skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yep, the marketdroids running Adobe are definitely going to invest money in R&D and improving their code. Look at CS4! Oh, right.

Definitely seems like a baffling move from the outside, but to be honest virtually everything Adobe's done in the past few years has been bizarre and counter-productive. Frustrating, because skunkworks projects like Lightroom (sorry, Adobe Photoshop Lightroom) show that the engineering heart of the company beats on. It's just got arteries clogged with bullshit, nonsense and Flash.
The sequel approach is unique. I worked with it a year or so ago and was happy.
There's No Such Thing As A Good Client
I note that every advantage of OOP you cite is a modularization feature (even subtyping, since OOP basically conflates modules with types).

Clearly you are not entertained by rants based on my experiences, so maybe I should just cut 'n paste pg:

"Object-oriented programming is exciting if you have a statically-typed language without lexical closures or macros. To some degree, it offers a way around these limitations. (See Greenspun's Tenth Rule.)

Object-oriented programming is popular in big companies, because it suits the way they write software. At big companies, software tends to be written by large (and frequently changing) teams of mediocre programmers. Object-oriented programming imposes a discipline on these programmers that prevents any one of them from doing too much damage. The price is that the resulting code is bloated with protocols and full of duplication. This is not too high a price for big companies, because their software is probably going to be bloated and full of duplication anyway.

Object-oriented programming generates a lot of what looks like work. Back in the days of fanfold, there was a type of programmer who would only put five or ten lines of code on a page, preceded by twenty lines of elaborately formatted comments. Object-oriented programming is like crack for these people: it lets you incorporate all this scaffolding right into your source code. Something that a Lisp hacker might handle by pushing a symbol onto a list becomes a whole file of classes and methods. So it is a good tool if you want to convince yourself, or someone else, that you are doing a lot of work."

http://www.paulgraham.com/noop.html
A psychological addiction is defined as when you spend time doing one thing instead of doing something else that you feel is more important. It's self-referential: only you can define whether you are addicted or not.

By this measure, if the youths are self-reporting that they feel addicted to the internet, that's very, very interesting. It says that the youths themselves feel they should be doing something else, not some old, stodgy institution.

I know it's fun to play the old folks against the young, but you just can't keep waving your hands around and yelling various buzzwords. At some point there are real, independent metrics that come into play. Kids can't spell. The ability to put together (or appreciate) a cogent argument spanning more than ten words is being lost on a generation. No amount of technology is going to give critical thinking skills back to people who spent their formative years on FaceBook and WoW instead of somewhere else -- anywhere else.

It's not like being instantly connected to the world's body of knowledge and each other is going to make up for cognitive potential lost through inattention.

We've got some really cool stuff going on now -- stuff that has the potential to change the nature of what it means to be human. But we shouldn't put on blinders to the sucky stuff simply because the cool stuff is so neat.
Stonyfield Yogurt's Bumpy Start Up Story
i think you make a great point. you can evaluate the "knockoffs" by who is engaged and actively helping the companies. saul and reshma at seedcamp are very good. brad, david, shawn at techstars are also quite good. i don't know all the programs well enough to do this for all of them. but that is critical to the success of the program. and Paul and Jessica (and Trevor who i've not met yet) are the model for sure
Free to users != free to promoters; they surely profited off of those Dark Knight icons.
An RSS feed can go down, but RSS itself cannot go down.
The problem is that you're starting from the assumption that things can be made "fair", by "punishing the offender". Consider that the legal system (which is designed to make the fairest decisions possible) takes forever and is not necessarily accurate. For starters, you need to admit the possibility that a fair resolution != convenient resolution.

A "con artist coder" registry isn't fair. It's error-prone at best and exploitable at worst. Sure, those "registries" might make you feel safer, but they don't really accomplish anything useful. (See the no-fly list, for example)

The logical thing to do (imho) would be to take the loss as a lesson and move on. (Paying the full amount only after completion sounds like the glaring lesson here. Also, getting second opinions before choosing a freelancer and having a written contract are no-brainers)
Awesome dude! Instead of making hollow claims of doing something in a weekend, you have actually built a site up to 180 uniques/day within a month?

Respect.
He probably has another (better paying) client, and intends to do your work, but something else always gets in the way, so he doesn't have enough time.

Most people are not deliberately evil, they want to do the right thing, but find excuses.

If you are still interesting in him doing the work, find a way to increase the urgency - for example tell him if we don't launch really soon it will fail, etc, etc.

As far as the bad code, nothing you can do about that.
That's what I meant. I think that's a better ad/gift model than their idea of making users pay for digital icons.
I'm almost done with writing this thing! I explain better what I mean there, so hopefully you'll forgive me for waiting another hour or two and posting that.
I never implied it was. Only that it could have been. Wasting time is a pet peeve of mine.
I liked this when you launched it here recently. I still don't understand how you're dealing with the PRS issues though. At some point, someone has to pay the artists. Can you give any insights on how you deal with this?

