skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you are learning Python, new to programming, and want to be a web-entrepreneur, I strongly suggest you check into Django once you learn Python reasonably well.

Best of luck
What's it like to have your brain split in half?
But that's a brilliant idea! It makes complete sense! There must be a catch - are they going to block Skype? Throttle bandwidth (or more deviously - increase latency) to prevent viable VoIP? Because WIFI everywhere is death to the telecom industry.
Oh how I wish I could share the joys of hacking with non-hackers, but that would be like describing the color blue to a blind man. You just gotta experience it yourself. There's nothing like putting something together and seeing it work the first time. Even if it isn't perfect, that first output is better than sex. Still makes make holler and jump out of my chair! (The output, not the sex.)

I would strongly suggest trying out any of the many "Build an App is x Days or Hours". Grab a book or something on-line. They're everywhere. There was even a pretty good "Build You Own Ruby on Rails Web App" on the forum a few days ago (probably 2nd or 3rd page by now). Follow the instructions and do what they say. Build you app.

One of two things will happen: you'll either feel like I do and you'll be hooked. Or not. Either way is OK, but to not give it a shot in 2007 would be a shame.

(By the way, you'll probably find out that's how the best of us got started. School is cool, but nothing replaces just doing it.)
How (wormy) apples really kill pears :)
I'm one. Coincidentally, I'll also be starting to learn how to program tomorrow. I'll be learning C from K&R. I wish you the best of luck with Python.
Sorry to sour your future-casting, but this "killer app" has been a non-starter for many many years. Except for some niches where the flow of data is the primary thing you want to express, visual languages are too cumbersome. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_programming_language
>Always saying yes separates you from the other 99%.

Yes, but only if you can carry through with the things you promised to do. If not, they'll hate you for saying yes all the time.
Neurotic bots rule
One of my biggest problems with a lot of Media is that they mistake 'coming down hard on everyone' or 'show both sides of the story' with thorough research and logic. When the focus is on avoiding bias, rather than on improving substance, that's what you get. Usually, slanted articles are bad less because they're slanted and more because they're poorly researched and contain few insights.
Paul,
Vico and Pirsig both address the problem you outline in constructive ways, Vico through a pragmatic view of history as a Science, an evolutionary philosophy if you will, and Pirsig by a link to anthropology and a distinction between philosophy and "philosophilogy" which is what is mostly going on today.
Tones
Orkut is quite possibly the worst name for a social network that I've heard. I have no idea why it was chosen, or what significance it has, but it's definitely not an advantage. Nobody I know would hear Orkut for the first time and think either "Social Network" or "Google." (In contrast to, say, "gmail," which immediately evokes email and google).
Virtual Universes Landscape
True, the question is whether Facebook will be worth that much in 5-10 years.
Has anyone used this site to incorporate?
Any feedback would be useful, I am looking to inc an LLC, single owner, 100%
What do you like about living in Seattle as a tech person?
Might be moving there soon! Need tips and opinion...
He's talking about an earlier and much more ambitious AOL than you are. AOL once hoped to be what later turned out to be the web. But because they weren't open enough, the web grew faster, and they became merely an on-ramp for it.

(Then after a few years of being a quite prosperous on-ramp, they lost even that, which is the vanquishing you're thinking of.)
Presentations from FOWA
"Orkut" is the first name of the guy who wrote it.
Or at least, whatever the cause is, it's not in the data they're traditionally given to use...
What if you have great technical people in the beginning who happen to have no equity stake?

They leave as soon as something better comes along. Giving them equity [with vesting] prevents that from happening. If the person is okay with just a salary, he'll go work at Microsoft or Google and additionally collect the "intangible" benefit of job security.

These aren't difficult concepts.
9 months ago, we were the MySpace generation. Just saying...
Not only that, it's what everyone calls him because no one can say his last name.
The fact that a startup dies when someone leaves doesn't imply that said person was indespensible.
OK, so I read Hackers and Painters while in LA. I'd arrived after 3 years of studying computer graphics, 2D, 3D, image compositing, 3D animation. I wanted to be a VFX artist. I was starting to put together a decent portfolio of some stuff I'd done.

