skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Valleywag's 25 predictions for 2008
Tesla Asks Investors For Another $40 Million To Start Its Engines.
Where do Credit Card Fees Come From?
I loved this article.

PG: feature request - how about a way on news.yc for me to give points out of my karma to a submission/comment that I particularly like? Right now, upvotes are free so I can just throw them around. If they came out of my karma, maybe they'd be more valuable and presumably lead to better voting?
great service -- been using fiveruns for a few weeks...
Then they'll roll over and go to sleep.
> they've built a great flex application and that is no small feat without hard work and talent

?
I'm curious to see some hacker discussion on this, though I can't think of anything to contribute myself...
I'd consider it rather a problem to have a dating site that supported only Windows and Linux users.

At least Mac users tend to be attractive...
Interesting idea.

Lots of people have also wanted to be able to give more than one upvote every now and then, say 5 extra upvotes in a day. Your idea may solve that elegantly as well. You can give as many as you want, but they come out of your karma.

The real challenge is to avoid complicating the UI.
Me too. The numbers look good. I presume they must be nicely profitable for those numbers. Unless the hardware and energy costs are too high (rails is a bit power hungry).

I wonder why they took on investment from Jeff Bezos - maybe it really it just to have involvement of Jeff Bezos (which would be entirely sensible) not to do with money.

Good on them I say.
How to Solve the Problem of the Dollar
Or like user-created subreddits.
There is a residual talent pool of generally undervalued developers in every urban area that is not Boston, NYC, Seattle, and San Francisco. Lots of smart, ambitious people simply cannot relocate to trendy areas.

There are fewer startups, and fewer resources for those startups, in Minneapolis. However, that doesn't mean there are no startups there.

Meanwhile, cost of living and competition differences in underutilized areas make startups in underhyped areas more efficient and easier to staff, up to a point.

I really wonder how much this meme about how much easier it is to staff in San Francisco comes from social ineptness. It always seems like the people infected with it simply can't conceive of recruiting in any way except national job postings and IRC. Our last 3 hires came from meetups we organized.

Finally, if you're really freaked out about finding developers, put your money where your paranoia is: hire remote devs.
It's probably not about the money.

Nice numbers that they have there, much more than I expected.
Hrm, I was hoping it was a longer article with some new insight, but it's an introductory piece. If this is all news to you, check out "Turtles, Termites, and Traffic James", and "The Computational Beauty of Nature"
Yeah, that's where it's from.
It might also be a good idea to make downmods come out the voter's karma.
Facebook's first European employee
But Rails doesn't scale!
There are few options: library in C (overhead with writing wrappers but very fast, or general wrapper like SWIG), stand-alone program (overhead with running it, and parsing the output), daemon, whereas daemon can, roughly speaking, listen either of on TCP (overhead related with connections), or local socket (only local machine, and depends on the OS), as well as use either well established protocol (REST, ROAP), or your own.
Humour 'comes from testosterone'
Just to clarify, I'm not suggesting +1/-1 mods come out of the voter's karma. That is an incentive against the transactions that are the life-blood of this network.

But if you want to do something special one way to do it is to pay for it in karma points. And yeah, that could be +n or -n.
It's the latter, but my comment was directed against the great number of people who fail to understand that all sensible ways of pricing a business are just attempts to estimate its future earnings and liabilities.
Bit of fun :: Dhtml Lemmings
this is a great version of lemmings using javascript.
You may want to examine Erlang again. The recent R12B-0 release included an array module that allows you to do nice sparse-arrays, etc.
Programmer/partner wanted
Hi,

My name is Bill Turner.
I teach at the Expressions College For Digital Arts in Emeryville Ca.

I'm currently looking for a programmer/co partner for a Wikipedia-style project that will be a data base of information pertaining to a particular nitch industry. This project will also have user uploaded videos and forums. This will be a commercial venture.

