skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well I'm going to throw a different idea out there. I applied to YC with a friend last year, we were rejected.

It was a very difficult idea to pitch.

We thought our idea was the best thing since sliced bread and all of our friends told us so (this should have been a warning sign... false positives)

We went on to building it anyway.

We got a version built, up and running in a couple months after initially dragging our feet. It basically worked, but poorly - we never took into account that battery life would be an issue on the phone app.

We got a little disheartened, started bickering and eventually the thing failed - before we even launched.

Somehow we had gotten the idea in our head that we needed YC to be successful. No, we needed a good idea and our idea was, at the time, not so good.

Not being accepted isn't the worst thing in the world. Everyone thinks their idea is the best idea EVER... We sure did.

The partnership broke down as a result of us forging ahead anyway without really looking at our product and only talking to people who only gave us positive answers.

Anyway, moral of the story for us? Being rejected was the best thing that could have happened for us.

I learned a lot about the other person during this process and also a lot about myself. I'm not bulletproof.

On reflection, I also learned that being unwilling to discuss my idea openly with others for fear of it being stolen was stupid. We would have discovered flaws early on and saved us a lot of trouble.

I openly discuss my new idea with others now.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=502164

Some people tell me it's stupid, I ask them why and we discuss it. Some others tell me it's interesting, and we discuss it. Some tell me it's great and we discuss it.

I refuse to accept simple answers now and discuss as many different aspects as I can think up. I also appreciate other's perspectives on it.

This has also helped cement the idea in my head and I can pitch it relatively easily now. I've come up with a solution to a problem, rather than having a solution and looking for a problem.

Will I apply to YC again? Probably, I'm not sure. I've got a clearer head now - not so caught up in the hype.

To reiterate, getting rejected is not the worst thing in the world. It's just one avenue in the startup process. you should think of YC as a tool to help you get where you want to be, rather than the destination.
Nu looked cool. (I thought from browsing that it should be some Lisp-like macro lib; a guy I knew used something like that for assembler, started early 80s. PDP-10. :-) )

Interesting idea to level a scripting language on using the message passing mechanism of Obj-C -- and so integrate the resulting code with the compiled Obj-C!

Thanks for making me look!
I sure hope they didn't base any decisions off of the quality of the video. Posterous hacked it up like a baby bunny through a wood chipper.

Condolences to all who got rejected. Take it in stride.
The Rapid Release Tautology
Turn Off Your Step-Thru Debugger
I'm not sure if you're staying that Android is or isn't what non-technical users really want, but Android also has an App Store.

Unlike the iPhone AppStore, users can also install applications that don't come from the Android AppStore if they want to though.
What did you think was satire? That variable names have dollar-signs in front of them? Haha, that's so funny!

Next we'll hear that Lisp has parentheses.
True, but the upcoming devices (only the HTC Magic as far as I can see) don't seem that much more appealing than the G1.

I like that the G1 has a physical keyboard, that's pretty much the main reason I bought mine (as opposed to waiting for the HTC Magic).
No no, seriously. There was a TED presentation about this unintuitive phenomenon. It was posted here a while ago.

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/dan_gilbert_asks_why_are_...

edit: Fixed the link, it wasn't the one I meant to link to.
You must be in a different echo chamber then ;-)

Here are some interesting recent blogs for non Perl echo chamber members....

* http://www.bofh.org.uk/2009/02/20/marking-time

* http://www.bofh.org.uk/2009/02/22/moose-for-ruby-programmers

* http://www.bofh.org.uk/2009/03/11/writing-parsers-for-fun-an...

* http://www.bofh.org.uk/2009/03/13/magic-vs-mundane-keeping-t...

* http://www.modernperlbooks.com/mt/2009/03/working-with-testc...
Scala can't scale! (kidding)
According to the mpegla website, after 31st December 2010 content producers will have to pay money just to stream content, let along decode or encode to H.264.

AFAIK, Dec. 2010 is when the current licensing agreement expires and a new one is drawn up. They merely reserve the right to change the agreement to add a fee; they don't say that they will.
>> I ended up using Smalltalk for my startup.