Then I made some friends who worked in the VFX industry, and I realized how much the life of an FX artist sucked. So, shortly after I got my first offer to work for an FX firm, I decided to leave town.

One of my friends, (he teaches FX at Sony Imageworks now) told me: The guys at Imageworks who have the most creative freedom are the programmers. The artists have to reproduce what someone else tells them to reproduce for 16 hours a day, 6-7 days a week. The programers write code whatever way they want to as long as the code gets the job done.

So, I picked up a copy of Hackers and Painters, left LA and enrolled in a CS program. That was 3 years ago. I've been plugging away at school ever since.

I've since moved to the Bay area, I'm finishing my degree in two more semesters, and I'll finally have a go at my startup.

I agonized and complained for months after I read Hackers and Painters because I couldn't hack and I didn't think I'd ever be able to. I was intimidated. But, then I figured if I didn't take the leap and dive in, I'd still be whining about it months or years from now.

So, if you're upset that you don't fit in in hacker culture, and that your not a hacker... Maybe you're trying to tell yourself something. Maybe what you really want to do is learn how to hack. It's what I wanted all along. I just didn't know it.
Do you have any comments on the similarity in ideas which early founders share. Essentially an idea emerges out of ones experience of life. Most of life's problems are out of context for undergrads. I am 22 ear old myself, have started, but this thought is bugging me.
Speed Dating as a Design Method
Agree. You guys seem to be mistaking a hacker with the technical guy behind a start up. They are not necessarily the same.
I am relying on "inside information".

I suppose that means this is an "appeal to authority", but, still, if a person critical to making software work is gone, and the company fails specifically because they can't make their software work, what else am I to assume?

(Needless to say, sometimes I've been that person.)
the other good thing about 'viral' startups, is that you get instant feedback about whether something works; you don't have to hang around to see if people like it or will use it.

Max Levchin told me that he would never bother with a start-up that wasn't viral in some way for this same reason.
It's not writing another tinyurl site that's difficult - there are a bunch of other url shortening services out there. Part of it comes down to how long people think you'll last and, so far, tinyurl has outlasted many startups - they'll likely be around well after Twitter has been acquired or replaced by some other service.

But yes, twitter can certainly roll their own.
Knowledge search is cool and all, and Naver shows how powerful a force it can be when the entire nation's using it, but so far it's not fulfilled its promise of being the way to search.

Both Yahoo and Microsoft developed QA products (Y! Answers and Live QnA, respectively) hoping to have a semblance of Naver's success, meanwhile piping the answers into the mainstream search, enhancing their Google competitors. So far, though, beyond being somewhat popular, they're sort of glorified forums. The people answering questions aren't supplying good enough answers to be worthwhile most of the time. And the fact that the sites encourage high volume over high quality doesn't help matters either.

Even worse (for a would-be Google killer), Google's still the king of indexing content, so if you open up your question-answer pages, which you almost certainly would, Google's going to be serving it up for you and getting ad revenue for it. I think this is not the right vector for killing Google at all.
5 Myths About Sick Old Europe
Web 2.0 helps to easily find the next book to read
WebMD article on the same research, different second interpretation

http://www.webmd.com/balance/news/20071005/negativity-may-ch...
Thanks for the inspirational post. Keep it up, and keep sharing your experiences with others (on- and offline)!

