skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Come on, give Aaron his due. He's had an impressive career to date, for such a young chap. He's a smart kid, hopefully, he has a shell to protect against such silly demeaning posts like this...

Lots of startups end up going nowhere, it takes more than brains and ingenuity, a bit of luck and fortunate timing also comes into play...

Still, Aaron has had a heck of career already -- hell, I didn't even graduate from college until I was 23 (of course at that time, the PC was just a toy, and most Americans did own one, and programmers mostly worked on 24x80 green screen terminals in that day...), yet he reached the pinnacle for a programmer...
I think light frameworks are the best because they do not cause frameworkitis.

http://uint32t.blogspot.com/2007/11/web-programming-framewor...
"tech strife"
Actually, yes I do. We're aiming to take software development past the next productivity hurdle. Right now we are researching some of the core ideas involved. If we succeed with software, our approach has applicability to other design related activities. Our first laughably trivial proof of concept might be ready within six months, we're not really sure yet. There is also the quite real possibility that may run into insurmountable difficulties, practical or theoretical.
Powerline network throws down the gauntlet on Ethernet, 802.11n at 400Mbps
To Make Lemons Into Lemonade, Try 'Miracle Fruit' - WSJ.com
I worked on a large Python project before Django came out and ended up building my own framework. Recently, when I used Django, I realized that almost every feature it had was something I had ended up writing myself. Django had a lot more man hours going into the framework and was much cleaner and better tested than my implementation.

There are certain things you need for every project:
-ways to handle configuration files for different environments
-a pattern to map URL's to methods and templates
-a basic ORM so you don't have to write SQL for every single CRUD operation
-a test framework that simulates an actual web request
-a way to handle SQL migrations
-a way to get data to and from forms

Almost every production web site needs all of the above. Why spend time doing it yourself when people have solved these problems already? The only reason I can see for writing your own framework is as a pure learning experience.
Loopt May Be Friending More Mobile Networks
Ajax, Browsers, Running Out of Time
AKA: $$$$$$
Not if you're Justin.tv!
Ehh... price?
Woow... they want my real dollars for vritual instances of Windows Server. Wouldn't virtual dollars be more fair?
Do you feel like you know what's going on behind the scenes in Django? That's my biggest concern with it. (haven't tried it yet.)
I feel like you - so far I have usually used frameworks, but there are always aspects that make me unhappy (not even RoR satisfied me). Now I wonder if the recent article about IDEs also applies to frameworks: if you insist on using a framework, you probably won't be able to use the latest, coolest programming languages, because there are no frameworks for them yet.

I am not sure how much work it is to create one's own framework, but I suspect it is less than one might think. The hardest part to me seems serious OR mapping+caching.

Personally, I would probably go the same route as Groovy on Grails and build on top of Spring+Hibernate (so leverage existing frameworks, but in my own style).

Also, I don't know any programmers who became famous for using other people's frameworks.
"Microsoft"
Is Wikipedia Planning a Facebook Competitor?
Oh no! I guess this kills our Y Combinator application.

My co-founders and I are in stealth mode, working on a Web 2.0 app to reduce the perturbative uncertainty in the determination of Vub from semileptonic Beta decays, where one must calculate the rate of Beta events with a standard dilepton invariant mass at a subleading order in the hybrid expansion.

Can you believe someone beat us to it?!?
I actually just had to write a paper on the employer spyware type software. I found an interesting article that is very applicable to this discussion:

Urbaczewski, A., & Jessup, L. M. (2002). Does electronic monitoring of employee internet usage work? Communications of the ACM , 80-83.

To summarize: Theory X management that thinks that the employee is trying to screw the company will use tracking software to enforce policy and morale and job will be low. Theory Y management will use tracking tools as metrics to identify areas of improvement and provide the data to the employee for their betterment.

Identifying trends in your own behavior can increase your productivity, which means that you'll take less time to complete your work. This has the potential to lower your stress and make you a happier person.

