version 2." i've noticed emails appear almost immediately in gmail lately.
Some Mind Hacks | Ask YC-HN: What are yours?
I'd assume guerrilla marketing should add some value to the message, thus helping it stick: it either makes you think, surprises you, or entertains you. Sending this to news.yc or anywhere else where marketing is a hot topic might- barely- qualify, because of the meta discussion it generates. The described trick itself is just plain spam.
Except you can't even try to change your vote. It's a cruel world out there. :>
Perhaps the state of 'hypnotized' really is 'following along' because you want to believe?

I hear what you are saying...I just don't believe it.
MS desperately needs an internal search tool for their own enterprise info. You simply cant find anything on their
intranet, its shocking. This is made worse by constant employee churn and re-orgs.

It would literally be worth the price to MS if all Fast did was help MS get its act together internally!
The Startup Makeover?
$13.3 Million For Startup That Wants To Kill Snail Mail
A First Course in String Theory (book): String Theory for Undergraduates
I wanted to do this same thing a while ago and have done a lot of research and reading in this area. Here are some search terms that will likely help you:

* automatic wrapper generation

* information extraction

* removing noisy information from Web pages

* template detection

* wrapper induction

"Wrapper" is a fancy computer-science term for "scraper."

I wrote some Python code that does this -- given X sample documents, detect the differences between them and automatically create a scraper tailored to those documents. I released the first version open source -- it's called templatemaker: http://code.google.com/p/templatemaker/ .

But that version of templatemaker is quite brittle, because it was designed to work on plain text as much as on HTML. I've since written an HTML-aware version of templatemaker that is really frikkin' awesome (if I may say!) and beats the pants off the old one. I don't know if I'm going to open-source it, as it's quite valuable to my own startup.

Hope this helps!
of course its a noise band :)
Looks like Bertrand Russell advocated the Four Hour Work Week 70 years ago!
However, that's not it.

Hyptosis is a well-known mind state, and there is nothing strange or mysterious about it. It's even used in medicine, and if you do some google searches you'll see the term mentioned on all the most important medicine journals worldwide. For people who works on psychiatry, neurology, etc. that's no secret at all.

There is plenty of info on its wikipedia's page too if you are curious about it.
I've always heard of comet explained in terms of building chat clients and the like but I think it's mains application is to make AJAX polling redundant
Not sure if this is appropriate - as not responding to one particular person - but I'd like to send a BIG Thank You to everyone out there for the advice, encouragement and sometimes the reality "keep your feet on the ground" type stuff. This has inspired me to move forward with this. To those who have done stuff like this before, thanks for the links and I'm grateful for you sharing your experience.

If its OK I'd like to let people know about my experiences. Oh, if anyone is interested in collaborating or just sharing ideas then I'd be happy to do likewise

All the best
Instead of a $1,200,000,000 solution for that issue, here is a $50,000 solution for them that is even better! :-)

http://www.googlestore.com/appliance/product.asp?catid=2

$50K version indexes one million documents.
The article uses links in red and blue. That confuses me a bit - Wikipedia has trained me to see red links as indicating missing targets.

Anyone else sharing this affliction?
Torvalds: there is no open source community
So get a good book on C++. Frankly, I don't consider programming languages university level at all...
Point taken, thanks. Hopefully it was still obvious as a joke - I think I would hire pg even as a Java developer with 0 years of experience ;-)
Great for people we read the original first, too. As the update consists of clearly marked comments.
I think everyone here has heard of FAST...
Thanks for enlightening us.
Oh, I thought you wanted to play on the fact that pg may be a fine programmer - but that he would be a lousy Java developer for lack of motivation.
"Premature optimization" has become a mantra for not thinking about performance at all. If users notice it, it's not premature.
America's downfall: Hey teachers, leave us laptops alone!
Thanks - I really don't understand why scientific publications go into "closed" journals...
Google and Facebook Join DataPortability.org
Domain Registrar Network Solutions Purchases Searched Domain Names
"kids who are really interesting in programming, not computer science"

I have troubles imagining that kind of person? In any case, I would be wary of a programmer who doesn't even know Quicksort.
Comcast promising 160 Mb/s Internet
U.S. courts consider legality of laptop inspections at the border
At the end of the article:

There are all sorts of lessons in these cases. One is that the border seems be a privacy-free zone. A second is that encryption programs work. A third is that you should keep your password to yourself. And the most important is that you should leave your laptop at home.
The article did mention internet and that got me confused. Thanks. Here is the company site for reference:
http://www.fastsearch.com/
Autechre is very mild, as far as noise is concerned. Try "Incunabula" for a very listen-able album.

