skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think the old Yorkshire men already claimed the muck-brass analogy long before Paul Graham or Joel Spolsky ;-)
I have a macbook. It's solid but I'd avoid it for linux (which I've decided I prefer to osx) - the single-button trackpad alone makes it a bad choice for linux. If I were getting a new laptop now I'd get a high-end thinkpad with lots of RAM so I could use vmware effectively. I have a friend who has just done this and raves about it - he runs Ubuntu.

Some people can get X11 configured to do wacky things with the keyboard so you can run linux. I figure - why bother?
The big mistake you made is to install J2EE. Just install JDK and Tomcat, and you will be fine. J2EE is weird indeed - it used to be OK, you could download just the things you need, but I guess some Sun managers decided to make it bloatware and abuse their users, so now it is some indescribable blob. I don't even know exactly what it is - just don't install it, don't use, I can only repeat that!

You need some J2EE libraries, like the servlet API, but I think you can use the one that comes with Tomcat.

Also, I think there is some weird bug in the latest Tomcat versions, so the recommended version at the moment appears to be 5.5.17 (I am still using Java 1.5, though, and not yet Tomcat 6).

I have never heard of the java.policy files - you chose the wrong path and I would recommend you backtrack and relax. It actually is very easy...

As a sidenote, I found it very hard to set up Rails, too. The automatic thing didn't work (presumably user rights issue), I wasn't sure if I needed a db driver and went looking for one, and so on. I only successfully installed it once I switched my computer to Linux.
Your Personal Genome
Dogs smarter than we think, study shows
While we're ranting about Sun, my university's old-ish (1990s?) big (8 SPARCs, 32GB RAM) SunOS (before Solaris) time-sharing machine that they have for all the engineering students to do projects on doesn't even have a freakin' Subversion client on it. I spent the better part of an hour trying to compile it before giving up. Shouldn't they be encouraging students to use source control? I guess I take these things for granted.
Wouldn't it make sense to wait until January 15th, though? Rumor has it a new Apple Notebook will be announced...
Not really, but the first bubble crushed a lot of companies that thought online retailing was a totally distinct business to normal retailing.
It's a shame that so many people will not attempt to follow on with their "dream job" goals.

At my UK University there is a strong culture of getting a good degree in a quantitative field, perhaps doing a PhD in a similar (but still quantitative) field and then being plucked out by a large investment bank to work as a "quantitative analyst". The salary is good, but I'm sure the work becomes tedious after a while. The process is almost as precise as an automobile assembly line!

I wish the culture of entrepreneurialism was stronger than the desire to go and price financial derivatives. After all, two/three hundred years ago nearly everybody was an entrepreneur (farmers). How things have changed...
This story reflects the cross-platform, proprietary history of the Sun JDK. Now that it's free software, it's all going to be a simple apt-get away, if not part of the default distro installations. Naturally, Microsoft and Sun still won't co-operate.
This reminds me of a similar article on Chimps beating humans in memory tests. It was on /. the other day, perhaps it was posted here too? If not, here's the link:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2007/dec/04/animalbehaviou...
I wonder if they could reduce the support costs for the installable version by selling complete servers with the software pre-installed?
| Now that it's free software, it's all going to be a simple apt-get away

I certainly hope so. I'm afraid I won't be around much to find out, though.
The language statistics are interesting: big lead for C/C++. I wonder if those are students forced to use C/C++ by their university, or if C/C++ is really still that popular.
I know, I've been talking to my teachers about needing to integrate some form of source control into the curriculum. To not teach that is absurd.
| The big mistake you made is to install J2EE.

I hear ya. But homework requirements and "the smart way" don't really coincide often.

| have never heard of the java.policy files - you chose the wrong path and I would recommend you backtrack and relax. It actually is very easy...

.java.policy is essentially setting applet permissions. It wasn't that bad, it just was the straw that broke the camels back.
| Unless you're being paid by the hour to set it up ;-)

Agreed. I'm trying to think like a business owner, however. As a contractor... that's a different story.

| This should be better now...

