skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They're measuring the wrong thing. These kids would totally kick previous generations' collective asses at GTA and completing raid instances.

Ever watch your parents try to use MS Word or even a web browser? It's painful. Kids today may not know how to use a ruler but they can use 3DS Max. Let's see the Greatest Generation do that. Nonlinear video editing--? What's that?!? Kids today do it all the time and post to YouTube.

This month's Scientific American Mind says: "A generation ago TV programs such as I Love Lucy, Dragnet and Starsky and Hutch required virtually no concentration to follow. Beginning in 1981 with Hill Street Blues, single-episode dramas began to weave together as many as 10 threads into their plotlines. The hit drama 24 connects the lives of 20 or more characters, each with a distinct story."

The subject of the article is massive IQ gains during the 20th century. "If asked what dogs and rabbits have in common, a boy in 1900 would have said, "You use dogs to hunt rabbits." A boy in 2007 would say, "They are both mammals." It would never have occurred to someone a century ago to offer something so trivial. Who cares that dogs and rabbits are both mammals? What is important is what things are useful and under one's control." The context is working on abstractions with no concrete referents. (Although the article badly botches the proffered explanation of what a mammal is.)
10 things you can ask a co-founder but not an employee
Radiohead disappoint (but not for the reason you might think!)
I didn't get the impression that you saw that person as a founder.
I had to mod you up for the recursion effect.

Of course, the guy in this article specializes in generalizing about specialists, so that must make him very unhappy.
Hardware Assisted Brute Force Attacks: Still For Dummies
Yes, it has been the advice of many that you must make a startup idea attractive to the investors' spouses.

Guy says it, for example:

http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2006/03/the_art_of_rais.html

(under number 6)
MSNBC: Radiohead's Experiment Rocks Music Industry
Using Lisp at Paragent
I think it is a question of scale. A half billion dollars is a lot of money.
There is a beautifully YouTube-eque comment I thought you may enjoy:

"trust, when ppl get tired of Facebook, IT WILL FAIL miserablly!!!

Why?

1. There's another bubble coming next year because too much money put into web 2.0 stuff, trend, ....etc

2. As more and more Social Network out to the mkt, ppl will just switch to different sites whenever they like.

3. Facebook is too much "ego", if he is smart...then get 15B now for real.

4. What if there's a SN raised no where but become a big hit in China? it will generate more users than other SN in the USA.

5. You can NOT rely on ADVERTISING stream...try come up more creative products or strategy!"

wow.
Scientists should never be censored
The point is this post is nonsense. Facebook's current valuation IS $15 Billion. Because of Microsoft's stupid investment we now have to live in a world where Facebook has a $15 Billion valuation. Thanks M$!
I'm not saying that MS might buy all of Facebook.

Some of the fine print in the 240 million dollar deal might be all they were ever looking for to begin with.
We already have some powers that the ancient civilizations couldn't even imagine so that they could attribute them to their gods.
"Whether or not Lisp becomes more popular with a new generation of developers remains to be seen."

My bet is it won't. Lisp success stories have been around for ages. PG has articulated its advantages well, as have others. There's some psychological reason why it has never achieved massive popularity. If it ever becomes massively popular, it will be in a generation that is somehow psychologically different.
Location, Location, Everywhere
Ranked Searches with SQL
Yeah the web site was crap. I liked the design, but usability was bad. I also resented the input form for my address. How much is an address worth? I wanted to subtract that from the price I was prepared to pay...
Where Are You Now? Design for the Location Revolution
Even if anyone could add features to FogBugz, not everyone can do it in a way that leaves the codebase clean enough afterwards.

It doesn't take much inherent difficulty or complexity for a project to become a total mess in a year or two if left in the hands of incompetent programmers.
Fair enough. Still, what is the point of the article? Some additive quantities are squares of other quantities, you add them, and it looks like the Pythagorean Theorem, without triangles... Is that it?
I think that's a good thing. If it gets popular, there won't be a competitive advantage to knowing it.
The hot languages in the circles I move in (Python and Ruby) are, from my point of view, poor-man's Lisps.