If you're a programmer that lives in the bay area X preferably the East bay and are interested in hearing more send me an email
At: oneokayfella@gmail.com

Thanks
Bill
No, don't sweat it. You can't do a web application of any kind without violating any number of patents.
I have found "PHP Solutions: Dynamic Web Design Made Easy" to be an excellent learning book. It covers all the usual things you'd want to build in a web app.
Yargh, but are you out of Davy Jones' Locker yet?
damn shame they couldn't figure out how to sort the morning Jams in Exeter out.
Teach yourself PHP in 24 Hours. Sams Publishing....very comprehensive.

But, I must ask you: if you are using/learning PHP on the job, why not try something better/more interesting off the job (like I do)? PHP was my first web language and where I a learned lot of real world software development strategies, but I definitely wouldn't recommend learning things the PHP way to a beginner.
nice little story, they were a bit slow with the pro accounts but I like the pricing. If they get 1 percent of their 300k users to upgrade thats $75000 a year.
I'd never thought of it that way, to be honest:

"He suggested men might respond aggressively because they see the other unicycling man as a threat, attracting female attention away from themselves."
Uh ... I don't know why this is made into such a big deal. There was a agent-based simulation done at Stanford back in the mid 90s that demonstrated this. About the only thing I can think of is if that these guys developed mathematical proofs. That would be something. The article wasn't too clear on it. It is not that much different from fluid dynamics simulations.

However, " Drivers and policy-makers have not previously known why jams like this occur, though many have put it down to the sheer volume of traffic." is a load of crap -- unless said drivers and policy-makers have been living under a rock for the past decade.

The Stanford simulation was done to also show how cars that drives themselves can reduce traffic jams. The computer will always maintain a certain distance. Furthermore I recently read about the origins of 'Futurama' -- the citation escapes me. After WWII, GM had created a nice, big exhibit telling folks to go out there and build the US interstate highway system. So they could sell you more cars. The designer who conceived of the highway system had also conceived of 'smart cars' as well, having the foresight to see our current traffic problems.

Besides, the article has many comments referencing different simulations done in the past, since the 1970s. If these guys figured out a mathematical proof, that's something. If not, then the article does have much going for it.

It sometimes disturbs me that the our cultural insistence on Progress denies us of our evolutionary history.
Google Recommendation, Web 2.0 Should Be Free
It took me two minutes to fully understand what's the point of your site.
No, I am not a pirate of the caribbean.

However, as soon as I get wealthy I intend on buying a
very large boat.

"yargh"
Well at the moment my main concern is the job as there is still a good deal of work to be done (and possibly undone) and therefore I kind of have to hit the ground running. Now as far as off the job is concerned I'm definitely open to suggestions. Any recommendations?
The most meaningful 404 *ever*
The most meaningful 404 ever
Google's Data Asset
I have 3-4 accounts with them, only 1 active. I'm sure there are other people who have multiple inactive accounts.

EDIT:

I don't mean to dis-credit them. They have a steady income from those who like to use their web-apps. They are also becoming the "role-model" for small web-dev shops.
InterPlaNet -- The New Internet
Fred Wilson: Facebook worth $5 billion, $7 billion tops
Are Desktop Computers Dying?
Dibs on the .mars TLD!
Least meaningful 404, since the actual response header returns "200 OK" :-/
is_immune_to_poison. is_resistant_to_fire. reflects_magic :only => :fire.

I find that a touch inscrutable, but to make an object have various behaviors certainly doesn't require subclassing.

obj.addProperty(new PoisonImmunity());
obj.addProperty(new FireResistence());
obj.addProperty(new ReflectsMagic());

or, in one line:

obj.addProperties(new PoisonImmunity(), new FireResistence(), new ReflectsMagic());

or, super-fast mode:

obj.addPropertyFlags(POISON_IMMUNITY | FIRE_RESISTENCE | REFLECTS_MAGIC);

or, pulling from some configuration file:

obj.addProperties("poison_immunity", "fire_resistence", "reflects_magic"));

...maybe you're doing something I don't grasp, but it seems like another case of pretending that java has a disability that it doesn't.
> No PG is a big drawback,

Evidence?
Yea, they are. I live off my laptop, and when I'm home I plug it into my 24 inch dell and a MyBook external drive (where I keep all large media).