It is. I eventually found a script that automated the whole process for me.
I'm sure it's better now. This was a year ago or maybe two. My classes are all online, and they require more recent JRE's to be installed for their Java based online classroom environment to work.
An interesting question here, is whether China can convert to a service economy, which is much more information based. If they can develop a big enough internal market with high levels of consumer demand (the Chinese are savers unlike the west) then I cant see why they wont be able to rival the west in the service business.

In which case we are all stuffed, lets learn mandarin and move to Shanghai.
They could sell a virtual appliance that comes pre-configured.
Something that they could run on top of VMware or Xen.

Or, perhaps a they could sell a pre-configured server. But, then they're supporting the OS that they're selling, and they might not have the flavor of *nix that the company wants.
Neat. I've actually been asked at least one of these in a job interview (as a problem solving type question). The "check to see if an integer is a power of two" one, in particular.
Are you sure you need to install J2EE? You don't need the sun J2EE server-crap to develop J2EE applications! J2EE is two things, a specification with implementations by Apache, Bea, jBoss and others, and also an implementation by Sun, which probably sucks.

Perhaps you could use jBoss instead of the Sun garbage. I only ever have used Tomcat, though, so I can't really comment on the Application servers. OK, used Bea Weblogic, too, and recommend against it.

Also, what do you mean by applets - why do you need Applets for J2EE?
Am I the only one that finds this Beacon "controversy" story very boring?
But the news feed in retrospect has turned out to be a huge success. It seems to me that they just try to push the boundaries and find a balance that everyone is happy with.
Brooks isnt exactly a lightweight. Nick Kristof, who lived in china for years, has written similar articles.
I already inaugurated Vent YC! http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=70475
Summary, anyone? I think the abstract could be more motivating ("computer scientists should know about Thermodynamics" - yeah, but why?).
fogbugz can do this.
You clearly have no idea why US companies make things in China. They excel at it. It is all about quality, customization, and efficiency. Talk of cheap goods from China is an easy way to spot someone who has only read the talking points.
Do you not work face-to-face (or back-to-back) with your team members?

Over the summer I worked for a company of a few hundred people that didn't use project management software (except when contracted externally) because if you needed something, you just went to the appropriate person and told them. It got things done fast.
Jim Simons profile (Renaissance Technologies)
I don't mean he should rely on a focus group or let someone else write for him, I mean finding one or two people that will help him make sure he's saying what he wants to say. There's a lot of room to improve clarity and readability without becoming 'sanitized.'
Chomsky once wrote about how the founding conditions of a country determine the eventual outcomes. They're extremely resistant to change because they're so deeply embedded with the fabric of the culture. And that seems especially true of this country with the constant social tension between freedoms and Puritanism.
The article failed to mention one thing -- corruption. In a chaotic, churning society, corruption is kept lower because you never know who's going to be in power next year. In China you always know. That makes it too tempting for little side deals to be set up. Every one of those side deals takes a little something from the rest of their society. That's why corruption is so officially scorned in China, although it is pervasive.

I don't see them overcoming this problem with their current system, much less moving to a service economy. But I wish them well.
Cats are even smarter.
"In which case we are all stuffed, lets learn mandarin and move to Shanghai."

You don't need to. There's probably a Confucius Institute just around the corner.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.04/mandarin_pr.html
China really is ruled by academics: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsinghua_clique
he must be desperate to hire new people--he's been posting essays at a blistering rate.

i can't blame him though--joelonsoftware is a great recruiting tool.
>How necessary is automation in a country with a billion people?

Just as much as in a country with a million people, or a thousand. Imagine, China needs two billion shoes!
To answer your first question, absolutely yes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Performance_Computing_and_...

