skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
True, good point. You still lack the ability to discuss, though.
The manuscript 'Think Python' (http://www.greenteapress.com/thinkpython/thinkpython.html) includes a chapter where they use a Turtle to create simple drawings in Python. This book is aimed at beginners.
There are a couple separate issues here, and they really do need to be handled distinctly:

1. How do you get useful tools? Nowadays, you can just download free interpreters and compilers for several languages, etc. This is still a somewhat new phenomenon. (I remember saving for a while to buy a C++ compiler, as a teenager.) This has gotten MUCH easier, IMHO. Starting with a free Unix helps, because it will likely have development tools pre-packaged. Windows doesn't have otherwise ubiquitous tools present, nor the sort of culture that tends to accompany them.

2. How do you recognize what tools are any good? This may be getting harder. Any good advice is drowned out by the sheer quantity of contradictory advice coming from blogs, the reddit echo chamber, etc. It's not easy to figure out the implementation quality, availability of libraries, and other relative merits of different languages until you're already at least competent with one. (Python still seems to me like one of the better choices for a first language.) I imagine that a newbie being sold on [insert language] will probably just end up more confused.

3. There are numerous protocols, standards, etc., and it's hard to figure out which matter. JSON? XSLT? TLA? Learning which of these actually matter (and, really, which will still matter in more than a year or two) takes perspective that new programmers don't have. I'm not sure if this aspect has gotten better or worse, since a lot of old stuff that seemed crucial at the time has likely just been forgotten.
if you want it, totally build it!
awesome but not sure if i'd get much work done!
I wonder what kind of virtualization technology are they using? They don't advertise it anywhere on the site. I would speculate that they use different virtualization technology for Linux and FreeBSD, because on 'BSD installed software doesn't count towards disk quota:
http://minivds.com/technology/software/index.html

Pre-installed FreeBSD OS will not occupy your VDS disk space. Our experts will update all the pre-installed software regulary.

Pre-installed Linux OS takes up disk space allocated to your VDS. And we will not update the software - you will have to do it yourself.
Love it.Not that expensive.
Some research reactors have nothing but water between you and the fuel rods in the core. It's pretty good shielding, but it's still freaky to see a working reactor core right before your eyes.
Followup: This http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=492789

(How did that pass by with no votes and no replies?)
This is not true.

It depends on what type of spam we're talking about.

The obvious here is social network spam (you don't enter captchas to send emails), which is where captchas are most used against spammers, can be very profitable ($xxx per x,xxx-xx,xxx users).
The OLPC has that already if you haven't seen it.

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Turtle_Art
The biggest lesson I drew from this experience is that listening to other interviews would ultimately be useless. Every conversation with YC will be unique, because every team and product will be unique. Mimicing somebody else would give you no advantage, so the only approach you can really take is to know yourself, know your product, and know that YC isn't a necessary factor (albeit a very helpful one) for your startup's ultimate success.
Moreover, the threshold for what counts as "cool" and "exciting" has risen significantly. Twenty-five years ago, it was sufficiently cool to have a text-only console program. While text-only programs can still be useful today, they don't appear terribly inspiring to invite someone into programming.
Have you tried:
http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/startupswiki/Ask_YC_Archive#t...
and http://searchyc.com
Small Basic is pretty cool

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/devlabs/cc950524.aspx

it has a few graphics things and handles a lot of stuff for you. for example, if you want to use the Turtle object, you write one line of code:

Turtle.Move( 10 )

this will automatically open a drawing window with default properties and show an actual turtle moving 10 pixels

it has intellisense and a cute UI too
Two weeks of SIOC wishes
I quit Facebook about a year or so ago, which as an expatriate Australian in London was quite painful due to my friends being far more frequently seen on FB than on email or Skype. Still, I don't regret it - they seem to push the privacy boundary every once in a while and sometimes they get caught. I don't miss it.
I started about a year ago. I found that I have better focus at work and more energy at the end of the day. I'm happy I made the switch.

My work involves periods of concentration where I'm focused on my workstation for hours. And also periods of activity when I have to move frequently to and from my desk. Remaining standing makes the transition to and from workstation much less of a distraction.