I can have a huge screen and tons of storage with a laptop, and I can move it around with me. If I have a Desktop + Laptop, I have to worry about syncing all the time.
I think everything is moving online. Once that happens, laptops will become obsolete too and there will just be publicly available computers everywhere. They will all be able to do the same thing since they will all have access to the same internet.
With the growth of people on the move, and the technology in laptops today. I would say yes.
Unix makes Computer Science easy
That or people on unicycles are stupid.
How ticket scalpers break Ticketmaster's captcha
The Crunchies 2007 - Celebrating the best of internet and technology innovation
Would you trust a public internet terminal with your online banking credentials? How about your email, or the login details for the server hosting your startup?

We may be headed towards a world with omnipresent wireless internet access; but we're probably going to carry around our own personal devices for accessing it. (Exactly what form said devices take is an open question, of course, but I'm guessing they will look something like an iPhone.)
To the 40-something programmer asked to learn something new
REST is not a language.
every free webapp has inactive/fake accounts. do you think myspace has 100M+ active users? i have a friendster account that's been collecting dust since 2003.
The Crunchies: Finalists Are Up, Vote For the Winners
> PHL is not a desirable place to move to

Silicon Valley a desirable place? It's an overpriced hell-hole of tacky drive-thru suburbia. The only reason to move there is to make money. Philadelphia has a lot of nice neighborhoods and accessible cultural amenities.

I believe the argument for the necessity of relocating to Boston or Silicon Valley for the kind of stuff ycombinator does has centered on the liquidity event. My $5 says that avenue to riches will be greatly diminished and that steady cash withdrawals from owner's equity will be a much more popular path to riches, as it has been in most businesses for most of commercial history. But what do I know.

If you want to do something seriously technical that's going to take years and millions, then yeah, I'll allow that it's a good idea to move to a hub city with a deep talent pool and deep pocketed investors. But that probably doesn't describe 98% of the web and software opportunities (and there are also the many glaring exceptions such as RIMM). Most sub $10 million software opportunities are probably in straightforward application of the programming craft to solving industry problems, often in conjunction with good business development skills. The industries and businesses are mostly not in Silicon Valley and Boston. And you hardly need a city of geniuses to write some software.
Fare-Finder Shootout: Mobissimo Wins (founded by Xooglers)
"timsort": A description and performance comparisons of Python's built-in list sort
At the risk of starting yet another language vs. language war, I will share with you some thoughts that have been rattling around in my pea-sized brain;

Actionscript 2 - fun, easy. Pre-requisite to AS3 and/or flex.

Actionscript 3 - This is by far my favorite language. For brevity, I will just say that it allows me to do a great many things, in a scripting/interactive environment that allows me to work on 'fun' stuff (such as Papervision 3D).

C# - Pound for pound,vs the compiled langs Java, C++ and C just don't stack up to it (jvm sucks, C++ is very confusing, and C, well just leave that to the experts as pg says). Depending on what you are doing it is only marginally slower than C++, but you (I) can develop ~3 times faster. YMMV.
not sure why that got modded down...
Well, the tasks that use to only be done by desktops are moving to other form factors.

The overall market for the desktop form factor is shrinking. As chips get smaller, we can put it in different form factors. Laptops take over for some balance between power and mobility. Mobile phones take over for the quick-whip-it-out kinda computing. Very specific computing tasks will end up in what we might call internet appliances, like an Ambient Orb or a Nabaztag. Even everyday tasks like emailing or web browsing might end up on Jack-PC thin clients.

That said, desktops have some advantages over other forms of computing--some off the top of my head are dual/triple screens, faster CPU/price. And if you want to do crazy hardware things like overclocking with some crazy cooling schemes, you'd probably do it with a desktop. Applications like photo-editing and coding seem more comfortable to me on a desktop.

