skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's a little ironic that HN is not particularly responsive to feature requests from the community... in contrast to how YC recommends startups be run.

No, it's not ironic. HN is not a startup. Isn't that obvious?

Make something people want is advice about how to get rich, not some moral imperative.

Edit: this whole issue isn't that puzzling either. What part of "the guy is a minimalist and has very little spare time" don't you people understand? :)

Edit 2: ooh, downvoted! Well I do concede that countering spurious claims to irony is a bit of a tic on my part, probably ever sense I saw the brilliant http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nT1TVSTkAXg
Private owners that don't conserve their resources quickly find themselves without resources to conserve; governments that don't conserve their resources get another chance.

Many things get in the way of this simple statement being true.
When you make the rules, you also make the exceptions.
As a personal project, I've built a simple search driven website using Scala + Lucene. The article doesn't make a fair comparison of Scala vs. Java complexity. The examples in the article are focused on Scala strengths, e.g. for-comprehensions, closures, Range classes, etc. It is true that these features are superior to Java equivalents. However, Scala is still too awkward in implementation of annotations, generics and type inference in general. For example, Scala 2.7.5 annotation problems make integration with Java Persistence API (JPA) an adhoc hack. Scala 2.8 still has serious bugs open on annotations. Generic type are fundamentally complex and while Java attempts to abstract some of the complexity related to co/contra-variant types, Scala requires a deep understanding of nuances in practical application of generics. ML type inferencer in Scala is great when it works (in simple situations) but it is a headache to figure out _why_ it causes problems in the cases when type inference doesn't work as intended. Unfortunately when the type inference doesn't work as expected one is forced to hard code type casting which defeats the whole purpose of a type inferencer.
I think it is generally a bad idea for any entrepreneur to read things that Ted writes because if you surround yourself with the kind of blind negativity he perpetuates, you probably won't ever build anything interesting out of fear of attack. For all the YC folks here, develop thick skin and ignore shit like this.

Ignoring all the anti-FriendFeed comments, which are ironic on many levels, we didn't build Tornado to optimize requests/second. That is just something the community has focused on post-launch. We built it to handle large numbers of standing connections for FriendFeed's real-time features. That is an area that is hardly as well-developed or solved, and I am happy we contributed some useful code given how many people are becoming interested in the space.
If the point of the article was to say "Hey, C's faster than Java!" that would be true. But that's not the point.
So far as I can tell, HN wasn't built to be a home for a community as much as it was built as an experiment in Arc.
Not your average peak oil theory, from Macquarie
Being the person who blogged twice re: twisted.web vs tornado, I find Ted's post comical but irrelevant. I appreciate a lot of the other comments people have made on this thread.

On the greater state of the HN community... I find that several people have had pretty negative things to say about the work that I've done, rather than offering constructive feedback. Thankfully I have some thick skin, but it's otherwise demotivating and disenfranchising. It certainly doesn't encourage others to put themselves and their ideas/work out there.

HN is a community of really smart people and by sharing the work we do, we could/can all benefit from each other. For those who keep it positive, thank you...
Okay. Reasons the Apple/NeXT parallel is totally laughable:

1. Mint founder isn't Steve Jobs.

2. Mint founder didn't also found Quicken.

3. Mint made a pretty little web app, based on someone else's platform, nothing that Quicken themselves couldn't do, if they could be assed to hire a decent consulting firm...

4. NeXT, on the other hand, created bleeding edge hardware and an amazing new operating system that was worthy of being the core for the next decade or two of development.

Apple didn't "buy" NeXT. Apple paid $400 million as a way of groveling -- begging for Jobs to come back. And Jobs brought NeXT tech with him, of course, but let's not fool ourselves and pretend it was due to the tech. The tech was a bonus.

Jobs' return was the return of the prodigal son and messiah and troublemaker all rolled into one, and it was the last desperate gasp of a company that absolutely could not function without him.

But I guess most of you guys were too young to take in those subtleties at the time.

The bottom line is, Mint isn't even that good. Getting bought by their Big Daddy competitor is the expected outcome.

Did you ever really think they were going to spin it into a lifetime of riches and plucky entrepreneurial do-gooding?

They are buddy-buddy with credit card companies; they have a rather draconian ToS; their UI has only the gloss of friendliness, with glitz and shine and no true usability work baked in; they basically have screamed "BUY US!" the entire time they existed.

At $170 million, Mint is a mere toy to Intuit. The Mint founders are not going to revolutionize things at Quicken -- Quicken's key customer base does not overlap with Mint.com's customer base (if we can even call them "customers" since the service is free).

