skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There was a simpler question about risk on the first Y Combinator application: http://web.archive.org/web/20050324021230/www.archub.org/sfp...

>If you could trade a 100% chance of $1 million for a 10% chance of
a larger amount, how large would it have to be? Answer for each
founder. (There is no right answer.)
I'd have imagined that a huge non-tech organization like the NYTimes would be too full of PHB's to let anything "untested" like S3 or EC2 be used for a high profile project, but between this and their open sourcing some code (code.nytimes.com), I seem pretty wrong. What other non-obvious (Facebook, Google, Amazon) companies do you guys know of that are tech-open-minded?
Masked thieves storm into Chicago colocation (again!)
to me Ruby is what Sun always wanted - a simple language (ideally running on the Java VM) that would lure away all those disgruntled VB programmers away from MS... too bad they focused their initial attention on Groovy. Times have changed
looks like that's fixed already. No doubt there will be many more of these fixes in the next few days/weeks...
Why would it be different than the societies we have?
Comparing Collections != Comparing Objects
can't i beat the wager by getting my parents and friends to give me a big pile of money a few days before my 55th birthday?
The future of programming languages in a massively concurrent world
If, as it appears, whatever-it-is-that-replaces-Moores's-law states that the number of processor cores will double every 18 months from now on, then in 6 years time 32 core machines will be common place.. and the hacker's weapon of choice a gleaming new 64 core Macbook Pro.

It seems to me that in such a world any language that by default addresses 3% or less of the processing capacity will quickly loose popularity and those that embrace concurrency at a fundamental level (not another library) will become more and more relevant. IMO, Joe Armstrong in this (previously submitted) video talks a lot of sense on this issue.--> http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=351659

My motivation for posting this is simply that I would love for Arc to succeed in it's objectives. But to be a '100 year language' I imagine it would have to first thrive in the next 10 years; and to do that it must be seen as a great language for tomorrow's world and not today's. From what I've seen so far of Arc I get nothing but good vibes and it would be a shame for it to be sidelined in the multi-core rush just around the corner.

My apologies if this has been discussed before. I am new here, couldn't figure out how to search past articles and Google just returns this home page.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

thread winner
According to a food-aware friend of mine, the waiter who brings you Filets de venaison frits sur leur sauce a l'echalote should be able to explain to you exactly what ingredients went into the food, how it's made, and a lot of other intricacies about your meal.
I think it's a bit unfair to compare google.com to yahoo.com. google.com is clearly intended for search, while yahoo.com is so much more.

Perhaps Yahoo should have made http://search.yahoo.com/ the default front page, but then search would have been the main business for Yahoo, which it is not
I agree that Britney Spears will not be able to make it in a tip-based music industry.
karma = saying what the news.yc community wants to hear. Slip one of a few keywords into the submission title and you're sorted.
The mobile web is going to be great in this regard since users are used to paying for everything and quick easy payment solutions are already in place. As for online solution take a look at http://tipit.to/
On second read, I noticed this gem of advice:

Google doesn't have to behave like this. At their current share price they can acquire any company -- and I mean ANY company -- for little or no cost. Killing little free411 after first cozying up to them is mean-spirited and, if Google continues to behave like this in the future, will hurt the company's reputation long-term. Maybe having a good reputation means little to Google, but it should.

It's time to grow up, kids.

So Google should acquire all startups that are affected by its services, even if there's nothing to gain from the acquisition... because it's the nice thing to do? I'm all for going out of your way to be nice, but let's double check who needs to grow up here...
And if it's fun then where's the effort?

I'm with you Shiro... I'll take fun any day.
My guess? Tribalism.

From what I understand, there is no way they would develop any kind of compex language in one generation, and would live something like apes do.
check out cilk; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cilk . i'm not terribly familiar with it, but it extends c++ and adds a few keywords/abstractions to work with concurrency. it's been spun out of its original project at MIT into a startup as well (http://cilk.com/ )
2GB of free storage online. Includes free streaming and other extras!
I think it's a race:

In one corner are languages like Erlang that have been designed for concurrency.

In another corner are languages with massive user bases, that don't do concurrency very well (Java for example), that will have to undergo modifications to work better.

In another corner, perhaps, are languages that are just now being created. They're the outsiders, but have more agility in their design because they don't have huge user bases.
Gadgets at great prices. Digital Cameras the cheapest on the Market.
PurelyGadgets.co.ukis one of the UKs leading online electrical retailers, selling a huge range of goods ranging from Camcordersthrough to Tripods and computer accessories.
21 Male/USA - Depending on how the wager is presented, I could probably be sold on $n = $1 billion.

For example, one should consider it a motivational tool - sure, most people in my position could make $1 billion with the right motivation, and this bet is just the right kind of motivation!

To take such a bet is morally required, because it'll lead me to leading a life where I create more wealth for humanity, even if I don't reach the $1 billion mark.