I'm getting ready to start a new project with a significant GUI forms component. I wanted to go with Clojure, but it still seems a little rough around the edges. So I'm leaning towards Visualworks Smalltalk, in part because it seems like a great language to prototype in and partly because the OOP aspect fits so well with GUIs.

I'm curious: did you consider Clojure? Would you mind elaborating on why you went with Smalltalk? given the number of Lispers on this site, the answer might be of broad interest.
Here's what I've learned about second guessing Apple's design on just about anything: don't.

...or at least, if you're going to do so, you first have to acknowledge the degree of success they've had in the past. Don't go declaring the shuffle's controls "flawed" until you have some hard evidence to back up that claim because, chances are, if it's your guess against Johnny Ive's, I'll trust Ive thankyouverymuch!
Often when I'm confronted with a policy suggestion I think, "I can't possibly know enough about the ecosystem that policy impacts to say whether the policy would succeed." Not being a domain expert in most issues, I reserve judgement on them. In this case, though, I don't.

As someone who obsesses about product design, usability etc., I just think accounting for real world factors of human behavior is always a good idea. I'm very happy to read this, and if you've ever noticed the difference between two layouts for conversions on your site (or any small detail that makes a huge behavioral difference), you should find this heartening too. Unless, of course, you oppose the goals of the policy or policymaker.
The Perfect Server - Ubuntu 8.10 [ISPConfig 3]
Ashish Gourav:Exploring The Hedonism of Life
The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.literally, because she’s freakishly stronger than I am.
By the way, could you describe your project, which smalltalk implementation you use, and how it simplified your work ?
Probably the best I've seen is the same idea applied to anonymous wikipedia edits: http://www.lkozma.net/wpv/ Not sure if this has been posted.
YouTube - Learning chinese - "Where to buy food?" - Lan's Chinese lessons No.20
If you know the content you are going to talk about, and believe in it... public speaking becomes that much easier.
Isn't that Peter Seibel's "Practical Common Lisp"?
When I first interviewed him in 1984, he converted me to his belief that everything in the world resembles a certain kind of parallel computation called a cellular automaton, (or a CA for short).

The interviewer is a devotee of Wolfram's NKS, too (many might consider that a bad thing...).
> better building designs

This means making sure that no air can get in or out, right? How does this affect air quality?
Has anyone here used this in anger? I'd be interested to know if it works better than, say, Firebug? The latter tends to have problems with dynamically loaded iframes (like those used with Google Gadgets), and will often miss breakpoints in event handlers. If Venkman were better in this respect, that'd be fantastic.
That's probably 0 degrees north, 0 degrees west, right on the Greenwich meridian and the equator, in the Gulf of Guinea. It's a spot that basically means "no data".
I think ensuring first that peoples' lives would be helped if they learn and use Lisp is important, too. Some people take this for granted (and can come off as incredibly condescending, PS), but I'm not so sure anymore.

I know (and really like) Scheme, but the balkanized Scheme ecosystem can be very confusing to curious onlookers, and can make finding one implementation with all the libraries relevant to a project difficult. There's the tiny core language, then there's a bunch of SRFIs that implementations choose whether to support, and implementations are all over the place as far as quality, libraries, and portability. (I eventually settled on Chicken.)

I learned some Common Lisp, but ran into so many portability and library problems, for stuff that would be trivial in Python, that I ultimately gave up on it. In retrospect, Scheme is a much better fit for my taste, anyway.

For a while, Python was my default language for real work. (Lately, I've switched to Lua. They're quite similar, though Lua has incorporated more of Scheme's good ideas, has more of its own, and has a much cleaner design, IMHO.) While neither has macros, they have a collection of libraries, an active community, an obvious standard implementation, great support for interactive development, a decent syntax, etc. Macros aren't everything, and SwellJoe's comment about NIH (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=550634) is absolutely correct. (Lua's design, in particular, assumes from the start that it will be embedded in something else. It's very simple to use it with other languages and their libraries.)