Mint must have been a mere annoyance, a PR problem, an insect buzzing around the room, crying "NEENER NEENER" in Intuit's ear, until Intuit decided it had to swat - or buy.

Buying is less work than swatting.
Maybe this is due to the fact that Shannon's work is quite theoretical. Sure, his work had an immense impact, but it's "behind the curtains", so to say. The point I am trying to make is that Coding is an enabling technology, i.e., it serves to enable reliable communication, but it's a means towards an end, not an end in itself. A lot of people think communication is about two antennas and something floating around in the air is transmitted between them, and somehow the receiver is able to guess the message that the transmitter sent. Well, the transmitter can do that because of coding schemes, but that's too technical for most people.

Another field which suffers from the same problem is Controls. It's also an enabling technology in the sense that it allows man-made mechanisms and devices to work as desired. Most people think airplanes fly because they have wings, when in fact they fly because they have controls.
Record efficiencies for silicon-based solar cells announced
I'm sure it's called 'self-help' because it empowers the customers of all the materials. People like to feel in control of their lives, and if you convince them it's them helping themselves, they'll be more willing to buy your 'self-help' stuff.
Yes, that would be the "if you have shareholders" part. Can you find an example of a $170 million sale of a startup with no outside investors?
Picking up a book to help oneself is you helping yourself. Books written for that purpose are aptly called "self-help." Do you think you need help? If so, such books would help.
An interesting part of the history of bank account feeds is that Intuit was a big part of the original OFX standardization effort. Initially OFX was looking to become a wonderful and well supported standard in North America. However, Intuit tried to turn the screws on the banks by charging hefty licensing fee for supporting OFX, and that eventually that killed the effort to free your bank account information.

I hope the lesson is clear for everyone: if you depend on someone for data, you don't get to charge them--they get to charge you. That goes double for banks who are generally extremely unhappy when they aren't the ones making money in a deal.

That's why Yodlee has a near monopoly. They are the only ones doing a decent job screenscraping from your bank, which is hardly secure or stable especially since some banks actively try to prevent this. This is very expensive and ultimately futile.

On the other hand, there's an opportunity for someone to get the OFX working again by reversing the flow of charges back towards the bank. If you do it well, you too can have a near monopoly and make money while you're at it.
I think the important thing here is that the term "backup" only makes sense within the context of what kind of thing you're protecting against.

RAID is a useful backup for drive failures, if you're able to replace failed drives within a certain amount of time, but not for manual deletions. DVDs and tapes are useful backups for manual deletions, but not for fires. DVDs and tapes, stored at an offsite location, are useful backups for manual deletions and fires, but possibly not for earthquakes.

Since all of the different backup and archival methods have major pros and cons, the only way to say something meaningful about how useful they are is to talk about them within context.
Lawmakers Voice Support for NASA Moon Program
Apple is an outlier. Intuit is not.
One person's calculated risk is another persons sheer terror. If you have been employed by a midwestern insurance giant for 20 years, your idea of risk might be heavily influenced by gartner, and you think in terms of "best of breed" and look for approaches that are "mature". If you are familiar with the field, and familiar with what you can do, you dive into building the key part yourself--something that never existed before and therefore has infinite gartner risk. And you are going to build your business on this?

My point is that the article shows how a different point of view about the risk of something if you are running your venture.
http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=1+furlong+per+fortnight+in+...
I found this about Disney World's sound more fascinating: http://30dayflight.com/day10.html
Universal "Death Stench" Repels Bugs of All Types
You're right, but the point he's trying to make is transparently obvious if you refuse to substitute "team of dedicated activists" for "online discussion group" that it's only a point to be made if you somehow confused yourself into thinking you had a "team of dedicated activists" instead of an "online discussion group".
What To Say To Your Low-Balling Clients
'self-help' is perfectly valid in the context of what 'help' alone would imply.

e.g.
'help' losing weight suggests things like a gym partner, a personal trainer, surgery, your spouse adopting your meal goals, etc.

'self-help' losing weight would be things that fall short of that: a workout schedule, a diet plan, etc. Things that have pointed you in the right direction, but don't include other people directly helping you.

What you're describing sounds closer to 'self-made'. As there was no assistance from anyone else, of any kind, it doesn't seem useful to include the word 'help' at all.
Former Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen Joins VC Ranks, Talks Startups
> That time may have been better spent getting more visitors.

