skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's a lot of humor in pg's essays but overall Yegge is more consistently funny and often downright hilarious. He'll often have a valid point, but equally important is the goal of presenting that point in an entertaining way. I think of it less as fluff and more of a tasty cream filling. Yegge has an exceptional sense of comic timing in writing, and sometimes it takes a bit of buildup.

Imagine a kingdom of nouns and verbs, where nouns have lots of rights and verbs are oppressed. Imagine replacing all the verbs with just one verb, 'execute!' Get it? Verb/execute/oppression?? I guess not, not when I try to cram all the ideas into 2 sentences. Sure it takes Yegge a page or so to get there, but the payoff is a hearty laugh.
[wipes tear] That's a good one!
I think it's a little to obvious to be PR work...
Mixx is backed by Main-stream media (LA Times invested in it). Not surprisingly, it gets more exposure than other efforts that provided better functionality.
Ask YC: Where to improve?
www.tipgroups.com

starting to think its almost ready to promote (not that I actually got a clue how to do that).

ALL suggestions are welcome.
(don't spare the rod) :)
> Telling me I need to take 10 minutes of tests for a site to be able to provide value isn't going to be an easy sell.

People LOVE those kinds of tests. Just look at all the ones on LiveJournal and OK Cupid. "Tell me about ME!!!"
Maybe his brain slipped. Seems to be a common problem these days.
How long have you guys been debating this? If it's longer than a day, that it's just a mechanism to help you not get started. Just write it, open the editor and make the first page, then the second and so on. Get the site built so that it works. Don't worry about scalability, you'll need to rewrite it anyway.

Choose rails if the guy who loves rails wants to write the the majority of the app, otherwise write it in php.

It would be best if you two sat together while you wrote the it, that way you can figure out if you can work together, or not.
We chose Python because 2 guys knew PHP and one guy was an ASP dude. We decided on Python because it would give all 3 something to learn (and to help to bond) but ultimately its ended up being more powerful than we all imagined.

The main thing for you is just to get on and get started
c++ LDO

el oh l
Why pay guys in India $2 / hour to do it when you can set up a "free" porn site which redirects TicketMaster captchas to the sign up page and get horny dudes to do it for free?
Predicting the Future, by Alan Kay
Heh, I might have misparsed "'No PG' is a big drawback" as "No, PG is a big drawback"... :P

Disregard my previous post.
Does anyone actually do this? I'd be curious to see a link to a site that tricks users into doing captchas.
The Crunchies. The Who'sWho on the Catwalk.
I'd say spend a day, competing.
See which one can get the most features, in the least lines/simplest/easiest to maintain code.
Why? I'm not convinced this is the number one criteria... Am I missing a joke/reference to something?
Worst "science" of the year
Reliability, consistency, simplicity, etc I imagine. A human can probably do hundreds an hour, so the cost is probably $0.01/ticket. They're surely earning a hell of a lot more than that per ticket.
Another data point that fits the theory.
Leave it to a Java programmer to extol the virtues of shell scripting.

Java's really that bad, is it?
Hmm. You could be a competitor.

I recommend using PHP and Java.
They have 4.5 messages and 6.5 to-do items per basecamp user account. That suggests to me that the number of active users is 10 or 20 times lower (100000 to 200000 users). Even if only 20% of those are paying, that's enough to be very profitable.

Given these numbers, I'd estimate that they'd serve 3-15 billion pages per year. With 100 CPUs, that's 1-5 requests per second per CPU. Of course, what matters is peak usage, not average.
Windows Power Shell addresses some of these issues.
Paul Buchheit: Twas the night before Festivus...
I'm not sure that learning a new language while developing for final product is a good idea, it will slow you down unless you are an expert. So I think it depends on what you want: decent website right now = old language; really powerful stuff at some point in the future = new language.
Now for a solution for ugly people?
Alan Kay is the greatest genius alive. Period.
Golf is a good program spoiled
An executable introduction to Lisp macros
CAPTCHA (which was edited after submission) had been capitalized in the title because it is an acronym. Isn't it?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captcha
Seedcamp Video Footage (European Y Combinator clone)
NastyMcT : Life In Alaska
NastyMcT : Life In Alaska : Blog : Photography
"I'm not sure that learning a new language while developing for final product is a good idea"

I KNOW it's not. I wasted 6 months on this same stupid question before coding it in what I knew best first. Don't make the same mistake as me.