Lessons learned:

- it's not for everybody.

- your co-workers/boss may make Rumsfeld jokes about you. (But you will have the Benjamin Franklin / Winston Churchill retort)

- it will take a week or two for your body to make the transition.

- a stool or drafter's chair will help with the transition.

- "Standing Desks" are outrageously expensive. Unless you can find something like Ikea's (out of production) Jerker Desk, or BYO.

- plan to play with the height adjustment. Your first guess may be uncomfortable. So ensure your desk makes this easy.

- budget for comfortable shoes and/or standing mat(s).
"nearly a million horsepower"

that's only around the same as 59 Wally yachts...

http://www.wally.com/jumpch.asp?idChannel=44&idUser=0...
Let's face it. CSS design is a visual art, and not every programmer is good at it. You either have it or don't. I have seen many programmers who do a fine job with CSS.
The Planetary Society's Quest to Deploy a Solar Sail
The more the merier, but I would vote for http://www.prgmr.com/xen/ The guy has been doing this thing since 2005, writes here and on his blog about how he is going about setting up his servers (http://wiki.xen.prgmr.com/xenophilia/archives.html) and writes a book about Xen (http://nostarch.com/xen.htm). The FirstVDS/MiniVDS on the other hand, go very dry official on their site, I'm not sure which virtualization technology they use and whether or not they are going out of business real soon (miniVDS forums are a ghost town).
In the article he mentions using @import over LINK due to some convoluted logic about "easier to re-use". LINK and @import behave exactly the same, except the well-known performance issues. Why should we trust someone who doesn't actually understand browsers?
Even better - because GMail recognises aliases, you can do "bob+siteisignedupto@mydomain.com", which means you can PINPOINT the exact site the spam comes from, and rat them out. This is without creating extra email addresses or wildcards/catchalls. It just works out of the box with your regular "bob@mydomain.com".
For color picking, HSV is very much better than RGB. With HSV though, I still don't have a good intuition for Saturation VS Value tuning so it seems there could be an even better color system.

Munsell appears to be that system, however there doesn't seem to be any public description of it that would allow one to implement it so you have to use some proprietary crap. I think that's a real loss for humanity.

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

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Munsell
Ruby Tips from the creator of Authlogic
It sounds like jails for freebsd and either UML or some homebrew chroot system on linux.
Is it something that I can install in a computer so a 6-year-old who never heard about programming could use it?
The other thing missing is the language filter
But mostly I'm just excited about the coming of technologies like cloudkick which will help push cloud providers (i.e. EC2, VPS'es) into being a commodity.
I kind of agree - heck I'd still like a cellphone with good enough audio quality that I can hear most of what the other person's saying. If I could hear all of it and tell who they are from the sound of their voice that would be sweet.

On the other hand, if there's any company who could make a simple, usable videophone device and make it popular, Apple can. Killer App? Doesn't feel everso likely, does it?
Looks interesting! I'll check it out.
Try activating the IMAP/POP settings on gmail, then suck in your gmail emails into a desktop client that supports bouncing to spam accounts, c.f. http://www.raymond.cc/blog/archives/2008/10/23/bounce-email-...
I don't expect you'll hear anything. I don't think eMusic cares, and I would be interested in hearing any ideas on making this more of a story. If companies don't get bitten when they leak email addresses to spammers then the problem will simply get worse.
What are the peculiarities (if any) of this technology over virtualization like Xen or OpenVZ that most similar providers use nowadays?
Except that with catchall address, you will inevitably be a collateral from spammers using your domain for fake FROM headers. You'll get a lot of people have auto-away messages, spam reply notifications, and "message undeliverable" responses from mail servers in your inbox. And since all of that is legitimate traffic, you can't train Bayesian filter over it.

Been there done that :)
A reasonable argument: The hype cycle is a law of human nature.

Another possibility is that the hype cycle is deliberately designed. That's also kind of what you are saying: If the hype cycle didn't exist, tech reporters or venture capitalists would probably have invented it.

