skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've always been a fan of wunderground (http://wund.com). In addition to the main site, it has similar functionality to what's described in the article with its mobile/iphone subsites.
unfortunately you're correct.

all the more reason to develop firefox-specific software!
New Blackberry 9000 in iPhone Black?
These are most of those I follow... as you'll see, it's very difficult to find good material on maths and physics blogs, or at least I've had difficulties on finding it.

Maths:
http://www.arsmathematica.net/
http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/
http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/ (not exactly maths but...)
http://plus.maths.org/blog/
http://terrytao.wordpress.com/
http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/
http://blog.plover.com/ (sometimes)
http://blog.wolfram.com/
http://gowers.wordpress.com/

Physics:
http://backreaction.blogspot.com/
http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress (very biased)
http://angryphysicist.wordpress.com/
http://scottaaronson.com/blog
http://motls.blogspot.com/ (very biased)
Someone also came up with this one: http://ycsearch.com/
Happy New Year!
Dear Startups,

Have a prosperous 2008!

Cheers.
Using the web as a GUI has become much easier in the last 10 years. The new frameworks allow you to do things in a matter of hours that would have taken weeks in the early days (possibly some personal skills bias is coming into play here too).

Try out something like RoR or Django.

I had the desire to write my own framework for many years, and completed a few half-baked frameworks, but it is definitely worthwhile considering one of the major frameworks. There is a lot of time, thought and effort put into them that you can leverage!
"The guy is pretty annoying and I can't resist taking cheap shots at him, sorry."

Especially when he introduces terms like "encapsulation" and "testing" that don't seem to be connected to anything other than his bad analogy. I can't figure out what he's on about and I'm not especially motivated to, since I'm pretty sure he's looking for a pattern where none exists.

It looks to me as if inspiration and invention have happened throughout history independently of the circumstances of being employed by a company seeking to make patented and copyrighted products out of them, or being a hobbyist committed to sharing software.

PageRank is a ridiculous example. Isn't it proprietary specifically to try to gain an advantage over Google spammers? And why would a hobbyist start a PageRank-like project in the first place? I'm not convinced Google's decision to keep it secret is optimal, given the success of free and open email spam filters, but they have enough smart people working there to come up with a reasonable solution to the problem anyway.

Speaking of spam filters, I'd say those represent a far better example of innovation than anything Lanier could think of, and virtually all of that innovation has happened in free software.
Aye, have a good one all.
BB specs seem to get leaked quite a bit!

I don't know that I like the look of their new phone.
In no particular order:

Slashdot,
BBC,
Gizmodo,
New Scientist,
Bilogy News Net,
Eureka Alert,
YC News (of course),
TechCrunch (US and UK),
Techgain,
How To Change The World,
VentureBeat,
Get Venture,
FoundRead.
So get off your ass and write something better!
"puthu valsara aashamsakal"

/in my mother tongue,Malayalam/
So then: someone should make "voteupronpaulstories.com" and "allyourronpaularebelongtous.com" and "this-is-where-you-vote-on-videos-and-NSFW-content.com" to make reddit and digg better.
It really depends on what you want to do, electronic design is not (IMHO) much different then the ideas in software design. My background is EE, my day job is circuit design including firmware and in my spare time I do web projects, RoR mostly and some PC software and I think alot of the same principles apply.

There are many ways to design the circuitry as the same for software, many designs will be 'better' and many will be quicker to market. But you can hack hardware together just like you can for software (its just much harder to upgrade a circuit board design).

If you have never done much hardware design I don't think I would recommend buying a cheap microcontroller and going to town will all the design. It would probably be much more advantageous to get a development board and try things out first. Sites like sparkfun.com have a lot of different offerings. These also give you a schematic of the circuit to start with.

As someone else noted it really depends on your needs and goals, I am assuming this is something complicated enough to warrant a uC.

Good Luck!
Bon any nou! (Catalan)
Gezuar vitin e ri!! (Albanian)
This article doesn't talk about that. Terry Tao is debunking the myth that only genius people can do interesting discoverings in mathematics; that is, that you have to be Poincare, or Euler, or Gauss, or Erdos to do interesting mathematics.

