skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Good conference - Too heavy on scalability.

Best slides from the bunch IMHO:

James Tauber's Django Patterns - an in depth overview of common patterns found throughout a Django Project:

http://eldarion.com/talks/2009/05/eurodjangocon_djangopatter...

Alex Gaynor's Form's presentation included many interesting ideas including a few 'ohhhh' moments using some functional hotness to get things done fast:

http://www.slideshare.net/kingkilr/forms-getting-your-moneys...

Paul Smith's talk on the EveryBlock stack dives into map tile generation and rendering using Django.

http://www.slideshare.net/pauladamsmith/the-web-map-stack-on...

Simon Willison's talk was excellent though you might not get as much out of the slides. Turtles all the way down!

http://www.slideshare.net/simon/django-heresies
Gmail - And the winner is... - business4rj@gmail.com
Thanks Dan. Very excited about it.
Should have spoken more about the application/interview process. As it stands right now, it seems more like a suckup post.
You are correct, about 50-75% of the issues have work arounds.

I've done some keybindings.

> You get used to it eventually.

You don't if daily you use osX, XP, Gnome. two of those can be made 90-95% similar (GUI wise) the third only about 70%.

I've done that for Terminal. Amazingly I use more software than just Terminal ;). I've googled for hours, couple people who spent inordinate amount of time on this have documented that there is no, and can be no "No consistent focus follows mouse. No raise on hover" due to the way in which the framework works.

A bash script is not an "icon".
Hey Laurel it's pretty cool. They've got some great mentors and the program looks awesome.
Need more than one example to call it intelligent. I tried "Am I mentally retarded?" (IQ test?), "Am I at risk for cancer?" (risk factor questionaire?), "Am I at risk for lung cancer?", "Do cigarettes cause cancer?" all without ANY results. Help me out here, what kinds of questions is it smart about?
Hmmmm... ok, fuck it. Y-Combinator is better.
Again, work visa does not mean immigration. It means he gets to live here and has access to the US if he needs it. And he has access to VCs and startup communities as well.
I'm going to do a follow up post with more information about that, and also why I think the program is different and why I think the founder centric stuff is important.
Have you used http://www.thefunded.com - it's as blunt as HN in its reviews of funds and programs.
It knows:
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=what+is+the+answer+to+t...

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=what+is+the+airspeed+ve...

But it doesn't know "How do you get to Carnegie Hall?"
I did some research. You are allowed to borrow up to 70% of the $300,000. This is for Entrepreneur Immigration. For investor class then they need 400000 liquid assets and he can borrow %70 of that as well.

So it is not as impossible as it sounds.
Do I win hacker points for being the type of person who would think to do exactly this while drunk?
Does the specific rankings matter? I'd thought the only metric that matters is on/off frontpage.

My assumption(perhaps woefully assuming) is that people scan the front page for new/interesting titles and read them. Not that they think "Oh, I'm not reading that it's only at #13, maybe when it breaks into the top-ten."
Anyone else get an interesting error http://i44.tinypic.com/359es9e.png
I'm going to second that. After reading the post all that I came away with is, "Some startup got in. They're excited. They think incubators are neat."

Sorry if that sounds harsh, but this seems more like a proclaiment of excitement than something substantive.

Edit: Adding constructive criticism: This should say what they're doing, what they like about the program, what the process was like and perhaps contrast it with some of the other stuff that's out there.
I believe some states even stop alimony at the advent of cohabitation of the supported party with another.
Written by a morning person. However, research shows that night owls get more things done.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/5208608/Night-o...
I feel similar like these guys. Today I got the news that I am accepted to the program and can’t express how thrilled I am. I think the program has a lot to offer.
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From using it, it seems it's not so much smart as it is a whole bunch of hard coded solutions.
It's certainly an interesting model. Maybe even brilliant.

The institute doesn't actually have to invest any money at all to get to watch and know these startups and founders. And if any of them start taking off, they will be in the perfect position to invest.

Will less risk across more companies yield greater returns than the YC model?
New Technique’s Gonna Find Out Who’s Spammy or Nice
It's always puzzled me why radioactivity is always associated with reactors and bombs.

Natural radium is radioactive and has a billion year class half-life. It's more toxic than Plutonium-239 (e.g. the stuff they make thermonuclear devices with) and it's estimated that there are about 15,000 tons of it dissolved in all the oceans... What this means is that sea salt contains radioactive radium.... a substance that is more toxic than the dreaded plutonium...

If we want to talk "radioactivity" then this is the kind of thing we need to be talking about, not stupid stories about teenagers playing around with breeder reactor technologies.
Well, it has not changed my views (admittedly I am not entirely anti-copyright, only against current laws). Anyway, why should someone's view be more valid because they have a vested interest?

