skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Your right, for brevity's sake, I sacrificed clarity. Perhaps "programmers of software driven by large enterprise marketing departments"
Even the fine grained estimates? Maybe if you are building software to "spec" (ie someone elses) but for actual software companies, I find it hard to believe that works well that often. Leaves no room for "discoveries". But everything else seems consistent with my experience.
By the way, if anyone wants to talk about a serious platform, how sick is .NET right now? First IronPython, then IronRuby and F#, now LOLCode.

Microsoft is still a (relevant!) tech behemoth, whether we want to admit it or not.
Actually I was thinking more in terms of pushing code into production that I haven't tested properly. In all other things I try to make a habit of embracing risk.
Pycha: A library for making charts with Python
Well, I think the point is that Microsoft gave Facebook $240 million in exchange for a few things. A "strategic alliance", 1.6% equity stake, an advertising deal for Facebook ads outside the US, etc. Now, it's not correct to just multiply those numbers to arrive at Facebook's book value, but the deal certainly values Facebook very highly: as a company that Microsoft is willing to essentially give $240 million to at a very generous valuation. So while Facebook aren't a $15 billion company, they're a company that can raise $240 million in exchange for a small equity slice and an ad deal -- which is a very highly-valued (overvalued?) company indeed.
KnowledgeBid v2 - looking for feedback on new design
We got great feedback on v1 and could use some more...

http://www.knowledgebid.com

v1 feedback from YC: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=65969
hopefully we removed enough text for you guys...
I remember the previous version. This is much better. It's good that you pushed the listing to a second page. The overall design could be better, but it's good enough.

Now, building a community is your biggest challenge. The age-old chicken and egg problem.
"How are you handling ACID guarantees?"

Maybe I'm missing something but I don't see how ACID plays into things. You don't imagine the search engine is putting stuff in to the database do you?

From the link above, "Do any of these with your "big hash table" in less than 1 second"

1 second is eternity as far as my search engine is concerned. If I can't handle a request in less than a couple of milliseconds, I'd say I've failed. I've used this same approach in the past on a search engine that indexed 14 million records btw, and I didn't fail ;-)
There may be a point here, but I am still uncomfortable with the use of the Pythagorean theorem here. Even if applied to areas only, it seems like a stretch. In fact with this approach one can suggest other identities. For example, if you replace squares with cubes (or circles with spheres), you will have a^3+b^3=c^3. And this clearly has nothing to do with the Pythagorean theorem.
Nice GEB reference, upmods for you!
Do you think it may be similar to the political phenomenon of not voting for / supporting a candidate because of his/her lack of perceived ability to win?
14 million? Okay, that's not very much. A RAM-based approach is fine there.
averages are for average people
If anyone doesn't remember how v1 looked - you can check it out here:
http://www.knowledgebid.com/images/v1.gif
[After YC denial]

"Over? Did you say "over"? Nothing is over until we decide it is! Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor? Hell no! And it ain't over now. Cause when the goin' gets tough.... ..... .... the hackers get goin! Who's with me?? Let's go!"
Heh, fair enough. Do many startups really have more than a few tens of millions of records to search though?
The Blub Paradox also applies to editors/IDEs
>Actually historically there were numerous instances of largely-homosexual civilizations. Just look up the true story behind the movie 300.

This is anecdotal evidence. Isolated societies that practice homosexuality do not offer a sound argument against the general trend. Note that you can only think of a few examples.

>I think you completely forgot about masturbation, which pretty much destroys that entire line of argument ;) Males "waste" sperm on a constant basis. :)

Recall that is is a conversation about bisexuality and homosexual behavior, not homosexuality which is obviously not evolutionarily helpful to a homosexual man (although there are theories that account for the genes that increase the liklihood of homosexuality having an evolutionary advantage for the women that carry them). Evolution is not a boolean question, traits propagate according to their relative success. Men who only want to have sex with women are more likely to deposit more sperm into women than men who deposit sperm wherever it fits. Masturbation would work against both populations.