Minimize the number of unknowns. Your app is unknown. That should be the only unknown. Forget about scaling for now. Forget about learning new technology for now. They'll just take focus and energy away from the only important thing now: getting Your App 1.0 up and running. Code it with what you already know. When you're ready to rewrite it later (you know you'll have to), post your question again.
Stupid follow-up question for everyone (with no right answer):

Of all of your resources (time, knowledge, attention, focus, energy, passion,...), what would you say is the "split" between application development and infrastructure building/maintenance?

For me: 90% app dev, 10% infrastructure. I didn't realize people spent so much resource on the latter.
Aren't they all? Pretty people don't need the internet. They just go out in the real world and take their pick. (Or so I've heard)
IMO, it's a question of accountability. Decide first who is accountable for the success of the effort and the give that person the power to make the decision.
(no pg) = (big drawback)

(% of us) CouldaBeen (English majors) > 90%

(% of us) CanWriteWell < 50%

HaveAbility.ToReadThisPost = Priceless
Mixx received LA Times funding within the last two months, but they have been around much longer. They're one of the startups in Virginia that much of the valley doesn't hear about.

One of their front end developers is a good friend of mine and I complained about the same thing about their groups/sub-reddits, etc. Funny thing is that I think reddit did most of this already, but it's just been tougher for them to be on the radar now that they're part of a larger media conglomerate (no matter how startup-like they are, drankkit anyone?)
AFAIC, until these fare-finder services add Southwest, they're worthless.
Use Blub. It has everything you need. All those "more powerful" languages just add a bunch of meaningless parentheses.
You should probably use S3 to store and access the multimedia stuff. Other than that, I'm not sure what a scalable website is.
David Byrne and Thom Yorke on the Real Value of Music
2 Young Hedge-Fund Veterans Stir Up the World of Philanthropy
only cuz Feynman passed away. But yes, Kay is pretty neat. It wasn't until I watched one of his talks that I figured out that his vision of OOP wasn't what I learned in C++ or Java.
Almost everyone on iilwy seemd rather pretty (ok, so I only looked at the girls)...

Maybe there is a boom for photographers coming up, as everybody will have to spice up their online appearance.
Ask YC: Web App Legalese for Privacy & File protection?
We are about to launch and need the requisite legalese for privacy protection and file protection. Do you know of any good resources for essential but non-verbose legalese?
Lisp of course :)
Johnny Chung Lee - Projects - Thesis
The college entrepreneur's guide to picking a business idea
:)

I haven't willingly used Java since those classes, however.

I'm just saying that for the basic stuff, you can actually learn quite a bit just by learning how to write shell scripts. And the learning curve is quite a bit shorter than in Java before you can get something remotely useful done.
I looked at it: What does it do exactly? Who is it for? (Maybe I fall outside of the target market?)
Is that because they are good at improving their pictures with Photoshop?
Which language did you try to learn?
I agree with downer.
I also strongly suggest .NET. It is well worth borrowing 50k on credit cards to pay the licensing fees, and Windows servers are much easier to manage. Linux is highly unstable and experimental, you get what you pay for with it.
Additionally I would consider outsourcing your core code development, and hiring a new 'idea guy'.

Best of luck competitors!
Johnny Lee needs to get hired by someone.
Yes, yes and yes!
I took a week and evaluated basically one setup per day.
RoR, Django, Zope, Java/Struts/Hibernate. Yes, the last one took 2 days to evaluate.