Best of luck with a great app.
What is your opinion on Sinatra's support community? I keep peeking at Sinatra for my new app. I have a Merb app in production and working on a new one. My new app has characteristics quite different than my old one but I still get to borrow my education from Merb. Unfortunately, Merb's google group is a ghost town these days. I worry this is going to get worse and have no interest in counting on Rails 3 being useful to me in the next year.
I love markov chains, I wish i could use them more often!

(Markov chain fanboyism).
Larry's got lots of money from helping implement the coming police state in the USA. Just wait until our next 'terrorist action'
The facts are not irrelevant. The kind of critical thinking you will gain after learning about medical experimental protocols is not the same critical thinking you will learn by doing needlework.
"What did you do about it?" is really the kicker. The foresight to say something bad is coming without being able to predict when doesn't impress many people.

Anyone with a level head knew there was a housing bubble. But if you're working as an investor, you don't get paid to sit back and watch your rivals get rich while you're waiting for the pop.
Races as we know them today didn't exist until fewer than 20,000 years ago, when genes involved in skin pigmentation emerged, Hawks said.

1) This blows my mind -- am I reading it right that there was virtually no variation in skin color 20,000 years ago? I assumed there was always variation in skin pigmentation, with darker skin colors predominating until we expanded into northern latitudes where lighter colors made sense.

2) What about Neandertals? I always imagined them being light-skinned, since they were adapted to northern climates. I wonder if they evolved genes for light skin tens of thousands of years before modern humans did. If so, that must have made them look even more freakish to modern human eyes, and vice-versa.
Don't troll for interest, it's unseemly. (I'm interested, please post the link.)
I am making a shift to artist-uploads only. It turns out that most of the popular songs on hiphopgoblin v1 are actually songs by less-known artists. There is a high demand for better upload/management features so that's what I'm building. Conveniently, when they upload the songs the artists themselves can agree to give me rights to play their music. Nice it works out this way.
That's about as helpful as saying Twitter can go down, but HTTP cannot go down.
I built it part-time in a week, and then it immediately went to 180 uniques/day. But without (minimal) hands-on involvement traffic has decreased to ~55 uniques/day. The prospect of throwing out all the code and the redoing v2 myself is just psychologically daunting. In looking for a cofounder, I'm mostly seeking social support and motivation (as well as someone a little more technically experienced to complement me)
I see no reason why something like Twitter couldn't be decentralized. All it really is is a huge RSS aggregator. If every Twitter user had something like Opera or some other web exposed RSS server where they could publish their comments subscribing would be as easy as reading a blog. You would lose a couple of features however...

* Size limitations would need to be maintained client side and thus would be inconsistent.
* No way to make it so that only your followers can DM you.
* It wouldn't be nearly as easy to ensure unique identifiers for each user.

In short, I totally agree but I do wonder if this kind of network is fairly far off. Seems like we're trying to decentralize a lot of things right now (cpu processing, social networks, p2p downloading, etc) and so I'm sure problems like this will get tackled very hard in the coming years.
sounds like a - 'no name artist' pandora ; which isn't bad; but to advertise over/around their songs might require special agreements...with artist and/or labels if they ever sign.

Good luck with your idea, I hope it works out well for you.
3 weeks unpaid time off, if my recollection is correct. And then they go spend that kind of cash on an acquisition, I doubt it will create a lot of good will inside the company.
TC50 Backstage: Tim O'Reilly Interview
Viaweb was targeted at small businesses which is a completely different market from large enterprise sales. I'm not talking about off the shelf business products that solve a standard problem, but if you're bringing a new unique solution to the market you really need a dedicated sales force.

Things like industry contacts can be critical (it can often be impossible to even get in to a company to pitch without an inside contact), lead times are very long, etc.

The challenges you face are often vastly different to most web 2.0 apps. Crossing the Chasm is a good book on the sort of challenge.

In those sort of circumstances you may well be better off finding a consortium of angels who are from your industry than joining a generic incubator style scheme (although obviously they have their own value).
Student "Learning Styles" Theory Is Bunk
But what he's trying to say is that when Twitter goes down, it takes everyone with it. When a blog goes down it only takes it's RSS feed down with it, not every RSS feed in existence.
According to Gould (a paleontologist).

Dawkins, with his gene-centered view of Darwinian evolution, refutes this, explaining that evolution by natural selection is gradual.
"There is a built-in business model here: smart advertising. Artists can pay to have their songs cued up to FOO listeners in exchange for BAZ dollars."