You can also extrapolate it to general science (remember Einstein?), technology, business, and so on...
Stastny Novy rok (Slovakian) and better yc.utf-8 support :)
Verizon just sent me a flyer advertising an LG that looks much like an iPhone. I don't have either, but am extra proud of my four-year-old LG with a liquid crystal display.
Feliz ano nuevo!!! (Spanish)
(the first "n" doesn't appear as it should, but well...)
I hope you guys find this website useful. I know there are a bunch of other YC searches out there, but we're trying to improve on all of them.

1. nycs.bigheadlabs.com - a good one created by the Disqus guys, but they stopped updating the index quite awhile ago, so all of the search results are stale.

2. trk7.com/yc - Another YC search, but the interface is really confusing.

3. ycsearch.com, Google - Indexes insanely fast and has an excellent relevancy algorithm, but you can't sort by post date or points.

4. Firefox toolbars, etc - I haven't tried them, but I assume it just uses a Google custom search.

5. SearchYC.com - full text searching, 15 minute updates, and a cool user-search feature (try searching for your username (case-sensitive)). We also enable sorting results/submissions/comments by relevancy (sucks), YC points, or post date.

What we really want to do is to start generating some user stats and interesting queries such as "top points per submission", "most linked-to websites", etc. If you're interested in one, post it here!

Anyways, we want you guys (YC users) to help us decide where this goes. The sky's the limit!

Happy New Year's!
Anyone think anyone will ever release real thumbboard for the iphone? I hate typing on my ipod touch as my fingers are not built for it.
Amazon's EC2 Open Source Firefox Plugin
I always read Terry Tao's blog, and his website is full of interesting material as well... Thank you for your interesting comment.
The world is not so flat, God of Visas edition
Why have morals when you can make money instead?
Developers continuously push the envelope, so building state-of-the-art applications will always be difficult and time consuming. It's the last 10-20% of development--the truly hard finishing part--that takes an application from "good enough" to "really cool" (also from being permanently labeled "beta").

As an analogy, there was a time when breaking the four minute mile barrier as a runner was considered impossible. Now it's quite common. Yet it's just as difficult to be the fastest runner.

My advice would be to become familiar with a number of web frameworks _and_ understand how to build your own. This will take some time, but the benefit will be your understanding of when to use frameworks and when not to. One question to consider is what sort of projects are you planning to build? If it's a one-off for a client, would a framework get most of the job done? If it's a product you'll be hosting or distributing, will you be living with the code base for a long time and therefore benefit from the investment of your time in development?
&#1057; &#1053;&#1086;&#1074;&#1099;&#1084; &#1043;&#1086;&#1076;&#1086;&#1084;!
Es posible:

&iexcl;Feliz a&ntilde;o nuevo!
So, were HTML character codes disabled here?
Storm, Nugache lead dangerous new botnet barrage
Feliz ano novo! (pt_BR)
#8 There's money to be made.
Puthaandu Nal Vaazhthukkal.
(Tamil)
I think it depends on whether you have a favorite language to program in and if there is already a framework that fits your own need there is no need to waste energy.

I have created my own toolkit that sits over the top of the asp.net 2.0 and that fits my needs and gets used for all my projects.

I think in a few more years time your be able to use tools like Access to deploy web apps(I know you can do it to a point now).
nice try :)
Okay, what these guys really need is to send the reply in a comment attached to the original blog post. That would drive way more traffic, too, since they could answer people who are just "lazyweb"ing, and don't even know about hoosgot.com in the first place.
PayPal Founder Peter Thiel Invests in Hooja
The reason I say "no" is because the designer I worked for had ridiculously high expectations. And with Django we were able to deliver to many of those expectations, but the ones we were slow with we heard about for a while.
The base looks similar (space is function call, static types inference, currying, '->' for function definition etc.) because the common ancestor for haskell, o'caml, erlang and various others is ML, another language.

This is the same kind of relation between C, java and C#, the basic type system and grammar are cousin.

