skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A similar post:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40651

[P.S: Not that I condone messing with your brain chemistry. You can see my opinion there.]
Jottit may end up being the classic example of why striving for perfect code is a bad idea.

Half a year on a textarea... I hope it turns out to be awesome.
I like "Introduction to Algorithms" by Cormen, Leiserson, Rivest and Stein (also known as "CLRS"). For a theoretical college text, it's amazingly readable. It's also occasionally useful in real life coding, which says a lot for an algorithms book.
There's nothing wrong, technically, with Facebook apps. They're as hard to make as any other web application. The issue, ultimately, is building something heavily dependent on some other company's platform. I guess you could argue YC wouldn't want to gamble by trusting not one company, but two. Then again, Xobni's sitting on top of Outlook, and we know how much PG dislikes Microsoft. And Loopt is tailgating, at least for right now, on Boost's platform.

Ultimately, I think YC will fund any enterprise that looks like it can make some money.
They have dishonored their families.
If your services are already parallelizable to the degree that they could sit on separate VM's, couldn't you just run them side by side on the same machine without all of the extra overhead a VM gives you? Maybe this is a Rails-related problem, but in general the hard part is not the move from parallelized tasks on one machine to many. The big problem is taking some non-parallel code and trying to distribute it much later on.
Erlang for Python programmers: Part II
There's a hidden advantage. When he's done, he's done. He doesn't need to spend any more time on it once it's basically perfect. But its function will last as long as there's a server to host it.

So if his next project turns out to be that way, then ten projects thereafter, pretty soon he's made a suite of applications that a large number of people find useful.
On one hand I think there are kudos to give for bucking the irrationally extreme "release early, release often" trends that seems to abound. I've seen a lot of bad software released under this banner.

On the other hand, that's an awful long time for the features I see in a really crowded market.
OK, I recognize that there is potential for important/big/profitable Facebook Apps. So far, there hasn't been one, just developers making revenue by driving traffic to other Facebook Apps. My message to the original poster is that it will take a company making a really unique Facebook app to get YC funding.

If someone had an idea for a Facebook app that had the equivalent market potential of Xobni, things would be different, but I don't think anyone has had an idea like that. Except maybe Parakey, but that wasn't originally intended as a Facebook app.

For now, if you're making a Facebook app, it seems like a good idea to use it to get some initial users via Facebook's friendly viralness and then launch a spin-off site on the open web, like Lending Tree did.
I once did a post-mortem on 700 IT software requests over an 18 month period. I came to the conclusion that 95% of them were to change THAT WHICH SHOULD HAVE NEVER BEEN RELEASED. In other words, 10 programmers were kept busy in a $100 million company FIXING THEIR OWN BUGS. The business wasn't changing so much to require them; their own incomplete work made them necessary.

Sure, you can work on perfect so hard that you never release anything. OTOH, there's a lot to be said for high quality work.
Interesting, but this is just stupid:

> Here's a tip. If you want to make money, why not offer something of real value to your visitors like a product or service. Provide content that is so good that people will want to pay for it. That's called doing good business.

If sites supported entirely by advertising had no "real value" then people probably wouldn't be using them so much... The commenter has no clue about internet "business."

> Begging people to look at your ads for junk they neither want or need is nothing but ad welfare.

And this is exactly the FAULT of google. It is incredibly counter-productive that publishers cannot directly support the advertised products as is the case with CPC advertising.
please. Microsoft <i>is</i> hated because they're big and more profitable than God. Not that I love microsoft, but the sensational story of Bill Gates making it while he stole QDOS is largely one promulgated by the press.
He saw this post in his recommended links on Reddit and he right clicked, copied, and submitted here without hesitating.
Because that's what people do. Get with the program.

I think you should make it a Facebook app.
this is almost exactly like my site nobodynotes.com , which somehow has become popular only in Iran, and now I can't read anything anyone writes.
i hope you had fun making it :)
There's a guy posing as PG in the comments. It's pretty malicious too, because when you click on "PG" it sends you to a web archive of Paul's Infogami blog.