Quoting Guy Steele, on Java, "we were not out to win over the Lisp programmers; we were after the C++ programmers. We managed to drag a lot of them about halfway to Lisp. Aren't you happy?"

I believe languages (both hot and widely used) will continue to move in the general direction of Lisp. As for why more people don't just leapfrog that process, I think the best answer is in Worse-Is-Better (http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html).
Quote of the Day. Give us (News.YC) your  quote for Motivation. Must be your own.
Mine "I you wait for the Ferrari, You may miss the Pento and You will end up walking" In other words grab what is here "now" while still setting your sight on the bigger prize.
"Let It Flow"
Inc. is a print magazine. This is just an online version of the offline article in a magazine that's printed a month ahead.
i like that. it is funny that you say it. Sometimes we spend hours trying to figuring soemthing or days trying to get something (or someone in my case) and the minute you stop trying it all happens. I think by trying we are making it hard for "anything" itself to make it happen so just "let if flow"
Why Experts are Grumpy and Amateurs are Happy.
Facebook Feeding Frenzy
I don't think Richard Gabriel nailed the genesis of worse-is-better popularity. If valuing implementation simplicity above all else were it, then Scheme would be very popular. Unix and C became more popular than Lisp by running fast on cheaper hardware. For a long time Lisp has run fast on cheap hardware, but it's still not popular.

But if either simplicity of implementation or speed were necessary preconditions of popularity, how would Java have become so popular? Marketing? If marketing is what matters, how did Java (in its C# incarnation) displace Visual Basic?

Any time I hear someone say "Lisp would be popular except for problem X" I think of some other computer language that became popular despite problem X. Even its supposedly problematic syntax. Look at XML; it's popular, and has a syntax pretty much like s-expressions only worse.

Complexity of implementation? Slowness? Lack of marketing? Unfamiliar syntax? No, none of these explain the lack of popularity. Someday somebody will hit on what the real roadblock is and remove it, probably by accident.
How do people like this always find something to complain about? Enjoy the brilliant, cheap album and complain about something that matters.
Why aren't people looking at this deal and saying "$240m is the price to secure their ad revenue deal?" If they paid the same amount and didn't get the equity, would FB still we worth $15b?

Paying $240m to secure their ad relationship may have been a good deal in and of itself.
Joel is a rarity: brilliant, successful programmer, entrepreneur and writer. But when writing about how to develop successful software, it tends to be things that would resonate with frustrated enterprise software programmers, like he used to be, or guys like Scoble perhaps. But his theme is similar to PG's, concentrating on making it possible to develop software using programmers with average talent will not result in exceptionally useful software programs.
For anyone wanting to make their searches fast, I would strongly recommend ditching the database.

Write a program that sucks your entire database into memory (memory is cheap - unless you really have tons of data, you can afford to do this). Store records as objects or more simple structures, and index them in hash-tables. When you get a query, just look up the objects using the query as a set of keys into your hash-tables. If you take advantage of your knowledge of the data, you'll be able to do any intersections, filtering and sorting way faster than the database can.

This is how I did things when I rewrote justin.tv's search engine. The bulk of the work took me two days, and it's fast (it'll be live in a few days, when we let our designer loose on it - right now it's functional but ugly).
I find switching between programming and "business" tasks even harder than programming for many hours straight.
It's worse than that. Simply by operating shitty public schools 'for free', the ruling riff-raff is crowding out investment in private alternatives for the less than well off. With no public schools available and minimal to no regulation of private ones, every neighborhood would have private alternatives with plenty of eligible kids to fill them.

I suspect well off neighborhoods would still in general have 'better' schools, simply due to having more resources, but even the poorest of parents would have at least some competitively exposed, hence at least decent, options. If nothing else, charity, churches and such would help out the neediest of kids.

