skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The Best Tech You Can't Get
More often than we'd like, we're a bit behind the tech curve here in the US. These 20 products from overseas are hand-picked by our experts as the best in design and cutting-edge features.
I think this is shallow and thin, although I agree part of the problem is that the buyers are not the users.

The bigger problem is that the buyers have already spent god-knows how much other money on dozens of software solutions that all were supposed to walk on water. Now the poor schmuck writing some simple app has to take into account leveraging all that other previous investment by the organization.

Ever buy Enterprise Software? Every vendor loads that stuff up with so much junk that it's a wonder they can fit it all on a stack of DVDs. Most of them can do everything but the laundry. And for each of those purchases, there's some executive somewhere wondering "why aren't they just implementing that software we bought last year?" -- it quickly becomes a political process where nobody wins. It's not a simple users-aren't-the-buyers situation. Even if the users were the buyers, you'd still have the same situation. EDIT FOR CLARITY: That's because there is no single user with a single set of needs. Such situations rarely exist. It's more complicated than that.
A better way is to change the algorithm to compensate for the extra votes a story gets AFTER it becomes popular. For example: votes after the story made it to the home page get half the weight.

Hiding votes removes one of the critical 'social' components of this type of web site.
This discriminates against those who rarely post but when they do it's a gem.
Reason #1: because they have wives/are women.
!@#!@!#!

Is it just me, or is this one of those problems where when you fix one part of it another part comes undone?
I guess "not being a big enterprise" is one answer to the enterprise problem (one that I'm inclined to agree with), but it leaves me with nagging doubts. Those companies most likely exist because in one way or the other, at that size, they are the most efficient for whatever market they are in. If you decide that software for those companies sucks, throwing up your hands and walking the other way is one answer, but it doesn't really address the problem in a meaningful way.
How the Mighty Fall? Yahoo's Embarrassing Web Errors
Maybe I'm behind the times, but I still think of Yahoo as one of the Web's great success stories. And, until recently, I also thought of it as setting the standard in Web site operations.
2007 Deloitte Technology Fast 500 List
Annual list of the fastest-growing companies in North America
NPR : Harvard Square's New Businesses Annoy Neighbors
Marathon Business
ICANN Addresses the Domain Snatchers
Interesting interview, and I love Kay's quote, "Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves."
Highlet
A new kind of start up ?
Also, you don't really understand a high-level language unless you understand C. (I'm mostly talking about Python and Java here.)
If you think of Python lists as dynamic arrays of pointers to void, the world suddenly becomes easier.
Finally indeed. Congrats to the Gmail team!
Marketplace popularity is often the product of luck and first mover's advantage rather than evolution (examples that come to mind: Windows, MySpace, etc.).

By the way, I like C.
I remember leading the test drive of a popular ERP system for one of my enterprise clients. The salesman had never had a prospect force him into a "test drive". My number one rule was "Nobody touches the keyboard except me."

As I entered an order, I asked, "How do I find my Customer Number?"

As I entered a part number, I asked, "How do I see how many are in stock?"

As I scheduled the order, I asked, "How do I see the current factory schedule for this item?"

It drove the salesman nuts. He couldn't explain how to do anything without grabbing the keyboard.

I asked, "What good is this system if I can't even enter one order?"

His response..."Are you going to train your people or not?"

That's pretty much their attitude. He was so upset with me, he went directly to the CEO, who asked me what was wrong. I handed him one of our orders and said, "If you can enter this order into that system, we oughta buy it." He couldn't. We ended up buying another system that people could use.

The dinosaur is big, but it is dying. Hack on, and let the one who delivers the value win.
I like this observation:
"In other words, JCPenney just lowered the price from $39,990, and Yahoo is just running a little behind?"
Mobile Browsers: Have They Moved Beyond "Only for Emergencies?"
Web browsers are improving as more and more business and consumer users purchase Web-enabled mobile devices or smartphones and the potential for monetary gain becomes apparent to software developers and device makers. But have they moved beyond the point of "just for emergencies?"
Where do we say that?
Last sentence of the article: "all D users agree that by downloading and using D, or reading the D specs, they will explicitly identify any claims to intellectual property rights with a copyright or patent notice in any posted or emailed feedback sent to Digital Mars."

