skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've been waiting for an ereader since the late '90s. this kindle thing is a bit underwhelming but i am really looking forward to digital books:
a) all off-copyright books are(should) be free - dickens, jane austin, jack london, jules verne awesome ;-)
b) i love the feel of a book but i'm a voracious reader, my bookshelf literally takes over the rooms of my apartment - i don't really need hard copies of all the things i read
c) i like to parallel read a handful of books at the same time - i switch from technical to fluffy when i get bored
d) having said all that, i don't think i'm gonna be an early adopter of the kindle - i want an open digital standard and the right to move my copies around
Ask YC: Where's the best place for online discussion?
I've moved completely away from Reddit now and have Hacker News as my homepage. Great articles and obviously some great people.

What interests me is what forums / sites people on here use to discuss startups? I've always got questions - either of a technical or a business nature and after being in business myself now for around 14 years I've also a lot to offer (though I say so myself!) with various topics. There is a lot of talk on here about physical meet-ups, which is great, but we're all online so my interest is where we can meet up to help each other online. Where do you do this now?
Articles on history, phenomena, psychology, physics and more:
http://www.damninteresting.com/
Does Anyone Donate or Tip for Content/Software?
I would rather work with a more robust and defined language. Certainly having hacked dHtml for so long, javascript has grown a place in our hearts. I have not used it yet, so maybe I won't be impressed with how it works clientside. It's still new to me.
Oops, my bad then. I thought you had a reason to recommend Ruby.

Learn some basic hacking in (insert a programming language (that's not VB) here, whatever the paradigm). :-)
Why can't an iphone function as an ebook reader? Is it just too small?
Yup. Just did actually about 15 minutes ago :) I just donated for an online Python book. This one:

http://gnosis.cx/TPiP/

We found it useful. Also the fact that the guy was moaning that nobody gave made me do it :) Wonder if thats just marketing!
It doesn't have to be an either/or proposition. I would like to have a bookshelf of paper books and electronic copies on a reader. The one for reading in traditional fashion and the other for reading on a plane/ train etc.

Owning two types of cars (or a car and a motorcycle) maybe a more helpful metaphor than horse and buggy vs car. The Pragmatic Programmers release all their books as non drm-ed pdfs and you can buy both the electronic copy and the pdf if you choose. They seem to do well.

But yes, the kindle is very underwhelming, I'll for a better reader without DRM (or at least hackable DRM).
Thanks, those educational recommendations are nice.

Joining an open source project, or helping people out in a technical forum is honorable, but not what I'm looking for, since coding is what I usually do. Love citeseer and damninteresting.

I guess I'll go pick up some old books of mine too.

Thanks, keep stuff coming.
Also check out the lift web framework, written in Scala

http://liftweb.net/

Highlights (from link):

Advanced Framework

Lift has a number of great features for web developers. Many inspired from existing frameworks like Seaside, Rails, Django, TurboGears, and Wicket:

* Comet support is easy to add and scalable
* Mapping between databases and code is easy (Rails)
* Content and code are well separated (Wicket, TurboGears)
* Forms are secure by default (Seaside)
* Convention over configuration is emphasized, no xml hell (Rails)
* Component model makes pages elements easier to create and maintain (Wicket)
* Prebuilt classes are provided for standard functions, e.g. User (Django)
* Semantic information carries from model to enable smart display. e.g. postal code, social security number, email address
* State machine support for model objects, including timeouts. e.g. after 3 days w/o confirmation, delete this new account
* Site Map provides site wide navigation and access control support
Personally I really don't see much value in paper at all. Beyond romanticizing the medium, what do you gain? Every objection I've heard of (readability, battery life, etc) is just a transient technological phase. DRM is horrid, but it's no more a natural feature of e-books than NDAs are a natural feature of paper.

The whole romance of paper thing reminds me of the romance of film. Didn't slow the digital camera one iota.
Having connected and electronic books gives you possibilities that weren't available when they're in print. They might lose some of the advantages of print (like bragging rights of having a full bookshelf), but the advantages it confers outweighs it in other ways that you can't imagine if you frame it in terms of the old.