Just a general feeling, but I think this appeals to the Theory Y crowd.
I've used frameworks and written my own. Obviously what works better depends a lot on how similar your problem is to what the makers of the framework intended to solve. The dilemma is that as you build your app your problems become more specific to that particular app and you tend to gain less and less from the framework. Eventually the framework gets in your way. Not because it forces you to do it in a particular fashion, but because you feel compelled not to stray from the framework's path in the interest of consistency and simplicity. Unfortunately, the same may be true of your own framework creations, just the consequences are different.

Frameworks are great if you do a series of similar, straightforward projects like many contractors would do. A framework allows people to get acquainted with your code more quickly, so it's good for companies with high staff turnover. It also has a name that HR can put in a job ad.

If you roll your own, try to do it as a collection of independent libraries, not as a don't-call-us-we-call-you type of framework. That's my conclusion after many attempts at framework writing. It has always been the case that some parts were good and others were crap. You can't throw the crap out if everything is interconnected. The code that connects everything needs to be either the smallest part of the framework or part of the application itself.

But anyway, as long as you stay away from CMS, you're going to be fine.
Look cool. Too bad it doesn't run on Linux or I'd check it out.
Which links have I already viewed?
This is a minor feature request: it would be nice if there was some graphical representation for links that you have visited previously e.g. a change of color, or they disappear somewhere. If this isn't possible/desirable then nay bother pal as we've all coped well enough thus far. Cheers.
Maybe he lives in Tokyo.
Which one of the YC partners will wear the thick gold chain currently on Reid Hoffman's neck?

http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2007/fortune/0711/gallery.pay...
And what have you done qwertyy? Aaron has managed to start many companies and wrote software that others use. He hasn't started the next Google and he hasn't written the next awesome Python API, but why fault him for that? He is trying, and by most measures, he is very successful.

Your points:

a - That's pretty impressive, at 13 what were you doing, and the rest of us?

b - I don't know the specifics of the merger, but that happens all the time, and good for him.

c - He is a good starter and most people go through many startups before they hit it big.

d - That many people seem to like.

This whole comment has nothing to do with hacker news or startups. I'm surprised it got past PG and I can't believe how many people actually commented on something that isn't worth commenting on. Thanks for wasting my time.
If you can find one that gels with what you're trying to do, then by all means, save yourself the time and go with it.
My signup mail sent my password in cleartext. Please, please don't store it like that, and especially don't send it over the wire like this.

Update: having used it for the past few hours, the product itself is very well done. Nice work.
PG, The more important thing that should worry you is, "Do you have cabal/clique detection and elimination built into Hacker News" - that's what basically ruined reddit.
CodeIgniter
It's lightweight, scales exceptionally well, designed in a language 95% of the web development community knows like the back of their hand, and powerful.

You'll keep yourself from reinventing the wheel, yet you won't limit yourself on capability by conforming to an obscure set of rules and development practices.
You can't tell yet. A lot of good startups sound that lame when they first launch.
The 7 Services Virtualization Lacks for Utility Computing
fun! thanks for distraction at work :)
a:visited {
color:#606072;
text-decoration:none;
}

Thanks Firebug!
I can't remember him attacking a lot of people by name.

As for the dripping with egotism bit, that is an interesting problem. I probably would have sounded like that too at his age, but back in the pre-Web era there was no way for anyone to read what most 20 year olds wrote. Now that people can start publishing so much younger, we'll have to learn to be more tolerant of various flaws of youth.
a:link { color:#000000; text-decoration:none; }
a:visited { color:#606072; text-decoration:none; }
What's in it for me? I am interested in technology and opportunity. Personalities of the digital culture kind of bore me. It sounds like a waste of time.
Trevor, unquestionably.
Extreme energy makeover: Home office edition
For me, the main benefit of ORM is that it makes it easy to plug in caching (memcache) for just about everything, which you're probably going to want when your reach scale.
Well, there might still be a closer one, by a couple blocks... ;-)
Maybe it's better to say that a few related bodies of technique have been collapsing into a discipline called Graph Theory.

http://www.math.uni-hamburg.de/home/diestel/books/graph.theo...
Martin Fowler's book on DSLs
I think unix time is set in UTC, not PST. that might help.
I felt in several projects that it wouldn't have been possible to do it without an OR mapper.

