skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"... One problem I can think of is that I'm forced to mix two languages in one story .."

Do you mean embedded? that I agree with. Embedded sucks but there are lots of techniques (abstraction) you can use to avoid them. Unavoidable is writing web based applications without using several languages. Though I can think of some lisp apps that do not (news). Do you lisp?
It appears you took down the linked post. I read it and thought it was good. Hard to follow until I became familiar with your other articles, and much shorter than those were, but still good. Please keep writing.
> Resumes are about presentation.

I couldn't help thinking of this Calvin & Hobbes strip when I read that:

http://www.marcellosendos.ch/comics/ch/1989/11/19891102.gif
But the language you're inventing is just a prettier syntax for basically the same semantics.

No offense, drfranke, but this reminded me of a conversation I had long-long ago, with a group of physicists. I was saying Fortran was going to die soon and their only argument was "see, you can do it in Fortran! you are just replacing one syntax with another!". Actually damn Fortran died a bit later than I expected, but those're just technical details :)
For more than two decades, the Fed has been the prime enabler of dangerously speculative economy
Is Google Alerts Better Than RSS?
Is he right? ( Confessions of a Terrible Programmer )
What Happens When Housing is Cheap?
"If I get to pick the programming language for a particular program, my "go to" language is Ada."

Your "go to" is considered harmful.
I wish I could mod you up two points. Great analysis.
Fortran is still very much in use in theoretical physics/quantum chemistry departments.
How do these filters work efficiently on a HashTable? And most ORM frameworks I know come with a SQL-like query language. How else would you formulate complicated queries?
Science Lovers' Dating Service
Except it has 0 matching profiles near 1000 miles of my zip. I am doomed!
Because nobody cares about creating a decent math library for one of the mainstream dynamic languages.
5 reasons why the mobile Web sucks
Why haven't OO databases become popular if that's what so many people really need?

XML, while not necessarily 'object-oriented' is hierarchical, not relational. It's becoming very popular.
I suppose the question comes down to what you want to do later in life. If you are happy doing what you are doing what you are doing for the rest of your life, I'd say you've made a great choice. If you say, hit 30 and start wondering about what life would be like doing something other than coding you may be shit-out-of-luck, possibly having no skills with which to change careers.

All I can say is what you are doing would not work for me personally. I'm the kind of person who likes doing a lot of different things. I was just working doing economics consulting. Now I am managing a large Ruby on Rails development project. I like the change and challenge of shifting rapidly from one industry to another, picking up things as I go along and adding to my overall database of skills & knowledge.
Joel optomised this article so well it was published in "October 2007"!

I watched Aardvark after purchasing a copy and was probably responsible for some of the fun Joel describes sending the DVD, OS. One of the things that struck me watching the film was the project was just so straightforward. It was bland. I don't know if it was because the programmers where so good? Joel was overseeing the specification? The idea was predefined? There was no coding frenzy of Coderush, no blood in the water like Startup.com. No grungy craziness of e-dreams.

Then again maybe thats the point. A great example of "software management" in releasing a version 1 product. The movie was still like eating cardboard though. (5.5/10)

- coderush http://www.amazon.com/Code-Rush/dp/B00004T128

- startup.com http://en.wik ipedia.org/wiki/Startup.com

- edreams http://www.kosmo.com/blogs/TimsBlog/2004/04/
10 Interesting Future Web Trends; SFP08, anyone?
I agree high school may be mostly worthless for people who are set on one particular career path. My brother wanted to be a cook - dropped out of HS - and now attends the Culinary Institute of America. Should graduate at 19 w/ a degree & mucho work exp.

Still, this seems to come back to PG's hackers & painters essay. I agree w/ him that the best people in any given field are those that don't stay entirely w/in that field. Living completely w/in the realm of domain specific knowledge is like living in a fishbowl. There are other waters & aquariums - if you swim in them a little bit you can learn enough so you can decorate yours a little better. At least that's my two bits.

