skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
i've heard a lot of ideas floated around about how to solve the problem of israel and palestine.

is it just me, or is it arrogant for us to assume that it is our problem to solve, and thus exponentially arrogant to assume that we can solve the problem by annexing what should be two sovereign nations.

also, i thought this was hacker news?
Candidates' Competence on Their Faces?
zoomable interfaces, erlang and functional programming, adaptive resonance theory, android, javascript, basic GIS, meta programming in ruby.
GWT, Android, Ericsson JSF MobileFaces, Metro web services using Glassfish, JPA (mapping to MySQL DBs), and Flash Lite are what I'm dabbling in right now. With the exception of Flash Lite, all of that is Java based... Meh.
i dont really know why, but it reminds me of zappos.

no flashy web two oh shit that gets in the way, just a competently design site based around selling stuff.

the only catch is whether or not the customer service is good, but from the 'why revzilla' sidebar, it looks like the stated goals are at least on track :)
Hey guys, many long days and many long nights but we have finally launched. RevZilla is a motorsports superstore carrying 10's of thousands of different motorcycle, dirtbike and atv related products.

The system it is running off of was built from scratch in Rails, with a PostgreSQL backend. We are also heavily relying on Apache Solr (and the acts_as_solr plugin) to power our product browse / search pages, and use it to provide some very cool faceted search capabilities.

I applied for YC funding two years ago with a different idea and got rejected (for valid reasons). We did not apply for funding with this startup for two reasons, one was we did not need external funding, we have been able to bootstrap this far. The second reason was we wanted to stay in the Philadelphia area, our industry connections are here and we are also opening up a retail store. So since this is not a purely tech startup, the benefits of being in the valley or Boston are a bit less.

Please give us some feedback on what you guys think, and if anyone wants to chat about implementation or other specific details drop me a line, my email is in my profile.
Update: to change the number of items rendered to 100:

http://hystry.com/newsyc/follow/?-render100

etc.

More details of the url parameters are on this page:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=71827
For UK news.yc readers - See Paul Graham at Imperial College London on Dec 4th
I don't think MIT's ugly, but I was certainly in the minority on that issue when I was on campus.

The reunion scene in Good Will Hunting was actually shot on Kresge Oval (I think), but I'm not sure why they went elsewhere for interiors. You may be right.
Feature update: to change the number of items to N rendered add renderN to the blacklist. e.g.:

http://hystry.com/newsyc/follow/?-render10

Putting it in the whitelist prob won't do what you want.
Well, perl is pretty new. In geological terms. Plus, I'm finding that 1000+ line java applications can be replaced with 15 lines of perl.
After working almost exclusively in game development for a big while; now I'm exploring all computer vision related technologies.
Wow - kinda leapfrogs the competition from a visual standpoint doesn't it? Great design.

Be interested to hear about its scalability once it hits its stride and experiences its first seasonal rush. From my experience in that industry, I think this is the slow time if I am not mistaken.

Either way - well executed. Bravo.

Any way I can get a discount? :-)

-Johnny
Attractive interface, I like it. Its a little busy, but not to the point where you get lost. I think it works really well, awesome work.
Ditto to the zoomable interfaces. There is a lot of potential there.
the article is garbage, but i gotta give the author props for his tremendous indecision on this non-issue, as displayed in the subheading: "Teenagers are abandoning their Yahoo! and Hotmail accounts. Do the rest of us have to?"
What makes you want to sell individual copies rather than collect a monthly fee by providing it as a hosted service? If it has to be hosted anyway, and unless it's going to be tightly integrated with the buyer's website/server, selling a hosted service might make a lot more sense since you can collect $x/month instead of $30 just once. And you keep your source code, and releasing updates is far simpler.
The bottleneck to success is not the idea. It is the execution of a idea.

Right now, there is a great example of this that is rapidly evolving and you can follow easily. Facebook apps.
Do the best 'ideas' for Facebook apps dominate? No, the apps that take any idea and execute well are the ones that tend to dominate. Speed is a big part of the game - the first to market tends to spread the best.
Bourne shell, sed, awk, sort, uniq -- the UNIX utilities are worth your time to get to know well.