While I don't know Ruby (Python & Lua already fill that niche for me), I'd expect Ruby programmers find similar productivity there.
A few years ago I hired a guy from the Ukraine, he only wanted 2$/hour. I couldn't believe it and paid him more, but at that rate you have 50 hours to customise. Not too hard.
Web2.0 nədir?
Pretty much. PCL is a great book that did much to bring the O'Reilly flavor to the community. Another good contribution is the Common Lisp Cookbook website, that contains snippets for common tasks.

Sadly, this doesn't seem to have struck the heart of the problem (although Lisp-in-a-box that came with PCL seems to have done it for some people).

Think about why Java is so widely used. I would argue that it's because of one thing: portable packages.
There's http://www.competitious.com/
Thanks for the response..
I'll take out my wifes 6110 some time soon and give it a go.

Can you link to a park that would show up the site in full detail?
Smartphone Appstores compared
Organic jewellery wholesale
Bali arts, clothing and fashion accessory wholesaler wholesale jewelry, beach wear apparel, musical instruments to retailers and distributors. Products include didgeridoo rainstick djembe drum, rattle, shaker, maracas, thumb piano, pipe, bob marley sarong, organic jewelry, wooden earlets, ear plugs, earring, bracelets, necklaces, whistle, gong, silver jewelry, sarong, dresses, seashell beaded jewelry from Bali Indonesia. Feature fashion directory and fashion blog industry news trends.
Excellent article and well written. I knew none of this until now! Six months ago I was offered a job in Dubai for a Tech Dir position at a major advertising company; I'm very pleased that I didn't follow-up on that opportunity now.
Bali arts, clothing and fashion accessory wholesaler wholesale jewelry, beach wear apparel, musical instruments to retailers and distributors. Products include didgeridoo rainstick djembe drum, rattle, shaker, maracas, thumb piano, pipe, bob marley sarong, organic jewelry, wooden earlets, ear plugs, earring, bracelets, necklaces, whistle, gong, silver jewelry, sarong, dresses, seashell beaded jewelry from Bali Indonesia. Feature fashion directory and fashion blog industry news trends.
Can someone explain the "it's only for AI" objection that people bring up? I have heard it from a few people first-hand and they couldn't say much else about it. Is it like "Macs are just good for graphics?"
An introduction to global warming impacts: Hell and High Water
It's cyclical, but it's a virtuous cycle, not a tautology, as the article itself states:

"The only realistic way I know of to release software frequently is to start to release software frequently. You will probably fail the first few times you try. If your release process is painful, it will continue to be painful until you identify and eliminate the causes of the pain."
whats the name of your aggregator? we're doing something similar. Wanna chat? peter [\at] omgponi.es
tying the release date to the calendar, not to any particular feature

(Just thinking aloud) Can this be applied to other areas (like "learn Language X")?
Community Building 101 for the Bootstrapped Startup
The article seems to be saying that you can improve your speaking by moving your lips more. Although a lot of people could stand to speak more slowly, this advice will really only take you so far. Rehearsing and using hand gestures freely will take you farther.
"Visualworks Smalltalk,"

Doesn't VW have a "pay us x % of your revenue forever" license (http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/userblogs/cincom/blogView?con...)?

I am curious as to why any startup would want to accept these terms.
Safari 4 Beta
Emailed your profile email. Thank you.
I made a preview page that I handed out to people personally to maintain secrecy. Nearly nobody saw it, and nobody saw it without my handing out the link.

I didn't think it was worth monitoring something as private as that.
Some people (apparently) assume Ruby is only for the web; they're confusing it and Rails.

Lisp was closely associated with AI a few decades ago.
>> Dubai is a living metal metaphor for the neo-liberal globalised world that may be crashing – at last – into history.

Just out of curiosity, is that the same globalized world that the author used to fly there while speaking only English the whole time? Anti-globo self-righteousness, direct to you from the Dubai airport. Nice.