I won't answer to the "static typing is inflexible", but you should check the type system itself, and its genericity system and modularity system.
Your intuition is right. MVC frameworks do not help individual hackers. Their purpose is to make it harder to do bad things. Making it easier to do good things is not a requirement.

On the other hand, it does look like good client-side JavaScript frameworks provide a competitive advantage, if used judiciously. I haven't investigated which is best yet.
Pipelines Using Fibers in Ruby 1.9
Using an example from a benchmarking suite to illustrate language conciseness doesn't make any sense. We all know that conciseness is inversely proportional to speed. Whoever wrote that Java code was trying to write the most performant, not the most concise code. He did a great job, by the way, since for that particular benchmark, Java outperforms Ruby by a factor of 20! (http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4/benchmark.php?test=sum...)

Sorry for initially assuming that you wrote the code. I wasn't familiar with that site, so I didn't register your original allusion to it.
cheers and beers!
It actually stopped indexing news.yc in the summer time (some minor thing tripped it up, but it hasn't been tended to).

We should probably put a message up telling people to stop using it, or link to this new one. Nice work.
Bonne annee !

(first French !)
Mutlu yillar
Working on Todo Lists Projects?  DoMoreList.com
I think utf-8 or Unicode support would be a disimprovement.
If there are hundreds of thousands of educated Indians clamoring for engineering jobs, how aren't they taking over the world yet? What needs to be done to provide them the opportunity? Sounds like there is quite an opportunity for the provider as well as the providees...
Happy new anus to you too...

(Changing that enye into an enn is just a bad situation in Spanish sometimes! ;)

Any hope on yc news ever supporting fancy characters like that?
Story of how spam started
Ask YC: Has anyone programmed with NLP software?
As in, used their voice to write code. Lemme know your thoughts.
An nou fericit! (Romanian)
To those that have, shall be given
Yahoo Exec Souders To Google; Yahoo to Zero?
I was just kidding. I do like the app. You did a good job of keeping it clean.
Who Is The Openest Of Them All?
Free business tools for the college entrepreneur
Rails is a Ghetto... [NSFW for Language]
Some pretty harsh words...
Naya saal mubarak! (Urdu-India)
Why is this interesting? It's just some guy calling people names, airing personal dirty laundry on his petty little web log, and then complaining about how poor he is ("I wrote Mongrel and then my career was ruined").

I'm sure he's a smart guy, but he manages to make himself look totally unprofessional.
Daily Mashup: http://dailymashup.com/
NewsMap: http://www.marumushi.com/apps/newsmap/newsmap.cfm
In basketball you have to shoot 50pct. If you make an extra 10 shots per hundred, you are an All-Star. In baseball you have to get a hit 30 pct of the time. If you get an extra 10 hits per hundred at bats, you are on the cover of every magazine, lead off every SportsCenter and make the Hall of Fame.

In Business, the odds are a little different. You don't have to break the Mendoza line (hitting .200). In fact, it doesn't matter how many times you strike out. In business, to be a success, you only have to be right once.
It's interesting to see the "inner-agenda" of Rails community especially for those who aren't involved. For some time many Rails bloggers are defending Rails very hard and often they poke (obsessively) other technologies.

I've always knew these people were defending Rails for consulting money.
(for the record I use rails) once you sift through his rants some of it is both interesting and disturbing at some points:

"(15:11:12) DHH: before fastthread we had ~400 restarts/day

(15:11:22) DHH: now we have perhaps 10

(15:11:29) Zed S.: oh nice

(15:11:33) Zed S.: and that's still fastcgi right?"

Thank God JRuby is here...
"Why is this interesting?"

I think you just answered your own question. ;)

Zed (and his code) is very well-known, intelligent, and important to the Rails community. Whatever you may think of his perspective or how it's been presented, he has some ostensibly valid criticism and it will certainly be interesting to see how people will react to it.
If the main people who control the direction of the framework which you use to make your living were acting in a shady way wouldn't YOU be interested? It's not just "personal dirty laundry" in that what the people he's talking about do, how they work, affects a lot of people.