>Actually in many societies men were NOT focused on social interaction with females.

I did not say interacting with women. Lots of people interact with women without reproducing. I said 'interfacing,' which was meant as a euphemism for fucking. I will spare you the confusion of further euphemisms. Son, people fuck everywhere.
I can't speak statistically, but the one I work for now does and the one I'm about to start will too (but in the latter case I'm writing a DBMS, so that's kind of a pathological example).

If all your content is human-generated and O(n) in size, then 10^7 is a lot. The big numbers come when your data is produced by a simulation, or when you're doing OLAPey things with O(n^2)-sized intermediate results. Real-life example: keeping a log of all users, the IPs they've logged in from, and when, and looking for evidence of sockpuppet accounts.
Willie Nelson might sing it thus,

"Mothers, don't let your boys grow up to be a Mycologist studying the genetic basis of host response to invasive pulmonary aspergillosis"
Glad you think it's better than v1 - anything in particular jump out that could be better with this design?
Wondering when you were going to be called on to work really hard? It's now. Step up.
How is this modded down at all? I've found this is exactly the case.
I used Hypercard very briefly before moving on to MetaCard, which was more powerful, cross-platform, and had better color and multimedia support. I built a bunch of monster stacks in MetaCard, including a complete ERP system for a 350 person company (!)

I found that both tools were incredibly productive and actually made it much easier for me to jump to Lisp because I was already familiar with things that would seem 'magic' to programmers using more traditional tools. The productivity, dynamic features, and 'macros' had me programming circles around some of my competitors in my niche at the time. Many people thought the Card tools were toys, but they allowed faster development than anything out there and my compiled stacks STILL run faster than, say, Java. Yes, even today. I know this because I benchmarked it recently. One company is STILL using the MetaCard-based ERP system I wrote, and a video store chain is still using a POS system I co-wrote.

When the MetaCard technology was sold, I moved on to using a tool by the buyer of the technology, a Scottish company called Runtime Revolution. By that time, I had discovered some other tools that were also very powerful and I was focusing on mostly web apps, so I stopped using the Card technology. (Even though the tool has internet features built-in.) I still know some companies that have great products on the market that are secretly based on *Card technology, though.

If you are really into HyperCard-type technology, you should check out www.runrev.com. In some ways, it is still ahead of many of the alternatives. In fact, I have an enterprise license and a training book that I'm not using if you want to contact me. There is also a Python-based Hypercard-like system around that you should look at, although it is much more primitive.
great then
Spot on. It would seem Tools are critical to a software factory, Languages to software innovators.

Noting the the reference to Lazlo: http://www.openlaszlo.org/
"OpenLaszlo is "write once, run everywhere." An OpenLaszlo application developed on one machine will run on all leading Web browsers on all leading desktop operating systems."
Heard this before?
Too much gray, and too little white space. And the white space issue applies to the listing page as well.

But again, these little details are not what makes Web sites succeed or fail. Unfortunately, most of the feedback you get here will probably focus on the design because that's the easiest thing to comment on. If you want real feedback, talk to your customers. Even better, watch what they do or not do and study their behavior.
Yes, it takes brains to use Wasabi, a language that's probably roughly as powerful as the next release of Visual Basic.
Erm, didn't the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbour?
Thanks for clarifying. We're looking for design feedback here, as well as anything else we can get.
Agreed, better than v1. Just one more design bug: avoid gradients. Just avoid it. Gradients are bad. Its very hard to create pleasant gradients. apple.com pulls it off.and thats not encouraging, because you know who designs for them. Do you really want to throw that kinda money at design. Take the easier way out. Avoid gradients.

Other than that, we just have to use this thing to give more useful feedback beyond site design. Roll on with the beta.
Maybe Steve and Mark are both Harvard drop-outs, and the Google founders aren't? Steve lost one hacker (in Bill leaving the company) so now he's going for the next-in-kin?
"If a thing's worth doing, it's worth doing badly."