Also, doesn't look like you got down-modded for your MS comment so I don't think you can claim to be on the receiving end of any hatred. For my part, if you said google/yahoo/ibm my response would be the same. I just don't want that for my kids.
and totally inappropriate for so many situations
SEIA, "Software Engineering for Internet Applications".

- online, free http://philip.greenspun.com/seia/

- in print http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0262511916/pgreenspun...

- test crashed dummied by armies of MIT grads

- smart authors

- easy to read, lots to master

More suggestions from similiar question ~ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=58927
CoScripter Simplifies Web Experience
Haha. Maybe next year. It has taken decades to reach to the RDMS that we have today. They have improved efficienncy by time, but the inovation has stoped.

Any new system, (OOD) will take years before reaches the maturity level to be used in commercial solutions. Kinda hard for a cash strapped startup.

Also, there have been attempts to build OODs but they have failed, mainly b/c they way ahead of their time.

What I would like to see a distributed Object Oriented Database system, that can scale at will.
Inventor of the Web Criticizes 'Stupid' Male Geek Culture
Paul Tallon: The Alignment Paradox
YC startup Clickpass looking to hire a designer in San Francisco
Emerging Technologies Conference 07 news around the web
9 Ways to Build Your Own Social Network
There are some seriously awesome links on the front page blog. http://www.technologyreview.com/

If anybody is hanging around the area, speak up :)
I'm excited for this one, but it takes millions of dollars in equipment costs to do it today. You can cheaply test for a million basepair subset of someone's genome right now with the right machines at 92% accuracy, which means you really test for the same 100,000 basepair subset ten times to get great accuracy. The full genome is way out of reach today, but hopefully not in five years.

9. Personalized Medicine; this has been on the cards for some time, but in the not too distant future our medical details will be online and the networking aspects of the Internet will be utilized to improve the way medicine is prescribed. As a recent report noted: "Imagine this: you visit your clinician, undergo genetic testing, and then you are handed a miniature hard drive containing your personal genome sequence, which is subsequently uploaded onto publicly accessible databases." See also the blog ScienceRoll.
Web apps: e-mail and games remain hot, office apps cool
I don't think Paul is introducing a new argument such that if a high tech startup starts making money before seeking investment that they are in same class as sandwich shops are. It looks like he's just pointing out examples that disagree with your post (that every company needs to have that strategy.) He then suggests that maybe such Angel networks are behind the times and have unrealistic expectations, if they expect companies with customers, income, and a proven business plan to go to them for $200-300K when those may be ready to contact Silicon Valley VC's for millions.

I can see why Paul believes this isn't a very realistic strategy, long-term. With such a low volume of investments, the investors would be busy working on other things, some maybe unrelated to technology. On the other hand,Silicon Valley VC's would be researching technology and figuring out what is hot and how to help their companies full-time. (I'm just extrapolating here.)
Regarding PHP.
Every time the issue of language choices is raised and php is suggested, many are quick to speak against learning php. I've gotten the impression that php is something I should stay away from, but I am very interested in learning it. Is it worth learning? What are the advantages and disadvantages? Should I just stick with Python (the only language I know currently)? Many of you also say that php will teach you bad habits. It'd be nice to list them so that I, and perhaps others, can stay clear of adopting such habits.

Thanks.
Because they return 404s? :-)
Ok, let's leave it at this: my YC app is for a web-based distributed RDBMS. It's going to speak SQL because that's what everyone is used to, but I've long entertained the idea of designing something nicer to work with and supporting it as an alternate frontend for the query compiler. If you have good ideas about how to do this, and think you're capable of implementing them, then please do send me a resume.
I'm happily surprised that people liked this idea. I always expect my ideas to garner more resistance.

In regard to the market size, I think everyone who has friends and goals could use this.