For noise, try Venetian Snares - "A Giant Alien Force More Violent & Sick Than Anything You Can Imagine". Served best with a FPS.
Well, perhaps he would be persuasive enough to convince management to switch over to LISP ;-)
Best excerpt from the end of the article:

There are all sorts of lessons in these cases. One is that the border seems be a privacy-free zone. A second is that encryption programs work. A third is that you should keep your password to yourself. And the most important is that you should leave your laptop at home.
Huge Monitor: Alienware Curved Monitor Looks Like It's From Another Planet
SQL Insertion mass hack infects tens of thousands of sites
Someone mentioned dapper.net and I upmodded it, but I think it will get lost in the noise.

As far as I understand, they are very close to what you are trying to do, so study them carefully as a competitor.
832GB solid state drive launching
I'd rock some major freecell with this guy
If I were Microsoft, I'd try to come up with some way to get Passport (aka Windows Live ID) into to the data portability effort.
The IT department is dead
Lots of important technology makes no money, and is a poor investment. Do Prototype, Mochikit, or Twisted have VC funding?
Yes, probably lot's of cool things can be done with it, some that even the inventors have not yet thought about. At first it seems like a recipe for disaster, though (debugging hell) ;-)
Is the page supposed to look like this or is Opera having a really bad day?

- http://i250.photobucket.com/albums/gg244/yc96013/YC96013.png
wait till one of them suddenly drifts to mars
Has any "saved" thing ever disappeared from YC?
I thought the article would have been more interesting if it had been more about frameworks and less about hammers.

Thinking further, it also seems odd that there actually are different hammers, not just an universal hammer. Maybe for good reason? So maybe the analogy was not that great.
It's intentional, and it more or less makes sense if you've listened to Autechre's music.

IDM people are kind of the intelligent chin stroking artsy bedroom-techno loners of the electronic music scene.
I think you mean "SQL injection"...
"Always" is a dangerous word. I'd argue that polling is better for simple applications where latency and scalability aren't an issue. "Comet" adds a layer of complexity where it might not be necessary. Premature optimization... you know the rest.
Hm, I don't know?? Sure, standard things like email can be outsourced, but isn't IT in theory a blueprint for the business processes in the company? Would that mean that all companies would be the same? I don't think that will happen.
Advanced Python or Understanding Python [google tech talk]
34 for a few months, yet.
"Not sure if I would hire him as a Java Developer, though."

You've just owned up to being old. Nobody codes in Java anymore.
surely it makes sense,however,it all depends,different models should suit sepecific circumstances,

http://blog.sina.com.cn/FrankieCHN
I hope I can make kind friends in this hub,haha^^
I spoke to 2nd year Comp Sci undergraduate a few days ago. I'm about 70% sure he said the main language they teach is Java (I don't recall him ever speaking about C/C++). I was telling him about my forays into Haskell and how function composition combined with recursion often confuses me.

His reply: What's recursion?

It's surprising really. Although I hate Java it does have a wide range of concepts within, including recursion surely. Perhaps they focus on displaying a GUI window rather than understanding binary search, etc.

* * *

I think drawing up an "Arts" programme in computer science is a good idea. But only as a MA lest you'll see more variations of the aforementioned example. Things are different in the UK though because university enrolment is linked to university funding.

If I did meet an artistic person who was interested in computer science I'd give her the following advice: learn the very basics of computer hardware (input, encoding into bits and logic, ouput), learn how to read programming documentation/books/tutorials (I'm not sure how I'd expand on this). Once you've understood for loops, switch statements, closures, recursion, etc take those in the same way you took the building blocks you used in your childhood games. Then build something using them.