Maybe if it's always just select "star" instead of select object, the difference is not so great, but if you can't use select * for some reason, it becomes unbearable for me...

Also, the automatic loading of linked objects and collections, and the caching, are nice features imo. You only have to write object.getMappedThingies() instead of another SQL request (talking about Java here).
Or they will have to get used to people ripping them down (sometimes for valid reasons, although in a childish way).
Good, they need to get with a GSM carrier so they can get iPhone users.
Think these books are of much help to someone who isn't already good at bargaining? They look ripe for the 'squeezed books' treatment:

> Focusing on six key psychological leverage points...

Should be easy to summarize.
Martin Fowler's upcoming book on DSL - Work in Progress
"... Is he "famous" for no reason? ..."

I wouldn't say famous which is such a "media cliche". More recognised for his contributions. There's the

- rss spec http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.09/start.html?pg=5/

- rdf spec - http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-rdfcore-wg/2001Apr/0...

- webpy python web framework http://webpy.org/

- writing http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/productivity

Maybe the biggest thing Aaron may have to offer is speaking out - a trait that seems to be devoid in his generation ~ http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/shifting1 As much as he might an annoying "shirt" to some, you cannot take credit away from the technical work he's done at such a young age.
Wow. It's very interesting to suggest that egotism is a "flaw" of youth. I think it tends to come hand-in-hand with intelligence/genius, too, so is egotism also a flaw of being intelligent? Swartz meets both criteria, so maybe that's why he's a hyper-egotist.

I wonder what Swartz will be like when he's 40.
Ask news.YC: what are you listening to right now?
Artist,Title

For me the response is: Within Temptation,Stand My Ground
tek-emo: depressed about technology.

bob was pretty tek-emo after his macbook battery exploded, his ipod hard drive fragged, his gmail accounts wiped, his facebook profile vandalized, and his WoW account stolen.
you mean to tell me a hack of client side javascript and server side XML isn't scaling very well? OH NO! but but but i went a web os!

the future is going to be the flex/air combo with cf or java midlevel support. or potentially mozilla prizm if they ever get it fixed. microsoft silverlight is basically flash circa 2005, but they can quickly ramp it up to be a flex/air competitor with a stroke of a finger. oh if only google would pump out more support for gears.
Death Is the Road to Awe, Clint Mansell
Just by listening to him for a minute, you can tell this guy has that "thing" that makes someone a good founder.
Loopt wont work on the iPhone yet (natively), because it requires GPS hardware (which the iPhone does not yet have). Hopefully someday though, its a cool app.
SQL is extremely verbose. During my previous life as a Java programmer I moved a project from raw SQL to the hibernate ORM, and removed 10,000 lines of code in the process. Using straight SQL, the data access code was more than 50% of the entire code base. Switching to an ORM got it below 10%.

It really depends on what you're doing, but I can't imagine why anyone would want to write SQL by hand. If you really want simplicity, don't use a database at all.
Paris Hilton is the Ron Paul of news.YC !
"As for the dripping with egotism bit, that is an interesting problem."

Maybe he needs someone with more life experience who is experienced at writing for the web to advise him on how not to "drip" his egotism quite so much while still communicating his point. Maybe even someone with a past business relationship with Aaron who he might respect.

Not to name names or anything. :)
Sure. Re-reading my comment it does sound a bit harsh, and I agree - the idea doesn't have to be earth changing to be wildly successful.
I guess we'll see in time what becomes of his startups.
I don't think you guys get it: qwertyy IS Aaron Swartz!
You're right, of course. Really, if it would cost a person only a few hours to switch to linux, or a couple of minutes of productivity per day, it wouldn't be worth it.

But there's the possibility that someone would gain productivity by using linux.
Heh-- no need to ever apologize to a startup guy for helping spread the word. No harm done!
What is the real value of a business?
Doesn't it work on some phones that have APIs for a triangulated, interpolated GPS?
Tito Nieves, Fabricando Fantasias
ASK YC: Startups hiring in Vancouver, Canada
Asking all Canadian YC readers - How is the job market for someone looking to join a startup in B.C, Canada and how does one go about looking for these jobs?