So morally, the question shouldn't be about maximizing one's outcome at age 55, but about finding a value that I would deem achievable for the next 35 years.

Also, even if I don't make $1 billion, the kind of skills I'd learn trying to make $1 billion over 35 years would allow me to live a comfortable life after 55 anyway.
The way things are headed, we'll soon be running most of our applications in the browser. Someone needs to come up with a multi-threaded JavaScript. Yes, I know, it's not going to be pretty.
I would agree with Don, but something inside of me feels like playing devil's advocate.

OpenSocial isn't about killing facebook in its tracks, but is a wise move in the long-term. Nobody is arguing if facebook will be around in 1 year, but will it be in 10?

With their platform, facebook defined the scene as "facebook is open for people to make apps, everyone else is closed". With OpenSocial, the frame is "facebook apps use proprietary markup, OpenSocial apps use web standards".

I don't think OpenSocial as it is now is the only thing that's coming out from Google that will affect facebook. If this pattern continues, facebook is in for a PR nightmare.

And let's not underestimate the value of public perception - being seen as "the guys with the proprietary markup" or "the guys with the walled garden" for long enough puts you in the position Microsoft is in now - where people are just waiting for a reason to bash.
There is some chicken-and-egg effect: multicore processors are selling well if you have applications/languages and vice-versa.
As far as I see, OpenMP has some potential as well as Erlang and others.
If you think you can do it (i.e. build a successful company), you probably can do it regardless of your status (in school, unemployed or while working for another company). Actually there are numerous examples of people who have done it and each one has their own story. You really can't generalize or conjecture statistics for the future so 1% stat including margin of error is moot. I would rather rephrase your statement as "An entrepreneur is more likely to be passionate about his/her ideas and opening his/her company than building a successful career in another company".
No. In Ruby, array indices start at 0.
Google Gears is multi-threaded.
I read something like that sometime this year. It was kids of age of the kids from Lord of Flies and they gave them an island or something similar, I forgot the results though.
I didn't think of it from that perspective, but I can see how that would work in your case. Maybe I'm just looking at it from the wrong angle. I took it as someone who knew the deal and just didn't want to do it because of a job offer from a cube farm.
Is anyplace in Cali sacred? I feel like Dorothy at the end of the Wizard of Oz. Pull back the curtain on these places, and there's nothing there...
green, not sure what you are asking here.
Sorry my comment wasn't really very clear. If you were running a YC clone, how would you feel about encouraging people to join startups? I think you're a little quick to dismiss people who aren't initially very keen on startups. Just questioning if perhaps your opinion comes from a place where you don't really want others to see the startup light.
Anyone who saw _Top Gear_ last week will know these things are hilarious, especially if you're Jeremy Clarkson's size.
The article doesn't mention legal downloads which might skew the results even further in favour of filesharing and will to some extent explain why CD sales are falling.

Another reason why I think CD sales are falling is because the music that the present day record industry puts most of its effort into promoting is of a lower quality than it used to be. I think things like Napster spooked the industry, it reacted incorrectly and it became extremely profit orientated to the point that it actually became detrimental to profits.
I think 'race' is one way of looking at it. Another way to look at it is that there will be more than one 'winner'. Just like today, I think in the world of tomorrow people will use more than one programming language. So all of the languages that expect to be around tomorrow will need to evolve into languages for controlling concurrent systems on massively parallel architectures.

You are correct in saying that some languages are simply given as winners.

Erlang is a VERY impressive language from a performance standpoint. That said, it really needs to be used in conjunction with some front end UI language to present the results of all of its processing. Make no mistake about it, if one has so much data that one will need say 32 cores to process it, then a clever presentation layer is a must. Another drawback here is that, for those Erlang programmers who are something other than elite, Erlang will handle all of the locking and synchronization on its own. I think experienced senior programmers see where that one is going. That said, the way Erlang implements concurrency is cool. I like simple!

In my opinion, Java is another clear winner here. From Wall Street systems with US$900,000,000,000 a day in transactions flying through them, to medical imaging systems rooting out cancerous pathologies, to petroleum exploration systems trying to find the precise limits to all of that new Cuban oil, Java is at the center. When it comes to handling massive datasets in a maintainable fashion, Java is second only to the C,C++ languages. Some would even say that C or C++ code is less maintainable than Java. I would say they should hire new C programmers.

Lastly, C, C++ and Assembly will always be around because there will always be someone,(Carmack) who wants to outshine everyone else. And we can all agree that nothing flies like an assembly routine. As a bonus, we can get exacting control over concurrency, synchronization and locking. It may be difficult to believe, but this option is attractive to a certain class of hacker.

Concurrency in todays web darlings, Ruby, PHP, and Python will be challenging. I think someone out there will simply come up with a new language. Or the web guys will switch to Erlang over time. They will run into a data size problem though due to the way Erlang implements concurrency at a low level. It will be interesting to watch them problem solve that.

