skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Two other thoughts based on a quick glance at your site:

1. "shortcomings" has one 'm' (About PikLuk)

2. Testimonials from guys names "Joe Bob" sound fake ;-) Just 'Joe Larson' might be better. Similarly, if you can only use the first name of a person providing a testimonial, you should add other descriptive info (such as 'mother of adorable 9 year old Susie" or something.) It is a small thing, but it adds a psychological weight to your testimonials. There are tons of little odd marketing tricks that have been studied and shown to increase conversion rates. That is one of them.
"Hofstadter's Law: 'It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's law.'"
WordHugger allows internet marketers to own a piece of the web.
Funny enough, I can. I've seen how people use it. There is nothing there that people wouldn't have wanted to do ten years ago, and while I'm sure there will be new features in the next decade, I can't see people not wanting to keep in touch.

I have more faith in Facebook surviving than I do youtube -- all that it takes to replace youtube is social networking and cheap bandwidth for everyone to host their own.
TechCrunch And Huffington: Who Will Buy The Big Blogs?
The name brand blogs. The big ones. Huffington. TechCrunch. GigaOm. Boing Boing. Ars Technica. SeekingAlpha.

AOL has already bought Weblogsinc. It owns popular blogs including flagship Engadget.

But, with the internet operations at newspapers and some other tradition media companies making very little headway, the big blogs take on a very significant attraction. They reach audiences in great numbers. They have credibility. They are not expensive to run. And, they make money.
AWESOME concept... really unique, and I think it's going to sell AND do a lot of good for kids.

One thing I would say is don't mention the word "entertainment" for kids. If parents are going to get this for their kids, it's going to be for them to help study for school tests, gain knowledge at large, etc. etc... productive things. Maybe you also provide some access to appropriate entertainment content, but don't stress this.

A lot of the other words on the site need to be retooled and fine-tuned, but overall your concept/idea is great.
What if you want to create "some kind of game with a ball"? You have a lot of things already pinned down (ha ha) in your example, it's not a "blue sky" project where you don't know exactly how it should be.
A good follow-up at
http://www.mathewingram.com/work/2007/10/03/cnet-to-buy-tech...
Unfortunately they are licensing it under "Microsoft Reference License" which means read-only access. While not the ideal access mode, I think its certainly a step in the right direction. A little bit at a time, and sooner or later Microsoft might actually embrace open source. ...Maybe.
The idea is that it is not about the site but the expenses to get the project done and create a company structure to support it.

Personally I feel they feel they are doing some things wrong. 1) The name means nothing, sounds like a fish I might eat and 2) They are going to have to do major advertising to bring house buyers into the site. House buying isn't great right now. They will need to survive a year or two of house market funk to survive.
This is actually tremendously useful despite the fact that it isn't Open Source. Being able to view method implementations in the debugger will be a boon to performance, and will definitely remove a lot of guesswork.
Has anyone here worked extensively with both darcs and bzr? I use darcs and love it. I hear some people rave about how much better bzr is. I've used it very briefly and didn't see what the big advantage was, but maybe I'm missing something.
"the break even point for an automated tester is when they've run their tests twenty times"...

I find that (at least in early development), when I'm in the zone I refactor several times a day (differnent parts of the system of course). If my break even point is twenty times, I'd never get there. Every refactoring would virtually obliterate all of the previously automated tests.
A nice feel-good futurist article from the president of the Italian Space Agency
There are premium service you can upgrade to. It is only $4.99/mo or much less than that if you prepay for a year or for two. We even offer "lifetime membership" :-)
A quick update: we added some screen shots to "Learn More" page and provided a link to it from the front page. Just make sure you hit 'Refresh' in your browser.

This seems to be the most common (and very useful) feedback topic.

Thank you guys very much.
http://pikluk.com/more
I liked Reddit's system. Click on a prominent "feedback" link (in the early Reddit it was in the top left, and one of the most prominent actions on the page), it takes you to a page with a textbox that e-mails the founders. I submitted a couple bug reports to Reddit when it was a few months old and got back fixes within the hour, which was one of the main reasons I decided to stick around.

Also, don't underestimate the usefulness of forums. They become a pain to manage when you get big, but they're absolutely invaluable at getting feedback and building community when you're small. Forums let power-users help newbies (pulling some of the support load off you), and they also give users a chance to weigh in with "No, that's a terrible idea" when another user proposes a half-baked idea. When I was working on FictionAlley, there were many times when a user came up with a suggestion, I was like "Yeah, I can implement that", then other users chimed in with "Please don't; it'll ruin things for the rest of us. Here's what you could try instead."
Y Combinator co-founder Jessica Livingston shares advice on how to get accepted (audio interview)
Any tips on finding a NON-technical co-founder?
http://peter.allmedia.googlepages.com/pottedphilosophy

You talk about the "meaning of words" in a very English school way. Obviously the meaning of meaning is the branch where Wittgenstein left the British for dead and led to Heidegger and Derrida. Meaning of meaning is an important issue as we begin the task of programming computers that will be more intelligent than we are.
We just added screenshots to "Learn More" page. Please hit refresh in your browser.