Coming from an art background though, you probably have a significant advantage when it comes to creative expression.
I need to learn how to hack and I will
Real  World Defensive Driving Advice on HubPages
"Here's the deal" (winks the capitalist to the Mexican/Indian/Filipino), "You come here and take a job for less than the prevailing wages. In exchange, you get to live in a place that has traditions, institutions, infrastructure, social programs, laws, etc, that supplement your salary...all at no cost to me."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

Keep in mind, that everything is paid for. By someone. Just because it isn't person X who is paying, doesn't mean it is good policy when person X writes a column in Reason magazine.
Simpler XP Tip: Turn off your PC. Throw it in the garbage. Buy a Mac.
"a tall free number"

Is that also something to do with prostitutes?
Great article. I cant write code if god could help me, but i understand it to a decent level. But i hope to take on the business end of things in my company because i have more experience there. Knowing how the program works is a great value for a business guy like me, because i can communicate with the hackers on my team, and speak in their dialect. Its also kinda necessary to understand how your product works.
Aha. Guess I'm too young to have known that.
I think it's clear that on average, people in America generate more wealth than they pay toward the commons. Hence, more people will generate even more wealth, giving even more toward the commons.
Just as computer science studies algorithmic theory as well as implementation.
And it sucks that Google Answers was closed because of those other services.
PG - i use news.yc on my cell phone from time to time. it seems that something changed in the last few months that makes it quite unreadable at least on my phone - all the text is centered, not left-aligned at all. Perhaps the mobile browser doesn't support whatever CSS you're using to left-align things, and taking the <center> tags literally. I don't know how much of this was my fault either. :-)
One way Facebook can be very useful is by providing trust and accountability for distributed/social applications.

For example, if everyone did email through facebook, then you could restrict incoming email to within 6 degrees of your friends. If spam starts being sent because of one of your friends, you have incentive to cut off that friendship before you get cut off from your social network.

Like that article awhile back talked about, Facebook is another step in automating the way we build trust. And trust is the bedrock of a cohesive and effective society.
The thing keeping them from becoming a true commodity is an effective aggregation service. (Not yahoo pipes, which is just for rss feeds)
Google Answers wasn't knowledge search, it was a paid answers service. The focus there was lower volume, higher quality regulated by a financial marketplace rather than community features. Not really even in the same class of product.

It was shut down not because of competition but instead because it wasn't worth anything to Google, really, at least relative to their search product.
For what it's worth, this is not the right way to implement such a site. The author notes that there's a collision problem, but pretends it's not a big deal when it actually is. What's the chaining (re-hashing) strategy, and do you really want to pay that cost every time anyone clicks either of the colliding links?

The better implementation is the one that seems stupid, namely start at 1 and increment your link number every time you get a new one. Encode it in something like base 36 (numbers plus lowercase letters), and you're basically done. This method also guarantees that your links are no longer than they need to be.
A warning or two on C and K&R:

If you hit a brick wall when you get to the chapter on pointers and arrays, don't panic. That's perhaps the first relatively hard thing to learn in C, it may take you a little while to grok it.

And I get the impression that K&R doesn't teach it well; I myself read the Lions notes to "get it" (_Lions' Commentary on Unix_, ISBN 1573980137, a critical 1977 book with the UNIX Version 6 source code and excellent commentary). Now of course there are many more good expositions on this and the other harder parts of C.
Ask YC: Any good online resources on the Linux kernel?
I've recently made the transition from the Windows world to full-time Linux usage and am finding myself increasingly curious as to how it all works. Are there any good primers on Linux kernel design or historical accounts of how the OS came together? I'm primarily looking for things that are available in digital format, as at the moment I'm not able to acquire additional paper products.
you are talking like a MBA and a manager. As per your learnings people are machine so you can easily replace one malfunctioning part by another.

I am not involved in any startup but like to do my job with creative energy and scripted quite a few time saver solutions for my group. Until now all my manager were thoughtful enough to allow me but this new guy thinks that he can replace any person with any person without looking at the unique attributes of each of the person. He wants me to do the work others can do without looking at what i can do and others cannot...
I am sorry but you are sounding like my manager so get a job in big company. Startup make you respect your talent and looks like you do not want to do that...
Coders may be dime a dozen but believe me true developers/hackers are not...
Smart move on BT's part. Makes for an easy way to further monetize existing bandwidth and increase the value of their Wi-Fi network by adding more hotspots for little cost.
the google comparison is so idiotic I don't know why you even brought it up, they are different things and will have different values. That being said you talk as if things were static, "fb apps are far from indispensable" uhh that doesn't mean other better apps won't come... your issue there isn't really with the platform is with current app developers I guess, or is there something particularly wrong that will prevent interesting software from being written for this platform?