On the front end, it's easy . . . Microsoft wins. Anyone who understands concurrency in an intimate fashion knows the challenges of getting a scripting language like JavaScript to support it in a satisfactory fashion. Do you lock and synchronize for the developer? Do you let him/her? Do you copy the heap and send messages? What about client side memory in a tabbed browser? The questions go on and on. Java may have somewhat of a chance here, depending how things go, but basically Microsoft will continue to have the majority lock.
The factors of entrepreneurship
I pay my due respects to all programmers if this article summarized what you have all went through.
Concurrency in web languages is a non-issue, because each request is independent (or should be, if you have a proper shared-nothing architecture). You simply run multiple processes and give each process a full core. Most FastCGI/SCGI webserver modules have functionality built-in to multiplex among backend processes.

Concurrency in the database is more interesting, particularly since that's where the bottleneck is in many web apps. But that's a C/C++ problem, and many DBMS vendors have already invested a large amount of effort into solving it.
How fun can it be to make hundrends of sit ups everyday for a long period? Yet, strong abdominals might be a must in order to be top in some fields (let's say to be a soccer player in Chelsea) or to be the actor that plays Leonidas in 300. Building strong abdominals IS painful and boring and it takes a lot of motivation to do it.
Concurrency in todays web darlings, Ruby, PHP, and Python will be challenging.

Heard of stackless python? [http://www.stackless.com/]. Eve Online is the highest profile app using it I know of.

Introduction to Concurrent Programming with Stackless Python [http://members.verizon.net/olsongt/stackless/why_stackless.h...]
They can't go fast enough to cause an accident =P
But then, modern cars could overlook these little ones and run them over.
I wish EVERY technical person would see the startup light. It would be a great boon to the economy. It escapes me how they can't, as statistically they probably report to someone who is not as intelligent as they are (a suit). All I am saying is that if they have such a low level of testosterone that they would choose reporting to a boss over being their own, you probably shouldn't waste your time.
I think the measure of "VBness" of a language may not be so much the intrinsic qualities of a language as the calibre of the programmers it attracts. I think VB was (is? ) considered an atrocious language because the average user of VB was, rightly or wrongly, seen to be a "mord" who knew next to nothing of programming and wanted to drag and drop and click his way to project success.
How to be an "Employer of Choice"
There's more articles on that site, mostly distilling the same information that was collected and covered in Branham's book "The Seven Hidden Reasons Employees Leave"
Amazon isn't well known for their culture. I remember couple months ago where I heard and read awful things from employees and ex-employees that works/worked there.

Picture this: they'll give you a pager so they can page you at 3 AM in the morning to fix bugs. The development culture is more like patch-n-release without thinking the long-term design.

No wonder Steve Yegge bolted to Google (and then praise Google for having "Clean Code Base")
Stackless is interesting, but I found it to be a little unwieldy when I wrote a volume visualization test. When each task needs access to the entire volume of data, Stackless gets REALLY slow. I didn't look through the Stackless internals the way I looked into Erlang, but the slowdown was undeniable.

Again, for massive datasets, accessed by many cores over a massive number of threads, it needs a little more development.

TEST ALGORITHM:

Standard Volume ray casting. Each pixel processed separately. Ray casted through volume with alpha based early ray termination.
That's an excellent test algorithm because of the shared memory issues. Might be better if the rays affected the environment -- say laser beams. (For some reason I have a picture of sharks with laser beams)

Ray-tracing is a nice, simple problem domain -- enough to be complicated, but not too complicated.
If you simply received a karma point for making a submission or a comment, then I imagine we'd receive quite a bit more spam. Instead, we're all put on the spot to make valid contributions. This is great, however, there isn't really a forum for users to dispute the lack of merit when downmodding occurs. As far as I'm aware, no web community has that sort of democratic judicial arena for disputes, and it would be nice. Something to think about...
Ask YC: For the hackers, what's your favorite part of development?
... aside from finishing, of course. Thinking up the original idea, planning, building, refactoring, showing your project off, etc. For me, it's definitely refactoring.
Damnit, I was gonna say "finishing". ;-)

Aside from that, it's the incremental refinement that happens after you have a basic architecture, a useful app that puts stuff up on the screen, and a small userbase. Changes are usually pretty easy at that point (if you did the architecture right), and there's the instant gratification of writing a feature and having people immediately use it.

I find that most projects follow a "ski jump" happiness curve. Thinking up the initial idea is a lot of fun, as are the first few planning stages. Then you come up against all the little details that are absolutely necessary to build something useful, yet not really fun to deal with. By the time you're about 2/3 through with building it, it looks hopeless. Then you start cleaning things up and figuring out an architecture that reconciles all the different concerns. If you haven't made too many tradeoffs by then (or skipped the step entirely), the launch and refinement process is kinda fun.
Hack: Discover the hidden 8 bit Sound card in your PC
Go watch Kid Nation. Wednesdays at 8:00 on CBS.
Isn't stackless not truly concurrent since it's still beholden to the Python GIL?

