skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To respond to the criticisms of these sites - audience has a LOT to do with it. Visual and artistic-types gravitate towards very different design values. Depending on what you want the site to do, and for whom, these sites could very well be just the sort of thing you need. The broader the audience, the less 'design-y' you should make your site. Google is a great example. They cater to everyone by using a design which doesn't say too much and is informed 100% by the core function of the site.
Interesting. I hadn't picked up on that ratio from your essays, although I certainly didn't think all YC applicants were students/fresh out of school.
After using namespaces in 5.3 I'm more than sold, I'm in lust

Woah now, it's just a little syntax... relax a little. There's a whole world of programming languages out there with more variations on syntax than you can dream of. Then again, maybe I don't see what the big deal is?
I like Gruber's assessment. It draws some simple conclusions which illustrate that Apple is not the "little ol' computer company" it was derided for 10-15 years ago. It also illustrates how Apple's might could actually pose a real threat of extinction to companies just like MS in the coming years/decades.

I've also assessed things Apple/MS in a post of my own. I don't think it's become public realization yet, but Microsoft is scared. Apple poses a serious threat, and they have recent experience in starting the long and dreadful decline in the browser space to help them get a taste of the backlash that's coming.

http://blog.iamron.com/business/microsoft-buys-customers-cow...
Should I Be Worried About Scaling?
Getting irritated at work with talk about "we need to be ready, just in case"

Open the floodgates...and watch in despair as only a trickle comes through. Welcome to the real world.

Update: Wait until you get home to do something like this. Already got in trouble for it :( Need to remember: "Think then act"
Exactly. This is not news. C# has always been a step ahead of Java. They're both enterprise languages, good for large teams. But C# has always offered comparable features to Java as well as more higher level features. Add to this, albeit a subjective opinion, that VS is a superior IDE to Eclipse.
Fundamentals of Weather Observing
One liners like this is why Perl has a reputation of being like line noise. I'm a big fan of Perl, but if any of my employees wrote this kind of write-only code, I'd fire them.
The only really 'hard' thing I ever did in C was write an OS with interrupt handlers that passed control to user space.

Debugging that took me more time than I care to remember, I hung that box so often that I hooked the reset switch up to a foot pedal :)

Other than that C has been pretty good to me in terms of showing where the bugs are. Post mortem debugging would usually give you the location of your crash and that plus a little bit of deduction will tell you what you're doing wrong.

Memory overwrites (and stack overwrites) are things that belong to a certain phase of coding where you are still learning the ropes and you have not yet mastered the idiomatic solutions that people will use to avoid such problems. Setjmp and longjmp are also an excellent source of hard to find bugs, as well as multi-threading (the multi-threading problems are not unique to C, some languages are simply better at doing that sort of thing, occam for instance).

I've heard C compared to a race car, it's great as long as you stay between the lines, take a turn too fast and you're heading straight for trouble. Experience (as in bumping your head a couple of times) will make sure that you know how far you can push it.

C is like any other powertool (think chainsaw or plasmacutter), you can easily get hurt but once you've mastered the tool it is quite amazing what you can do with it.

I got in to C after a long period of writing almost nothing but assembly language (x86, 68K and a bunch of 8 bitters) and I remember thinking of C as a very 'high level language'. My perspective has changed a bit since then...
I think Arrington is bluffing here and I'm calling his bluff.

I would probably do the exact same thing in his position. There's no way I would quit the iPhone, and I bet he won't either. He's just using his powerful voice to put more heat on AT&T and Apple to reverse this decision.

And I'm glad he is. I hope it works.
I should point out the obvious that C# was designed after Java was in the wild for some time; thus, Microsoft got to learn from the mistakes Java made when designing the language.
Take this message back to Sammael. Every death he has caused since waking, I lay at his feet and call due. Every murder he has ever done or caused, I lay at his feet and call due. He escaped justice in the Rorn M’doi, and at Nol Caimaine, and Sohadra. More of Lews Therin’s memories, but the pain of what had been done there, the agony of what Lews Therin’s eyes had seen, burned across the Void as if Rand’s. But I will see justice done now. Tell him, no truce with the Forsaken. No truce with the Shadow.

Oh fuck off. How can people read this stuff? They're like romance novels for nerds.
I like your popular tags better. Twitter went away from "tell us what your doing" - to a more - "share what is happening anywhere in the world" - I think they and everyone is tired of "Froot loops were great this morning, now in I-40
these things tend to be reversed pretty quickly.

I have an ongoing feud with a friend of mine where my part of the feud is to refer to him as a juggler as much and publicly as possible (He hates jugglers, and thinks they should all be shot, hence..)