In regard to creating revenue, I have two ideas.
1. The cliche: Targeted advertising. Having adds based on your goals makes a lot of sense if the ads can get enough context to be relevant.
2. Let people pool prize money. The person who reaches the goal wins the pot. My company would take a small fraction of the prize. I don't know where this would take the company though. Would the company have to be a bank? Would it fall under gambling laws? What are the complications of holding things in what could be viewed as mini-escrow? This path is probably more complicated.
Journalists loves lists, and they can be fun to read, but this doesn't have much value for people trying to predict the future. Let us not forget the oft-quoted words of His Eminence Alan Kay: "The best way to predict the future is to invent it."

The fact is that web 3.0 (shudders in self-loathing at having used the term) doesn't exist yet. If you could see the future, it would be blank. In 1998, web search wasn't the future. Google made it the future. If we don't already know what the future holds, it's no use predicting it--it won't exist until a company comes along and tells us what it is. For the more ambitious among us, that's the role we're looking to play when we start a company--not to predict the future, but to define it.
"Let people pool prize money. The person who reaches the goal wins the pot."
Dude, your head is full of bright ideas.
You got a killer application, indeed!
It seems like sentiment is slowly shifting away from PHP hatred as more people that understand good programming practice start or return to PHP for whatever reason. PHP lets you use whatever code you want in combination with html and doesn't force you to use the MVC paradigm. As long as you stick to the MVC architectural pattern, you should be fine.
Having said that, I have successfully done a lot of things by effectively bypassing the RDBMS. I just never felt that great about it.
An earlier draft of the paper cited, full text available for free:

http://www.diw.de/deutsch/produkte/publikationen/diskussions...
YC Winter 2008 Hopeful Looking for 3rd Co-Founder / Lead Developer
From the article:
"Hypothesis: every boom, ever, leaves behind an infrastructure for steady, above-average growth in some other industry"

Have you considered the tulip boom that happened in the Netherlands in the 1600s? I'd be curios to find out what industry that helped after it collapsed?

In any case, I doubt that this thesis holds for housing.
Whoa. Staring at that site's text for a couple minutes then switching back to News.YC produces an interesting series of horizontal lines.
Good point. It's also not the end of the world in many cases to use 2 queries (or even more if each one is blazing fast). Just check your data first to make sure you don't have O(n) where n can actually be 5,10,20+.
This one is very good... I found the only way to get higher in life, in profession, in anything, is to acknowledge the own limitations. Whenever the time comes that you start feeling you are really good, you are getting worse instead: as to be really good, you need to get even better, and you can only do that if you are humble enough to recognize your own leaks.

And it doesn't care if you are Einstein or Mozart... the battle for skills isn't against other people, but against nature. Einstein needed to get always better to understand more of the nature, and the same for Mozart and his music.

At least, that's the way I see it.

Sorry for my primitive English :)
Even if you built the most perfect possible recommendation engine, it still wouldn't matter unless you were able to build a large enough user base who was actually using it.

Re: ability to get recommendation engines working better, see the Netflix $1M competition as an example of just how hard it is.
I was going to say the EXACT same thing.
Calacanis may be a dick but he has proven himself (to the tune of $30M or whatever).

I don't use Mahalo but I have no doubt he'll be able to monetize that kind of business and eventually sell out for a decent payday.
I am skeptical about the assertions stuff. I rather write my methods so that they don't blow up if they are being called with wrong data. Throwing an Exception is OK. I can't recall a case where assertions where really necessary. In fact it seems messy to me to write a method but then to add instructions for humans of the form "but don't call it with parameters like that". It should all be in the code, not in the instructions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afterimage

Bright on dark really strains my eyes... at least when I'm not in a dark room.
Russell can be read as a critique of PG. As he says, there is value simply in doing the thought experiments of philosophy even when this does not lead towards any greater knowledge of truth. In theory, this should allow one to greater appreciate what one does NOT know, which could (and, in my view, should) make one more humble.