Or is that not the case?
Unless somebody comes up with an app that's doing massive amounts of data processing in JS, I think giving each tab/window its own thread in the browser will be an adequate solution for the foreseeable future.
I really hope that if multiple cores increase, they are done in a way which hides them from the programmer.
For example a 32 core CPU, but that appears as a very very fast single core. That's where the concurrency/'threading' issues should live, not in everyones code.

Threads are usually the problem IMHO not the solution.

I don't agree with the suggestion that javascript will need threads either. Javascript works extremely well in a single thread. There isn't really much of a need for threads. Having multiple cores doesn't change that, it just means you might need some abstraction layer like I described above, that utilizes all cores, whilst appearing as a single core.
Programming with Python -- the Other Guys
PDF!!!
Bye Bye PCs? PCs Being Pushed Aside in Japan by Array of Gadgets With Similar Power
An Open Facebook API vs Google OpenSocial
Ah, I think I see where you're going.

The choice between the two is not nearly as obvious as you think. Otherwise we should all play the lottery, no? The reasons why a is a pretty good idea can get pretty nuanced and sophisticated, and whether a 20-year old knows them all has more to do with who he's talked to recently than any actual ability.

The only reason I'm in a startup now is that I read a few of PG's essays many years past the age of 20, and started having conversations like this on reddit and news.yc. I think it's worth the minor investment in time/effort to reach out to me/them if you're a seed firm.
Not if you owe it back to them. I said net worth, not gross.
Is "Hacker News" run with open source software?
I realize a search feature for Hacker News is likely in the works, so couldn't find the answer to my question in a prev. post. Excuse me if this is repeating a prev. questions.
Tks
Yeah. I made the mistake of projecting my own life attitudes/experiences into the other person. In which case I made the assumption that the decision the other person would make is 'Based on all available data at your disposal, which is the best course of action'.

The other person does not have all the data that I have and probably has not projected future possibilities of the optimal outcome. In that case, they may equate a startup in the same neighborhood of probability as a lottery win.
No, or at least, not yet. It is written using Paul Graham's language Arc, which has not been released yet. Arc has been in development for quite some time and is occasionally the subject of vaporware jokes, but presumably it will become OSS eventually.
No, manufacturers have their own reasons to sell multi-cores, namely, that that's the only way they can sell them as being 'faster'. Intel is going to stop selling single-core processors not too long from now (eg).
Overall a good article that brings up many great points. I find her first requirement of Substantial work history on a large well known product or hundreds of thousands of users or a PhD to be kind of ridiculous. She's saying in order to do a VC-backed company you need to have already "made it" in some way. That toiling in obscurity doesn't "qualify" you for running a company. I find that to be a load of bullshit. In a perfect world, in perfect cicumstances, everything will go perfect. Since this isn't perfect world, in the end only two things really matter; can you build it and are you smart enough to make it survive.
Don's right about the "Checkmate" stuff being silly. Open Social isn't going to crush Facebook. It does neutralize the API advantage, however, and lays the groundwork for some other technology to come along and make Facebook irrelevant.
The #1 reason why developers are on Facebook is because of growth and distribution. It's the most viral platform in the history of man.

OpenSocial has limited-to-none support for viral channels. It's not that interesting, yet.
Mobile may help solve this issue, but I think it is going to take a long time, especially in the USA.

I am betting that the form of "free" content will add value - www.shelfmade.net
What lures me to programming is an obsession with progress. While I've learned to appreciate the process of programming, the elegance of properly done code, and the seeming lack of limitations, seeing day-to-day, week-to-week, yearly progress is huge for me. I like looking back and saying 'wow, my robot/program could not do this two weeks ago'. Maybe it's just because I am vain!
Good stuff. Very relevant for our crowd.
Ask YC: Profit: $25/user. Customers: satisfied. Competitors: none. Target market: huge. But...
My startup's service:

http://www.inquickersmyrna.com/

Customers love the service, and they say it's worth the price of $25 per use.

The bad news: Right now we're only serving about 1-2 customers per day.

My goal is to move the site from 1-2 users per day to 10-15 users per day; I think if we could pass 10 users per day, it would be easy to persuade other hospitals and urgent care centers to participate, and it's all downhill from there.

How would you raise consumer awareness for a service like this? I've tried a few things (mostly offline), but none successful so far.

(If you're still reading: So far I'm the only person working on this business. I'm looking for a person with strong ui + graphic design, seo/sem, and/or copywriting skills to work with -- initially as a contractor, eventually as a co-founder. Interested? E-mail me.)