I do find plagiarism and copying that is not properly attributed, or that is not necessary very annoying. Why do people copy and paste text from my website to Wikipedia, Scribd and other places? Why not just link? Why not attribute properly.

Most sites are pretty good at dealing with this - A Wikipedia editor spotted it a copy and paste and took down the content before I got round to complaining, but Scribd seems to go out of its way to make it as difficult as possible (written DMCA notices only).
Not correct, the taxes are actually paid by the receiver and not the payer. If the receiver is in a lower tax bracket, then they pay taxes at that rate. This is basically all factored in to the process of setting alimony by the courts, so pretax and post-tax don't really make any sense here unless the tax brackets are different. Note, IANAL or an accountant.
depending on how recently you drank, it takes time for your body to absorb the alcohol from your stomach...
I don't think your comment is offensive, and I get what you're saying -- you would prefer that all of humanity be inspired by what one of us does. Regrettably this is not the case.

People identify more with people that look like themselves. This is a bug in the human OS and we can't ever totally fix it. Even if we could somehow fix that, there are good reasons why someone will gauge their own chances based on the success of others who are similar to them, especially in a society that's still working on eliminating racial and gender disparities.

Let me take an example closer to home. Paul Graham's theory about Y Combinator was, among other things, that people were ready to found successful companies at a much earlier age than was previously suspected. He has pretty much proven this by now, and I know lots of bright kids who are ready to take the startup plunge.

But think of how people felt before -- "I can't start a company, I'm just a college kid" or "What do I know about business, I've just worked in a coffee shop" or "The people who start computer businesses have to be really smart, I don't even have a degree yet." or even if they do think they have the skills, that "nobody is going to trust a kid like me, the game is stacked against me. Forget it." And there is even the worry that one might succeed, but then be totally alone and alienated from all your friends.

If the barrier is that high just for ageism, consider how much higher it is for sexism and racism. And people grow up and leave their youthful inexperience behind; you can't do the same with gender or ethnic background. Think how much more mental fortitude it would take to try to succeed in a profession where you'll always be the odd person out due to your gender or color. Knowing that someone's blazed the trail for you becomes very important.
The duration of alimony is probably very dependent on the state. One example that I am aware of is that alimony is typically paid for half the duration of the marriage. If his new wife is beyond that period, then she may only be receiving child support.
This is pretty much what happened to the investment banks and GSEs too.
Great work Jed, hope it all goes well. It'll be interesting to see how it compares to YC and others.
See previously: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=548002
I herd it was a Google-killer, but it turns out to be a Google Calculator Killer
I think it is a radically different model. Part of its founder friendly focus is precisely that it doesn't make people give up other work and move somewhere full-time. The use of warrants rather than (fairly or unfairly) articulating valuation by providing tiny seed funding as part of a stock deal avoids the question of pre-seed valuation, and it encourages the best eventual valuation possible.
It has some very interesting ideas.
Maybe a good thing:

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=is+wolfram+alpha+self+a...

"Wolfram|Alpha isn't sure what to do with your input."
What would I do? I'd collect a bunch of irrefutable proof and try the case in public as a way to generate publicity for my project.
Thanks, dupe deleted.
Also, they have only provisioned for like 2000 requests a second [1], which seems pitiful for launch day when every one and their mother will hit the site.

[1] http://blog.wolframalpha.com/2009/05/12/the-computers-poweri...
Apple will do the same thing it always does with stuff like this: introduce a system that accomplishes 50% - 80% of what people need and then listen to what people scream the loudest about for where to go next.

First round: Push notifications. This (mostly) satisfies the loudest screamers... "I HAVE TO RUN MY IM CLIENT TO GET IMs!!!"

It's all speculation from here on out, but...

Second round: Background Music. Apple will provide some API so applications like Pandora can play their music in the background. This will necessarily entail some amount of background processing to be allowed, but I'm sure it will be heavily curtailed.

Third Round: Limited "full" backround support. Who know what this will look like, but it will probably be something like the user can select N apps to run in the background

By the end of the third round, hopefully the hardware and battery technology will have advanced enough that Apple will allow any app to run in the background
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Yeah, they had to send a follow-up email. It looks like the beta was kind of last-minute; my email from the Wolfram folks misspelled "Wolfram" and "Password" -- and mixed up my password and my username.