I thought this was mine for years, but Chesterton beat me to it. Generally, if something is worthwhile, but not critical, it's worth spending the 20% of the time to get it 80% of the way there, and doing five such slipshod jobs, rather than one perfect one.

This is contrary to every reasonable software engineering practice, which is probably because it works better for things which aren't software, like user testing or business planning.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0077975/quotes
Looks great. Any plans to provide a history of successful contracts for a specific area, to give potential users an idea of what the going market price is?
Or you could use Lucene (either the native Java version or one of its many ports) and leave the information retrieval to the experts.

Do you really want to implement stemming, WordNet integration, etc. yourself? No, you don't, if you know what's good for you.
Bad mouthing a market you're about to buy into isn't so dumb. If he were super enthusiastic about Facebook in the first discussion, Microsoft might have had to pay more to get the deal.

"It's just a fad" == "I can walk away from this deal" -- one of the best negotiating positions possible.
Well, Berkeley DB is totally ACID and it's fast as shit.

But BDB isn't a database, it's more of a storage engine, which is why complex queries of the kind you like to cherrypick are obviously a poor fit for it.
Is the the time right for mobile web?
Motorola: Apple won't open the iPhone
That's a very interesting idea - have to think about how we could pull that off. It definitely would be informative...but tough since there is going to be huge variance in who people are going to want to talk to.
Do you know anything about the early history of Microsoft?
This is a gem. It is now the subtitle of my blog. It will be misinterpreted, but oh well.
Prism, a new experiment from Mozilla Labs, lets users split web applications out of the browser
This claim comes as Moto just announces a 94% drop in 3Q profits. Think someone is a bit scared, maybe?
Yep, I have 10 years experience..I am java/j2ee programmer and architect .. I have done Computer engineering ....coding in any language is not an issue
Does this mean new engineers who join facebook will get stock options with a strike price reflecting the $15B valuation? Won't that make it harder to recruit people?
the animated gifs: make it transition instead of having it disappear and reappear. at first i thought it was your server being slow at loading images then i realize it's animated. have the first frame show an image instead of starting out blank.

icons: why are they alternating between b/w and color?

featured listing needs its own call-out box. it's featured content, make it look like it.

the how it works section can use some work as well. numbers perhaps?
any sample output?
What's rms do to deserve the downvote? The quote is from that movie, and that movie is brilliant.
Yes that would be better. But then a lot of software falls under that. That which doesn't can also be described in belittling terms. Pick any software you like, mostly it will be trivial (or possible to describe it in trivial terms).
I remember the v1, and this definitely looks a lot better. I have one suggestion though: the 3+3 main points on either side are the ones that people will probably read first, so users should be able to easily understand how the process works. I had to read a second time slowly of the left side before I really got it, especially the first two points (more especially the second point). Maybe something like Talk to Experts in this area (I don't know if they usually can be qualified as experts, or maybe another wording for people who know these things).

If you don't get what I am saying I could try to rephrase it somehow..
animated gif - good call. i'll try to add in a frame of fade, and start it off with an image.

icons - we wanted the icons in color on the front page to stand out a little more - since they're key points for each side.. maybe it doesnt appear as that?

featured listings and how it works - we tried toning this down so people would focus on the main image.. might have to rethink that idea if its distracting.

thanks for the feedback.
juanpablo dot scaletti at gmail

it works as IM too
Probably because "Amateurs" is an F word?
I agree.. Trying to put the whole process into 3 short steps is difficult though..

I think because people define (and dont define) themselves as different things like "expert", "seller", "provider", or "qualified information source".. then its like what even is a "qualified information source" - i guess it could be a book? a website? a person?

we just need an all including, short word, for this type of person.. that people can identity properly as the person providing insight to the market researchers/product managers.
"It works in my machine"
Aaargh!