I'm amazed at how much time people devote to making other people look bad.
I don't know; I was quite tickled to find myself described as a BOFH...
He didn't steal QDOS and it wasn't promulgated by the press. Microsoft purchased the rights for it from Seattle Computer for $50,000. Well documented.

http://www.google.com/search?as_q=qdos+50000&hl=en&n...

They are notorious for their strategy of backing out of deals with small independent software developers (like a lot of us) and having that code conveniently show up in the next version of their OS.

Here's one example:

http://judiciary.senate.gov/oldsite/jeffress.htm

"At one point, we nearly sold our product to Microsoft. In January 1996, Microsoft invited us to its Redmond campus. It told us it was interested in acquiring Electronic TV Host and in hiring our employees. We understood that Microsoft would continue to offer our electronic television guide as a stand-alone computer program. We were excited. We shared our technology with Microsoft, and all our hard-earned insight about the industry. We even shared our business plan.

Then, negotiations broke down over price. Microsoft wanted to purchase us for less than half the price we offered. Microsoft told us that if we didn't sell at its price, Microsoft would compete directly against us. Of course, Microsoft could compete against us very effectively: it has the resources, and it has our hard-earned knowledge."

You can google hundreds of others yourself.

Whoever can stay in business while still paying their lawyers wins. Nice.
www.digitalgunfire.com, cheese on toast, and instant coffee. (Every so often I think "real coffee is great! I must drink more of it", but as a result I'm building up a collection of filthy abandoned coffee makers...)
Greenspan's Britney Moment
So that is how the terrorists communicate? ;-)
+1 point for incisive social commentary.

This site remind me of the Bored@(insert name of college library here) sites, which people have managed to find good (and even non-lascivious) uses for. Best of luck with it.
With a net worth estimated between 50-100M, Cramer has little to gain from this. I'd really like to hear more evidence behind your opinion.
leaders delegate who pop their collars for them
textmate, bundles are great
Some people just suck. I wonder if it's one of the guys who submit malware here.
As a general rule, day-trading is a very bad idea. It would be surprising if after expenses Ms. Torii (whose success is extremely atypical) is still in the black a few years from now. Making serious long-term money is rare enough among pros. People day-trading from home don't stand a chance.
Wow, movies on the Wild West are definitely what kids from Western Pennsylvania need to be learning about in a "World Cultures" class. What else did you watch? Riddle me skeptical.
I don't know what the larger context of the quote it, but as commented by others, it can certainly be taken out of context as support of a nerd-superiority complex.

That aside, the nature of the "soft sciences" is that you can't very well conduct controlled experiments, because it is unethical, or it is hard to control all the variables. So current soft sciences plod about trying to gather some type of predictablity in their theories, but often falling back to trying to make causal statements of their experimental observations.

I think there's been attempts before, like cybernetics, that tries to model human behavior using signal processing techniques. To my understanding, it's since fallen out of favor. So while it's been tried before--and I don't know for sure, but my gut says that there probably is mathematics, other than statistics, to bring more analysis into the social sciences.

Otherwise, the math just hasn't been invented yet. Currently there are studies in nonlinear systems, complex systems, and math of intervation and manipulation. My shallowly informed guess is that one of these will help out.

Or else we just have to wait for a Physicist to help us out here.
Clay tablets (in my lame attempt to be more hardcore than the 'vim and proud of it' club)
Yeah, the source of the problem was that the founders and the professor were out of sync. If they agreed with him, they shouldn't have been in that meeting in the first place. If they disagreed with him, they should have stood up in the middle of his rant and told him to stop talking and leave the room.

As it happened, I guess it was uncomfortable for them to discuss, so this scene, which is just about the worst-case scenario, came to pass.
"On the Waterfront"? Wild West? Watch the movie. Be less skeptical.