As a joke I created a Wikipedia article with his name, and spent some time writing up an entry about the great juggler that he was. The plan was to send it to all of his friends. I submitted the article, composed an e-mail and refreshed the Wikipedia page to make sure it worked. The time it took me to write the e-mail was long enough for some editor to delete the article.
Good thing I put my shredded paper in my worm compost bin. (Well, actually I do that because it's beneficial to mix some lower-nitrogen waste in with the higher-nitrogen waste (vegetable scraps).

But it really does destroy the shreds nicely, even if it takes a few weeks.
There is a language filter in order to display only language we want to see (in the standard version, not the low bandwidth one).
This is a thinly veiled marketing pitch, justifying the extra cost of buying from the guy with a team in NYC, rather than the guy with a team in Russia.

To get it right, we need to not only have a tight feedback loop with you, we want to become you. ... That's hard to do across two oceans.

No, that's hard to do - full stop. You're not bringing your full 15 (I'm guessing) man development team to your client-site for more than a curtesy visit - and certainly not "to become" your client. That's for your analysts. And why would that be significantly more difficult over an ocean than over a desk?

It's nearly impossible to do that if we're shipping chunks of an effort in packages halfway across the world.

Then don't ship "packages". My offshore team work off the exact same Trac-issue-list that the rest of my team does.

Software can always be built elsewhere, but the basic premise that the early blueprints are 100% dead-on are a fantasy.

Strawman! "outsourcing=waterfall=bad" vs. "insourcing=agile=good"? No..

But connectedness alone doesn't lay the groundwork for building great product.

But somehow you seem to argue that un-connectedness does? Bah.
Don't the log files contain that information ?
It kind of is an operating system. Check out Process Manager. Read the developer manual.
Strongly seconded. You wouldn't treat your clients with contempt, and you shouldn't treat their clients with contempt.

People use services to solve problems. Some problems demand that level of focus to get it right fast. If you don't take their wants/needs seriously, why would they take you seriously? They are paying you, not the other way around, (and even in that case, it's a bad idea to treat people like that).

I see what you're trying to do, but it's coming across as "if you wear a tie and need it right and right now, you're an uptight jerk". Perhaps they are, perhaps they're not, but you're doing yourself no favors by pointing it out.

Also note that people with those requirements are the most likely to pay a lot for satisfaction; they might be the most profitable segment of your client's customer base.
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Then again, maybe I don't see what the big deal is?

The big deal is that 99% of the PHP community has no clue about programming, so if they hear someone talking about something they get overly excited about it and start talking about it too. That way they "look smart".

This is not totally unique to PHP, but man, they have a weird-ass community.
Ecch. Years ago, working on genomics stuff, it occurred to me that the same kind of approach could unshred documents. I didn't pursue it, because I didn't think of who the market would be. (Well, that and the usual other million distractions.)
Actually, within the scientific community the aquatic ape theory is about as controversial as intelligent design. It never had any supporting evidence. See http://www.aquaticape.org/
http://cyclone.thelanguage.org/
Rare is the market event with a single possible explanation. If this is not obvious, here are some examples:

--

Microsoft's Revenue Drop

* PC buyers care about their computers less than Apple buyers, so in a global economic downturn, they cut back on new computer purchases moreso than Apple buyers

* PC buyers are waiting on Windows 7 (mentioned in passing by Gruber)

* PC buyers feel higher levels of satisfaction with their computers than in previous years, and feel an unusually low need to upgrade

* PC buyers have consolidated their personal inventory, perhaps owning only a single laptop (maybe work issued) as opposed to a laptop and a desktop

* Microsoft is not attracting first-time computer buyers as much as in previous years

* PC buyers are switching to Apple

--

Apple's Growth in >$1,000 Sales

* There are fewer PC competitors in the market

* PC buyers feel that equal or greater value is achieved in the <$1,000 market

* The >$1,000 market has contracted around Apple

* Apple is attracting more first time computer buyers than in previous years

* PC buyers are switching to Apple

--

I don't know how probably true these explanations are, before or after reading Gruber's article.
No. A lot of stuff here isn't really fundable. Some is too meh, some is too bootstrappy (which is awesome, mind you) and some is too conflicty.

I'm in three YC companies so far, but I found them at YC, not here.
Unemployed Americans turn to libraries for help
Ask HN: Payroll for bootstrapped startups?
For those of you bootstrapping a startup or who have in the past, how do you handle payroll once money starts trickling in? Assume you're set up as an S-corp or LLC with a couple of shareholders/members but you don't necessarily want to distribute profits in proportion to ownership. Is there a good payroll company for software-startups or should I go down to my bank and see what they have to offer?
If they do any amount of command line wrangling, you should hope that your employees are writing code like this every day. The whole point of these one-liners is that once you get the hang of it they're very powerful additions to your *nix pipeline.

They could write highly maintainable, well tested, peer reviewed etc code to do the same things, but in this context that would be hugely wasteful, as the utilities already exist.