I swore I would shoot the next person that said that to me. :)
Lolz.... I iz in ur screen riting ur code
no wai... mikrosoft still suckz,,,. ^_^
Storm worm going out with a bang, mounts DDoS attacks against researchers
LOLspeak on news.yc. Now I've seen it all.
Inflatable car will treat you like a Martian probe
I'd call it a database, just not a relational one. It has everything except a query compiler.
San Francisco's only hacker bed and breakfast
First, let this and other examples show that backing down from what you believe, won't save you or your position if you get embroiled in a controversy. So now he looks like a coward in addition to looking prejudiced.

Second, there is no correlation between IQ and being morally upright, from my experience (and I doubt that there are many studies on it either). And what he was complaining about are the high rates of corruption in African governments, which is about morals, not IQ.
The chef does molecular gastronomy or food hacking. Anyone here ever booked dinner with him?
Fossil record supports evidence of impending mass extinction
This is a very disorienting idea.
Facebook's Stock Options
I don't think that anyone is about to confuse a bell curve with a delta function.
' "Any time I hear someone say "Lisp would be popular except for problem X" I think of some other computer language that became popular despite problem X.'

In the absence of corporate backing (java , c#) , to become popular, a language needs a BDFL leading an open source implementation effort, who knows how to enthuse, manage and coordinate contributors.

The whole "standardization by comittee" is an anachronism (in the absence of corportae backing,, and imho). Not to mention the misanthropic lisp "community" that hangs out on comp.lang.lisp.

And libraries. Lots of them.
And/Or a "killer app" that drives adoption.

Also XML didn't succeed as a programming language. Lisp Vs Xml isn't a proper comparison.
Anybots' Dexter the star of Robo Development
"there is no correlation between IQ and being morally upright"

That's why being smart isn't the most important attribute to look for in people.
It's not as hard to build a startup in New York City as you've heard
there are some examples of output (horizontal and vertical barchart, line chart and pie chart) at the package's example directory
It seems to apply, but in reverse. I never really grasped what IDEs were for till I saw someone at a conference editing Java code in one. Now I get it: they're for generating the macroexpansions that your source code consists of in such languages.

I suspect IDEs are like Bail Bondsmen. It may be a good sign if you don't know what they're for.
They do it everytime they make blanket statements like one race is more intelligent than another or people at 20 solve problems better than people at 50.
Initially, the title bugged me because I generally associate specialists as people who are actually good as something (anything), and generalists with people who aren't, and therefore defend their lack of goodness by calling themselves generalists. This is probably the more mainstream use of the term. For instance, a computer science generalist might be very happy, because he's good at many different kinds of software and computing, and can use many different techniques to achieve a goal, but a journalist would call him a computer science specialist. A computer science specialist, by contrast, is somebody like a professor of PL research who has poured his entire career, and especially his journey to tenure, into a useless pedantic language that no one will ever use. To a journalist, both are specialists, but to a CS guy, the first is a generalist, and the second is a specialist. So, if you were a journalist, or more generally not invested in a particular field (let alone subfield), the essay wouldn't make sense.
wrong. The sum of an infinite geometric series is a finite sum. If an infinite parade of new languages each drag us halfway to lisp eventually we'll all be programming in it
Darpa's Robot Car Race: Gentlemen, Start Your Processors
Brin
"We really started to grow (Google) during the bust of the dot com bubble," he said. "Their timing may be somewhat inverted." Google, he said, benefited from the discipline imposed on it by the bust. "I think that's an extra challenge that they face," he added"

it's obvious he is considering Facebook overvalued
Hackers: 'Your Vonage Call is Owned'
Pageless pagination: cease and desist
Ruby in Leopard: Ruby 1.8.6, 30 gems, Objective-C bridge, XCode and Interface builder integration
http://steve.yegge.googlepages.com/transformation

Skip to the bottom section if you're in a hurry.
I would add some listings on each side, maybe about 3 to 5 with a more link to see more. I want instant gratification, an extra click might send me away.
Developing extensions for Firefox an exercise in futility
Looks much better than the previous version, but I wanted to ask:

What about those 16 <br> below the div container, why are they there?
at FogzBuz developers don't write software... software writes itself!!
if you use a mac and gmail, check out mailplane. it's like this but better for gmail
I have found a potential team, but...
So here I am again asking for your knowledge and expertise.