But they caught the relevant mistakes pretty fast.
You pay $1200 for rent for yourself; or yourself plus a significant other; or for yourself, significant other, and three children?
Don’t hate me for my .NET
The difference is, except for taxes, he chose to make those decisions. Slaves did not choose to be slaves.
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Well, if you're the one to make that point that makes you the first X-er on Mars. But you deserve some credit for that achievement as well. More credit than just "another guy who landed on Mars" but less credit than the first man on Mars, I estimate.
It could work out the other way. Men can get alimony as well.

http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB120700651883978623-wV...
Github's fork queue is dangerous
In fact: http://skitch.com/nothingmuch/bxtct/yuval-kogman-nothingmuch...
Wow. congrats. unfortunately I'm one of the hundreds that were rejected :)

But the best part for me is I get to meet Adeo in person, and I know I shouldn't be judgemental but he's impressed me as a darn good person that is passionate about helping out start ups as well.

I hope everything goes well with your venture, and please do share your experience with us
No, but I'll add "blanket proposals to ban discussion of certain topics" if you like.
It really does kill Google calculator! It does symbolic stuff, like Mathematica. http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=y%3D+y^2+*+x^2+sin%28x%...
IRCTC to soon cater to food orders ahead of rail journeys
Adeo is a genuinely great guy. I don't care if it sounds like sucking up. I met him at an event in Boston that he got me a free ticket to, and I was flat out broke after getting there on a shoestring and he bought me a beer and introduced me around. I think he knows how tough it can be trying to get something started, and he really believes in what he says.
That difference is mostly irrelevant. Slavery entered into with consent is still slavery. The key part of slavery is not the path of entry, but the path of exit, in that you don't get to exit.

There is very little functional difference between this guy and a bonded laborer from pre-independence India.
That's true, it's one hell of a calculator.
I'm a guy in the same age group as you, and I totally agree. If I didn't trust my (hypothetical) wife absolutely, I would never marry her. When I decide to marry someone, I am not going to treat her like a security or an asset or some other financial instrument -- she's a human being. I think the concept of a pre-nup is evil and derogatory, even given the state of the current legal system. (I don't agree with the "the guy always gets fucked" BS either; my parents are divorced, and my dad got off just fine. He didn't even have a very good lawyer.)

I think, basically, people make dumb decisions when they should make smart ones. Buying a house, getting married, writing a book, etc. are not things that you can rush because you really want to get them done. They take time. The people that get screwed when doing these things didn't invest enough time.
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I see what you mean, and I get the motivation for this kind of thing. I'd quibble with your choice of example, though - Paul backtracked on that, unfortunately. But leaving that aside, I liked the way you described the reason for all this: as a bug. As intelligent beings (ha ha), I think humans should try to be aware of the bug and work around it, instead of reinforcing it, which is what this does. (In this case, sexism is reinforced.)

Consider the implications of your last sentence: The trail has only been blazed for you if someone else in your subgroup has done something already. It hasn't been blazed if some other human did it. Again, this just reinforces the separation of humans into subgroups, instead of rejecting the importance of subgroups entirely.
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> It isn't possible to escape domain specific code entirely, however. For example, code is needed to know that the string “the 23rd of October 2007” denotes a date and to calculate square roots. However, in our system, such code is isolated from the core query processing system.

Why can't the algorithms for accomplishing these things be stored as facts (or rather, graphs of facts representing an AST) themselves, within the system? They could be JITed into real function pointers when they were needed, and then GCed (leaving only the AST) when they hadn't been called in a while.

I was trying to do just this in a project a few years ago, but I used LISP-like cons cells to express the AST. They which conflicted with the underlying triples the knowledge graph was expressed in, creating a lot of storage bloat and "facts" that weren't really informational by themselves. Thinking back, if I attempted it again, I would use an AST format very much like Smalltalk's labelled-blocks representation of code.
Paul backtracked on that, unfortunately.

I did?
I'm not sure what you mean. Are you saying an X-er has to do it for that point to be made? I don't see why.
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I think it might be because the output comes from Mathematica's engine, and the best way to render various formulas, tables, charts, etc. is to just use the same graphical output.
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I just installed Eclipse, and in the workspace directory, it created a ".metadata" directory, containing 9.2M. Most of it is here (output from du -h):

8.8M ./.metadata/.plugins/org.eclipse.jdt.core

Unfortunately, finger memory takes a lot longer to retrain than 15 minutes of learning the basic basics - it's more similar to retraining from guitar to piano. But truly, it's just a matter of time.

I would love to have automatic refactoring tools, but they often don't do quite what I specifically need (and I don't need to do it often enough to become practiced with what the tool can do.) Last time I needed a lot of boilerplate, I wrote a quick script to do code generation for me. I very rarely need it, but it was a guilty pleasure to write the tool.

The other thing I like about Eclipse is that javac is always already loaded, so you don't have that 2-3 second start-up delay. So... I wrote a little javac server - javac is sitting there in the background, and I send it the src files and switches from a client - instant compile! I hardly use this either, but again it was fun to write.