What is that all about?
It could also be a technical error on the shop's site. Stuff happens.
Lisp compiles to machine code.

Here's a page on how to do it with clisp:

http://clisp.cons.org/impnotes/image.html
Usually there is a choice between proprietary "pre-standard" products that come out pretty quickly or standards-based products that take years to arrive. This allows customers to make the time-to-market vs. lock-in tradeoff.
Banking on busted IT projects and dormant IP
Facebook opens developer platform for mobile
Interview Shawn Broderick founder and CEO of Trust Plus
How can you know who to trust online?
Using the same human cues we rely on in the real world, TrustPlus helps people trust by letting them view the reputations of others and by building their own reputations - anywhere on the Web. TrustPlus is building a community of trust, giving people the tools to weed out fraudulent buyers and sellers, assess a potential friend, know which reviewers are reliable, protect themselves and others from online predators, and much more.
David Lee of EditGrid - the online spreadsheet service with an i-Phone optimized edition
Based in Hong Kong, EditGrid is an online spreadsheet service that solves the collaboration problem by allowing concurrent viewing and editing by multiple users in real-time. The company recently raised a Series A $1.25m round. Funding will be used to further grow the existing user base of 25,000 users as well as to establish a global distribution network.
At the Office 2.0 conference, EditGrid announced the release of an iPhone-optimized edition of their spreadsheet. This is the second recent big announcement for Edit Grid following the news that they were recently named to the Red Herring 100 Asia 2007 Awards.
this is great news for xobni - xobni for gmail!
I'm the opposite, actually. I usually upvote something if I feel it hasn't gotten enough votes already. That is, if I think a comment is a 3 or a 4, and it only has 2 votes, I'll add another. If it has a 5, I'll leave it alone.
Google Team Wins Cubicle Decorating Contest
Fear and Loathing on Facebook
There's no denying that timing, momentum and markets can sometimes conspire to propel less than optimum products to an undeserved position of dominance. The C language just might be an example of that.

However, I think the author's most most salient argument could be summed up as: "before claiming to be David slaying Goliath, make certain you're not really a dwarf standing on the giant's shoulders."
There are always two underlying themes in all Wolfram's writings:

1) Wolfram is a genius: the next Newton.

2) Buy Mathematica.
Excellent examples of C annoyances.
Sun/NetApp mutually assured patent destruction begins
He has one interesting point, though: will competition drive the seller's costs down so far that eBay becomes a glorified classifieds listing? If so, then it's also competing with free listings other places.
It was inevitable, I suppose. Channeling Carl Sagan: "Just think of the billions and billions of enemies..."
An open letter from the founders of Scribd to those of you who didn't get into YC
"The best place to work, if you want to start a startup, is probably a startup. In addition to being the right sort of experience, one way or another it will be over quickly. You'll either end up rich, in which case problem solved, or the startup will get bought, in which case it it will start to suck to work there and it will be easy to leave, or most likely, the thing will blow up and you'll be free again." - PG

So you didn't get into YC. We all know it probably isn't your fault - PG admits that with so many applicants, the choice becomes increasingly arbitrary. The question is: what do you do now? If you're a hacker, you're probably weighing three options: (1) Start your startup anyway;
(2) Work for Google, Apple, etc; or
(3) Work at someone else's startup

If you want to do 1, more power to you. It would have been easier with YC, but if you work hard you could still pull it off. Unfortunately, too many great programmers see only options 1 and 2, and forget that the next best thing to starting your own successful startup, is getting in on someone else's while it's still young. It's also a great path to eventually starting your own company.