Thank you for the feedback!
This is one of the biggies on Google's Javascript style guide.

I would leave out the part about silent not defining my namespace, though.
"V-Commerce"? What the hell?

Can we please come back to improving the real world...
Nice. I find those more compelling than slugging through all the explanatory text (though I don't have kids, so I'm not in the target audience). You might try and figure out a way to get them on the homepage.
+1 to "Test-Driven Development: By Example" by Kent Beck. It won me over.

Anyone that wants to test in Python should really check out nose (nosetests). I made a slight modification to Django so that it gets run any time a change in code is detected in my project (i.e. whenever the development server restarts). So every time I make a code change, the tests run. Combining this feature with doctests makes testing a total breeze (and confidence booster).
Why not make it possible to be able to sign up after you download the browser?

Like if you don't sign in/connect-the-browser-to-an-account, it'll only let you go to a few sample pages and let you mess around with a few settings. As soon as you try to do anything else, a "Please sign up" form appears.
I second that. If you have something like a display bug or some strange inconsistency in a website, having that bug there is actually a chance for you to show how responsive you can be to user bug requests. That is, having and quickly fixing a bug could turn out to be a good thing. That is not the case if you are NASA or your local nuclear power plant.
Facebook as a company isn't a fad--with the footing they have, they'll be around as long as they adapt and make what people want.

I do see Facebook apps as a cancer on the design, though. If I were in charge of the site, I would probably not have given people as much control over the look and feel of their apps. Too MySpace-y, IMHO.
ok, so now I get it. TTD is better suited for those large companies where people don't know what the f are doing, so they need to test everything (just making sure), and when speed doesn't matter, as big companies everything goes slow.

The same enviroment and thinking that brought us java, and made it a clusterfuck of "abstractions", and "design principles".

I'd rather just code ad design at will, and be able to refactor, change, or throw away code without being held hostage of these tests which will break at some point, not because your code is not right, but because they were design to test something according to a thinking, and when that something changes, all those tests are obsolete.
We aren't ruling that out. However, we have made it very easy for people to try it free, without commitments of any kind.
Inside Amazon's dynamo - the Distributed Storage System *behind* S3
> "I did strip out things that connect to other websites though. I'm not sure how I could allow outgoing connections, and still prevent a malicious user from sending spam, or other bad things? But I'll add that down the road perhaps."

That's a shame. I was wondering why openurl didn't work. Why import the module if you don't allow outgoing connections? You will have to address the spam issue eventually but really that's almost a problem of success; focus on it when you need to. Until then, disallowing outgoing connections is overly restrictive and cripples what could potentially be a really cool service.

I also noticed that try...except blocks are blocked as well. Why is that?
Broadcast your miserable life with Justin.tv
Right, I don't think Microsoft is open (pun intended) to just anyone modifying their baseline code. It's almost as good, but if you've got access to base class code for instance, instead of extending a class you could instead grab the base code and strip out all the crap you don't need (which is more often than not, quite a bit).

It's a great start.
Good points. Maybe I'll put outgoing connections back in then. Until there are 100's of new utilities every day, I could probably keep an eye on things.

The security code I found doesn't allow try ..except, I'm not sure why. In any case, what I'm working on right now is a way to remove most or all of the restrictions. I'll let you know when that's up and running.
Here are some real tips:

1. Have a lot of money

2. Be famous already (also rich, see 1)

3. Give away at least 45% of the company

4. Don't be a douche
rwebb is right, serving "limited" ads to kids could be a huge... You are directly reaching an audience that companies spend millions of dollars just trying to.

Rather than seal yourself off from this potential revenue source you might want to re-phrase the wording on your site to say that you do not allow unnapproved/offensive ads to reach their kids. I honestly wouldnt feel bad if you offered limited ads since your service is free. I dont think parents will mind as long as the ads are carefully filtered for offensive content.

Wow, you are in essence the gate keeper to the ads kids can see. If ad agencies dont go through you then they cant reach your highly desirable user base, even if they are already advertising on the web page that the child is viewing (b/c you block them). That is just huge.

Sorry if I'm thinking "evil" here, but I'm just offering suggestions with purely business interests in mind.
Actually software is so much easier than any other kind of physical engineering, that ridiculously small and inexperienced teams try to solve fiendishly complex problems. That's what makes it hard.
Another Journotroll article from valleywag with no real point.
not if you cache your data structures intelligently... probably not a good solution for something like PHP or Rails where you lose your application state across requests

Or do you mean that using "like" is slow? i would think that it would not be as long as that column is indexed.
"... We'd definitely want to do a Justin.tv feed! ..."