Also, having read the article, I'm missing the "neo-liberal" part. "Medieval dictatorship" (as he himself put it)? Check. No rule of law? Check. No concern for individual rights? Check. No constitution to hinder government expansion of powers? Check.
Ufo cover up | airforce ufo | area 51 | roswell
UFOstream allows people to easily upload and share video clips on www.UFOstream.com and across the Internet through websites, mobile devices, blogs, and email.
Good article and a great highlight of just how crazy brain chemicals end up making a lot of our decisions for us. I'd just add, don't even think of getting married for the sex - that all changes.
Hey, thanks for submitting this! :-)
> The excellent Wikipedia section you linked to makes it crystal clear that the CRA, which passed in 1977, had no causal role in the subprime meltdown

Where?

Here are a few quotes:

> Economist Stan Liebowitz wrote in the New York Post that a strengthening of the CRA in the 1990s encouraged a loosening of lending standards throughout the banking industry. He also charges the Federal Reserve with ignoring the negative impact of the CRA.

> Jeffrey A. Miron, a senior lecturer in economics at Harvard University, in an opinion piece for CNN, calls for “getting rid” of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, as well as policies like the Community Reinvestment Act that “pressure banks into subprime lending.”[60]

> asked if the CRA provided the “fuel” for increasing subprime loans, former Fannie Mae CEO Franklin Raines said it might have been a catalyst encouraging bad behavior

> CRA, which passed in 1977, had no causal role in the subprime meltdown that started in 2007.

Uhm... You know that it was "strengthened" (Expanded) by Clinton twice?
Thanks for the link, I'll take a look at it and see if I should revise my own implementation.
I watch through my Macbook Pro hooked up to my TV. I wish someone would get it working on the old Xbox, I still love my XBMC.
Mainly, I've heard flaky things about nginx's mod_wsgi so I choose to use the tried & true apache mod_wsgi
48 minutes, but the last 18 are questions. It doesn't talk much about django itself, but concentrates on the types of data they have to deal with, how they obtain it, etc.

The big news (to me, anyway) is that under the terms of the grant under which EveryBlock is developed, it will be open-sourced on June 30.

There's some interesting discussion right at the beginning about their data model, which seemed to be forcing non-relational data into a relational model. This was actually addressed in a question about 34'15"; he said they'd been investigating CouchDB, but are currently limited by the lack of geospatial support.
Walt Disney got a yes from the 996th bank he approached. I'm such a pussy that I would have quit after 950 attempts. He never quit. That's the point. I expect that you won't either.
San Diego Divorce Lawyer
San Diego is an attorney or law firm which offers compassionate & experienced representation to clients involved in divorce, recovering from a car or truck
Except for the lisp macros, I think it lacks the eval-print-loop? (Quite logical, since it was done for Newton from the beginning and not comiled in the native environment, I think.) That loop is part of what makes scripting languages and lisp so productive.
http://www.freerainbowtables.com/ Your mileage may vary.
Experiences deploying a large-scale infrastructure in Amazon EC2
You Pay, Computer Prays for You
For small stuff I'll just use Firebug, but for the heavy lifting it's still Venkman for me. You can debug chrome with it, set breakpoints, read the stack, set it to trigger on errors or exceptions, etc.
I don't know. Debuggers, used correctly, are powerful tools. I don't require debuggers to write code, but I don't think I would be making the best use of my time if I simply stopped using them, or even avoided using them if possible, as the author suggests.

A certain part of your brain shuts off, because you expect the debugger to help you find the bug. But in reality, you wrote the bug, and you should be able to find it.

This might have been more true at one point in time, but I think it's less and less true as time progresses. A large number of bugs I find are not in my own code – they're in libraries I'm linking to or including, in other people's code. Or the documentation is wrong, or some subtle behavior in an API changes between versions. Trying to figure this stuff out without gdb; just thinking about it makes me want to pull my hair out.

Sometimes you end up with really goofy stuff that would be impossible to figure out without the copious use of breakpoints. For example, recently I was working on some lower-level multithreading event loop for an app that had very tight timing requirements.. it was for the Mach kernel (OS X) and on my machine I was getting a really terrible Heisenbug. Event timing would be fine whenever gdb or dtrace was attached, but would start to jitter and error when it was run without a debugger – no deadlocks, though. One of the system calls I was using to return the absolute time (after you do some math) relies on the CPU core to derive its value..