Although Scribd now has 8 people, working at Scribd is a lot more like doing your own startup than working at a big company. This is true in terms of the work environment: at Scribd you'll work with a bunch of YC hackers, you'll have a huge impact on the product, and you won't have to deal with management or bureaucracy. But - and this is often overlooked - it is also true economically. Valuations are always debatable, but the cash value of the equity you would get in Scribd is actually higher than the cash value of the equity you would get in a new YC startup, which is only about $125K. At Scribd we'll either all get rich or we all won't, and you'll participate in that.

Scribd was originally started by the merger of two Y Combinator companies, and since then, everyone who has joined has either been a YC applicant or someone who started a company themselves. YC startups often "cannibalize" each other in that way, and it makes sense. We want to keep this trend going, and right now we need help more than ever to scale our insanely fast-growing website and to develop the technology that is going to revolutionize the way that documents are shared on the Web.

If you are interested, send us an email at hackers@scribd.com, or just call Trip's cell phone at 617-335-6685. Feel free to get in touch about anything, even if you just want some advice about what to do now. For more details about working at Scribd and our uncorporate culture, check out our jobs page: http://www.scribd.com/static/jobs

Sincerely,
Trip, Jared, and Tikhon
What YC companies merged to make Scribd?
I found it funny that Sun was seeking money from NetApp and now NetApp has turned the table on Sun. This particular post is one-way towards Sun but it was Sun who contacted NetApp first saying that NetApp was infringing upon Sun's patents. NetApp did some research and found it to be the other way around.
Source: Microsoft wins Facebook bid battle
How to measure your site's carbon emissions (Microstartup in a Week #3)
Hulist, Hackerarchy and JobBook are the official YC companies to merge into Scribd. Tricloud and Nanobeep were great YC applicant companies that joined us, and Buzzshout was a non-YC but very cool company whose founder is now with us.
Java Vs Ruby ?
there are plenty; it's just that if they hunt, they're called pack animals or swarms.

anyway, the review is good -- I like the descriptor of Friedman's writing as "middlebrow horseshit"
Who knows what this study says, let alone how valid it is? Like just about every newspaper article about science, this Telegraph article absolutely sucks.

Here's what was the original journal article was supposedly about:

"...the difference in life span between males and females... grows in direct proportion to the degree to which an animal's society is polygynous."

Great! These folks have apparently plotted a graph, where X is an animal society's "degree of ploygyny" and Y is the lifespan difference. The shape of that graph is the entire point of this study. It would be interesting to see it.

How many of the data points from that graph made it into the newspaper? Half of one data point. We learn that the male-female lifespan difference among modern humans is 5 years out of 80. (This is, of course, probably the least useful piece of data in the entire dataset, because modern humans live a lifestyle utterly different from that of all previous humans, let alone most other animals.)

The scientists might well have data about polygyny in humans, but it's not shown here. They certainly have data about polygyny and lifespans in other creatures -- but it's not shown here. If the damned reporter had just given us the numbers for one creature -- dare I suggest the chimpanzee? -- we would know a lot more about the original study and how much it applies to humans.

But no! Instead the article tells me that women live longer than men (duh!) and that modern human societies tend more toward polygyny than toward polyandry. (Double duh.) Gee, thanks.

Sorry about the rant, but this sort of thing is intensely frustrating to me. People wonder why the public doesn't understand how science works. Perhaps one reason is that the average person never sees any actual data.
any advice for non-hackers trying to start up?

our rough plan is to find a hacker to make a beta/demo for us based on our design, and ride that demo into seed funding, which we'll use to hire some hackers, and ride that into a VC.

are we missing something? it's obviously a bit different than what this crowd generally does, but, do you see any fundamental flaws in this approach?
Talk About Getting Crushed by the Competition: Sometimes blatant me-too plagiarism wins
This is what happens when you take a working e-commerce site written in Lisp and rewrite it in C++.
Cracking Go
Am I missing something or does this seem like a very profitable business?
More proof that its not so much about the idea, but execution. You are always going to have clones if the idea you are working on is worthwhile. What you need is a team that can churn out features to crush your competition.
On behalf of the people who depend on Carlson's software, let's hope he writes code better than he writes informal essays.