One of the reasons I remember Dr. Shultz's class so much was that he exposed us to so much culture in a sea of mass produced crap. We need more teachers like him now as much as ever.
I prefer to use jEdit when I'm working on a project that I move between several different machines to work on - if I know I'll be developing on a mac, linux, and windows machine it's good to keep some sense of organization the same inside the text editor and it's plugins.
Nobody else likes using ed sometimes?
I went to public high school in a Western Pennsylvania suburb (two PA Turnpike stops away from Paul Graham's alma mater, which means our suburban strip wasn't quite as good) and in my best social studies class (US History) we watched an unreasonable amount of full length movies, including Band of Brothers in its entirety. We didn't do a whole lot in the class, but at least he told us that Westerners killed all of the Indians. He told us to just read Howard Zinn if we wanted to learn something.
Taken without consideration of the lengthy post you've made throughout the thread it did seem a bit ... arrogant? I'm not sure if that's the right term =)
Loopt is a service available to Boost as well as Sprint subscribers. What is Boost's platform -- a cellular network?
Ever ask yourself, "Why would anyone pay that much for THAT?" Pretty soon, they won't. If you can provide an offering that makes more fiscal sense to consumers or small business people, you may find fertile fields. I can just hear them now, "I hated paying those $#@^! Now I can use <insert your company name> Web service instead."
As a matter of fact, I have watched "On the Waterfront." I am not sure what I am not supposed to be skeptical about. That it is about 'World Culture'? Please...
I think his point was that watching On the Waterfront was more educational than what is usually done in a public school social studies class. Based on my experience watching lots of movies in my high school history class, I agree.
Damn, correct. Didn't even notice I did that.
Malware? I haven't seen that, or at least haven't identified it as such, and I have showdead turned on. What are you referring to?
Fine. I also agree.
Define 'best' in the construction 'best social studies class'? Learned the most? Most fun? Coolest teacher?
Me and PG's Code
I accepted a job with Yahoo for which I will be starting very soon. The position is with the Small Business, which encompasses various Yahoo products. One of those products happens to be Yahoo Store, formerly known as Viaweb.

So I am looking forward to possibly having some contact with some of PG's work!
Playboy gambler says Feds can't stop his online empire
A guy submits tv by demand links that try and get you to run a javascript function or an .msi (scariest extension imaginable) to let you watch videos online. If you search for tvbydemand malware, it gets you to that guys site where he reposts press releases about OTHER malware. Shady as hell.
> What do you think?

I think that this is a fluff piece ---the sort of "almost information" that's killing Reddit and Digg.
Just a comment in general.

I'm a former Redditer who no longer feels anything in common with the commenters there. I have found a much better home here. I love the idea of talented hackers of various ages, backgrounds, and cultures being in "moving toward" mode. If you're interested in a start-up of any kind, you better be in "moving toward" mode or just hang it up.

I don't know you, or anything about you, and certainly don't want to enter a debate.

I didn't name the course "World Cultures". In fact, I'm not even sure that was the name. Maybe it was "Social Studies 11" or something like that. I remember the teacher and his class as one of my all time favorites. Imagine my pleasant surprise this morning when I found out that Paul Graham went to the same high school as me and that also, he had one of the same favorite teachers as me. I've been feeling great all day because of this. (Yes, I know, after 3 days in front of a terminal, even the little things amuse. I will try to get a life.)

It's often a good idea to be a little skeptical in business. The times I wasn't, often someone took advantage of me. Why are you skeptical now? Don't you believe me? Do you think there was something fishy about Dr. Shultz's class? Or are you trying to make some other statement that I'm missing?

"I am not sure what I am not supposed to be skeptical about."

I am not sure how to respond to such a strange statement (double negative aside), so I'll just respond with some advice my grandmother gave me long ago, "If you look for trouble hard enough, you'll find it."