Filesystems -- how to write them, and what's out there already.
I was just kidding about the ugly. I'm a huge fan of the campus architecture.
If you click around the links on the leaderboard [http://www.netflixprize.com/leaderboard], a lot of folks describe the basics of their approaches.

There are also a few entries (like "When Gravity and Dinosaurs Unite") that are explicit blends between two single approaches from different teams.
Never heard of statehood hacking? ;-)
Wasn't the Bell Curve discredited years ago?
Android looks like a lot of fun, and I get a good feeling about it. So I decided to port Hecl to it.

I want to do a web thing in Erlang + javascript, but haven't quite figured out what... although <horn tooting> I actually started using Erlang a number of years ago.
Are they serious?

Why don't we make Iran the 51st state while we are at it.
Actually America was basically a hack of ideas that Locke, Mill, and a few other guys had. Politics is all about hacking -- except you've got political theory instead of computer languages and commerce instead of sales. The interesting thing is that there are only so many political startups every century. Just like in our world, most of them don't make it.
Haskell, compilers, interpreters.
UK tech start-ups 'suck', Silicon investor says
TinyURL Outage Illustrates the Service's Risks
> And the cellular connectivity, which generally costs $60 or more per month, will be included with the device for free says a source close to the company.

Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm....

Now if only someone would figure out a way to decouple that from the device itself.... :-D
Yes, a start-up without a guy that kicks ass coding is doomed. Start-ups provide people with better technology, so it would make sense to know a little about stuff like software/servers/internet. Actually, all other things being equal, the start-up with the strongest technology base will eat up the others.

No, YC is not a bad place to look for people interested in starting a start-up. Just beware, because the word 'hacker' is overused in this place.
Why Ruby on Rails? Python is also worth learning.
Um, so just release a small open source teaser, and everything is peachy again? I think not.
Parsers (they are new to me).
Which ones? I suppose then there are also 1000 line Perl applications that can be replaced with 15 lines of Java. There are enough bad programmers out there...
Interview with Jason Knight, CEO of Wesabe
how are you guys handling inventory?
>Paul Graham, arguably one of the most important figures in the Internet's history

Now that's just a little bit ridiculous, no matter how good his essays are.

http://www.unc.edu/depts/jomc/academics/dri/pioneers2c.html
whats wrong with parkatmyhouse.com?
Viddler's New Tag-Based Advertising System
Few comments about your comment:

- karma whore: not really a nice way to talk to people, specially when its a tight community like here, kyro (but maybe thats why you don't disclose your real name and email here)! if you spend some time on this site then you would know its a lot easier to gain karma points here than what you think. I could simply push any of my articles that are submitted to the first page, or write something up that would gain me a lot more points than you would think. ( Also, my understanding was that just submitting a URL will not get you points, but thats besides the point.)

- after looking at your submissions it seems like you operate more like a leech than a true contributor. Most of your submissions appear to be self-centered, and will only benefit you. We are not here to help you on your textbook problems, finding you a partner or other stuff.

- if you think submitting links will get you more karma then you don't appear to be that smart! you should know there are easier ways to do it!!!

- FYI: the same exact story was not posted 30 min ago, its not even possible to do that with the same URL, you should know that. But if you mean similar coverage then its a different story. I have read them, but this was the one that was covering it live. Also I thought some of the comments on TC were interesting.

- I do post out of genuine intention to contribute. I actually believe I have posted many interesting articles, (some of which have even gone unnoticed). Also most of my Karma is coming from my comments, which are usually a lot lengthier than the average comments on the site

- you are right I have received a lot of karma for the past 18 days, reason being is how active I have been! I guess if you have been as engaged as me (and not as selfcentered as you are) you would have had thousands of points right now.
The 10 worst consumer tech trends
At the moment most items are drop shipped, eventually we will be moving to create our own fulfillment center
Doesn't it take 10 lines to say "Hello World" in Java.
I implemented a much simpler version of a 2d physics engine like this in a graphics class back in college (but in gtk on linux). It was really fun to do and surprisingly straightforward. A lot of the math gets much hairier in 3D.