I don't know the answer to your second question, nor could I answer it for the median of whatever group Larry & Sergey represent.
Report: iPhone outpacing rivals in Europe without 3G
Not to mention competition with eBay.
i think it's a great book, not a "serious" book, whatever that means

as i mention in another comment, I'm willing to call it mental-masturbation, in the sense of exciting one's mind (the nerdy mind anyway), so in a way I'm probably not too far from your vision of the book

i also think this kind of excitement is the basic motivation of the nerdy minded persons, and any text/experience that can get you in that state is something to appreciate.

lastly it exposes the reader to many topics, the reader may get interested in some of those topics and make some further investigations on its own, and at least in that sense it is a science divulgation book (it's more important for science divulgation to get you interested in the topics that to give you some raw facts)
I bet diversity of PHP installations is the source of his support issues, not the diversity of Unix installations. There's plenty of software that runs fine on diverse POSIX-compliant operating systems.
I think the main problem is that because margins are so low in online retail, you have to run a large and efficient business to make any money - seems like it would be difficult to start out of your garage and offer the same prices that amazon does.
zendesk.com?
There are two types of muck though:
Muck that cannot be avoided and becomes a hard problem that must be solved => brass.
Muck for which there is a known way to avoid it, and solving it is just a short term fix with shrinking demand => legacy.

Data cleansing/integration is an example for the first kind of muck. I believe on-premises server-side software belongs in the second muck category. As a startup, think hard before you do it!
Ok, thank you, next time I'll approach it from that perspective.
I liked the article, but thought the note about the communist party not being Communist was a bit naive. It has always been this way: every communist country has been ruled by dictators who like power. Only the useful idiots in the west believed the ideology.

The ending note is interesting. I'd like to hear more about expectations of change in China. The growth of a middle class could help out a lot. The inevitable failure of the Great FireWall will help.

The biggest push will probably come from the top, as insightful leaders see the need for independent thinking and creativity -- the opposite of rote memorization.
If you are needing only 2 user accounts, fogbugz is free for a 'startup' account (1-2 users).
Torturing a robot.
Future Scanner: A Digg Clone That Tracks The Future
Per the syllabus--"Project requirement: Install J2EE"

I know that applets are as a rule pretty lame, but part of the project is to access and use the database via a jsp, a servelet and an applet.

Project is actually done and finals are next week.
GodTube offers wildly popular alternative to YouTube
Neat idea of crawling articles relating to the future, but I think the information is presented incorrectly. It should allow people to see trajectories and compare differences between what was predicted before, and the articles written in that particular year.

Even better (but almost too hard), if given the historical trajectories and how the graph of technologies enable each other, you can give prediction accuracy scores to current articles about the future.
Brilliant. Looks perfect - thanks!
Because it hasn't yet been mentioned, you might consider an OLPC. They're small screen size is, imo, greatly compensated for by their durability, portability, and mobility. They run debian and can be used in direct sunlight. Did I mention the price is right? Oh, they also have much better antennae than the thinkpad. :D

I'm not sure if the needs you outlined above are driven by some technical requirement or if that's just a list of the laptop-de-jour to which you are aspiring.

If nothing else, check out the hardware specs for the pure geeky pleasure: http://www.laptop.org
Why compete? Use their plumbing to get rich. Tens of thousands already have.
Sixteen Languages: a journey through 16 programming languages in 361 days
He's spending 16 days on each language: Smalltalk, FP, Ada, Python, OCaml, BrainF*, i86 assembly, Prolog, Erlang, Forth, D, Lazy K, Haskell, FORTRAN, Lua, and Scheme.

Everything he writes is in a subversion repository: http://16languages.googlecode.com/svn/

More information on the format: http://16languages.blogspot.com/2007/09/rules.html
I've done really well with Toshiba. I've had a number of different Satellites and they've all been good.