To a physicist the hype cycle looks like a very slightly underdamped oscillator. [1] It oscillates a bit... but only for one or two cycles. And the pain caused by the "Trough of Disillusionment" is quite possibly outweighed by the utility of that initial steep slope. Or by the risk that, if you try to design the perfectly damped hype cycle, you will err on the side of caution and design an overdamped hype cycle, which is a disaster.

(To translate that last bit out of Physicist: If you try to design a product that is perfectly suited to its intended task, perfectly scalable -- not too little or too much -- and has perfect, clear documentation so that everyone understands exactly what it is for and what it is not for... there's a good chance that you will design something that is ever-so-slightly wrong for the market, and everyone will know that it is wrong (thanks to your complete honesty and clarity) and it will take a little too long to fix (because it's so thoroughly overengineered)... and by the time you get it fixed the quick-and-dirty hack will have stolen your mindshare and your market. Or you'll just run out of money before getting it fixed.)

---

[1] Of course, as Bruce Sterling once pointed out, the cycle is incomplete. Nobody ever draws the right half of the curve, which includes "obsolescence", "death", "consignment to collectors on eBay", and "rebirth as a cool, retro fashion accessory".
"How about a grass-roots weather data feed? Wave your iPhone about and upload some GPS-specific current weather data to everyone's favourite mapping and mass-data crunching big brother, GOoooooooOOooogle and see if they can compete with the Meterological offices. Google Maps with satellite photo exists, why not Google Maps with live (and predicted) weather info overlay? Bonus points if there's a hardware sensor-array accessory for iPhone 3."

You just described the idea behind my (not an iPhone app) startup: OtherWeather.com Would love someone to write me an iPhone app for it though, I've been trying to convince my developer friend to do just that for months.
I started at the BFOIT(.org) program, where I learned turtle graphics (JLogo).
I'd prefer it if Apple didn't enter the moral policing world. Well, beyond their already no-porn policy. But then again, Americans always were prudes(puritans) by European standards.
Anyone here on HN using Facebook successfully to promote their startup and/or personal website? I'm actually curious, and know of people in general who use it effectively but I'm more curious about the results from fellow Hackers.
Give your page some air

Always my biggest problem. Being a natural maximizer (as many programmers are), I can't stand non-performing real estate. It's taking me a long time to understand that white space is performing, just not the same way that code performs.
"it makes very little sense to take a product with the name recognition of Webmin back to an incubator"

We don't think so. Webmin is an Open Source project. Virtualmin, Inc. is a business. The business is new, and had pretty low recognition when we accepted YC funding. We're still not as well known as a company as we are as an Open Source project, but we are finding more and more of our customers have never used or heard of Webmin.

"neither the money nor the YC mentoring seem a good fit for them; they could have gotten funding from RedHat, IBM, Oracle or whoever else."

This makes assumptions about us and our company that aren't accurate.

We weren't looking for funding for our Open Source projects. We've funded them just fine on our own for 11 years; Jamie and I have lived off of our Webmin-related projects for most of our professional careers.

Now we are building a product startup that has a shared codebase and a large number of shared objectives to our Open Source projects. Building a business (a startup, and not a consulting business) is a very different process than building a successful Open Source project. We wanted some help with the former. YC provided it.

"i don't think the server automation tools like Webmin or cPanel see much love from hackers"

We'd rather you not group cPanel and Webmin together like that. They aren't even in the same market. Webmin is for system administrators, cPanel (and Virtualmin) is for hosting providers and their customers. Webmin happens to have been used by hosting providers a lot over the years, but it's a general purpose administration tool in use by large and small companies and individuals all over the world.

I won't make claims about how hackers feel about Webmin, but I will mention that Webmin is downloaded more than 2 million times per year. I can't think of who else would be downloading it from SourceForge. It's a UNIX system administrators tool. A very large percentage of UNIX system administrators are also hackers.