"Platform is the Bubble 2.0 buzz word"

first there is no bubble2.0 at least not even close to the extent of the last bubble, bad investments/ventures will fail as they always have and will, there are no crazy IPOs with ridiculous valuations. there won't be massive lay-offs.

"It's also yet another way in which MySpace is superior. They have always allowed you to stick JavaScript in your profile page, so it has always had a platform."

uhhm the platform is more than sticking widgets on your profile, if you're writing an opinion piece on this maybe read up? I mean just that you don't come out sounding like a complete idiot.
1, 2. I think it would be nice if editor support made it easy to switch back and forth between math notation and standard syntax.

3. Lisp is nice, but the implementations have issues. I'm mostly satisfied with SBCL at the moment, but I keep writing utility functions to get around the warts in the language. Languages seem to be an instance of the "all X sucks - some just sucks less" pattern.

4. I think providing explicit support for state machines would be a Good Thing even without the visualizer.

5. Something that lets you look at an expression as you step through evaluation and substitution would be useful. Macroexpand does this at compile-time, but I want something similar at runtime for parts of the expression that aren't macros. I suspect something like this exists, but I haven't seen it yet. Slime's disassemble takes the name of a function and displays the corresponding assembly code in a buffer.

I agree that it's not practical at this point to try to completely prove the correctness of programs; I think it's more useful to prove specific aspects of a program as an alternative or supplement to tests. It's also useful to make assumptions about things you can't prove in the mathematical sense but can rely on when writing or running a program.

What's next? I've been meaning to download and try out Qi, a language that builds on top of Common Lisp and has a type system based on sequent calculus. It looks like Qi allows users to start with fairly general types and narrow them down as the program develops.

I didn't enjoy OCaml when I spent a couple days trying to learn it. The restrictions of the type system were frustrating, though I did get the feeling that it's a much better way to keep people from breaking stuff in a "software engineering" situation than using Blub.
Worse is Better is a good discussion of the philosophy of Unix, which definitely plays into the development of Linux.

http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html
That's just another component of intangible capital though. The reason risk-taking isn't mentioned separately is because it's of far less significance (either because it doesn't make much difference, or because the delta between developed and less-developed countries is small) than education, property rights, etc.
Let me give you a real example from a program I worked on. I'll simplify the code.

Say you write a function that takes input given by the user, inserts it into a list, and then sends the action across the network. Every item has an ID, so when the function finishes, the current ID number needs to be incremented.

add_item (item) {
var item_id = current_id;
insert_item(item, item_id);
update_current_id();
send_item(item, item_id);
}

You write the function, and it works, and no one has any problems with it.

Two months later, you come back to the function and think, "That's messy. I should clean that up." So you do.

add_item (item) {
insert_item(item, current_id);
send_item(item, current_id);
update_current_id();
}

Do you see a problem with this code? No, you don't. You even run the program and try it out, and everything seems to work fine.

What if the function header had said "throws NetworkException"? You might have been more careful, but I wouldn't count on it. If the function were longer, which it would be in real life, you probably wouldn't catch your mistake.

On the other hand, what if the code looked like this?

add_item (item) {
if (insert_item(item, current_id) == INSERT_ERROR) {
return INSERT_ERROR;
}
if (send_item(item, current_id) == SEND_ERROR) {
return SEND_ERROR;
}
update_current_id();
return SUCCESS;
}

Do you see the problem now? Of course. It's staring you in the face: current_id won't get updated if the network goes down. The result is that you could have two items in your list with the same ID.