If anything, I think desktop will remain as the computing hobbiest's choice of platform to tinker with, as they're cheap (power per price) and you can open them up and fiddle around with shit.
... maybe he meant to type .5 and .7 and his fingers slipped.
Now when I read something that this, I'm wondering about the PR submarine. I did try out mobissimo though, and their interface is kinda nice, though I have no idea if they actually have the lowest prices.
Amazon SimpleDB Thoughts
The executive summary is: I like it. It's solid, straightforward, and eminently useful. Sure, it's limited. It includes design decisions that clearly simplified the implementation at the cost of functionality and usability. Still, as a result of those decisions, SimpleDB has the potential to be very robust, scalable, and performant.
"But nobody ever said trying to make an electric car would be easy. Sometimes ambitious startups need a billionaire with conviction to see them through the rough spots."

Elon Musk's SpaceX hasn't had a successful flight yet (two failed attempts last time I checked) and now Tesla needs more money. I disagree with anyone who says that he won't win, I wholeheartedly believe he will.

Now there is a man who is still an entrepreneur with courage in his convictions.
I'm just wondering what their expertise is in comparison to YC and other YC look-alikes. I mean if I were choosing something outside of YC, I would go with TechStars, Europe, and probably the newer Launchbox Digital.

They seem to be in it to benefit on someone else's creativity versus YC (and possibly others, time will tell) are in it to make "something useful."
Ha ha. I've found C to be easier to understand then the plus-plus version; but then, I have not gone that far with it. I'll definitely give up some time with the C's and Actionsript in the future however. Thanks for the advice.
Johnny Lee creates a headtracking VR system with a TV and a Wii-mote
I'm not dyslexic, but my healthy doses of rejection occurred because I was nerdy, poor, and liked talking about things like robots, space, and role-playing games.

It's helped quite a lot when dealing with rejection in the business world. Paul Graham is just like Charleen from middle school.
the way i see it, yes desktops are dying b/c as many have said, you can do those tasks just as easy on other form factors.

dont worry though, the desktop isn't going anywhere, and neither is the desk.

when multitouch really takes off and becomes the sole form of interface between the user and pc, i believe we'll see things equalize to how they were a few years ago.

laptops will be slightly less functional, and a great addition to a large desktop. imagine a your desk, except instead of that monitor you have a huge, interactive surface. i believe that is the future of personal computing.
What's broken with Unix? A clearer alternative to text processing.
>The three men are willing to put up the money for DreamIt's first fund but would like to get some economic-development money from the state and/or the city for it, and aren't willing to back future funds without assistance.

Clearly they are not very confident. There are a number of state funded early stage venture capital in Pennsylvania and they all lose money.

And their webpage looks like it was designed in Frontpage 2000: http://www.dreamitventures.com/Home/tabid/36/Default.aspx
Sour grapes in France
Ruby closures and memory usage
Ask YC: Deciding what programming language
Scenario: Two programmers with solid programming knowledge are trying to build a scalable website that will include multimedia uploading and user login.

One loves ruby on rails, ajax knows some php , c ++,

Other loves php, java, knows some c ++ etc.

Both nkow mySql

How do they decide which programming language they should choose for dynamic, scalable website?
Mr. Yegge meets Mr. Brooks
This is quite exciting. I was born and raised in West Philadelphia, where I spent my days chilling out, maxing, relaxing all cool, and shootin some b-ball outside of the school.

Though I've since moved west to be closer to start-up opportunities (and after an unfortunate physical confrontation with two gents up to no good), I applaud their efforts.
Challenge: Ugliest Ruby FizzBuzz
When evaluating prospective partners, the business plan the partner wants to pursue is not essential information. In fact PG ISTR recommends settling on partners before settling on a business plan. You do not want to post a list of skills you claim to have or a list of places you were enrolled or employed or something that might provide evidence that you really have those skills?
I only develop websites for niches, sorry.
If you both know php, use php.

If you want someone else to cut the Gordian knot for you, I hereby command you to use python! ;-)
He says he teaches at an art school, so presumably he is a quite competent web designer.
Imho, consider three main aspects: overall performance, future scalability, and learning-curve for the team.