Of course it may well be wise to take an undergraduate in computer science (of the old c/c++ kind -- ones that focus on core concepts basically) to practice the for loops, closures, etc if the artistic person isn't great at self-study.
Sorry, but even with the graphs, I'm not seeing how 1000 users continuously connected for an hour doesn't translate into a lot more server load that 1000 users polling for an hour every 10 seconds or so.

The math just doesn't add up in my head...
Use Collablog [collab'log] to start your own TypePad, Live Spaces, Blogger, etc.
Some advice from applying last round:

1) Have a team in place you have evidence of working on projects on

2) Have great cofounders who have track record of doing stuff

3) Apply with an idea that is making a step change in a new or existing industry and has a way of making money directly or indirectly.
Head Tracking and VR for Desktop Displays
One interesting comment there: If you look at FAST's management team, the FAST CFO used to work for Steve Ballmer. No doubt this was one of the reasons why they managed to negotiate a better deal than could be expected.
I have nearly the exact opposite opinion of Joel here. I think the problem is that Java schools try to teach programming without teaching computer science. Mostly they avoid programming and computer science as much as possible and try prepare their students for jobs in IT departments and enterprise and maintenance coding.

I have zero time for any programmer who isn't interested in algorithms, structures and languages. But I've never met a good programmer who isn't.
Richard Gabriel came up with something similar several years ago: The software MFA.

http://www.dreamsongs.com/MFASoftware.html

He draws analogies between software composition and creative writing, performing plays, etc. Worth a look for those interested in the current thread.
If you love what you're learning, you'll learn better. Then it can take on a spiritual quality.
Cisco pumps $9.5M into SaaS Startup
It's a little more complex than counting links.

Before Google, most search engines only examined the keywords on a given page to determine relevence.

Google improved on this by ranking results according to the "PageRank", which is a probability distribution that represents the likelihood that a person randomly clicking on links will arrive at any particular page.

With few exceptions, PageRank doesn't really capture any semantics associated with the links.
- Investigate, analyze and verify.

- Be skeptical.

- Wear sunscreen.
He certainly managed to generate a great deal of buzz. If it's for enough buzz, I'd be willing to make investors think twice.
Are there ways to make yourself more driven?
Yeah same here, 0x28 isn't a bad age to be so far. ;)
Comet is better than polling only if the benefits outweigh the opportunity cost. For almost all situations, the greatest upside is improving user experience.

Is Comet the best thing you can do, right now, to improve your user experience? If so, great! But I highly doubt that.
I like the idea of this a lot. Being ORM agnostic is a real win in my book.
Oh, right. The cloud. Whatever.
Indeed. The same is true of ajax really.
is comet going to become the ron paul of newsyc?
Agreed. At least a selection of different musicians could have been chosen. What we have proved is that ONE GUY plays a new violin as well as he plays the stradivarius.

Every violin has a "personality" and as you live it and love it, you become tuned to how to produce the best from it.

Is there a space containing extra greatness in the Strad that simply cannot be reached, even by a good player, who has not played the thing for years and years and discovered all of its personality?
Every time you search for a domain on Network Solutions, they register it themselves.
SanDisk Flash Drive to Offer Automatic Web Storage
burn the ships.
How will data that should be private and well-protected (like health and financial information) work in this "cloud"?

Besides, most IT departments relish complicated proprietary "enterprise" technology for job-security reasons. They're not going to tell the CEO that they're no longer relevant, not when IT is already viewed as a cost center.
Doman registration scam: 35 million names registered in April. 32 million were part of a kiting scheme.
Be creative in finding smaller releasable pieces.

The #1 thing to optimize for is your own motivation.
Indeed.

Comet is only better if you have an app that sends significantly more data to users than it receives. If you're constantly sending data to the server, or only send responses based on user input, then comet is the wrong choice.
Hopefully this exposure will seriously hurt their business, but I think ICANN is responsible for failing to administer the assignment of names appropriately. There should be no refundable period and applications like this made in bad faith should lose network solutions their accreditation.