As it stands now, a poor parent in an inner city (even more so in one as much at war with religious anything at all as Oakland), is pretty much left without viable alternatives to the local public indoctrination institutions.
Are we part of the most elitist business?
Yet again, we find a post focused on drawing a line between the good programmer, and the bad one.
I think we should really be thinking how to become a better person and that does not come from stepping on everybody else, just to feed the ego.
I'm personally tired of lists of things not to do. Mistakes come from doing, and that's a fact of life, no matter in what profession you are. If the greatest minds of the world would have paid attention to this "don't do" lists, we'd still be living in caverns.
ARPANet Co-Founder Predicts An Internet Crisis
I wonder if anyone have actually done the experiment? When you are doing a startup, you want to work as much as possible, however it might very well be that you would be just as productive if you worked just 40 hours.
"Oh shit."
My best quote for motivation:

"Sounds great. How soon can we have that?" -- from a user.
"Sure, what could go wrong?"

(the consequences of me saying that too often are great motivation for me being more careful).
Stop wasting time and get back to work.
It can't be done.
Mobile 2.0: Mobile Internet vs. Mobility
I'd be very interested in seeing such a study. I think the answer lies in not just how hard you work, but how smart you work; i.e. monitoring your productivity and adjusting various factors (length of time, time of day, etc.) to maximize productivity.
iPhone will attack Sony Ericsson but lose out to Nokia in Europe
One part of it may be:

Lisp culture contains the attitude that this is the right way to do things, and other ways are worse, and choosing them is a mistake. Thus, for anyone to take up Lisp, they have to admit to themselves their past decisions were mistakes. It's a lot easier to say "screw you, I'm right" and not switch over. If Lisp is right, they wasted a lot of time and effort, so they are invested in it being wrong.

The same thing happens in other fields.
specially when your friends say it.
Answer that question once when you are single and no mortgage, but if you have a life partner and house.., you may want to answer it a few more times.
Two main points, mostly to look at this old theorem in new ways.

1) The sides of a triangle (3-4-5) can represent portions of any shape. For example, circle area (radius 3) + circle area (radius 4) = circle area (radius 5).

Instead of radius, you could pick diameter, circumference, or any line segment and the relationship would hold.

2) You can use the Pythagorean Theorem to split any squared quantity into two smaller ones. This can yield surprising insights; is it immediately clear that a list of 50 takes as long to bubble sort as a list of 30 and 40? =)
Paul, what do you think of Modern Art, especially painting? It seems to me the very same arguments you made about philosophy hold there. People try to look impressive by doing something opaque and incomprehensible and calling it art. If you don't "get it" that is used as even further evidence as to their genius. It seems to me the same situation you talk about, when there is a market for people producing and consuming such things.

I would love to know your take on the subject.
Charity day: Give away one idea. One that you love for good Karma
1. Simple online tool for craigslist power seller (with no technical expertise) to create templates on the fly.
2. ihatemyjob social network (80% of people hate their job, something can be build around this and I dont mean another linkedin )
3.Unmatched or Edisharmony.com ( I mean seriously most marriages last 7 years, maybe harmony is not the way to go )
Based on my, admittedly quite limited, experience as an interviewer I think the author is mistaken. The type 5 questions, which he praises, are not very useful in practice. "Tell me about your research" is only good as a warm up question, to make the candidate feel a bit more comfortable before getting to the real questions. You can have very bad candidates that will nevertheless be able to reasonably discuss their research. It's the topcoder-type algorithm/coding questions that will give you a much better insight into the candidate's coding skills and analytical abilities.

So, if a company put emphasis on type 5 questions, it doesn't mean that they value "thinkers". It simply means that they're bad at interviewing.
And Ruby dragged the Java programmers halfway to Lisp. Who will drag the Ruby programmers halfway to Lisp? We'll never get to Lisp at this rate, but we'll approach it ever closer.
I think there is a turtle and a hare involved at some point here...
"You can't shit a feature."
May language adoption is not so much a matter of people flocking to a new language, but rather people fleeing their old language and its inadequacies,
One aspect of this article that hasn't been mentioned is that this also points out one reason that big companies have a hard time keeping good people unless they have some way to let people do this kind of work.