This isn't "nuclear power plant" paranoia. What I'm describing is a real bug I had recently. It wasn't the first time that I've done something like this, either.

I like your idea of putting the throws clause next to the function call. I'd like to see something like that for checked exceptions, and eliminate unchecked exceptions completely.
You are right, that's what google suggests to do if you hit the 500 emails limit. Using a queue is another option...

I didn't find any other limitations to using google apps.
A Ruby on Rails Amazon EC2 "Appliance"
Ask YC: can you recommend a bliki engine?
monkeycharger: A small Rails application for storing and charging credit cards
Interesting question, how do they make money? I guess they gather a lot of interesting data, because they can monitor who visits pages they don't own (and also which pages get recommended the most, a ka generate the most URL generation requests). Maybe they can sell that data. On the other hand, services that have a hook into the original pages, like Google Analytics, probably gather a lot more data than TinyURL can, so I don't see the advantage for TinyURL?
IBM's Eclipse Plugin for Hadoop, a map reduce framework
Hadoop: an open source implemetation of mapreduce and a distributed file system
For the OS, there's http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/

For the kernel, Wikipedia seems to have a good introduction and external links: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_kernel
I'm using it. It's not very mature, but it seems to work alright, and the other is nice, and responsive.
Update: for the record, I now consider applying with another idea instead, which I have already done more work on than the build on demand stuff. It is not as ambitious, but at least I might have something to show for.
It's Not the Sword, It's the Man
Ask YC: What's a co-founder?
If my co-founder has 10% equity, does he count as a cofounder in the YC application form? How about 5%? There are always cases where co-founders contribute differently and the percentage is divided accordingly. How does this play into the YC formula?
MSNBC Acquires Newsvine
Someone bought that dog? Amazing. Anyone know what the price was?
The best beginning to end book is probably Understanding the Linux Kernel, 3rd edition (you can buy it online at . It covers a lot of operating system concepts and how they are implemented in the kernel. At some point you'll want to look at the source code, and the best way to do this is using the Linux Cross Reference, found at http://lxr.linux.no/ .
Unreleased game "Crysis": there's still plenty of excitement outside of web applications
In practice there is usually a clear distinction between founders and people who are given a little stock for doing something for the company. The former are cofounders.

It would be rare for a cofounder of a non-broken company
to have as little as 5%.
I found this http://www.eskimo.com/~scs/cclass/cclass.html a useful, lighter, accompaniment to K&R when first learning C. Good luck. C is a great language for, er, implementing higher-level languages in ;-.
Browsed through the wiki article, but it is difficult to find (anywhere?) structured comparisons of OS design philosophies.
Kernel Newbies (http://kernelnewbies.org/) has a lot of information on kernel hacking. There's a list of recommended books on kernel internals:

http://kernelnewbies.org/KernelBooks

Including an online book on writing Linux device drivers:

http://lwn.net/Kernel/LDD3/

And on the Linux virtual memory subsystem:

http://www.phptr.com/content/images/0131453483/downloads/gor...
That is a retarded blog post with lots of errors. Good job on getting on ycombinator - but that's a dumb dumb post.
Grades and stock options.
From Charles Simonyi's interview on intentional programming.

http://www.edge.org/digerati/simonyi/simonyi_p3.html

the Dean talked to me and said, well, Mr. Simonyi, you were doing so well and are now doing so poorly; what's the reason? Can we help you? You can share anything with us, tell us what it is. Is it drugs, is it grass, acid, or mescaline? I smiled at him and said, I think it's a stock option. He said, well in that case we can't help you.
Werewolf Strategy
If you want a good discussion on OS design, get Andrew Tanenbaum's book "Operating Systems: Design and Implementation". He's the MINIX guy, and that book is pretty much the de facto standard text on operating systems. It's expensive, so see if you can find an international edition. I picked mine up for the equivalent of USD $10 in India.