Once, I dropped one when I was literally running from one end to the other of the Denver airport, trying to catch a connecting flight. It bounced on a metal plate on one of those moving walkways so hard that people turned to see what the big noise was. When I got on the plane, the case had a visible dent in it and I was sure I had cracked the LCD, but was too exhausted to deal with it on the plane. When I got home, I opened the case to find the LCD was fine and it ran like a champ. Anecdotal evidence, surely, but I've stuck with them ever since and not regretted it once.

But, I know several people who have switched to MB for their only computer and seem to be doing just fine with it.
Is there a compelling reason NOT to breathe?

I know lots of online retailing millionaires. Is it easy? No. Is competition fierce? Of course. Are margins slim? Usually. But if you have passion for an idea, a market, a good plan, and are willing to work your butt off, then there are fantastic opportunities.

(Aside: You won't get a whole lot of response from people making their fortunes in on-line retailing in December - many of them are working 20 hour days this month.)

I have often thought about starting something, but I'd rather hack. (I think that anyone can retail, but few can hack - I'm not so sure how empowering this thinking is.)

Things you'd better consider before taking the plunge:

- How will you find customers? Search engines, email blasts, catalogs, list buying, renting, or sharing, advertising...

- How will you fulfill orders? Your own garage, rented space, dropshipping from your vendors,...

- What capital will you require and where will you get it? (This may be the biggest barrier vs. hacking)

- How much volume will you have to do to break even? (Better be right about this or you're dead in a hurry)

- What people will you require and how will you manage them?

- What systems will you require and where will you get them? (Needless to say, there is great opportunity for competitive advantage here.)

- What makes buying from you so much better than anyone else? (Maybe the most important question.)

- There are hundreds of other things to consider, but you get the idea...

People have started with a small idea are parlayed it into hundreds of thousands (and even millions) of dollars per year in less than a few years. The case studies are almost endless. Google a few and see how they did it. Or watch Donny Deutch's show "The Big Idea" on cable TV.

If you decide to do something like this (not the best time of year now since everyone will be tapped in a few weeks), find your niche and go for it. Best wishes.
The key is that if you're going to stick with server-side apps you need to solve other hard problems.
It mentions it - indeed it's built around the concept. It's just not corruption in terms of paying off A or B (such as in developing or modern - if you take the extreme view - democracies. It's corruption in terms of A (an academic elite) looking out for it's own interests.

I'm not qualified to judge the accuracy of the perspective. But the argument says a specific type of corruption is there and it's deeply rooted in the social fabric (even as he implies payoffs). If that's not corruption, what would you call it?
Small and efficient can work very well if you have a niche and know what you're doing. I have several clients that do exactly this and kick butt in the marketplace. And, ironically, they all sell through Amazon with better prices and service. (One of my hottest product/services is Amazon integration for small retailers. They take 15%, but the orders just keep flowing in...)
Organic Chemistry for the YouTube Generation
This is pretty hilarious. Is "campaigning for green issues" going to do more for green issues than starting a startup like Craigslist that saves the world more wasted newsprint than all those activists put together?
i was hoping someone would do this...

1.the constructor isnt commented out in text mate, or dreamweaver just here(yc).

2.i need the $i cause i store the task into the db then execute it.

3. i could have done that, and it would scale. but i didnt cause i only have 3 demos. you are probably right about the extra '

4. need to review it, im on my phone right now
we all live a good hour away from each other, and come together once a week
1. I wondered if that might be the case.

2. I don't understand this explanation, is $value destroyed by the call to storeIntoDB? At the very least your $i++ needs a terminating ;
Yea, corruption is a big problem. Bribery, or gift giving, is a way of life for many Chinese people. When I was in elementary school, my mom made me bring food over every time I went to a friend's house. I'd show up ready to play Nintendo with a bowl of fried rice. It's part of the culture. It's a problem the Chinese government needs to work on.