As with any new technology, it's hard to think of it in terms of the old technology. The often quoted quip about radio is:

"The wireless music box has no imaginable commercial value. Who would pay for a message sent to no one in particular?" -- Associates of David Sarnoff responding to the latter's call for investment in the radio in 1921.

What's funny is that later, a radio pioneer says this about television:

"While theoretically and technically television may be feasible, commercially and financially it is an impossibility, a development of which we need waste little time dreaming." -- Lee DeForest, American radio pioneer and inventor of the vacuum tube, 1926

While TV might have killed the radio star, it hasn't completely supplanted it. By the same token, paper books won't go away any time soon, but you'll soon see advantages to having electronic and sharable books. You can search it, annotate it (as a group!), and cross reference it. You can discuss it and you can get it instantly, and licenses pending, we might get a new market of people that slice and dice excerpts from different sources--not just blogs and feeds, but from classics (Caterbury tales, Catch-22, etc)...like reader digest, but a proliferation of it based on different niches and interests.
Ask YC: Are there *any* startups using ASP.NET?
Seems like the number is small...but I'm still curious. Bonus Question: Why did you pick the web framework that you are currently using?
Making the transition from corporate to startup
For some, it's a status symbol. A full brain usually has a full bookshelf, but the converse isn't necessarily true. People will pretend to have a full brain by showing off a full bookshelf. In fact, The Great Gatsby has a library full of books with uncut pages. It use to be that the printer printed books by folding them like an accordion and just binding one side. Therefore, every pair of pages in the book would be bound together, and you had to cut them apart as you read it for the first time.

You can see some books nowadays emulating this sort of thing with the ragged edges, sometimes.

Gatsby didn't read books--he never cut them. He just had them to show off to Daisy.
Why Kindle Is No iPod
Splashup.com
I try to go read a book whenever I catch myself wasting too much time on the web. My book queue is way too long and too interesting to be wasting my time looking at cat macros.

I also have reddit, slashdot, cnn, kuro5hin, and fark pointing to 127.0.0.1 in my /etc/hosts file. The only sites I allow myself to check now are news.yc and nytimes.com
Remember 2.0 isn't even out yet.
Scala also compiles down to CLR (.NET) bytecode, though granted the support for CLR is not nearly as good as the support for JVM.

I think the comparison to F#/ocaml is only skin-deep. Scala does have type inference, which saves a lot of typing compared to Java. For example, in Java one might write:

IWidgetClassFactory factory = new WidgetClassFactory();

In Scala one can get away with:

val factory = new WidgetClassFactory

The parens are optional. There as no type declaration for "factory", yet the language is still strongly typed, so the type of "factory" is inferred at compile-time. In many ways Scala code "feels" like Ruby (in the brevity and expressivity of its syntax), but strong type-checking means you avoid bugs (at compile-time) that in Ruby you'd have to catch with extensive unit tests or total system failure every now and then.

Scala also has a sophisticated Actor library based on Erlang's actors. Scala's extensible syntax means that the following is valid Scala code (and was implemented as a -library-, it's not part of the language specification).

val response = myActor !? request

Actors are lightweight, so you can spawn hundreds of thousands of them on a single JVM, yet (unlike Ruby) they run on top of system threads, so you get real concurrency. This is unbelievably awesome for web development. Imagine keeping an actor thread alive for every logged in user to your site. Combine this with Ajax/Comet and you can "push" any updates out to the user as they become available.

Anyway, I'll stop raving, but check out Scala by Example (link elsewhere in the comments) and the lift web framework written in Scala (link elsewhere in the comments).
When large companies say something like "I'm hiring them for their wide-ranging intelligence.." they are usually lying their ass off but in startups that usually is true.

From my experience in startups, most of them care just as much about your 2 cents as about your LOC.

Because startups are much more malleable and prone to change their direction, strategy, market & product every input matters and sometimes you can recoup your entire hiring cost for an engineer from a single sentence he says offhand in some discussion.
Skittr, a Twitter clone that scales easily, written in 170 lines of Scala and lift
I read most books on paper. Simply put, the kindle won't change that, and will probably reinforce it.