It also makes me a very sad panda to know that you think we do the things that cPanel does that makes hackers hate cPanel (and thus think those same hackers should dislike what we do). We don't generate config files from templates...we parse them and edit them. We respect comments, file order, and if we don't understand a directive (say, for an Apache module we don't know about) we won't break it. We work the way the OS does, respecting file locations and defaults (like Debian's sites-enabled/sites-available, or the per-interface iptables stuff), and go to great lengths to do so (have a look at the hundreds of per-OS config files found in Webmin for an understanding of just how great those lengths are). And, we provide copious documentation, over one thousand printed pages worth, for how things are working and how they map to the underlying system. All of these things are dramatically different from cPanel, and are designed from the perspective of "I want a tool that helps me do my job rather than forcing the world to revolve around it".
I've been playing with Shoes lately. Check it out, it's fun and simple.
Nice catch, Zev.

your value = the sum of your assets * your integrity

Zero times anything is still zero.
Hmmm...pencil and paper. It's just crazy enough to work.
Webmin remains an Open Source project.

Virtualmin is also available in both an Open Source (GPL) and commercial version.

I'd be happy to answer any questions folks have about what we're doing (though I won't claim to be an expert, and I'm still figuring it out) and how well we're doing (well enough that I'm not at all dissatisfied with closing up shop on my previous service oriented business to start Virtualmin, Inc.).
URLs in books
I talked a bit about it (where "it" is "building a business on Open Source") last year on our blog: http://inthebox.webmin.com/open-source-and-business-a-precar...
Make my land line phone ring if my iPhone is on my dresser on the second floor and I'm getting something in the basement.
The best of twitter from #the99percent conference, archived & curated.
http://www.squidoo.com/the99percent

See also:

http://www.squidoo.com/hacking_education
Also, Start@spark
A pocket projector and some of these http://www.senseboard.com/

Best new product of 2001? They're not quite Duke Nukem Forever yet, but small powerful battery powered PDAs are here, pocket projectors are here to sidestep the small screen/low res problem, all we need are good small portable keyboard-replacements, and where's senseboard's ideal looking product? Floating about in Vapourware unfinished probably abandoned land, that's where. :(

Are you a recent startup seller not sure what to do with your newfound millions? Looking for a good cause? Reduced to blogging about learning Salsa dancing? Go give Senseboard a push, they're dead in the water!
Right back to the days of MS-DOS, every other OS version from Redmond seemed to garner contempt, only for the complainers to be mollified by the version that came after (and claim credit a la 'finally Microsoft has listened to what people like me have been saying since the release of FU-DOS 4.0...'). Vista hasn't been a failure for MS, just not an obvious success. 'Failure' brings to mind things like OS/2.

For >20 years now, I've just been in the habit of preferring the odd-numbered versions, and assuming that the even-numbered versions were meant as incubators for the next major shift (most recently, from 32 to 64 bit computing). At first I thought this was due to ham-handedness at MS, but nowadays I wonder if it isn't the actual strategy - the pattern has repeated so many times now, perhaps it's because it actually works for MS. Notice how aggressive advertising on Vista's behalf only began last year as W7 was going into beta.

Thus, I predict that Windows 8 will require a minimum of 2 cores, 16gb of RAM and a 1gb Graphics card, leverage virtualization technology for application switching and be decried as a hugely inefficient and pointless attempt to recycle server solutions onto the desktop for no good reason. When Windows 9 emerges, there will be many headlines of the 'Microsoft desperately needs to recover from the disaster that was Windows 8...' variety.
I'm officially old if you were 15 when UT2004 was out.

Take your same story (+4 years of age) and rewind 5 years (to the days of Napster) and drop the 2K4 from UT and you have my beginning to the world of web creation.
Yeah I spent my senior year of high school in math class programming my TI-83 so I could play Drug Dealer, MK3 and other assorted games (the teacher didn't seem to mind). Not to mention creating and selling cheat sheets to classmates with similar calculators (they minded that).
They're about as reliable as tabloids. The Forbes article is ok (http://www.forbes.com/2009/04/14/best-cities-for-jobs-opinio...). Here are the highlights: Washington D.C. is the new Rome and Kansas City is in "The Zone of Sanity."