BTW, bribery is alive and well in the US too, but it's wide open (suppose to be, anyway) and it's called "lobbying" or "campaign contributions".
Thanks, but that laptop is gone now :)

I was pretty sure it was an easy fix, I was just traveling so much I never really had a chance to take it in for a fix.
Gates invests $30 million in "Doomsday Seed Vault"
I'm convinced that Comet style architecture is the next big thing. As the libraries and tools mature there will be some pretty nifty implementations of previously impossible or extremely difficult to implement features.

Meebo.com is a good example.
At what point do we get to treat YC as its own entity, and not some kind of add-on for reddit?
You can watch a famous debate between Buckley and Chomsky on YouTube. On the whole, I disagree with Buckley. But I still wonder about this. I'd have faith in the faculty that I have met, but I'm afraid they're mostly physicists.
"- Warranty (can you extend it?)"

Generally electronics warranties are an overpriced scam (sort of like the insurance car rental agencies try to talk you into). I've heard from several places, though, that the Apple warranties are a great deal.
> You can't really compare the two

I'll still try. Both games have a philosophical and a computational side. The chess philosopher could ask questions such as

"everyone knows that dominating the centre is an advantage, but WHY EXACTLY is that the case"

But even if he understands this better than others, it won't help him that much because chess games are decided on the computational side. This is why you have to start at an early age in order to become a great chess player. And it suits computers.

Poker's computational side includes, for example, odds (trivial) and ICM. In most forms of poker, though, it is far outweighed by the philosophical side, at least as of today. The poker philosopher could ask questions such as

"everyone knows that being in position is an advantage, but WHY EXACTLY is that the case"

If he's willing to work hard on his understanding of the game, he might, in theory, learn the rules at any age and become the world's best poker player in just a few years. Getting direct monetary value from one's philosophical insights is an attractive proposition. Unfortunately there are big psychological drawbacks, which Matt Maroon describes so well.
One of the main difficulties in building a successful startup is intimately understanding the needs of your clients, suppliers etc.

Once you have clients of your own you obviously should interact with them continuously to get the data, but even the first iteration can be made much better & faster, by simply interacting with your competitors in various roles, and putting yourself in the shoes of your clients & suppliers.
I don't know what to call it -- corruption seems to be the best word for now. For our purposes an academic elite is the same as a political party -- it holds political power.

Whatever it is, the problem it presents is that there is not a single amount of predictable payments that can be made to create an economic transaction -- it's all up to the whims of the people who are involved. I guess it's possible to predict to some degree if you know all of the players, but there is no competition for doing it another way without the payments -- the same party owns the game, the tables, and all of the cards. I'm no expert either, but it seems that corruption in the states is of such a lesser degree to be of a different type altogether, at least as far as startups go. Likewise, corruption in some third world countries is so bad to make even the most trivial of enterprises fraught with hidden expenditures.

Here, if I want to make a startup to, say, sell fried chicken on the street corner, I've got 2 or 3 political people to meet and make happy. Now there might be lots of crooks in the local government, but each local government can be of a different political party, as can the state and federal governments. Even in a completely crooked world, that provides incentives for each section of political power to lower corruption, at least in sections controlled by the other guy. You simply do not have that somehow-it-works setup in China. And I think it's going to be a limiting factor in their growth.
Vint Cerf: "We built the road, now let's see where the journey takes us"
Bowling for gold
Hi,

For IE debugging you can use DebugBar (http://www.debugbar.com/) and Companion.JS (http://www.my-debugbar.com/wiki/CompanionJS/HomePage) that give dev tools for developers : DOM inspector, HTTP viewer, JS console, etc...

Hope this helps.

JFR
http://www.debugbar.com
An awesome idea, haven't encountered any businesses that use this approach but it would definitely have quite a few advantages. Most projects should probably avoid VMware as otherwise the cost of at least the most basic VMware license gets piled on top of each sale and at ~200USD that can be a significant increase.

But in any case it can be a great compromise between the clients issues of data privacy and response time versus the supplier tech support expenditures.

Would have upmodded twice if I could :)
Start-Up Blows Through $300 Million In VC Cash