I am currently taking an entrepreneurship class, and in this class we were all required to write up a two page pitch of a product or service idea. We were then given a certain amount of virtual points that we could use to invest in the projects we found interesting and profitable, and the top 2 would have to pick teams for a mock startup. My project came in first, and after responding to some grilling questions from the professor today, I was approached by 3 other students. These students expressed great interest in being part of my team, which is great, but I soon realized that they wanted to create a real team to pursue the development of my idea. I was flattered and excited, and we have exchanged emails to talk about it even further, but after giving it some thought, I grew a bit apprehensive.

I'm not sure if these folks are rockstar hackers, or have the strength to endure a startup. I don't want to jump into this on a high of excitement with people that perhaps might not be fit for it. So, I ask you, how do I go about deciphering whether these guys are persons who are smart, talented, and have a strong personality to undertake such a task? I want to go about this the smart and right way, because I know emotions can fog up the intellect and really mess up your decisions.

Thanks.
I wished. The place is full of hot girls. That's really good motivation for mot young (straight) guys.

My guess, too much fun can get distracting, hence NYC startups will be less successful than SV ones. (SV is the most boring place in the world, after Reno Nevada).
Quickstart: Debugging Ruby on Rails Applications
This article is for those that are new to Ruby on Rails, or those that have not spent the time learning the various debugging techniques.
Probably not the worst way to explain it. Now all you have to do is convince yourself that seeing the expanded code is a good thing, and you've just sold yourself completely on Java.

PS: It definitely can be a good thing, depending on your needs.
This reads sorta like an amalgamation of Google's internal code practices docs. That is, it seems like pretty good advice to me.
Can anyone confirm that the stock options offered from now on must be based on the valuation of the company from the most recent round of funding? I have a hunch Facebook's internal valuation's a ton short of $15 billion.
fixed - i added them in when testing low anchor links on the faq and definition pages - (ie http://www.knowledgebid.com/definition#total_earned )
Well said.

One thing that was glaringly missing from Joel's article was the importance of taking in user feedback and iterating like crazy. I'd go so far as to say that iteration is even more important than fine-grained estimates.
"Anybots says Dexter can go wherever people can go, including climbing stairs and ladders."

Has a ladder been tried yet? That'd be awesome to see.
Uh, we didn't say that. We said _our robots_ _will eventually_ be able to go wherever people can go, including stairs and maybe ladders. They currently are restricted to floors with small random crap on them.

The point of the wherever-people-can-go idea is that the whole Anybots vision of the robotics market in the next 20 years is that AI won't be production-ready, but teleoperated robots will certainly be production ready. So, we merely have to design robots and software that can smoothly allow a remote operator to behave as if (s)he is actually in the environment the robot is in, and perform tasks that way. In particular, this involves going most places people can go.

So, we have a big bank of monitors that displays a big panorama fusing all of Monty's cameras, so the operator can see what's going on, and a glove and backpack operation that allows the operator's movements to be sent back to the robot.
First ask yourself how do you know that you have the strength to endure a startup, then ask your potential co-founders some questions (maybe the same questions that appeared in the YC application form).

Other fact that you may consider is that you know them since a couple of days ago.
... or you can just use a proper full-text search package (e.g. tsearch2 for PostgreSQL), and get all that for free, with a lot more features (stemming, dictionaries, sophisticated ranking, etc.). For non-trivial queries, it is also likely to be at least as efficient as your home-grown search package is likely to be, unless you put a lot of effort into optimizing it yourself.

But hey, rolling your own text search from scratch is fun, so don't let me stop you :)