This is Perl as a replacement for Awk, not for Java.
You're right and you're wrong. I don't know if on balance you should be downmodded.

Yes, your framework should have a shortcut for boilerplate like that, so you don't have to type it every time. I have worked with numerous frameworks, and I am in fact building one myself: jperla webify. Please notice that to include this feature in my framework I had to look it up using Google because I didn't know!

I have to look it up every time precisely because my framework usually does it for me.

But also, what is your framework's magical shortcut function to link the external CSS? I don't know because 1. it's not standardized across frameworks like html is, 2. it's often coded in automatically (e.g. rails asset-packager) so I practice it little and never learn it. Like I said, I know a number of frameworks intimately, but not this trivia. I have to look it up. Google does, however, teach me the high-level concepts about the benefits of using a web framework and asset packager.

Finally, sometimes I just bang out a quick 1 page of static html with 1 statically linked CSS file (for debugging or mocking or random wanton fun) for which a framework would be wasteful overhead.
I think next they make a widget so you can tweet about the news.
* no hdd or way to install programs locally. Yay!
This is what IBM kept telling themselves in 1986.

The installed base of a legacy platform is not a guarantee of the health of the platform owner. Other companies that made this mistake; DEC, SUN, AOL.

In ecological terms, MSFT has overshot the carrying capacity of it's niche, and has not been able to exploit or create new habitat as an operating systems company.
we've had terrific success explaining the things we see in the sky with simple, "dead" processes. I think that gamma bursts specifically haven't been explained though?
It depends. If you agreed to a 2 year contract along when you bought your iPhone, you haven't yet completely paid for it.

Also, if you cancel your contract before it's up, you DO have to return the iPhone.

If you paid extra for an unlocked iPhone, then yes you have a point. But then you also have the freedom to go to another network without those restrictions.
Good thing those coders wading around what you seem to consider the shallow end of the coding pool are not writing things like our nameservers, web servers, operating systems, or anything else important. Oh, that's right, they are. And they keep fucking up. Repeatedly.

When this keeps happening over and over again it is time to consider the possibility that the problem isn't the craftsman but the tool.

The advantage of using lots and lots of glue languages is that it forces the important bits to be loosely coupled, adds flexibility to the development and deployment process, and leads to systems that are easier to comprehend and reason about. The only things that should be opaque binaries are system libraries and VMs/runtimes. Everything else should be "glue".
That's very true. Plenty of 'start-ups' never make it past their 10,000th signup.

My approach is to throw stuff out there as soon as possible and see what gets traction and what does not. Plenty of time to concentrate on the few that do pan out that way.

Good ideas are two a penny, in the last 10 years out of all the websites we've built for ourselves and for customers the number of duds is staggering. A good idea in and off itself is not a guarantee that something will take off. Some of the most well thought out things I've built have totally flopped and some of the midnight hacks still give me bread on the table a decade later.

So my approach now is to keep the first implementation as thin as I think I can get away with without people noticing how solid something is.

Knowledge about building scalable systems is invaluable though when you do hit the jackpot.
Also, http://www.bitc-lang.org/
Ask HN: Startup Idea - Outsource Travel planning ?
I was recently planning a trip to Vancouver/Victoria and was frustrated with amount of time and effort I had to put into researching/planning the trip.

Research flights / hotels to get the best deals, researching activities/places to see / dining etc.
Tried using Travelmuse/tripwolf but found them inadequate.

What if there's a service where you could outsource all the manual / grunt work of researching and travel planning ?

Do you think such a service would work ? If such a service existed, would you use it?
Coles Notes: traveling does not create life long happiness.
The lust has nothing to do with the syntax and everything to do with the functionality. Namespaces are long overdue in PHP (how has it taken so long)?

This is going to make developing larger scale projects (and projects that mix and match 3rd-party libraries) very different than pre-5.3

The initial uproar over the backslash failed to provide any commentary on the underlying implementation. I regret conflating the syntax with the implementation because the implementation is rock solid. The syntax, with a little practice, winds up feeling more natural than you'd think (or perhaps feel comfortable admitting :)
I think if you're going to seriously do something like this, you have to make it your sole commitment. pg has lots of essays on why, so I won't rehash them.

If you're waiting for the perfect moment, even if there was such a thing, I'd be highly doubtful anyone would be able to identify it except in hindsight. In the end, you have to make up your mind for yourself, because you are going to be the one to live with the consequences.
I'll quote pg from a few months ago:

"A fine, ringing denunciation. But let's consider performance. Do you learn more about startups from TechCrunch or the New York Times? I learn much more from TechCrunch. By the time the NYT gets around to writing about a startup, the news is usually pretty old. And they often get the story wrong, despite their supposedly greater professionalism, because they don't understand the domain as well as TC's writers do.

If you think there's a better source of information about startups than TechCrunch, what is it?"