Muchos Gracias.
NY, Chrome Dreams II ~ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chrome_Dreams_II
http://www.radiolab.org
He announced it as an experiment and never claimed to be the new Shakespeare. Where is the problem? Experimenting with writing is what blogging is about, among other things.
If you think he is so bad, why not take it as a life lesson: if he can do it, you can do it, too! Once again, the difference is in the doing or not doing. I for one liked his writing, but apart from that, it seems many famous people are not that great. It just goes to show that by putting yourself out there, you can still win.
Dave Brubeck, Time Out
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Out_(album)
Wyclef Jean -- The Carnival
Well that didn't take long. Wasn't much of a beta was it.
The Aquabats - Worms Make Dirt
Ok, "worthless" is a bit harsh and failed the "would I say it to Aaron's face" standard. His 6/30ths of a novel was an interesting experiment.
What's the holdup on your startup?
Limiting factor time, money, both? There may be an idea for a startup in what your inhibiting parameter is.
ASK YC:Advertising Revenue
Hello all, I've been looking for an answer to a question, but it is one that I have not been able to find. In preparing a Business Plan, I am looking at the economics of justifying an advertising revenue model. But the only numbers I am able to come up with amount to $94 a month from 125,000 unique visitors a month. Any suggestions or help would be appreciated. How can you have a viable company on $94 a month when you have 125,000 people visiting it?
My challenge is that I don't have a problem with the ambiguity behind knowing what to do, (I love it actually) it is just getting the cahones to say, "YES, I will commit to this uncertainty, if it kills me."
Yeah, right. I think this is his pretext for this:
http://www.theonion.com/content/news/u_s_intelligence_iran_p...
Why are people so hung up about things outside their personal definition of hacker news?
Ministry of Sound 2008
Squarepusher, Hello Meow
If I had heard the idea for reddit I would have shrugged and said "done already". In 94 or 95 I would have told Sergey, Larry, or Jerry Yang they could have great jobs at Lockheed Martin or Motorola with their resumes, quit that hobby web crap and get serious. And that was when I was in my 20's! So I would agree here.
"... Now I fear history may be repeating itself. Yesterday, I had Firefox 2 for linux crash 5 times, and IE7 for XP crash 7 times. The cause? Too many fat Ajax applications ... These are all long running applications that I keep open for most of the day. Then all of a sudden the Browser is gone ..."

Firefox 2 (& 3) are pretty stable but they do hog RAM. At the moment my browser with 17 tabs open is chewing through 198MB.

"... Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.8.1.8) Gecko/20071022 Ubuntu/7.10 (gutsy) Firefox/2.0.0.8 ..."

So that's a problem. Why is the Fox, the lean browser so memory hungry?

The other problem is the rush to ship Javascript applications. The tools are cludgy, the language has problems and it's hard to learn to how to write lean, secure applications with Javascript, let alone write applications. But I wouldn't be too quick to write off this technology. There is a sniff of innovation in the air with the MS browser team re-instated and a new Javascript language spec is being thrashed out.

The next 5 years is going to be full of interesting leaps, instability and lots of opportunity to exploit ~ http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/001379
harry potter audiobook :P
Didn't I just read about something like this in that story aaronsw is publishing in his blog?
Robert Plant and Alison Krauss, "Raising Sand"
I'm a caveman, trying to squeeze every bit of functionality and performance out of my app. I roll out everything myself. May take a little longer, but the OCD in me is happy.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=77136
What a great idea. After all, we can look to the state of education in this country, which has been greatly improved by the presence of the Chief Education Officer (Secretary of Education in the Cabinet).

Yes, I like sarcasm.

I guess I don't understand which important problem this is trying to solve.
desmond dekker - unity
Ten New Things in WebKit 3 -- With Awesome SVG Demos
I havent heard about that, but if thats the case and you find out more please share. It might be proprietary code rather than an official optional library.
I'd be very interested in this information as well if you happen to come upon it.

Cheers.
Time... it's not on my side.
I would take adenosine, guanine, taurine, and cytosine and pair them into double helices. And I would make sharing them fun. :-)
Hilarity.