My top two were RoR and Django, but the learning experience was invaluable. I got to see a good perspective of how they all handle things front to back.
I would absolutely disagree.
Vista sets 2007 land-speed record for copying and deleting
ActionScript 3.0: Is It Hard or Not?
http://seedcamp.com/ has this vid too
There was an article on YC.N or elsewhere that this was actually happening.
Alan Kay's list of recommended reading
Something I find fascinating about this list is how diverse it is. Out of 100 or so books, only five relate directly to computers. The others come from a multitude of fields. I suspect such breadth is common amongst most of the greatest software innovators - people like Engelbart, Kay, etc. Knowing how to program is useful, but without breadth (and some depth) in other areas, your innovations are unlikely to have depth of their own.
have sex,
run to the forest,
meditate
A more powerful language is a better choice than a familiar one. The learning curve with the first is mostly a one-time cost, but the cost of a lower-level language (complexity and gruntwork) is ongoing and increases as your system grows.

Just as important is to pick something you both love and feel great about working in. If you can't find something you both love, try to figure out why. It may be a sign of incompatibility.
27 Features That Make Google Analytics Best of Breed
Drug Testing Hackers at Startups
Hey all,

In your experience, do startups drug test their hackers either for pre-employment screening or after they are hired?

It seems like it would be a waste of money for most startups, but I am curious to hear what the reality is.
Festivus is for the rest of us.
Digital Certificates: Do They Work?
Mozilla Labs: Introducing Weave
>It seems like it would be a waste of money for most startups

It is. I've never even heard of anyone even thinking of doing anything like that.
An alternative I develop in my spare time: http://tudulist.com

Tudulist stresses the "tool to work together" point btw.
10 things I hate about Star Trek
Just my list, what do you hate about it?
MySpace posted unique users registered, traffics, pageviews etc. So out of those 100M+ users, I'm sure they have higher rate of active users.

The other thing to consider is the limitation of 37signals product might raise the number of users. For example: you can only have 1 project in Basecamp. A solution for this would be to create another account.
"OOP to me means only messaging, local retention and protection and hiding of state-process, and extreme late-binding of all things. It can be done in Smalltalk and in LISP. There are possibly other systems in which this is possible, but I'm not aware of them." -Alan Kay

http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~ram/pub/pub_jf47ht34Ht/doc_kay...
I live near philly and there's always "brain drain" talk (aka how can we keep wharton grads in the city?) It looks like a lot of their speakers and mentors are in finance/accounting. So whatever they say, I think this project is not really about software startups.
It might be worse than a waste of money, actually. It would tend to repel smart people.

I remember once talking to a smart hacker who was leaving a big co where he'd worked for a while. He said he was leaving because they'd instituted drug testing. He himself didn't use any illegal drugs. He was quitting because it was a sign the company had become terminally lame.
Reliable Script Generated Email Delivery Anyone?
I'm ripping my hair out trying to reliably get emails through to my users for new invites, new messages, etc on my php app. For example, hotmail and yahoo aren't even letting the emails through to junk folders; the emails just disappear.

Has anyone had any experience with a trusted email delivery service that would handle making sure my valid emails get through to my users?
To start, nice idea! Congrats.

To start off, I am on a Mac with FireFox...

1. Your sign-up screen and log-in screen have a very different look from the home page, and from each other (one is centered, one is to the left, one shows the table borders, the other dosen't)
2. I am not sure I understand the need for a "Go Back" button on the sign-up screen.
3. When you go to the login screen (or the signup or the About page) the Title of the page disappears. [It shows only the hyphen]
4. Is there a reason why Google Stuff, Car Buying etc show up on the left hand side, and never change? Refreshing the page does not help, but the top "Groups" section starts.
5. Is there a way to browse the groups without having to refresh the page (Much like Amazons recommendations... maybe?)
6. When viewing a Tip, the Works! and Unique links don't look like links (or buttons) and only clicking on them tells you that there's something there...