Just curious, what would you do?
The Pmarca Guide to Career Planning, Part 3: Where to go and why
But the Scribes site looks sexier than GEdit's. That's what programmers really care about!
Yes, Great question. I was planning on writing that as the next post.
"... Dude, have you tried bzr already? It's exactly what you need. ..."

I'm pretty sure they could but look at the first few lines & read them again ...

"... Won't someone please form a startup to tackle this problem? Branching sucks. ..."

This is exactly an example of taking something that sucks and making it easier for users in this case developers to use. Take those "irksome" annoying processes and make something that does the job better: Read the bit on "What Customers Want". It "could" fit this description ~ http://www.paulgraham.com/start.html
Today we celebrate the first glorious anniversary of the information purification directives...
It's called the "educational discount." Or else "Mom and Dad are paying for it."
Great post. I realized forums help build a community and augment help files and help desks, but it escaped me that forums also help brainstorm ways through bad ideas without offending the userbase.
Thanks adding this interview as emphasis can sometimes get lost in essays. Don't forget another G7 podcast, #24 on Zenter ~ http://www.grid7.com/archives/178_podcast-24-founders-of-zen...
I found this quote interesting:

---

I believe that the following statement is an axiom of software development:

It is impossible, by examining any significant piece of completed code, to determine within a factor of two how many man-hours it took to produce that code.

And the corollary:

If you can't tell how long a piece of code would take when you have the finished product available, what chance do you think you have before the first line of code is written?
sure thing. And actually one more: #21 Inkling Markets->
http://www.grid7.com/archives/171_podcast-21-adam-siegel-of-...

sean
I want to be clear in saying that the argument I was putting forth in this article was that you're already investing the time in testing your code, whether you test it by eye, or by code.

The question for you is - Would you rather spend your time in your web browser/console & debugger, or your text editor writing code? Clearly the latter has significant advantages , when it comes to reliability, etc, but if you're willing to forgo all of that, then you're really talking about where you want to spend your time.

Personally, I'd rather be in my text editor than my debugger (Okay, I don't have a debugger, since I write tests). My text editor is where I find my zone.
Google Deprecates SOAP Search API
I think the problem that you might be facing is more related to the quality of your tests than testing itself. If your tests are written correctly, you should never have to throw them away when you refactor.

In fact, that's one of the major benefits of testing: a refactoring safety net!
Spying on competitors
Man...they say submitting early gives you a slight advantage and then they give us little gems like this! I guess that's why they let you submit more than once.
What are ya doing? Need an ex-I Banker?
Not a bad reference.
http://www.truth.sk/vim/vimbook-OPL.pdf
The key to vim is to stay in editing mode.
Still, you can write your unit tests as you write your code. All a unit test does is verify that your code behaves the way you want it to.

I think a lot of people here are confused about what exactly a unit test is. When you write a unit test, you don't say: "I want a bowling application, with such and such a scoring method, and such and such a pin layout".

It's more like - "I am writing a class (or portion of a class) here that's going to perform a certain function in my 'blue sky', exploratory phase project". If you don't know what your code is going to do, how can you really write it. That is to say, exploratory coding isn't just typing random characters. You have some ideas.

So, instead of just writing the first function/method/class/controller action/model, you write a test first, and watch it fail. Then, you implement your method. That way, you know that your method works.

You really don't need to have an overall big picture of your application to write tests. That view is more of a misunderstanding of testing than anything else.
Coms vital when there's an outage
Google Transit Graduates from Labs
What is Google doing?
Just record the house, us coding, arguing, hanging out, vlogging, like..real world meets America's next top model(or top chef) meets Computer Programming.
Can I ask (as someone who runs a small colocation-oriented provider), what set of criteria do you use and what is a typical budget for your sites?
I think the Feedback button on Swivel.com is quite neat.
Interview with danah boyd
> Are you implying that it's not?

No, it just wasn't clear from your original comment.
The appearance of you site is very appealing. The layout, color combination is refreshing. The idea of site is compelling. Cool!
Google Purges The Payola
Laptop With a Mission Widens Its Audience
Hear Linus Torvalds talk about Git:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8
MIT's DARPA Urban Challenge entry powered by 10 quad-core computers
Soap, REST in peace. ;)
I'm not typically a Microsoft basher but this isn't a big deal. The .NET source code has always been available via Reflection. Download Lutz Roeder's Reflector, disassemble one of the classes shown in the blog post and compare the disassembled code with the screenshots. Having access to the set of debugging symbols and code commentary is obviously a good thing however.
Tools of The Effective Developer: Fail Fast!
"... Soap, REST in peace. ;) ..."