This could be useful if it were given freely to students and loaded with required reading by the school, but the cost would have to come in significantly below OLPC.

Even then, I feel like Amazon is late to the party, and at the wrong address anyway. The trend is moving away from stovepiped single-purpose devices and towards multi-function mobile devices. I'll wait for the next round of phone-camera-media-browser-dishwasher-espresso-cart-robot-lackey to include an eBook plugin. Speaking of that, which reader of this site is already at work building an eBook reader for Android?
plentyoffish.com
To split some technical hairs, According to Peepcode's Rails 2.0 pdf, Rails then uses OpenSSL::HMAC hashing. According to the source code cited by the article, http://dev.rubyonrails.org/browser/trunk/actionpack/lib/acti... it generates a SHA512 digest with the secret key. The marshal() method includes both an encoded cleartext and the SHA512 digest for "integrity checks". Note that the HEAD revision is r6424, not r6184; r6424 uses the HMAC digest, but still includes both the plaintext and the hashed version with an integrity check.

I don't know enough about the relative merits of HMAC vs. SHA512 hashing. I do know it still depends on the developer remembering to change the secret key into something harder to crack.

This isn't exactly a Rails 2.0 thing, though. Cookie-based session store was merged in in Rails 1.2.x, but enabled by default in Rails 2.0. You can still use memcached or "ActiveStore".

This security vulnerability is probably going to be one of the biggest gotcha for a newbie developer, as there is a wave of inexperienced or irresponsible Rails developers getting in on the action. Newcomers are still looking at the old, "write a blog in 15 minute" video made during the Rails 0.3 days, or the O'Reilly "Write a cookbook Rails app, parts one of three". Or Agile Web Development with Rails, 2nd Ed., which does not mention this gotcha.

One solution to this problem is not to depend on the developer to think up or generate a password. Rails 2.0 allows you to write "initializer" snippets that automatically load when placed in the appropriate directory. It would be almost trivially easy to write such a snippet that loads the secret key from an configuration file, and if one does not exist, automatically generate it. Such a setup would not depend on saving the secret key into the version control system, and can be refreshed every time the app gets deployed using an automation tool such as Capistrano. Though it would (should) invalidate all the current user sessions once redeployed.

Under this setup, you definitely don't want to serialize objects into the session. That's a surprisingly popular practice among a small minority of Rails developers.
What are the benefits? What is bad about it?
You didn't hear?! Hit 20K karma and get invited to a one minute YC interview. Get started!
I plan on using it.
No, the browser is definitely not just an application in Android. It is WebKit, which is in the framework layer.

Android can run any language that can compile to the JVM. On the other hand, compiling to Java bytecode really isn't much different from a source-to-source translation to Java text - at least not from the programmer's point of view. And have you ever programmed in an S2S environment? Sucko.

As for (2), you are absolutely right. The basic problem is that if the Web had been designed as an application platform from the start, the installable application would be dead.

But is the way to fix this to build a new installable application environment? Or a new network application environment?
unless your application is very unusual, you could've just ported your < 10 bottlenecks and made the same gain. (and x60? right..)
I think that this is/will be the direction of every industry which hires people to do creative work, whether writing/hacking/design.

And the only way big companies will be able to persist is to create a mechanism for launching offshoots of themselves by investing in co-ventures between current/former employees/entrepreneurs and the company.
I'm using it, basically because I'm extremely familiar with it. No ramp up time trying to suss out new language and framework specific work-arounds.
Not buying it when the pilot tells you weather is holding up your flight? iPhone to the rescue!
It emits light, strains the eyes, and uses a lot of power.
The people working on the hottest stuff will not tell you what "new" technologies they are working on. Very little of it is ever "new", just new ways of putting it together.
Nature inspired robot locomotion
its not obvious huh?
We should create one off this site. I'd definitely use it
A Wiring Diagram of the Brain
Synchronised shaking connects gadgets securely
Brutal ads on this site. You'd hope for better from the New Scientist.
Not everything. Just everything that is important. Most of buttons are to help them with things that are fun, not to automate tedious or hard tasks. I could only spot one computer that had a "homework" button.