Companies that allow interruptions or distractions that don't let employees get into "flow" or "the zone" and create/execute at their capacity are going to find that it's difficult to retain truly great employees because most great creators/makers are only happy when doing their best work - anything less is demeaning, insulting, boring and maddening.

The points made by other comments that some companies fear the gifted individual because that individual is not a cog that can be exchanged for others is correct - I've seen this fear before. So what's the answer? Have some of both kinds of coders? Accept a loss of control and the associated risks? Have an Advanced Technology Group (ATG, like apple once did) and let magic happen there and then toss it to the production group to put it into shippable products? How do you keep the envy between those in the group and the rest of the engineers under control? One thought was to have rotating positions in the group and you did some time in production and then you rotated into the ATG. I like the sound of the Google 20%, but don't know how well it would work for me - I want a couple of weeks per idea to really get it to the prototype/proof-of-concept stage. Then I can set it aside.

At another company, I had the software engineers in a separate building across town from the sales, marketing, support groups. And everyone one who was not a programmer was directed to contact me and not to contact programmers directly unless the programmer had requested them to. Not ideal in all ways, but it did help with many of these issues.

anyway, truly great post. I sent it to the VP of engineering at my company because it explains my frustration with working there so well....

This topic is worth a book on how to run a software engineering company. Take the insights from this blog, and then figure out a way to create a medium to large company work environment that supports what software engineers need to be truly productive and innovative.
In light of this story, perhaps I should amend my quote:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=72655
"that does not come from stepping on everybody else, just to feed the ego"

It's a bad sign if you think that judgments are all arbitrary and malicious. Maybe if you thought they were less arbitrary, you'd make enough changes for them to be less malicious, too.
if you are asking us to give a quote then it can't be mine - it has to be a "quote"
i would therefore say "one moment in annihilations waste, one moment the well of life to taste" and it is quoting Fitzgerald's translation of Omar Kyham
taking that attitude further, let's wish everyone hated computers except yc readers, so we could have a big competitive advantage.
CNET Networks Announces Sale of Webshots to American Greetings
I agree. Python certainly has its quirks. But what I like about it is that it doesn't force OO or functional styles. You can "ease" into them. I like writing non OO python.
Also with the significant whitespace, its great for teaching as it makes the code clear without syntactic noise.

the only thing I find confusing is forgetting that there may be a global function to do what I want. eg len(array) as opposed to list.length (ruby). But that probably doesn't hurt in reality at all.

The few books I have read on python are also excellent and approachable.

Also you can do fun stuff with python (build GUIs etc) and do tangible stuff that makes teaching it more fun.
What would unmatched do, exactly?
Also startups are short bursts relatively speaking, coding binges etc. He is talking about something sustainable for a career (of sorts).
How do you keep it persistent between individual web sessions? Do you run it as a separate process and just make the call when you need it?
If you really want to prepare for the next 10 years, you're wasting your time trying to pick a framework. In essence, you'd be gambling that your pick is the right pick. Frankly, if you really think you can do that; you ought to be buying stocks and not picking languages.

Instead, what you should be doing is learning how to be an excellent technology generalist. Get a solid foundation in the "Basics" of the web. Learn a scripting language that runs on the server, learn javascript, learn CSS & HTML. The most important thing is to figure out how you pick up new languages, because if you work on the web, you're going to be doing a LOT of picking up new languages and technologies.

Not putting your eggs in one basket is a very apt analogy to how to best prepare for a career on the web.
H Jaggu - do you (or can you) code yourself?