First the xml api, now soap. As much as I don't like soap, the replacement ajax api is hobbled and restrictive. Evil tactics are countered with EvilAPI's ~ http://sitening.com/evilapi/
Ask YC: cannot login. how to reset password?
Cannot login as juwo. Getting a login prompt now - earlier it used to save my password. Didnt delete any cookies. My password does not work, nor can I reset it.

Sent email but there was no reply.

Anyone have/had the same problem?
An Observation about News.YC
In too many threads on news.yc someone points out a pattern only to have someone else refute it based on perosnal experiences.

I just want to point out that this is flawed logic!

It's not quite as simple as "don't make generalizations" (although many would do well to remember that). Danah boyd really crystallized this in one of her blog posts by pointing out that
patterns are just that, patterns. There will always be exceptions (and maybe you are one of them), but exceptions and patterns are not mutually exclusive. Duh, right?

If it's so obvious, why do so many people craft their arguments this way? Just check out the comments in the post about how to find a co-founder for non-techies.

Maybe they just want to foster discussion, but it seems to me that we would get a lot more out of the forum if people qualified/quantified their comments.
basic points:

1) be determined.

2) know your co-founders well.

3) they like it if you've built stuff before.
I think this is a big deal for two reasons: it signals that Microsoft is starting to open up a little and the other reason is that getting code definition information through an IDE like Visual Studio is vastly superior to disassembling a .NET framework dll and inspecting the code.
"... Actually software is so much easier than any other kind of physical engineering ..."

Not so. While the construction of things is hard. It is backed up with hundreds of years of engineering experience, thousands in hacking. This has allowed engineers to design with both the confidence of theory and some understanding of tolerance,

Despite being just over 50 years old, Software is not yet an engineering discipline. There is no tolerance for error ~ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparing_software_engineering_...
Ajju,

the word 'caste' comes from the Sanskrit 'Varna' which means 'skin color'.

see http://www.raceandhistory.com/cgi-bin/forum/webbbs_config.pl...
I think both Werner Vogels and the paper itself were pretty clear that this was NOT the basis for S3. This line from section 1 is pretty telling even had they not spoken up on this:

"To meet the reliability and scaling needs, Amazon has developed a number of storage technologies, of which the Amazon Simple Storage Service (also available outside of Amazon and known as Amazon S3), is probably the best known. This paper presents the design and implementation of Dynamo, another highly available and scalable distributed data store built for Amazon's platform."

More supporting evidence from section 2.1:

"Dynamo targets applications that need to store objects that are (usually less than 1 MB)."

S3 allows individual objects up to 5GB in size. This in and of itself does not rule out Dynamo being the underlying store for S3 but does certainly lend weight to what Werner and the paper's authors have claimed regarding S3's origin.
>1) be determined.

I had told myself before the interview that I would open with "OK, we've got 15 minutes to convince you that our product is going to be huge and that we're capable of building it." Instead, I got nervous and let them dictate the course of the interview and we didn't talk about the design and big picture of our product. It also really didn't help that we argued against Paul Graham's simplified, buildable in 3 months version of our product. I wonder if we would have got in if we would have said "yes, that's a great idea." Now I know that one of the things they test for is flexibility, so if they suggest changes to your product during the interview, don't argue with them.
see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=62854
Right. How can you refactor code that has no tests? Basically, you've got no clue if your new refactored code works because all the precious time you've spent using the old code went towards ephemeral tests that weren't written down. That makes refactoring a lot more risky than it needs to be.
Biotech sounds like a good industry to get based on pmarca's standards. I'd love to move to the world capital of biotech, but I actually have no idea where it is or if there even is one.
Really? I think that is rather closed minded. Obviously there are different levels of "tech" companies, but I feel the promise of open source software is to see more diverse applications of that software = more diverse business ideas.

If marketing people can't build tech companies should coders be allowed to market their websites?
@webwright, i guess i do not yet understand what value you have in you're business yet. are you doing this to pay the bills, create a revolution, change the world, pay your future offspring's bills, or just to create something cool?

when i was thinking enterprise, i was not thinking watchdog, big brother, but maybe a personal productivity tool for personal use offered on the enterprise level. its your tool, you can do what you want with it. when i talked to a vc at defcon, she had said that usually you price it at 20$ per user annually for an enterprise micro-app like the ones that many of us YC'ers are/ could be developing. If you sell in volume you might even sell it like zimbra did to yahoo.

as a freemium, i do not think your business is as scalable. what do the yc investors think on here? i would guess if they are going to invest, they are going to use similar rules that someone like sequoia might, and they look for billion dollar companies. what is YC looking for?

have you thought about your exit strategy? are you in it for the long haul, or for a certain amount of wealth?
With these qualities you don't need to find a programmer, they find you. If you have money and a name you aren't looking for a co-founder, you're looking for an employee.
ARM spins multicore-enabled Cortex core. Translation: multi-core cellphones.