This is really great!
I bet that if your underlying code isn't rigid/dreadful, you could leverage the platform - sell it to other people, open source it to publicize yourselves, sell consulting services (or certify people who do)... something like that.
Erlang, Ocaml and Jocaml.
I have no idea about the industry or where you can exit with this business so I'm assuming this is going to be a lifestyle business.

But seriously, you're using way too many images!

Total loading time: 8.8 seconds (ed: WOW!)

objects:123 (762.2)

Scripts:3 (142.2KB)

Images:117 (528.6KB) (Ouch!)
Kindle: First Impressions
Ask YC: What Language Do You Use for Multiple CPUs?
I was hoping that Python threads split across processors, but it seems that they don't. Is there a language that does it "automagically" without having to explicitly code it?
Cory Doctorow - The Future of Internet Immune Systems
Here's the actual conversation, as close to verbatim
as I can remember:

Q: What can we do to make Britain better for startups?

A: Well, when you're doing badly at something, the first
step is to admit it-- to say, Ok, we suck, now what
do we have to do to get better?

I certainly never said British startups suck. If I'd been getting specific, I might have said British investors did, but I didn't even say that.

This whole article reads like what I said run through a blender.
Scala: a new language for rapid development?
Care to share some links/references on zoomable interfaces?
Learn some basic hacking in (insert functional language here). I'm not trying to start a programming language flame war.

The point of the statement is to do just enough so that you don't drive away potential technical cofounders. Basically make yourself more attractive as a cofounder by avoiding the traps that many other non-technical cofounders fall into.
Yeah there have been many internal debates about this, and much effort has been spent on reducing the number of objects on the page while maintaining the look / feel.

Any suggestions are welcome!

Currently getting an 81 on yslow which isn't terrible for how hefty the site is
I see you've been a guest in my modern kitchen.
Silverlight w/C# clientside. I'm excited by the idea of replacing javascript. I'm still happy to use java backend, I love tomcat.
Large-scale text mining (Google/Wikipedia). There's boatloads of patterns and data latent in an enormous popular text corpus.

For instance, if you have two terms, and you want to see how similar they are, that's P(A|B). So do a search query for A&B and for B, and P(A|B)=P(A&B)/P(B), and that's a first approximation, a Google Distance, for arbitrary terms.

The information silos are only a couple years old, and already they're so valuable. I can't wait until the Internet's a century old.
Yes, Brightcove.com

Founded by Jeremy Allaire (JRun); impressive client list
I'm writing a compiler in C. It's exactly the kind of practice I needed to make up for years of slacking.
Feature: non-YC startups to post to jobs.YC
Obviously, YCombinator doesn't want its job board to turn into a free version of Dice. ...yet I suggest that it would be a big boon to the community of people interested in startups, at little or not cost to YC, to allow firms that have, say, less than 5 or 10 employees, to post to jobs.YC.

To give an example (and, yes, you caught me, this is a large percent of the reason that I brought the topic up) HeavyInk is looking to hire a Ruby / Rails rockstar to help us do something amazing in the comicbook space.

http://heavyink.com/forum/forums/1/topics/30
ahhh i see! This is nice. Thanks!
The book was a lot of fun, and the movie looks like it'll be entertaining too. It was a little silly that the book pitched itself as "the book vegas doesn't want you to read," though. Vegas loves this book, and vegas loves this movie. How many people are really going to organize a card counting team talented enough to beat a big casino? This movie will fill hotel rooms and get the kids down at the blackjack table. +1 for Vegas.

One thing that irritates me slightly - the blackjack team was mainly Asian, from what I've read. The casinos were ready to believe that an irresponsible child of super wealthy Asian parents was throwing down this kind of money at the tables - a stereotype that the MIT team successfully used to avoid detection for some time.