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=500780
The author completely misses the point of the redesign. The point is to brand Twitter AWAY from being a tool to update your friends and towards being the world's cultural epicenter.
There's a reason Twitter deliberately took away the "you" and focused on the world. They're trying to convince the people who don't think they have anything to say to join.

It's easy to not use Twitter because you have nothing to say. It's harder to ignore Twitter if it's THE place to go for all of the world's events.
Breaking down social networks could foster innovation
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I've never really understood why verbosity was that big a deal. I could very easily type the code that I write per month in a single day. A bit of extra time typing for a more verbose language has very little effect on my output. I don't know if that's an artifact of the type of code I write (quite algorithmic, so large periods of sitting and thinking followed by a bit of writing), but it's just never seemed much of an issue to me on a practical level.
I find it oddly disturbing that someone would react with surprise to find out that one has not outsourced one's development team.
There is precious little news that I want to receive in real time, for me the s/n ratio on twitter is simply too large.

Even the 'best' twitterers can't seem to control the urge to spout junk on a fairly regular basis. Too much stream-of-consciousness for my taste. Better filtering would go a long way towards making twitter more usable for the general public.
A few months ago I spilled a full mug of coffee all over my white macbook keyboard (no cream or sugar, tho). I didn't notice I'd knocked the mug over (it was behind me) but after a few seconds the monitor went black and the light on the power cord died. After a minute or so of me dabbing at it with a tissue like an idiot, my coworker told me to take out the battery; I picked it up and coffee spilled out the battery bay. But I took it out and set the machine on my desk to dry over the weekend.

Monday I came in, put in the battery, turned it on, and everything worked fine. And I mean everything, even the CD drive. I'm typing on it now. For comparison, a guy I know had the same thing happened to his thinkpad with a cup of plain water, and it just died.
Which languages? SBCL is written in CL, GHC is written in Haskell, etc. Sure, there is some C to talk the C-based API of the OS it's running on, but all the important stuff is self-hosted. This is a rather common pattern, as nobody really wants to write important application code in C.
If you think the money you get from YC is the most important part, you've missed the point of YC.
I briefly looked it up, molecular biology would be a good fit though its pretty-much chemistry. It entirely depends on which areas are studied in biology.
Relying on single-thread (execution context/core) performance to increase is a mistake.
Nintendo Says Profits Slid 66% in Last Quarter - (Partially) Blames iPhone
See also "Area Number Three" in http://steve.yegge.googlepages.com/five-essential-phone-scre...

Being able to create that line-noise is, in most cases, significantly more useful than taking 3 months to create a perfectly engineered recursive phone-number finding program.
You don't know how many - "serious business men" call me then get all the information I can give them in 2 hrs; then a year later show me "their" site - of course it was a pre made template thrown into a premade storefront, and they wonder why its not ranking organically - with all their text in pictures etc... I just shake my head sometimes...
Precisely my situation as well.
OK, just tried it on FF35 and IE7. IE7 gets a runtime error. FF loads and the UI comes up, but there's no text visible (on what looks like the "Start" menu, and a largish box with expandable bits on the right. Vista x64 in case that matters.
I had some thoughts on this during the early days of the web, recognizing that the travel agent business was in jeopardy, i thought they would 'refactor' themselves as the travel experts for their area. Apparently, not the case.

There are lots of sites going after the market much like Travelmuse/tripwolf. Have you tried planeteye or dopplr? I'm not sure if they are any better.

In many ways, I think these sites are trying to do what you describe, though I don't think anybody has cracked it yet. Of course tripadvisor is another good source which I have relied on from time to time.

Hope you had a great time in BC, and made it up to my hometown of Whistler too.
Health Insurance - How to Escape From the Most Difficult Challenges
Actually, c-strings are a speed-for-memory trade-off. At the expense of saving a few bytes of memory per string, most operations are O(n) time (strlen, for example). If c-strings were in the form of <length><data> instead of <data><\0>, this bug would be avoided.

This is not a performance issue, only bad design and convention. (The other problem was using memcpy and strcmp on the same data. You can't treat blocks of memory as strings; a type system would eliminiate this confusion at no runtime cost.)
Title is still misleading even after the edit. iPhone is but a minor detail editorialized into it for upvotes.

Totally left out from the article is the fact that Wii users just don't buy games like Xbox or PS3 ones.
Yes, that is what I meant. Sorry for the rather major typ-o.
I wish Mono would be even half as good as the .NET, I really do!!

I actually had great hopes for the .NET Compact Framework until the Dalvik came along...
Thanks Rexxar - you've made my life easier. For some reason I've never noticed it before. Maybe it's because I use Firefox and the filter button looks really small on it.
Arrington promised: "The next time we talk about the CrunchPad publicly will be at a special press and user event in July in Silicon Valley."

Now end of July -- did this happen?
Google Readies Its Book Business