People first wondered why twittr was so popular. Oh it's simple, they said. It's micromicroblogging, they said. It's the inanity of updating your AIM profile/away message that makes everyone love it, I said. It's a regression of how we communicate.

Now that we determined people use twitter because it's simple, everyone wants to make it more complex. A progression back up the chain to how we communicate. Let's add video! Let's add file sharing! Let's add event listing! Let's add mapping and location finding! Let's pump it with steroids!

Personally, I can't even use loopt on my Moto Q, on my Tmobile Razr 2, or on my iPhone. I can however use twitter.com and someone can come along and create an addon based on the API to replicate this feature. Hmm..
Fishbone's "Still Stuck in Your Throat"
Kenna, Out of Control

http://youtube.com/watch?v=ESWWnJ1nBJw
Skip to 30 secs.
Welcome to Fantasyland
Old but good.
Kenna's new album was OK, but his first one, New Sacred Cow was a masterpiece. Definitely my favorite album of 2003.

This is the video of the first single, it was adapted from an Oscar nominated short film. www.youtube.com/watch?v=owS1coeoWEc
I think it does have to do with courage. The reason inventive individuals have trouble keeping on one track is that they're afraid one of their other ideas is better, or that they'll otherwise miss out on some other opportunity elsewhere. The courage comes in saying "Damn it, I don't care what else is out there, I'm going to pick this one project, take it down the rabbit hole, and see where I come out, regardless of what else is out there."

I say this as someone very much like Aaron, with a long trail of half-finished projects and a couple that I actually saw through long enough to bring to fruition.
Your comments features suck ass -- you can't even put in basic html lists or br's.
Are you sure that's SQL and not JDBC?

I moved from PHP/PearDB to Java/Hibernate3.0 to Python/DBAPI, and found that Java was by far the most verbose. Even with Hibernate annotations, I was writing more than twice as much code for equivalent functionality.

Perhaps the difference is that you have business objects defined already, and so the cost of Hibernate is only the annotations? My PHP and Python programs keep the SQL and drop the objects, and so they end up with incredibly tiny data access layers.

SQL is optimized for writing data access queries extremely concisely, so I don't see how it could end up as more than 50% of the codebase, unless you're using an exceptionally verbose database library (JDBC certainly counts) or your codebase is exceptionally tiny.
jwz's mixtapes

http://cerebrum.dnalounge.com/mixtapes/
I use a very thin database access library over DBAPI (modeled after PEAR DB, basically just wrapping queries with logging and timing, and converting results to Python dicts instead of DBAPI cursors). It was no problem using this with Pylons, instead of the default SQLAlchemy. If you don't like a Pylons module, just swap it out; the framework is built so you can easily substitute your own components in instead of the defaults.

I used the same library with web.py. Web.py's built-in database library is pretty impractical. Global DB connection means it's very difficult to do testing/mockobjects, and it wouldn't scale beyond one machine.
What You Should Know About The Stock Market
30 Interview Questions You Can't Ask and 30 Sneaky, Legal Alternatives to Get the Same Info
Spiritualized, You Know it's true
The little voice in my head, saying, "Who wrote this $*(&##?" That is all.
Time, and brainpower. Too big a problem, too stupid.

Money isn't really an issue - for the stage we're at now, more people would only hurt us, so our only expenses are my living expenses (practically nil; thank you mom & dad) and a cheap server.
Mike Oldfield, Tubular World.
Congrats! I'm not surprised at all...
tech vex or tech tantrum
I've been enjoying those too.
I was thinking of something that persists between logging in.
I also switched from web.py to Pylons. Long-term, I think you're better off with it; it's much more mature and won't choke on things like deployment, or internationalization, or multiple database servers.

But if you're new to Python web frameworks, I'd start with web.py and write a few apps with that. It's much simpler to get into, and you'll understand how things work a bit better.
Andy Grove: Forget about startups, it's large companies that generate real change.
DoubleClick unwittingly distributed malware ads
The Adam Carolla Daily Radio Show Podcast
Yeah. Aaron has a lot more homemade videos to make before he catches up with those two.
iLike Publishes Unreleased U2 Song
I like that explanation. You should know this, too:

http://philip.greenspun.com/materialism/money