Good article.
eppraisal.com
Bee Dance Strategy Helps Servers Run More Sweetly
You can learn a lot from "a child" (great article, must see video)
not to me :) This site is obviously filled with people who are passionate. Some of the startup sites are terrible and not focused on web/online startups. Programming forums are generally that but a fusion site, mixing programming, design and business would be great.
Misleading headline. Good article.
News aggregators.
There are plenty of startups using ASP.NET or Java-based tech. In fact most companies started by "business types" are .NET/Java because they are easier to find disposable coders for.

You don't see as many .NET shops here because most posters are (a) young, (b) non-business types, and they had a chance to pick a technology. Most went with something dynamic and Linux-based.

We did too. We're on RoR, despite having tons of .NET expertise. And here is why: (a) speed of developemnt, (b) cost of decent dedicated hosting, (c) more fun
OK so it is not a perfect solution but it is still a whole of a lot better than tailoring and adapting your application for every phone out there.
I bought an iphone which is the first pda-sized 'thing' I've ever had. I've found myself reading blogs and even a few chapters of a Python ebook on there (PDF) so whilst I love to sit and read a book I'd be very happy to do so on a device. However, its damn ugly and I'd want it to at least look cool if I'm going to be sitting using it in a cafe!
"Robust" seems to me to be a bit of a weasel word - a term that can mean whatever you want it to. What do you mean by "robust"?

Defined is a more meaningful word. I believe both languages have specs that clearly define how the language should behave. I suspect what you mean here is that when doing client-side programming, you'd prefer to only have to worry about one implementation instead of the 4-5 Javascript interpreters we currently need to worry about.
we are using .net, anyone here an expert .net user? with "nhibernate" experiance?

we want to move to mono on ec2 in 2008.
myspace moved to asp.net after they were bought by news corp.
I'm finishing a survey of web development technologies class. We've covered everything from PHP to Perl + CGI, classic ASP and ASP.NET, and JSP. I spent this past summer learning RoR, and I plan on picking up Django next summer.

[non-flame-bait personal opinion]

And, I have to say that I came to a strong dislike for ASP.net. In fact I was carrying a 4.0 until this ASP.NET project. I disliked it so much, I didn't finish the project. Perhaps if I spent more time on it, It might fit a little better, but from what I"ve seen, I hate it mightily.

The benefits:

It works well with IIS and the Microsoft Server stack. If that's what you know, stick with it. You'll spend months learning unix shell commands, and file structure, and how to install things, etc... I'm more of a unix guy and prefer to develop with unix on the server side. If that's not your cup of tea, then stay on the Microsoft side of life.

The cons:

I also didn't like the idea of ASP.NET pages. I found it really combuersone to code all the labels in the body of the <script> tags, and then output them at the bottom in the html. I simply found it really hard to get my mind around the ASP.NET way. I really didn't want to understand the ASP.NET way, I guess. I don't like how it handles SQL queries. I found it burdensome and cumbersome to write 5-6 lines of code on every page that access the database, to set the SQL query to a variable, execute the query. put the SQL query into a reader, then transfer the reader to another variable that's usable. Too long, clanky, too long. And, doing that for every page you're working on: BOORRRIIIINnnnggg! :)

Disclaimer

I was just starting out with ASP.NET, and I'm sure there's tips and tricks that would speed development up, and I'm sure I went about things all wrong. It's just that Rails really spoiled me this past summer. with the MVC model. Set up database connections once, access what you need through active record. Variables are there for you in the controller. Spit them out and format them in your views. It's like Ron Popeil says about his rotisserie: You set it and forget it!