It turns out that the clocks in each core in a computer are likely very slightly off from one another. If you think about it, this makes sense, but it wasn't documented. Since my computer had four cores, when I attached a debugger, the host OS would notice the increased CPU usage and shuffle the threads in the running processes around. Usually this meant all of the threads in my app ended up being executed just from one core: ta-da, timing problems gone. Take the debugger off, threads more likely to execute from across several cores, timing deltas might be messed up.

Anyway, I guess if the author's advice could be more generally summarized as "don't do stupid things with software" then I wholeheartedly agree :)

Make the machine tell you where the bug is.

Valgrind, dog. Valgrind.
Yes and no. The problem is the [lack of] specificity of the goal. You either did or did not release software on date X(+). To say whether you did or did not learn a language by date X is too fluid to be particularly helpful. If you did literally nothing, then you clearly failed; otherwise, it's all just shades of grey.

+ - One can argue whether or not you got "enough" features/tickets/bug-fixes into what you did release, but that's the beauty of regularly scheduled release "trains". If a feature misses one train, it just hops onto the next one, which is never very far behind. We do three-week cycles and have been the entire 6 years I've been here. When I first joined, I didn't see any way we could keep it up and argued against trying. Now, I can't imagine how our company would continue to run if we didn't have that 3-week heartbeat. (We are a IR top 100 e-tailer, over 200 technical staff, over a dozen "large" projects in flight at once, etc. Not every project goes with every release, but the entire site, fulfillment and support systems all go every 3, 4 weeks over Thanksgiving and Christmas/New Years.)
The elisp tutorial that comes with Emacs is pretty well written - fluid style, usage of real language features.
> Also, having read the article, I'm missing the "neo-liberal" part. "Medieval dictatorship" (as he himself put it)? Check. No rule of law? Check. No concern for individual rights? Check. No constitution to hinder government expansion of powers? Check.

That tends to be the dominating antagonistic definition of "neoliberalism". It may not be that far off.
The point of the question is that there is no mathematically "right" answer. The interviewer knows the answer from experience, and (s)he's testing two things: whether the interviewee's intuition on the market is right, and, if not, how well the interviewee takes to being corrected.

Your answers are "right", in that they are possible, but they are not the numbers the interview wants to hear.
The Geithner-Summers Plan is Even Worse Than We Thought
Hear hear, happened this summer. The second time around I'm the founder and not just an early-employee, and instead of $3M we only had $10k to kick things off.

What's kept me from applying to ycom is having a technical co-founder that I believe in. But that hasn't kept me from launching and running a relatively successful (in 4 months) mobile startup.

I love reading HN and following the ycom companies, the quality discussions definitely impact my thought process and decisions in the company.
To say debuggers will make you dumber (sorry "brain shuts off") is like saying using high level languages will make you dumber than when using low level ones. Lets all go back to assembly!
I used it a number of years ago before I'd heard of firebug, and I couldn't get anything done. Breakpoints would be hit inconsistently and it was not exactly a user-friendly interface, but most infuriatingly the thing would freeze up constantly, locking all of firefox with it. Maybe it has improved since then, but my experience with firebug has been much better.
There is a great quote about a talk with Stewart Butterfield (Flickr) in a pre-flickr world :)

"I was talking to Stewart Butterfield about the chat application they're trying here. I said "Hey, how's that going?" He said: "Well, we only had the idea for it two weeks ago. So this is the launch."
actually i am having similar problems with firebug... and venkman sometimes doesnt even know there are breakpoints... i heard venkman does a better job when debugging firefox plugins but I am yet to see that.
actually it has improved (in terms of reliability) since then but the UI is still heavy and woeful... firebug is simple (though cant figure out how to debug firefox plugins (chrome) with it...
No they are not.

YC has more experience than you.

YC has more success than you.

If they turned you down, listen to the "why" and make the adjustments necessary to be successful.

Consider it a badge of honor that they even gave you the time of day. Take the information, feedback, advice, and rejection to heart and grow a pair.

Success is not static, it is dynamic.