Really? They did in fact just sell off to facebook, which has way more users than Twitter. Result: NET WIN.

edit: Not attacking your comment, as you were just paraphrasing. Just seemed like an obvious place to point out the obvious flaw in that.
We advocate that founders pay a lot of attention to users, not that they literally do what users ask.

What keeps users here is not features but the quality of the links and the comments. So that is what I spend the most time on. E.g. we have really good software for catching spam, and also semi-spam promoted by voting rings. There are also a number of subtle tweaks to prevent flame wars.

The last code I released (the day before yesterday) was to enable the system to ignore the flags of people who flagged too indiscriminately. Which in turn depended on code I wrote to study how big a problem bad flagging is. Like good defense, this kind of work is generally invisible. Even news.ycombinator.com/classic is something I wrote for myself to try to gauge whether quality was declining.
Of course, the title should be 'Old english units of measure'. England started officially becoming metric in 1965 (with a few exceptions like road signs and pints of beer).
According to Wikipedia this feature appeared in Mac OS X 10.2.3 which was released in December 2002...

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

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_v10.2

= tmk =
Anyone can produce "analysis". Watch the cable news sometime--it's 100% "analysis" because only three facts have come out in the last hour, and they have a dozen people on call to give "analysis" of this "breaking news". Analysis is cheap. With more and more people offering this analysis for free, you'd think it'd be easier in the long run to just filter all of this freely available analysis and you'd end up with something just as good as if you paid the Financial Times.

Facts, however, are in short supply. Discovering a surprising fact or two is good journalism. "The CIA has secret prisons in Eastern Europe to imprison suspected terrorists". "The Watergate Hotel break-in was orchestrated by members of Nixon's re-election campaign". But facts like that are hard to get. The only people who'd pay for those facts are the political opponents of whoever they embarrass, which means if both parties are implicated you can cover things up. Also, political opponents will pay just as much for a convincing lie as they will for the truth.

"More data beats a better algorithm" is just as true for journalism. Yes, I'm sure the Financial Times does a good job analyzing the same shallow set of data we can all get for free. I'm sure they do a better job than most other places do. But analysis is what most of the media does. They scrape press releases and the like as hard as they can, never looking for more facts.

At some point, journalism is a public good. But, uniquely among public goods, it cannot be provided by the government because journalism often operates in opposition to the government.
AcceptEdge Launches College Recommendation Engine To The Public
Context driven scheme
I just wrote some imaginary code from the top of my head. The goal was to match my mental model of the real world. Comments and questions are welcome.
NYC Job Opportunity: CTO of GoodCrush
GoodCrush started in 2007 as an intra-Princeton, Valentine's Day program drawing nearly 30% of Princeton's student body within 24 hours of its launch. Now, GoodCrush provides web-based and mobile anonymous matching services to all college students. GoodCrush has just received pre-seed funding from an NYC VC firm and was selected for FirstGrowth VN: http://www.reuters.com/article/pressRelease/idUS150853+10-Sep-2009+PRN20090910.

GoodCrush is looking for someone passionate about the idea and its potential join the NYC-based team full-time in the CTO/lead developer role for at least 8 months to manage web development, a/b testing, and the integration of mobile development (which we may contract out). The CTO will have a large degree of autonomy and decision-making in what will be an incredibly exciting venture. We are open to working in PHP, Ruby, or Python. Prior social network, Facebook connect/app, LDAP, Google Maps API, and mobile development experience are strong pluses but not necessary. If you or anyone you know are interested or interested in more information, please let me know.

Best,
Josh
josh@goodcrush.com
Passion is the prospect that something incredible is about to take place. Notice the term prospect because a prospect is not a guarantee, but rather a chance that the world will be different based on whatever you desire to achieve. My personal opinion is that you can have all the intellect and money in the world, but if you do not have passion and enthusiasm, you have nothing! The irony of this concept is that passion and enthusiasm are the most powerful forces in the world, which means that as good as they can do, they can also be destructive in such a way that people will forever be changed due to their wrath. Let’s think about Madoff, Hitler, or Bin Laden because all three of these infamous figures had passion and enthusiasm which is how they were able to manipulate the lives of thousands, and potentially even millions of people. All three of these men obviously had intellect, but if they were lacking in the passion department, there would have never been a $50billion ponzi scheme, a Holocaust, or 9/11. Now let’s bring this to perspective for all of us entrepreneurs because these three men exuded passion in such a way that they were literally able to create a cult-like following and etch a place in history. I am sure that all of you will agree that their passion was overshadowed by their sickness and lack of self worth. But Steven Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, and Biz Stone are currently doing what these three infamous men have done in the past; but the difference is that they not only have the secret sauce of passion, but also an insatiable desire to impact the world in a positive way! Get excited about what you are doing and start to live with passion…
Interesting thoughts.