[/non-flame-bait personal opinion]
Firefox 3 Beta 1: The Memory Use Says It All
Good idea inovica. That would be a great mix for a forum.
The problem with forcing apps to be written in Java/dex bytecode is that you can go higher-level (Python/Ruby/Scala/etc.) but you can't go lower-level (C/asm). So if you want to add any new audio/video codecs, they are guaranteed to be much slower than the built-in codecs. If you want to write your own browser it has to be in bytecode, while the built-in WebKit browser is native code.

But Android phones may allow native apps; we really don't know at this point.
Brutal ads on this site. You'd hope for better from the New Scientist.
On top of my head:

predictify.com

loopt.com

pickspal.com/pickspop.com

triphub

You can look at craigslist to get a feel of startups using .Net.

http://sfbay.craigslist.org/search/jjj?query=c%23+startup
Please don't group Java together with .NET :D
Wow, that must be some good hosting if you have to get an invitation for the privilege of paying for it.
iamelgringo,

Have you tried Data Access Application Blocks?
We use them and we only need 1 line of code to read the database.

SqlHelper.ExecuteReader(strConnTxt, CommandType.Text, strSql);

Alternatively, you can use SqlHelper.ExecuteDataset.

We also use Code Generation software that builds all the CRUD methods automatically.
I thought that THIS forum was what you're talking about. What am I missing?
I'm not generalizing but I know a lot of people who hate/won't use .Net mainly because it is a Microsoft product.

What I believe is good with .Net is the 3rd-party support (free or commercial). The Visual Studio tool is also very easy to use and ramps up your development.
This is a great site - don't get me wrong. For news its wonderful and its great to see what other people are doing. However, for general advice type questions (more suitable for a forum) the site isn't designed for that and I was wondering where people tend to go other than this site to interact with likeminded people
Nope, not a one. :P
Not as much as this guy has eh?
docstoc is .net I do believe.

I use it and make a decent living programming it.

Use the best tool for the job and don't bogged down with what is trendy.

As someone already stated its easy to find talent. Also most of the fortune 100 websites use it.

mySpace use it so it scales well enough.

MVC is available for those that are willing to look around. However there is an official MVC toolset coming soon which will make some big gains on ROR.

At least its not Java :p
Atlas Shrugged movie in 2008 (Angelina Jolie as Dagny Taggart)
Yes, the position was for the build team, so I assume maintaining that beast was part of the job.
OK, I think that this site is both. I have posted my problems here and gotten excellent responses. I have learned quite a bit on others' postings. Also, I like to think I've contributed, too. Give it a try - you may be pleasantly surprised by the response.

(Most of my concerns are NOT technical. I can go to Webmonkey or Barnes & Noble for that. I'm more interested in how others like myself handle similar situations, technical or business. So far, I haven't found anyplace better, but if anyone does, I'm all ears.)
I never got the speed of development argument. I can put together the ror blog example quicker with .net.

I have found people trying to develop .net apps like Java ones and this adds needless overhead.
Notice how many of these were in the last bubble. Notice how much VC money these people burned through. These companies even got private people--Whoopi Goldberg--and corporations like Coca Cola to invest millions in these startups.

I'd bet you could add up all of the VC money given to web 2.0 startups for the last 4-5 years, and it wouldn't add up to the money given to cue-cat + Kozmo + Webvan. ($1.23 billion)

You've got to be kidding me! We could start 1000 startups for that kind of money and have plenty left over to buy a small carribean island to move to and run our startups from while drinking fruity drinks and getting massages.

I just don't get the hoopla of bubble 2.0. Nothing to see folks, just keep moving along and keep working on your startups.
If you are not against Java you might want to check out JSF. Code your pages using Facelets though, its better than using JSP. JSF is nice because (unlike ASP.net) it cleanly separates behavior and presentation (its purely MVC).

And its a component based architecture which is rendering format agnostic (HTML, WML, XHTML-MP, cHTML). So you can code one page which can render the contents in a different format depending on the client device. This is what the JSF MobileFaces library does when you hit the page from a mobile phone. It automatically renders the page in the proper format for the target device without the developer needing to worry about the details.

The problem is JSF is complicated, which can be very frustrating. For this reason I just use it as the underlying framework, which basically just directs to my GWT pages.