However, part of the problem of philosophy is it occasionally makes truth claims about the nature of its work and designs. This most philosophy profs to teach it as if it is a science, which it is not. If one viewed the ramblings of philosophers as more akin to the musings of the great poets presumably there could be greater appreciation all around.

Still, there must be selectivity of some sort. With PG, I also wouldn't advise anyone to read through the collected works of Berkeley. Russell's history unfortunately also isn't great, although, IMHO, it is worth reading.
Actually, this thread brings up an interesting point.

How many people here are trying to hit a home run right out of the box?

And how many are trying to hit a single, understanding that the odds are higher, but want to leave the door open to hitting the home run later?
I'd love to go for the home run out of the box, but I would need to raise at least one million. That's not going to happen anytime soon.
At RailsConf '07 I went to what appears to be the same talk. As far as I could tell, he missed the audience almost completely. The question we had was "How do I design my Rails app to scale, in case it's the next Twitter?" The question he answered was "What if you wanted to build a datacenter, so you could be the next Joyent?"
What language does force you to use the MVC paradigm?
Thats another thing the seed investors at this talk harped on. Don't try to hit a home run right out of the box. Start out small and try to self fund early on. Once you are starting to prove yourself, and can back up your claims with customer references and numbers, then you should seek funding.

Doing it this way will make investors more confident that your venture can succeed, increasing your chances of being funded and improving the terms of the investment. At least this is how they explained it.
I don't disagree, my comment was just trying to derail the chain of useless rhetorical questions and slow down the advocates on both sides of the fence.
How to Be a Good Graduate Student
Why backing up your data is dead
I was talking with my mom about this the other day, following the exact same chain of reasoning, and came up with this:

This housing boom has left a huge number of McMansion developments that will soon be unsellable at any price, because there are no buyers in their demographic. The baby-boomers who built them will soon be empty-nesting and moving to Florida condos. The Millenials that are entering the workforce now seem to prefer city-living and have no desire to live in a 5000 square foot monstrosity in the suburbs. The Gen-Xers who are having kids now just don't have the numbers to fill them.

Meanwhile, firm size is decreasing, more people are working from home, and the economy is shifting from machine-intensive manufacturing to knowledge-intensive professional services. If YCombinator is right, the next decade will see an increasing number of small startups, independent consultants, and homesourcers. Many of these people are interested in coworking, because it's a lot less lonely than spending all day at home.

So, my proposal is to buy up whole developments worth of McMansions, convince the local government to convert the zoning to mixed-use (perhaps they could create a new "professional" zoning category, for businesses that don't generate much physical commercial traffic), and then rent them out en-masse to small firms. Many of the McMansions being built today have 5 (!!) bathrooms, one per bedroom, so it wouldn't be too complicated to split them up into apartments with a shared kitchen & common area. People could roll out of bed and run next door to work. We could partner with ZipCar so that transportation would be available if yoou wanted to go to the supermarket or out for a weekend. There'd be community events so you could bond with everyone in the development and not just your coworkers.

This'd solve a number of problems at once. It eats up the unused housing stock in the suburbs. It provides an alternative for young urban professionals who don't want to live in urban areas. It builds on the coworking trend, providing cozy office space to single professionals or small firms. With gas prices rising, it'd cut commuting costs to nearly zero. It lowers the trouble of finding a place to live and an office to work for all your employees, many of whom are increasingly mobile these days. And it offers a sense of community to people who are often either increasingly isolated (if they live/work alone) or increasingly alienated (if they live/work in the city) these days.

Would folks go for an arrangement like this? Personally, I hate the city and can't stand living without some greenery in my life - but I also hate having an hour commute and no young people in my area. I'd love an arrangement where I could walk to work and knew my neighbors. Other opinions?
What do you want to gain from it?

If you want to learn a lot of good practices and maintain and extend your codebase in the future, RoR is fantastic - but may be a steep learning curve due to all the new concepts and levels of abstraction involved, and is somewhat harder to deploy, and probably somewhat more expensive to host.