There's a time to be skeptical and a time to be moving forward positively. Let's do the latter here. Peace.
All of the above, but I only have my other high school history/geography classes for comparison.
I wish Loopt was available to Sprint subscribers... I just checked again and it shows up in search but then gives me "Error. We're sorry, this item is unavailable"
Thank god I don't use anti-virus systems or security policy enhancement frameworks. Somehow they seem to be the wrong approach anyway.
Number Theory for Programmers, Part 1
I think they rewrote Yahoo Store in C++ or something like that. Sorry. They might have the code in a safe somewhere or something.... ask them and let us know.
Oh, he seemed like a great guy. He just seemed to be overzealous to accomplish a goal that really didn't seem (to me) to matter that much. When he said something along the lines of "Marion Tinsley is human, and humans make mistakes. Chinook will play perfectly after checkers is solved. Therefore, Chinook is better than Tinsley," I could almost hear "mad scientist" laughter.

To me, a program that already knows the right answer and simply looks it up in a database is much less interesting than a human who arrives at a similar answer through reasoning and intuition, or even an AI program that uses heuristics and some kind of internal scoring mechanism.

That's not even mentioning that I think a multi-year computation on something like solving checkers is really a (nearly) useless endeavor. Whose lives will be made better by this? Only in academia could such resources be directed at something with no tangible end value. I guess it's an accomplishment for Schaeffer, but to me it seems like anyone could throw a bunch of CPUs at a program that iterates over all possible checkers positions. I just can't imagine getting much satisfaction for such an accomplishment.
Just depends on what you need to do. If what you need to do is in the confines of what's been provided by open source, CMS, and the knowledge of other people, sure. But if one of those three falters, then well, that's where it get a bit tougher.

And part of what separates hackers from the non-hackers, is who's willing to learn, dig deeper, and figure out how to do.
Ah, ok. I've seen lots of those. I didn't realize they were malware, just spam.
Is it crazy? YC offers $20k for 2-10%...

It utterly depends on what stage the company is in. If it's a few guys and a prototype, $200k of seed money for 50% isn't necessarily a lousy deal.

And, for the record, it could last quite a while. 3-5 young guys making rice-and-beans money, cheap rent, 2-3 servers at ServerBeach...

The "professor" was insulting and controlling-- he raised the VCs' hackles, which isn't going to move the meeting in the right direction. If he had a problem with the valuation, he should have raised the concern before they'd issued the check. That's bad faith negotiating.
Let me know if you have any questions.

The original Lisp version of Store is still there, btw. I know because I use it for paulgraham.com. The new rewritten version was sufficiently different that you had to choose to "upgrade," and I never have.

I keep worrying that one day they'll shut it down because I'm the last user, and I'll have to write another web-based site builder. At least then I could support css.
What would you do differently from Weebly?
Be able to hack the source. I miss that.
fonts have been enlarged.
New iPod hash cracked, support for Linux to continue
Man that green/puke color absolutely hurts the eyes, and I don't need to tell you that anonymously either =)
I almost feel like upvoting this just for the nested parenthesis.
jwz's resignation letter from Netscape & Mozilla
Phil Pearson here from Broadband Mechanics. We use Xen for all our hosting... the killer feature for us is the performance isolation. If one site gets too busy for its VM, it might go down, but it doesn't hurt the other sites on the same physical server nearly as much as without virtualization.

The ability to (relatively) quickly deploy a blank VM for development is great, too. It means you can give people more control over things. If you have lots of dev sites used for demos, there's the danger that someone might make a mistake editing httpd.conf and bring it all down, but if they're all in separate VMs, you don't need to worry.
He says he is not a hacker.
Yes, easier to make stuff but not easier to make stuff that people are willing to pay for.
And you don't even have to start up emacs at all. I keep mine running for months without exiting. You can use tramp mode for editing remote files if needed:

/[user@]machine:localfile
Indian doctor develops enzyme that can destroy HIV
What would be the best way to benefit from this (other than shorting stocks)?

Am I correct in thinking that all the stocks will be hit? (impact differing only in magnitude, not in direction).