Here's the somewhat clever first graf: (Everything after that is a mish-mash)

"Jesus reflected on his situation and felt irrepressible sadness. His tear-ducts filled to a point where they could hold no longer and had to be released."

versus

"Jesus wept."

I prefer the later.
Microsoft Inks Deal with Facebook
C is as essential as electronic engineering. More generally, a programmer's learning path should go through (a) understanding how machines work (b) understanding C and (c) understanding the rest. You will never truly get the idea of Lisp or Python unless you know the lower levels, including the intermediate ones, which is C in particular.
6 companies for 8 people? wow
I think you people are diluting the meaning of company. When I was 6 I used to draw things and write down Copyright 1991 My Name, Inc. It was only a few more years that I realize, just cause I can write down a company name does not a company make.
"D is a multi-programming language"

No wonder there are so many useful applications written on D!
A $240M investment on a $15B valuation means Microsoft gets 1.6%, probably not the best outcome for Mark Zuckerberg. Looks like Facebook's investors are trying to make sure their share doesn't get diluted any further.

Also, this is great. Valleywag predicted the announcement shortly before it happened because the heads of PR at Facebook and Microsoft added each other as friends today: http://valleywag.com/tech/confirmed/facebook-and-microsoft-f...
Not very convincing.

Those who try to fix C/C++ with a "nicer" declaration syntax always fail unless they just copy C/C++. So what's so special about C-style declarations?

int a[10];

vs.

int[] a;

The first is more natural, since you are going to apply the index operator [] to a later on, many times. This is purely psychological. This shows that our understanding of "regularity" and "relevance" of a formal syntax may be against our instincts.
Some people hated Jesus too.
I'm in the same boat... I'm a technical person (read sys admin type) but not a hacker... I've even built my own company from the ground up (a trading company so it's nothing technical) and was able to make a living...

I've a bunch of (software/service) startup ideas but no idea where to begin... Most ppl I know are not hackers so I've considered just learning how to code myself, but I don't know how long it'll take... at this point I'm just wondering what I should do...

I've even considered applying for that entry level support job xobni posted here last week (btw are you guys still hiring... ? haha... ) just so I can get some experience in an YC startup environment... since most software startup only hires hackers...
Well, if they were YC applicants they probably weren't companies as YC seem to prefer groups that are not already incorporated. I guess it's more like people with 6 different product ideas (and names) got together to do Scribd then saying 6 companies merged.
This is why I didn't vote it up. The blog post makes a weak argument in support of C; namely, most foundational code is programmed in it. If you go back through computer eras, you could craft a similar argument for each of the dominant languages of the time (including assembly). I agree with Goladus that the author never says why C is appropriate or best for some of those apps he cites.
Sigh. People need to do an order of magnitude check on their carbon emissions. Forget about things that don't constitute more than 1% of your footprint.

For example, if you live in a place where people would die from exposure if left outside in the winter or summer, you probably spend more energy on heating or AC than anything else.
I would suggest laying out your design in html using a WYSIWYG tool like DreamWeaver. Also write down the "business rules" for each page like "user signs up here, is provisioned an account, is sent an email, and then is forwarded to the administration area"

Then hire someone off of Craigslist (or similar venue) to add a backend to it. If you could spend one or two thousand you could get enough put together to have a demo to show others.
He really is a genius though.
Pretending PG didn't already respond, I'd say that you won't find many VCs investing in porn at all, because it's not really a business that scales well.
I assume you got the "not the best outcome for Mark Zuckerberg" from Valleywag, too?