Speaking for myself, most of my programming time isn't spent in editing, compiling, debugging or looking up docs - it's mostly spent in understanding new problems - with pen and paper. Typing is the easy part!

But my projects are unusual. It's funny, in trying out Eclipse, I'm more interested in the cool ideas they've had than in actually using it. It does have some cool stuff in it.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=77502

Wouldn't call it backtracking though.
What's the solution then? To not let people make decisions that could potentially be bad?

That sounds like it's slavery too.
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Thing is, a race car is designed with the fact in mind that you're not going to do anything but drive when you're in the seat. If there were racing-while-talking-on-cellphones competitions, the automatic transmission would probably be a better optimization in terms of available-attention-to-performance.

Likewise, for some types of programs (extremely parallel ones, for example), you have so many high-level considerations that also thinking about the low-level implications would simply be too much. Premature optimization is just as much a drain on the programmer as the program.
> When checking for possible moves I found that there is an advantage in starting on the right and moving to the left.

Well, the big piles are hardest to clear, so that's where you should start.

I was very surprised, however, that one should prioritize deck->table over table->table.
It still needs work for more complex queries:

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=debt+%2F+pop++japan%2C+...

So there's a small bug when you look at France. Also, it took trial and error to get a query that actually worked. (ex: comparing debt / pop / LE between multiple countries instead of debt / pop leads to more bugs)
Outstanding job of putting my thinking into writing.
Searched for "india" -> Firefox + CPU got hanged. Bad omen for india I guess especially after todays election results.
i guess that means i need to buy haswolframalphabecomesentientandtakenovertheworldyet.com

reminds me of hasthelhcdestroyedtheearth.com
IIRC, about four years ago you made the point that if grad students can start companies, undergrads can too. Some time later, I believe you implied that you'd gone too far, and undergrads generally weren't as ready as you'd thought. I think one of the reasons you once mentioned was that people who'd worked for a while had experienced how much it sucked, and this made them more determined or desperate when they ran their startups.

That first point was in an essay or talk, but the second might have been somewhere else. Maybe "backtracked" wasn't the best word (backpedaled, maybe?), because I'm not saying you completely reversed your position and started rejecting all young people, but I hope it's clear what I'm getting at.

Here is the talk: http://www.paulgraham.com/hiring.html

And this might be the other thing I'm thinking of: http://www.paulgraham.com/mit.html
yeah i got that once (out of 40 or so queries i messed with)
Tips for coping when your startup is out of cash
I have used adwords and its good if you only show ads for google searches and take out syndication. I tried facebook ads and textlinkads but wouldn't recommend either.
Good job with the counter perspective. My main concern is the risk of being overloaded.

Based on my last two jobs (1 year and 6 months) the larger companies are also subject to buyouts and layoffs. Based on the position descriptions, the large company would be joining a team that solely does middle ware, while the small company will be hitting a bit of everything.

Looking closer at the offers, with the possible bonus, the salary at the two places should be the same. As long as I avoid burn-out, getting in on the ground floor should present better experience and roughly equal pay.

Ok, it seems clear to me which way I'm leaning. This weekend should be more interesting as I'll be talking about with my fiancee's parents. I'm fairly sure they'll be arguing for the more conservative approach.

Thank you for the feed back.
No. De-incentivize the lender. Create better exit situations for the borrower there by making such activity extremely unattractive for the lender.

Spend tax dollars educating and discouraging the borrower. This is valid because such conditions hurt the nation in the long run.
Because people are products of evolution.
Why don't you allow down voting of articles?
> There are massive "bad" parts of the Bay Area.

Actually, they're not as big as you might think. The problem is that outsiders can't tell the difference between bad and poor.

There's a rather interesting "crime map" of Chicago that shows that violent crime is incredibly concentrated. (An interesting fraction of the total murders occurred within the equivalent of a couple of blocks) In other words, "bad areas" are mostly just poor.

Buffet lobbies for a tax that puts money in his pocket. He's arranged so his estate will not pay that tax.

He also lobbies for accounting changes that make companies that rely on stock options seem less attractive to investors.

No one is stopping him from paying more tax....

Buffet strikes me as a pull-up-the-rope-behind-him kind of guy.
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Perhaps a silly question: is it's longterm name Wolfram Alpha, or is the second word merely an indication that it's in alpha phase?
Wolfram Alpha gets The Answer right
Ask Alpha: Where is god?
This is a good read for anyone who's ever wondered how hard it would be to gather a complete collection of the elements that make up the periodic table.
Exactly. If prenups were required by law there would be no emotional baggage in bringing up the topic.