Are you guys doing anything about this, like buy Euros etc?
The first 2 parts of the show

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z9EkablfWVk - Part 1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lj8MNEgiDTU - Part 2

They tried to counter at 30% but decided to take the $200k / 50%
That is the funniest thing I've read all day. Brilliant.
What ever happend to Shawn Fanning?... Shawn who?
I'm glad I read that article. Do any mathematicians here (or at least math majors) have any comment on it? I don't know much pure mathematics, myself, but the author makes some very interesting assertions and claims which have piqued my interest.
It would be a enormous breakthrough if this works as they say. One possibility is to use a modified lenivirus (such as HIV itself) to insert the gene for this enzyme. The promoter for this gene may even be able to be designed in such a way that HIV infection triggers the gene to become active, which would in turn excise the HIV from the genome. Also tied to the promoter could be a gene for a transmembrane protein or internal signaling molecule to trigger the cell to be destroyed and prevent the already produced HIV from being released.

A safer alternative to the lenitvirus approach would be to use a nanoparticle encapsulating the DNA for the gene and the required enzymes to integrate it into the genome (or even leave it as a plasmid. I'm not sure though if human cells will express plasmid vectors, though I know some eukaryotic cells do). This approach has been successful selectively targeting and delivering drugs (one paper used alpha particles) into cancer cells.
The paper is not publicly available, but it has conveniently appeared on Scribd. http://www.scribd.com/doc/296901/HIV1-Proviral-DNA-Excision-...
In this case we're really talking about configuration isolation. If you're running a database and a Web server on one machine and then want to move them onto separate machines, you have to untangle and move the config files. But if they're separate VMs from the start, then there's nothing to untangle.
But They Did Not Give Up
It's a strange feeling looking back at articles from the late 90s. It really makes me wonder what we'll think when we look back at today's tech news in another 8 years.

+1 for the reference to "javagator" - first time I've heard of it.
Algorithms, by Sedgewick. Various editions for different languages. Unbeatable as of 15 years ago :)
Fair enough. My skepticism was directed towards 'World Culture' classes that don't teach anything about the world and the stereotypical American that can't find his own country on a map. I doubt there was anything fishy about Dr. Shultz's class in particular. If both you and PG liked him that much he must have been pretty good.

Oh and welcome. Don't worry about getting a life. It's over-rated ;)
UPDATES: Bigger fonts (Caleb mentioned that earlier), Twitter updates (http://twitter.com/ventations), and you can now vent via SMS by texting "VENT your_message_here" to 41411.

And we like our color scheme. :)
What you build should be scalable, whether you are on one server or a thousand. I'm a huge VM fan, mainly because of the complexity of some systems we use. If you solve your app for a few VMs somewhere, it becomes trivial (mostly) to scale. Then you can do backups easily, share snapshots of complex systems, allocate hardware resources virtually, etc.

Not sure about Xen, though. I've been using VMWare for a bit and I'm a happy customer.I would be interested in hearing how the various VM tools compare.
So... sorry to be a spoilsport but if

(1) The aforementioned class was the one in which you learned the most
AND
(2) Your teacher told you to read Howard Zinn if you wanted to learn something
IMPLYING
(2') Your teacher didn't think you were learning anything

Then mustn't we conclude (3) You didn't learn learn anything in your high school social studies classes

?
upmodded you, but they're called MacBooks now.
I don't know, I start to change for the worse when I isolate myself from all people while programming for a very long time. Good thing we have the internet these days.
Aquamacs is a pretty good crutch if you want to wean yourself off of standard keyboard shortcuts slowly. Basically, 'Cmd' + key does the Emacs thing most closely corresponding to the usual thing a Mac program would do. Cmd-O for Open, Cmd-X to cut, etc. This works because the main Emacs key combinations use Ctrl, of course.
Yes, that would be the logical conclusion.
I always wonder about google and that - gmail was (and still is I think) spread by sending invites. So there is the FOAF angle there as well - and the same accounts are used in all their apps not just email. Mix in search history (if you use it - which I don't) and that is just frightening.