P.S. I did not create an account, but I hope this gives you something to work with. Good luck!!!
Vista is probably running some DRM scheme on whatever your are trying to copy or delete and it locks up. Microsoft might not be saying it, but they must feel burned by putting in DRM everywhere. It is bringing them nothing but headaches.
I was trying to learn php along w/ MySQL. Nothing hard about it. Except every question was either "What do I want to do?" or "How do I do...?" By switching back to older technology I knew like the back of my hand, every question was, "What do I want to do?" because I already knew how. In my case, it wasn't just the choice of language, but also DBMS and operating system. Once the prototype was done, I starting my current phase, where all the questions are, "How do I do...?" Already have the what. IMO, a much more effective way to learn a new technology.
Fermilab nailed with steep budget cuts, 70% cut for their linear collider
until southwest opens their booking system to 3rd parties, nobody wins.
I just bought "The Little Schemer." It is rocking my world.
Newly Discovered Design Pattern: "Code Well."
That restriction is only for the free version.
If Microsoft and Apple had done that, they would have had to find new founders.
Another (of countless) example of "correlation must equal causation".

(Look at all the garbage those rats brought with them.)
I believe he's referring to how every single one of the languages and technologies listed in this post are not capitalized how they're normally capitalized.
Dumb typo. Thanks.
"...and proceeded to write a test harness for my new classes. As I'd surmised, this took me nearly as long as writing the code..."

Says more about poor management of the SDLC than the technology used. I don't care what technology you use, if you don't test, you're an idiot. And if you do know what you're doing, you can make it work with any technology (albeit some more easily than others).
Check the content of your e-mails. Are there links? Are there images? What is your domain name or sender name? What is the subject of your messages?
I.B.M. Buys In-Memory Database Company
i've stripped html, images, etc, it's just text

i'm running php through suphp(i think?) so that emails are not sent from "nobody"

i've set up an spf record

i've had servint(where site is hosted) properly set up the A records(though i can't be totally positive that they know what they were doing)

the only thing i haven't done(that i know of) is gone through the domainkey process through yahoo

thanks again for any help!
Cloud computing. What is it?
Excuse me for not pointing out the limitation is there for "free account". Either way my point stands still. There are people who don't want to pay for their service thus they chose this way. Once they're done with the project, they just don't bother login-in anymore. Kinda one-off situation.
Why Struts? Why can't Struts be buried?
Richard Feynman - Ode on a Flower
Testing is important, but not as important as filling out your TPS reports properly.
Consequently, I remember reading something that tried to explain the fourier transform using the same geometric interpretation of a rotating vector with its complex numbers. I think waves can be thought of as rotations as any point on the wave is going through a cycle, and the FT can "pick out" different frequencies by looking at where the vector lands.

I should go back and look at it. To this day, I never really fully comprehended that and the butterflies in FFTs.
Maybe it was from a pro pr firm that "gets blogging"?
Wheres ycombo's vid?
No. Not until latency is no longer a factor. Which , at least in the US, will not be for some time.
A Python Dnd Proficiency Engine
From my personal (not very broad) experience and from talking to people who ran/developed free websites with accounts, a typical ratio of total accounts vs active accounts is 10:1, perhaps 10:3 if you are really good. On top of that (depends on the service) you may have a significant percentage of active accounts that represent the same user, but 10% of active accounts seems like a safe bet.

TB uploaded/downloaded numbers are really useless, they just thrown them in to look more impressive I suppose.

This means they probably have 20-40K of real active BaseCamp users.
It's because Vista sends a backup copy of everything to Redmond while copying. Those people just need faster internet connections.
A Taste for Danger
No. I'll take a look, thanks for the link.
Are you sending the mail directly from PHP or are you sending to a mail relay you control (localhost)? I'd suspect your mail header are not correctly filled first. If you're not using a local relay your mail may be rejected?

Is there anything in any logs anywhere?
Ahh, that explains it. I need to be more of a web 2.0 scrooge :)
How effective is the wisdom of crowds as a security mechanism?
The Two Flavors of Google: Hadoop vs MapReduce
Get right with RFC Jesus on your server.