Top 10 Big Cities for Jobs:
No. 10: Portland-Vancouver-Beaverton, Ore.-Wash.
No. 9: Oklahoma City, Okla.
No. 8: Raleigh-Cary, N.C.
No. 7: Salt Lake City, Utah
No. 6: Seattle-Bellevue-Everett, Wash.
No. 5: Dallas-Plano-Irving, Texas
No. 4: Fort Worth-Arlington, Texas
No. 3: San Antonio, Texas
No. 2: Houston-Sugar Land-Baytown, Texas
No. 1: Austin-Round Rock, Texas

Top 10 Mid-Sized Cities for Jobs:
No. 10: Mobile, Ala.
No. 9: Anchorage, Alaska
No. 8: Shreveport-Bossier City, La.
No. 7: Baton Rouge, La.
No. 6: Corpus Christi, Texas
No. 5: Kansas City, Kan.
No. 4: Durham-Chapel Hill, N.C.
No. 3: Lafayette, La.
No. 2: Tulsa, Okla.
No. 1: McAllen-Edinburg-Mission, Texas

Top 10 Small Cities for Jobs:
No. 10: College Station-Bryan, Texas
No. 9: Morgantown, W.Va.
No. 8: Kennewick-Pasco-Richland, Wash.
No. 7: Athens-Clarke County, Ga.
No. 6: Laredo, Texas
No. 5: Killeen-Temple-Fort Hood, Texas
No. 4: Houma-Bayou Cane-Thibodaux, LA
No. 3: Longview, Texas
No. 2: Grand Junction, Colo.
No. 1: Odessa, Texas
Round manhole covers, or if Feynman applied for a job at Microsoft
I am REALLY tired of these "why x suck at y" articles. Are these bloggers so devoid of inspiration or creativity? Honestly I find this particular title offensive as I'm a programmer who is frequently forced to fix the broken CSS of so-called "designers".
Tweenbots: human-dependent robots that navigate the city with the help of pedestrians they encounter
We want to see how it goes, if there is a lot of demand we will increase. It is an NYC based art blog: artobserved.com
You're right. That's why I've let it sit for five years. But I thought it might be solvable, so I asked.

I'm sure you guessed what those six characters were-- it's partly a vanity thing, obviously. :)
That doesn't sound anything like Feynman.
That's not a fair reading; I don't assume that coercion is necessary to make money (nor do I believe PG assumes that).

Excludability ≠ coercion.

An advertising-supported site can exclude non-payers from using their advertising inventory. Money is made without coercion (and free/open-source software might be provided as an audience generator).

A consulting/services/support business can refuse to provide their service to non-clients. Money is made without coercion (and free/open-source software might be central to the delivery of services or expression of expertise).

A paid-subscription website can exclude non-subscribers. Money is made without coercion (and free/open-source software might be provided as a complement to the paise service).

The OP's proposal of angel-funding an open-source library presents a challenging case, unless some excludable complementary product can be offered. Only the dual-licensing strategy could vaguely be said to include coercion, if you believe enforcement of copyleft or copyright is coercive. And as I noted, that approach requires overcoming other market/sales/staying-power difficulties.

If you have other ideas for turning a open-source library into a money-making non-coercive business, please share -- especially if they somehow work without excludability. I'm very interested in this topic.
I'm starting to read it, it's very helpful, thanks!
Permalink just in case... http://www.betaversion.org/~stefano/linotype/news/169/
Are you familiar with SciPy? The company behind SciPy, Enthought, had revenue in the millions when I last worked with them three years ago and were doubling every year.

They are predominantly a service business, however, and provide custom software for a few very large clients (oil and gas industry, and one very large consumer products company). They've moved slowly in the direction of products rather than services, but I don't think they've ever quite made the break from being a custom software shop for (very profitable) niche markets.

I explained their business as a way of saying that while you can build a profitable business and make yourself rich on the kind of tools you're talking about (the founders of Enthought are doing very well for themselves and could probably sell the company tomorrow and retire multi-millionaires; they're also doing fantastic things for their Open Source community at the same time), you can't raise money in the valley for that kind of company. Until you figure out how to productize what you're doing, and make it possible to increase revenue faster than you increase head count, you aren't building a startup. You might be building a business, and that might be awesome, but valley investors pretty much only invest in startups.
When the Real Estate Game Cost $9.95