Unfortunately that link to the funny t-shirts stole like 10 minutes from me because I had to read every single one.
Whoops, Students "Going Google" Get to Read Each Other's Emails
Weirdly, when they get to the programmer productivity bit they decide to compare _reported_ times for the scripters and _measured_ times for the non-scripters. Then they go on to try to justify doing this.

Why didn't they just measure them all?
I've been running the Beta for months now on OSX, ever since Thunderbird2 started crashing and locking up on me. I've had zero problems with it.
Vapourware? That's ok, lack of existence has never bothered the Perl community.
It is irrational but it shows how our mind work(what is sometime is irrational and does not always work according to statistics). On the bike you feel like you have more control because you can control one factor is yourself directing the bike and possibility avoid the accident(in your mind). On the plane you have no control in any directions. No matter what happens you are helpless and bets you can do is pray
Compare and contrast:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=827297

No discussion there.
But since so many people detest Intuit, maybe a challenger has a better chance than if they were competing directly with an independent Mint?
" Fake revolutions are cute and all, but think of how awesome it would be to never ever have to work for the man again. "

Selfish, short-sighted and immature...more words that describe the next generation.
Deep Green and Augmented Reality Pool
It was a metaphor. In other words-- The Mint guys might take that FU money to enjoy a life of leisure. Or they might use it to work on what they REALLY want to work on.

And obviously FU money here has a very different meaning than to punt a nasty boss-- given that they people who made the decision to sell here WERE the boss.
You have to give this guy some credit for at least trying, but the standing problem with these types of studies is that there are just too many variables. For instance, this particular study only consisted of one program. Also, it doesn't really control for program proficiency very well...he tried, but environmental impacts are going to skew those results (classes taken, work environment and language of choice, sample set bias for the previous, etc). Also, as a previous poster mentioned, these are from 2000. Since 2000, Java has made serious performance ground. I would be interested to see a few more studies like this...even if they aren't perfect, they do tend to remind people that there is a huge difference for language productivity, and that it dwarfs performance.

Maybe we could get a version where the program was to implement a decent sized project requiring several developers, to emphasise the code quality angle? That would take a lot of bored programmers to do, though.
In the Canadian Army, the people who re-pack parachutes for soldiers (riggers) have a similar safe guard to ensure quality.

At any given time, a commander can select any particular chute that they've packed, and they have to jump using it. Needless to say the quality control is near perfect.
In America, at least when I was in school not long ago, they're still referred to as English units.
Yeah, because Hacker News readers really feel entitled. Where is this arrogance you claim to see, and how is it different from any other web site online?
Being able to target ads well doesn't do you any good if you don't have the ad inventory to make use of that advantage. That's Facebook's problem: their users aren't apt to click on ads while on the site, so they don't convert very well, hence a lot of advertisers don't bother and their inventory sucks.

I've never seen an ad on Facebook that highly targeted me. I think that beyond a few niches (like engagement rings) Facebook's targeting works out to be a wash. That's why despite having 300 million users and billions of page views they are only barely profitable.
And it only works because real men do not wear pink without a disclaimer explaining that they are only wearing pink to signal that they are real men.

I guess I'm not a real man then. I have a number of pink shirts that I wear for work (amongst a whole load of other colours) and I've never even thought about my masculinity when wearing one. Frankly, the opposite seems to be true to me. If you have to put a big sign on your pink shirt talking about "real men" then you are pretty insecure about your pink shirt and your man status.

Bell also explained a second way to signal high-status: conspicuous outrage. Wear a shirt with the word "FUCK" on it in big letters (or, if you prefer, FCUK). This signals "I am so high status that I think I can wear the word 'FUCK' in big letters on a t-shirt and get away with it." It's a pretty good signal. It signals that you don't give a...well...fcuk what anyone else thinks, and the only people who would be able, either economically or psychologically, to get away with that are the high status

Is that a joke? High-status people wear shirts that say FCUK to show how high-status they are? Utter rubbish. The people who wear FCUK shirts (and other 'outrageous' designs) have nothing to do with high or low status. They are just being provocative, and I expect many, if challenged about what they were wearing would fail to be high-status about it.
Silicon Valley warning: Detroit still doesn't get it
FYI, people here are generally averse to title accouterments such as 'rockstar'
Because the stock market doesn't generate money. Money changes hands based on rising and falling values, but the money hasn't just appeared out of thin air, nor is it destroyed.