Also, it's not just "some guy." Zed Shaw wrote Mongrel, which virtually every Ruby on Rails project uses. Without him, Rails development would likely still be a huge pain in the ass.

BTW, you should read his essay on statistics; it provides a good starting point for figuring out how to analyze the performance of your sites.
Yeah, that statistics essay is awesome. My favorite essay of his, though, is how he uses finite state machines to implement protocols. It's pretty badass.
"Educated" folks praying to a "Visa God..." Mindblowing... Keeping the spirit of "plug and pray" alive!
I posted this on reddit and was surprised that no one had observed the same thing here (like, say, pg calling him out).

The arrogance contained in this rant is sad. He "almost" got his MS, he "nearly" completed a formal education, and he twice decided he was too good to be a Jr. Sysadmin at Google. What do Junior Sysadmins do at Google? They learn how to work with one of the largest distributed systems on the planet, and they become Senior Sysadmins or Production/SRE engineers. If you don't want to work at Google that's one thing, but unless you've got your own Big Idea (and no, "being homeless" does not count as a Big Idea), maybe it'd be worth the initial indignity....

Burning bridges in public is one thing, but I worry a little that he's burnt a bunch of bridges in front of him, not just behind. And the small satisfaction of a rant like this is not worth it. For perspective -- would you expect to see something like this out of Obie? Ever?

Make your own opportunities before you burn your bridges... the time for a victory rant is after you win big, not before.
Zed seems to be proving his own point quite effectively with his foul-mouthed rant.
Anyone else have their kids wake them up before 7 this morning :(
Looks like being another long hot Summer day...

Happy new year everyone!
Is written language ever really NSFW? Spoken language and nudity seems a little different to me.
pg called him out? where?
When he gets over his God Complex he will be very successful.
There's one thing that just doesn't seem right about this rant, which I think will make his whole argument fall to pieces.

Before he wrote mongrel, it seemed like he had a pretty decent working situation. After he wrote mongrel, he was jobless and nearly homeless for an extended period if time.

That just doesn't sit right with me as being truthful. How can a person, who is otherwise a qualified developer, write one of the most well-known pieces of the Rails infrastructure, but suddenly be jobless? I wrote a shitty weather app and got 3 gig offers within a day. How can you be a household name within the Rails community and not have a job?

By being an arrogant asshole? By demanding outrageous fees? By demanding outrageous control over projects? All three?
Plenty of things, written or otherwise, are not safe for work. I don't think this is one of them though.
This is perhaps the most interesting part of this entire article.
How to Think Like a (Python) Programmer
Exploring Python Bytecode
The arrogance contained in this rant is sad. He "almost" got his MS, he "nearly" completed a formal education, and he twice decided he was too good to be a Jr. Sysadmin at Google.

I didn't see his rant as arrogant . . . just pretty blunt. If you actually read his technical work, it's quite clear that Zed is very good at what he does and employs practical applications of computer science in his work. It's no secret that Zed thinks there are too many bullshit "hackers" out there who don't know basic computer science, yet they think they're God because they learned Rails or Django. It looked like he was trying to highlight the irony of (no offense to anyone here) English majors turned script kiddies trying to lecture him on topics in which they are, frankly, out of their depth.

Having been in the consulting world at a major firm for a few years before starting my company, I've seen it dozens of times. They'll pay, staff, and bill out non-technical people like they're technical and vice versa. You sometimes find yourself dealing with "superiors" and "peers" that think their "IT experience" of writing Excel macros makes them computer scientists all of a sudden. The water's just too deep for a lot of these people and they'll put their feet in their mouths a thousand times before they learn it.

(Before I get flamed -- I applaud non-technical folks who are able to crossover and start their businesses using frameworks and other tools. That's truly awesome. The problem is when these people start thinking that because they learned how to change a spark plug or bolt on a turbocharger, they're suddenly automotive engineers and can design a car engine from scratch just like their buddies who work at Ford. Formally trained engineers != mechanics, no matter what the field. Hell, I remember a few months ago, someone on News.YC had the audacity to declare that Computer Science is irrelevant to web apps. That's the sort of bullshit that goes on in this field. There are people who call themselves hackers and literally have no clue what they're talking about and no reverence for the people who've built the tools that allow them to get a foot in the door.)