But eh, it still looks like fun. I'll probably go see it. And yeah, I'll probably lose some more money at blackjack.
I'd actually suggest that real programmers expect non-Microsoft languages to be Open Source, eg, without restrictions on binaries.
I'll admit what everyone else here is apparently afraid to: Flex/ActionScript 3.

I don't really see a future for MXML in it's current form but the rest of the stack--mainly ActionScript 3 / the SVG drawing API, Video/Audio APIs are definitely worth looking at. Some of the highest paying web development gigs are in Flash programming, and it's a lot less painful than browser programming (which isn't saying much).
Distributed version control systems. Especially Git, ATM.

Also seeking a deeper understanding of language design and compilers. Some inspirations for why:

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/06/rich-programmer-food...

http://martinfowler.com/dslwip/

Next on my list after all that: Machine learning.
Mobile, mobile, mobile...
Maybe you have a friend from high-school or something whom you know to be really, really smart? Maybe you know someone whom you know could hack, or at least someone whose opinion would count who could help you search for a cofounder.
Whatever happened to jumpChat?
At least with Java, you had multiple working implementations of the VM from multiple vendors. With the Flash VM, there's only Adobe's VM, and they've made no indications of opening the code anytime soon.
I'm also rediscovering Perl, after a few years of mostly working in C and Python (really, I wasn't doing a lot of development during that time, so I've still done a lot more Perl work than any other language).

MJD's Higher Order Perl is a fantastic resource for "new" techniques as applied to Perl. And, I've read the latest edition of the Camel book and found that I never really understood the language when I was using it three or four years ago (at the time I had read Learning Perl, and Perl in a Nutshell). Perl is so much more powerful, concise, and pretty, than I'd realized.

Perl 5.10 and 6 are really quite nice, as well. Objects are still somewhat quirky in 5.10, but will be fixed beautifully in 6. Likewise for named function arguments. Field Hashes are neat.

Oh, and using JSON with Perl is lovely--since everything we do is passing around references to arrays and hashes and such, converting a traditional HTML UI to an advanced JavaScript one is so much easier than I expected (and because objects are hashes, it'd be possible to do something similar, even if our code were more object oriented). Really quite smooth. JSON::XS is super fast and easy to use.
We're doing a lot of this, too. Not to say there isn't a vast swath of on-server work being done, but a lot of new features we're developing are using the server just to serve up the JavaScript and collect some data from disparate sources.
Machine Learning, especially Reinforcement Learning
Admin wise, I find a lot of 20 line Perl applications can be replaced with bash scripts. Most Perl developers seem to think Bash is Bourne shell, and don't know how to use functions or arrays. It's unfortunately pretty common to see 20 lines of Perl invoked to do things like check a network port is listening, around 2 lines of Bash.
Gosh I would like to break out of that loop!
Or find a more satisfying loop...
Depends on the formatting - you can write it in one line without any problems whatsoever.
You could help this along by requiring a karma floor before you can post a job.

However, I believe that the jobs tab is a significant competitive advantage for the YC portfolio companies.
an operating system for web applications
In developing web applications, I often notice the parallels between "web" design patterns and OS design patterns. For example, there are clear analogies between memcached and memory, and the DB and disk. It's the memory hierarchy all over again, and the same algorithms exist (LRU, etc). Would it be possible to create an OS layer to abstract out the DB and the distributed cache, to make writing web apps simpler? I'm curious what the major challenges would be.
Also, the OS abstraction would hide the multi-server aspect as well, so you could run the "OS" on a farm of machines, and your app would work fine even though it was developed on a single machine.
I would like to abandon "email" as a metaphor. Its not like the -protocols- are going anywhere, but I've thought before of routing all my email (= server, Gmail, Y!mail, and college FirstClass) to IM. That would centralize all my "messages", and make it easier to check all my accounts on my cell. IMs are already logged and stored if I'm offline.