I was speaking with an older entrepreneurial guy the other day who was talking about getting an SBA Loan together. (he doesn't have the skills to design/code things himself, so this would be to pay people to do these things)

It made me realize how awesome it is to be able to 1) code, 2) do enough design, 3) barely enough marketing to be able to put something together in a few weekends and just launch it.

Sure I'd love to have a whole team working on this, but one such site launched after 8 hours of work the other week got 185k pageviews the other day =)

My advice: learn to code/design OR be a good enough salesman that you can easily land VC to afford to pay someone to do this for you.
>enterprise software programmers, like he used to be

Not sure he would qualify as one of those (not even sure what the definition is).
"stay hungry, stay foolish." -jobs commencement speech
"Quit reading news.yc, you slacker."
The Brand Called You
Judgments are arbitrary by definition.
I did go farther than I should have on my comments and apologize for that.
How are you defining 'judgments', here? I would assume that a statement like "A is taller than B" is not arbitrary.
Languages become popular when they gain a critical mass of developers. They can get this critical mass of developers for more than one reason. Marketing, running fast on cheap hardware, etc. can all be things that can single handedly make a language popular.

A lot of languages however have become popular due to large PR budgets (Java and the .NET family).

XML became popular because it addressed the need to have a self-documenting data inter-change format so that governments and companies can be reassured that even if a vendor goes out of business they can reuse the data (similar reasons for the push behind ODF).

Lisp hasn't yet addressed the needs of the masses (develop X blog in 15 minutes with a human readable syntax), or be pushed into the enterprise by large companies, or have a large pool of qualified developers, so it hasn't become popular.

Personally I don't think it ever will become a mainstream language. It requires a different way of thinking that I'm not sure a lot of folks can grasp. Ruby might be as close to Lisp as a lot of folks are willing to get.
The Snowblower Problem [pdf slides]
Also see the paper here:

http://www.ams.sunysb.edu/~jsbm/papers/snowblowing.pdf
Ask successful entrepreneurs about your idea preferably those in a similar field. I think thats a good way of judging its "worth".

Also assemble a team and just start working or brainstorming ideas. If you don't have people around you and you don't have an idea you want to pursue; join a startup, you will get an abundance of ideas and future cofounders.
I find interesting Kunstler's comments on Friedman's globalism cheerleading.

"I think we will discover (probably painfully) that globalism was a set of transient economic relations made possible by a half century of cheap oil and relative peace between the great powers, and the enterprises that rely on these transient mechanisms - such as Wal-Mart, with its 12,000-mile merchandise supply chain to China, and its "warehouse on wheels" of tractor-trailor trucks circulating incessantly on America's interstate highways - will be on their knees in a few years as we enter the export crisis phase of post-peak terminal oil depletion and the great powers of the world act with increasing desperation to compete over the remaining supplies."
http://www.321energy.com/editorials/kunstler/kunstler060107....
Is it worth running in the rain?  Enter your numbers here to find out!
I agree with the blogger's reasoning, only now there's a rumor of a $500 million investment from two NYC hedge funds (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=72562). The hedge funds would be making a financial, not strategic, investment so the straight-line extrapolation approach would be supported.
Don't be fooled, high schools int he US are pretty terrible in general. Most of the math and science I covered in high school in the US I learned through 8th grade in Romania. But the AP level courses are great. The high school I attended taught C++ as the AP course (switched to Java the year after I took the course).
But that doesn't mean they should be able to say any foolish thing that wanders into their head.
LOLCode.net - Now your LOLCats can use the CLR!
What is the best way to get customers who signup to actually use a product?
"In startup world, code writes YOU!"
Programming Habits
Here we go again. I'll play my traditional opening move:

"How are you handling ACID guarantees?"

and then I'll direct you here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=59885
Watson has retired:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/25/science/25cnd-watson.html

Watson's original statement seems like yet another attempt to take bell curves (of IQ vs race in this case) and treat them like delta functions. Reminds me of ability vs age arguments in some YC threads.
My solution to discrimination of this sort:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=69744