Be sure DNS is correct. You need reverse resolution--it doesn't have to resolve to the name of your host, it just needs to resolve to something. A sane SPF record is necessary to deliver to some hosts. A DomainKey may help deliver to some, though its adoption is still quite low. There are tools on the web to check your DNS zone for you, to be sure things are sane (though some of them are overly critical of unimportant details...but if you get them all right, then you don't have to worry about which ones are important).

Be sure you are sending through a real MTA, rather than using something hacked together in PHP (or whatever language). Every variation from standards is another point or two in the spamminess of your message...Postfix, Sendmail, exim, and qmail can all be configured to strictly adhere to standards. Most scripted mail send tools cannot.

Look at your maillog when testing. You'll know immediately if something didn't make it to the server, and you'll probably know why. The post-processing that leads to "it disappeared" situations usually come from your message looking so spammy that it wasn't even worth saving. If you have a real mail server that can receive as well as send, then you will probably get a bounce. You need to be able to receive those bounces. This isn't optional.
Give Visual Basic a look. It's 133+.
It's Harder to Read Code than to Write It
Thanks raju for the feedback.
Regarding (1),(2) (3) yea I got to clean those areas off.

(4) yea there is a reason, but not a very good one. I'll figure out a way to arrange groups thats more intutive to for the user, perhaps simply by most tips in group.
(5) I guess your refering back to the mainpage. Whats there right now is simply just a random group display. I'll rethink on that thought about the group browsing, I've tried to build the site on the principle of clean and minimalstic and avoid any flash or ajax whenever possible.
(6)I noticed that too last night when I added those buttons, but I thought "well they look good in IE" no big deal,...aha but you've noticed it too so I guess they've got to go.
The chaps fight with one another on blogs for the same reason. Oddly, it never helps with breeding.
I can tell you right now which charities help people.
A very cool hack!

I wonder how widely used head tracking systems are for gaming? I saw one at my friends, who plays a lot of flight simulators on his PC, and I guess basically the technology was quite similar to the Wii remote - IR-leds and a camera.
Ten Tips To Web 2.0 Your Office
These are really excellent data points, thanks SwellJoe.
Thanks for the pointer to Swig, it looks perfect for wrapping C.

Now what about wrapping an arbitrary language (ie, is there a "swig" equivalent for wrapping python, or any generic language X?)
If you have an email account somewhere with spamassassin, send some mails there, then look at the headers to see how SA scores you. Fix what's indicated and repeat. Not a 100% solution but it helps.
Ah, if only all companies were so small and work environments so humane...
RIFE of course. It handles login stuff and much more about authentication built in and also support uploading. Use RIFE/Crud. It takes less then 5 minutes. (it is a Java Framework by the way. rifers.org)
He's read his share of books...
You can't be normal and expect abnormal returns.
Spammer, i think -- read this first paragraph -- adlinks junked up in it, and submitted by a 2-hour-old account.

"What have I been doing all of these years... on a whim I picked up OK Computer and Amnesiac and am blown away -- great albums -- been listening to little else since purchasing them. I've always used simplified APIs built on SAX, so I felt it was time to learn the mechanics of it to expand the depth of my knowledge on that front. Must join <DELETED>.com and <DELETED>.com. Here is a Python class, using a generator object, that rolls n number of s sided dice:"
How do you send a mail using a real MTA? If I set up Sendmail and use the mail function in python or something, is that the right way to do it?
Solve This Puzzle to Get This Job
Look at how far we've come!
John Walker, founder of AutoCAD and programming demi-god, has a reading list that will blow your mind:
http://www.fourmilab.ch/fourmilog

I've been tipped off to several good books here.
Which ones, and how do you tell? I'm genuinely curious.
Interesting bug here - the ip in the link is 209.85.173.104. The address of the site shown after the link in brackets is 104.173.85.209.
The Unraveling of String Theory