If you want to "hack something together quickly" to deploy cheaply on any of a wide range of hosting providers, PHP provides a famously productive way to make a mess^H^H^H^H simple web app.
PHP isn't going to ruin you, but if you're comfortable with Python then why bother?

edit: I should be more clear here. There are lots of good reasons to learn PHP, eg. you want to work on a project or job that uses it.

If you want to learn it to expose yourself to new things, some other language is probably a better choice. If you want to learn it because you think that it's a better choice for a particular application than Python, I suspect you're wrong.
So the moral is, lose your confidence and think of yourself as a no-good loser. Then the billions will start flowing in.
I'm a no-good loser! How come I'm not rich yet? ;-)
erm... Rails is a framework, not a language.
Super+M is one of the best key combos in Beryl / Compiz. It inverts all of the colors in the window manager, which is great for turning white on black web pages into black on white.
Wow, even my apology is getting modded down! I must have hit a nerve or something. :) To all who modded me down: way to jump on the bandwagon.

Why is everybody so anti-HTML?
Wikipedia's Awkward Adolescence
Like a startup maturing into a real business, Wikipedia's corporate culture seems conflicted between its role as a harmless nouveau-digital experiment and its broader ambitions. Love it or hate it, Wikipedia is a powerful force. As the site matures, optimizing that force in the pursuit of truth will mean that Wikipedia must learn from others as much as it teaches.
"Once we've killed backing up in favor for keeping our files in the cloud, the next step will be keeping those files out of silos."

I'd prefer to do those in the reverse order.
Oversimplification is confusing (or, Don't ask stupid questions)
What % of equity would you offer? I'm in a similar position and I'm wondering about how much we should give away (if at all).
If you have a mac, ctrl-alt-apple-8.
I didn't go to the talk, but from the slides I got the impression that if you're the next Twitter you'll find it cheaper to build your own datacenter than to rent from Joyent. I don't know if this is true, though.
I think it was more about you cutting into this guy for using blogspot.
i disagree. if my code is being called with incorrect parameters, i WANT it to blow up. if a method silently fixes input data to something it can deal with, then it's hiding a bug that needs to be fixed.

also, assertions are good documentation. they let maintenance programmers a better idea of what's expected at this point.
Assertions are in the code. And they can really be helpful.
> Engagement is inversely correlated with CTRs

Which is exactly why more CPA ad systems are needed. That's the best way I see to allow everyone to get their interests in line.
Explaining the Excel Bug
10 Things You Can Do Today to Simplify Your Life
MI5 | Exploding chocolate bar
> An underlying theme of the talk was "risk aversion"

That's really funny. Why are they investing in startups, then?
eBay scammers waste my time
As a philosophy major, what initially geeked me about the brain is that we could begin to understand philosophical problems in the material terms from which they arise. My work has shown that the British Empiricists were right, to a certain extent. Other work has shown that different forms of moralizing - utilitarian and the categorical imperative - use different brain systems. That's the story of philosophy in my eyes - asking questions and postulating answers well before the tools were available to address them. The great fracturing of science into different disciplines reflects how those questions have been addressed as the proper tools have emerged in the history of science.

A fun game is thinking about what philosophers would be doing if they had today's shoulders to stand upon. Descartes no doubt would be in robotics. Hume a neuroscientist. Spinoza in computer science. Heidegger wandering the streets. Kant a Republican. Even more fun to think about is whether the structure of their brains led them to their conclusions - less free thought than self-discovery. Sort of like how Picasso is thought to have painted with brain damage.

Of course, that historical perspective doesn't address the current state of the field. To me, the modern philosophers are struggling to maintain their "privileged" grip on problem spaces. And that's why I do neuroscience!
Yes! If it causes pain, I WANT it to hurt. Has worked pretty well for us for 3 million years. The same for our code.