Looking at what you have described, I would recommend you to go with PHP and MySQL, or RoR and MySQL.
Learning a new language is easy if you already know how to hack. Use the most powerful one you can find.
Um... Or you could use Google Trends. http://google.com/trends/
Replace 'OO' with 'FP', and he could be my manager...
PHP is fine if you don't want to learn a new langugae, just use one of the MVC frameworks like Symfony or Cake.

The general consensus here though is Python/Django or Ruby on Rails, whatever you prefer.
ph34r!
The Mechanical Turk strikes again!
Oddly enough I heard Howard Stern say the exact same thing years ago. That's odd for two reasons. 1) he's a moron (blind squirrel/acorn theory I guess) and 2) I've only listened to him maybe three times ever.
Didn't the old Lisp Machines have everything this guy is asking for?
oh yuck... Ruby.
Consensus is boring. I think you should write your own custom MVC framework in C++.
What Xoogler?
http://www.mobissimo.com/company/founders.html
If you're looking to optimize for learning, choose a more powerful language that you don't yet know: Python, a Lisp, or Scala.
According to Jim Gray, the UNDO mechanism of InterLisp (from Xerox) inspired the transaction system of System-R (one of the first relational databases).

http://books.google.com/books?id=S_yHERPRZScC&pg=PA575&#...

I think he's talking about InterLisp-D in that section. Anyone know if earlier versions had the same kind of UNDO?
No, I'm talking about something different. I don't know Javascript well enough to toss off something, but the equivalent in Ruby looks like this:

class MyBadassSword < GameObject
is_immune_to_poison
is_fire_resistant
reflects_magic
end

When is_immune_to_poison is called, it reopens MyBadassSword and attaches more code to it. This is not a syntax feature of Ruby so much as using .include to append more code modules or rewrite definitions to it. The Java JVM supports this, but you have to jump through a lot of hoops to do that with Java itself.

The POISON_IMMUNITY | FIRE_RESISTENCE | REFLECTS_MAGIC is exactly what I don't want to mess with. I'm not instantiating PoisonImmunity() class. I'm not using bit fields like POISON_IMMUNITY. (I specifically said in my previous post I was not talking about bit fields). I'm not talking about pulling strings from a configuration file.
Didn't know that. Ouch.
Go for a language that's case insensitive...
I'm normally not one for spell checking other people, but I'm upvoting this.
Instead of feeling like you have to labor and lose your karma points to make things right, why not extoll the virtues of the article in the comments, which will cause people to read it. Imagine if this article had these 4 comments about the karma system, and 200 points. People would skip the article because they would feel a few people must have voted it up. On the other hand, when people start a discussion about how good the article is, people will actually read it, and that will cause them to vote it up.

I was about to skip the article because all the comments were about YC karma.
I've actually thought for quite some time that programing might be taught best via shell scripting.

By starting off by learning shell, you'd get all the basics like iterators, functions, variables, etc... You can then extend the newbies knowledge with stuff like regular expressions, pipes (parameter passing) etc.. At the same time, however, you'd be teaching a new programmer an incredibly useful set of tools that they can build on.

It took me 3 semesters of Java before I could code non-trivial programs. In one semester of Unix shell scripting, I wrote a flat file database with a decent user interface. I learned more about programming in that one semester than I did in 3 semesters of Java.
I suggest that you first code for flexibility for at least the first few iterations of your site. Think of it as a fail fast optimization. Because you will be learning a lot and finding better ways to do things, you want to keep it as cheap as possible for as long as possible to explore different alternatives to your initial website concept(s).

Other than that, don't focus on languages too much. Find a way for you and your partner to write 'services' with language agnostic interfaces. If done correctly, there's no reason why you couldn't have parts of your site built in every one of the languages you mentioned. Naturally, the extra flexibility this affords you comes at a cost of being much harder to do correctly.
If you both know php, it sounds like you've answered your own question.

+1 for suggesting an MVC framework like Symfony or Cake.