They learn how to work with one of the largest distributed systems on the planet, and they become Senior Sysadmins or Production/SRE engineers. If you don't want to work at Google that's one thing, but unless you've got your own Big Idea (and no, "being homeless" does not count as a Big Idea), maybe it'd be worth the initial indignity....

Meh. Any technical hiring manager who's researched what Zed's capabilities are would know that he is overqualified for that role. Why exactly should someone with twenty years of experience and Zed's skillset who also just happened to have single-handledly wrote one of the most rock solid webservers around with thousands of production deployments take some shit job just because it's Google? Honestly, they're just another company ...

Make your own opportunities before you burn your bridges... the time for a victory rant is after you win big, not before.

That's wise advice.
I think he was lamenting the fact that pg didn't call him out.
Sadly, Firefox still sucks on the Mac.

I'll use Safari until Firefox is better.
I suspect his problem is geography. I haven't lived there, but I can imagine that in NYC when you deal with Rails shops you get to talk to sleazy "MBA types" as opposed to traditional startup hubs like SV and Boston, where you typically have no problems finding cool hackers to work with.

BTW: I don't think he is an arrogant asshole, he's just just brutally honest, NYC-style. And yes, Ruby/Rails folks often smell too much like "get-rich-quick" in their blogs/posts online, so I am not surprised if they are indeed shady in real life.
I'm grateful for Zed's work on Mongrel, and by all accounts he's a first-rate hacker, but this rant just doesn't hold water. Though the Rails community can certainly be a bit elitist, it's also full of friendly, supportive people, and Zed doesn't produce any convincing evidence that there is a systemic problem. This looks more like an airing of personal grievances, based on a small number of encounters, and blown all out of proportion.
Starting a Business "Art of the Start" Style
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If I knew where Zed lived, I would send him a copy of "How to win friends and influence people".
Owning the cloud: virtualization software is full of bugs [pdf]
Why would pg call him out? what does he have to do with zed or rails at all any more then Bhutto's assassination.
It was a stunner for me, I must admit.
Though the Rails community can certainly be a bit elitist, it's also full of friendly, supportive people

QFT
Evolution of economics
Sure people would contact me for their tiny little start-ups, but I'd eventually catch on that they just want to use me to implement their ideas. Their ideas were horrendously lame. I swear if someone says they're starting a social network I'm gonna beat them with the heal of my shoe.

I wonder if it had ever occurred to Zed that most software jobs involve getting paid to implement other people's horrendously lame ideas.

I don't want to be a "Ruby guy" anymore, and will probably start getting into more Python, Factor, and Lua in the coming months.

Why is it that I find myself praying this guy doesn't try to get into Haskell, OCaml, Erlang or any of the languages I hope to use?

Someone should tell him to stop taking charm lessons from TDR.
My apologies if I misled some of you. I was a little appalled by the language, and felt it pertinent that most of you were aware of the foul nature of the language used.
Zed is a talented developer and a committed open source contributor. It seems that some of the negative aspects of the community got to him and he sort of snapped...

But I suppose if you're the kind of cat who keeps IRC logs in anticipation of future sour grapes, then I think you qualify as eccentric.

That's not a bad thing, but the rant is oddly reminiscent of some of Hans Reiser's rants.
Agreed. I checked out Zed Shaw after reading the article (I did not know anything of him except that he wrote Mongrel) and was very impressed [http://www.workingwithrails.com/person/5455-zed-shaw]. He obviously is a very important, and known member of the Rails (and Ruby) community, and I am anxious to see the response the community has to his throwing in the hat.

I personally have not interacted with the rails community (but have with ruby's) so I don't have an opinion as to whether he makes any good points, but taking him at face value, I have to admit I am a little disappointed.

Again, it will be interesting to see how this turns out...