I don't see why a higher valuation is "not the best outcome" for anyone invested in Facebook. Unless things are structured oddly, Mark Zuckerberg is being diluted as much as anyone else. Which is, not much at all. And wasn't $250 million the amount they wanted to take?
pg, can we start downvoting submissions yet, or what?
It doesn't seem honest to say that Hulist+Hackerarchy+JobBook=Scribd. That's like saying 0+0+0=1. ;-)
Sounded like 8 kids with varying ideas of a project, I can't even fathom what those names mean, now work together at a funded company.
Ask YC: Any good Rails log anlysis tools?
We've been looking for a way to analyse our Rails production logs, but haven't really found anything suitable. Basically we'd like something which can (1) provide site traffic information on a slightly more real-time basis than Google Analytics, (2) help figure out which pages are taking a long time to render, or are heavily loading the database, and most importantly, (3) pull out any errors thrown by the code. Does anyone have any suggestions for tools which might help do this?
Building business software? Read this.
Ask YC: Whats better than AJAX?
What will be the most common web application framework for the next ten years. I'm just getting started in the industry and plan to put in my time. I want to do some indepth study and have been visiting the usual channels that discuss "the best" languages. Given that you YC folks are in the eye of the storm I thought to ask you. Best,
http://venturebeat.com/2007/08/16/zivity-an-adult-social-net...

as for investing... most of the good ones have the cashflow to fund their own growth. online ones (lightspeed media, rki) and offline ones both have grown insanely over the years.
I like Friedman, but enjoyed this article nonetheless. However, I had to stop reading when I got to the Columbus discovered America part.
I would suggest trying, nay, struggling, to learn to hack for a month or two. Learn a cool new language, like Ruby (it's actually easier than, 'production languages', but it's cooler). Make an effort to build things yourself. Put enough effort into the technical side so that you might be able to notice technical brilliance for yourself, and so that you can make informed decisions regarding hiring and project directions.
The problem with the first one is that what you are declaring is effectively a const pointer named 'a' to 10 consecutive memory locations allocated for the size of int. The second is a declaration of a variable-length array named a.

So, for example, you can't do this:

int a[10];
int b[10];

a=b;

You get a type error, or an lvalue error, because you can't assign anything to a constant.
People here are smart, but smart doesn't mean they can predict the future with any degree of accuracy.
News Corp paid 580 million for myspace. MSFT paid 240 Million for 1.6 percent of facebook. ...guess which one of these companies has access to a financial spreadsheet application?

Obviously, Microsoft can lose 240 million dollars without much harm, but this unbelievable idiocy means that microsoft will either have a vast change in management very soon or an untimely death.
I heard from a math grad student at Princeton that there's some really weird drama behind Wolfram and some of his proofs.

Apparently someone working at Wolfram labs discovered a one dimensional, universal Turing equivalent cellular automata, announced it, and then tried to publish it under his own name. Wolfram apparently sued to keep him from ever speaking of the proof, but the court documents _included_ speaking to Wolfram about it.

So for about a year (or more?), there was a universal Turing machine, but no proof.

I guess this is a different machine, but it still seems really sketchy.
Give this man a cookie for not having a f*cking clue. +5 insightful? Throw him some VC cash too.
Most of the people wants to maintain health so, now a days marathon attracts many people and that makes a difference.
"Ousterhout's dichotomy", although I'm sure it predated him:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ousterhout's_dichotomy
Well looks like you are not happy with Ruby. I am Java Programmer/Architect. Every where there is a Ruby buzz. So, I am just looking for good place to find some articles which compares Ruby and Java and one I pointed out here has some detail which is helpful.
right now what we're doing is 1 step below that.

we're laying everything out in this program called conceptdraw, hoping we can give that document to a developer and be like "see, this is what we want."

that's a great suggestion though, we might end up having to do that.
Good point, but still, you can apply operator [] to a and b in some non-C dynamic language, which means the "int a[]" style is probably more relevant psychologically.