I just did a cursory search, and it doesn't seem there's a way to do it directly in iChat or Adium. It'd probably be easiest to do it through Jabber. I don't know enough about XMPP though... Anyone have an idea how to go about this?
Java, C/C++/Objective-C. Many others.
I first heard of the concept in Jef Raskin's The Humane Interface.

Here's a bit of a survey:

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000858.html
that's a terrible analogy, basically saying that texting/IM are counter-productive, which is often, but not necessarily true.
I believe Erlang does.
Your OS process scheduler should do it to some degree at runtime, but beyond that there is not a lot that can be achieved without explicitly handling synchronization and locking of shared resources. I know there are some startups working on parallel processing optimizations though, so there could be some new developments in the future. Google has been acquiring a few of these startups recently..
What I'm currently looking into, none of which is too new, is: Scheme (Gambit C), Lisp macros (On Lisp), concurrent-like programming with continuations and epoll, raw X Window protocol (i.e., not using Xlib after initialization), OpenGL/GLX, unconventional text editors (the editor part of Jef Raskin's THE/Archy). In a short term, I'm just scratching an own itch, but some of these technologies I want to learn for longer term projects.
See if the processing package is useful to you: http://pypi.python.org/pypi/processing
A trait being highly heritable does not make it highly genetic. Correlation is not causation.

http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/520.html
Aubrey de Grey: Why we age and how we can avoid it
i'd love to have something like that, since most of the time I access different sites and apps, I'm looking for a small amount of specific data, such as the content of my most recent email, my facebook notifications, a date from my google calendar, etc, and frankly don't need all the flashy UI and the redundant clicking to access them. If i can access my email via IM by simply sending "read newest gmail" to a specified SN, my life would be just a little bit easier.
P(A|B) != P(B|A), so not really a distance...
No, the standard Python interpreter kind of sucks at this. You might want to look at Stackless Python though, it has all sorts of neat concurrency primitives. http://www.stackless.com
Things that perl was designed for...extracting text from other text. The Mechanize library helps.
It is more like: email is a cockroach. Sure it is ugly, but it will still be around long after the rise and fall of prettier creatures like Twitter or Facebook.
I've used C++ for multiple CPUs and multiple machines. Quite easy really. Most people just make it too complicated I think.
Low quality is 300dpi old laser printer used to do fine at it.

I have the Sony reader and love it, but this thing is fugly.

There is different types of eink I think the phone screens are not bit mapped.

On the whole I think this is going to flop. Most people do not want to carry around a tablet when a paperback is what they want. All the gizmos are a waste.

Also, why add dumb features like wireless? Simplify, the ebook has a built in mp3 player, guess how many people use it?

The sony could be improved by upping it's resolution to 300dpi, make the screen a little bigger. Keep the same cool form factor and remove some useless buttons. Put a front light on it. And remove the DRM, DRM will keep killing ebooks until publishers get a clue.

I also think there is room for an ereader with a 300dpi letter sized display, panasonic had really cool looking prototype. Give me that in a sony style package with a pdf reader and I'll gladly fork over $1K for it.

Currently working through Guttenberg, amazing how Mickey Mouse has totally corrupted the idea of public domain.
For what language?
I missed coding, so I've been tinkering with the LLVM compiler infrastructure lately.
Ask YC:  Is it reasonable to ask users to lie to their friends in a Facebook app?  What if it's a short-lived lie?
I'm thinking of building such a Facebook app, which as a byproduct would generate Facebook app ideas along with their virality estimates.

It would be sort of like the ESP Game, but with invention being the byproduct of the game rather than image labels.
What really interests me is Common Lisp. I am planning on using it for a real web application (omg).

If you are interested:

http://uint32t.blogspot.com/2007/11/web-programming-framewor...

http://uint32t.blogspot.com/2007/11/update-web-programming-f...

http://uint32t.blogspot.com/2007/11/lisp-web-framework-desig...

So far it is fucking amazing. I love it.
In similar words:
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2000/06/09/choose-life/
C and C++ using shared state, but minimizing locking by being clever (e.g., subdivide first).
He invented web apps...