Ok, but how do you intend to actually get this advertising money? It's not as simple "if you build it, they will come". You need to be able to sell the site to advertisers. I didn't see anything in your "About me" background that makes you qualified for the "make money" part of this venture. Or you just planning to sell it to someone else to make that happen?
You're correct that Rackspace is more expensive than our current arrangement with Engine Yard, but it would have been quite the opposite had we elected to stay.
What this acquisition demonstrates is that there is a lot of established vendors who have cash burning a hole in their pocket, but no organic sources of growth. Years of bureaucratic culture - I would have said marketing culture but Apple does marketing well, so it would be a disservice to real marketeers to call Adobe's a marketing culture - has destroyed the technology soul of the company. Result: clueless management goes and overpays, aided and abetted by investment bankers (public) or VCs (private).

This disease abounds in the industry. Sun overpaid for a series of companies over a 7 year period; Intuit has acquired and done nothing with a whole lot of them; the less said about Yahoo the better; and VMWare + SpringSource ($400 million?) ...

I guess there is hope for a lot of start-ups yet ;-)
Huh? Are you saying Blue is a lighter shade of Brown?
But survival is good.
Forks represent around 30% of the total repos on our site, so the new, unique repos created daily still outpace new users.
Interesting take on why Canadian banks are doing well. I had heard a different take earlier this year. I read they were doing well because the Canadian gov did not deregulate to allow them to take the types of risks that banks, investment banks, and insurers have done in the U.S.
Actually - someone pointed out to me recently that a 64x64px flower lasts a whole lot longer than a chocolate bar.
Very cool. Sounds like a Hype Machine for hiphop. My advice: build in reporting/analytics capture into your code early, and solicit user feedback aggressively. Good luck!
It's already done: http://openmicroblogging.org/

Twitter is centralized for business reasons, not technical.
... which probably is the reason he got it wrong. Consistency is a blessing.
Don't only Caucasians have blue eyes? And aren't they (full disclosure "we" in my case) also the only ones with the mutated version of the gene which controls how much melanin is deposited in skill, hair and... I think also irises? Asians and Africans both have the normal version of the same gene.

And melanin has many roles, sun protection being just one, the other is as a structural protein. Just compare how black skin ages vs. how a redhead of the same (advanced) age looks.

And why would Caucasians have a mutation which deposits less of such a useful protein? Vitamin D.

It is produced when UV light hits the skin. In northern climates with less sun, and skin being covered or you die of exposure, often even when the sun is up, people get a lot less vitamin D.

Inuit get more due to their diet, and modern man also gets much more again because of diet. And yet most people living in the north even today lack vitamin D.

Also, I thought all of the above is common knowledge which makes me question the whole article.
Socializing with your friends a waste of time?
Making meta-discussion more useful
"Artists can pay" is a legal minefield.. lots of potential payola/pay-to-play/bribery issues unless it's made very clear that the artists are paying. Otherwise the more popular you get, the more likely you'll get the FCC crawling down your back.

The music industry is one of the most litigious on the planet.. you have to have balls of steel to play in that fishtank.

http://www.broadcastlawblog.com/2008/09/articles/internet-ra...
Independent of subpixel rendering issues, a good iconographer will tweak an icon at different sizes, even if they originally created it from a vector. Pixels do matter.
feel free to also check out hndir.com if you're looking for co-founders. everyone there is a verified undergrad in a particular school.
What exactly has Folding@home achieved in the time it's been running (about 8 years now)?

It's a nice concept (using idle CPU time to help cure diseases!), but the papers on the F@H site doesn't exactly inspire me - http://folding.stanford.edu/English/Papers - quite a few seem to be about the F@H itself (like "N-Body simulation on GPUs"), they're hardly "Folding@home cures suchandsuch disease"..

Then again I'm not a molecular scientist, and I don't understand half of the words in those titles...
>Dawkins, with his gene-centered view of Darwinian evolution, refutes this, explaining that evolution by natural selection is gradual.

People say he refutes this. According to him, he never said anything to refute this. In either case, you have to be specific about what "gradual" means. Dawkin's evolution is more gradual than intelligent design, but not so gradual that it is inconsistent with Stephen Gould's claim.
There are links to a number of supporting articles and papers on the OP's website - http://www.danielwillingham.com/

My two cents as an educator of business people? Any system that tries to categorise from an EITHER/OR perspective will be limited - human beings are too complex to fit into neat boxes, especially when there are only three options.

When you come from an AND perspective, you can use these frameworks (eg, using Visual AND Aural AND Kinesthetic tools in a lesson plan). Students are their own unique combination of factors, and by using all the tools available you as the educator are creating a framework for them to learn according to their own needs.
Matt, I am one of the founders. Great to hear from you! My co-founder has sent you an email about getting in touch.
Ask HN: Hacker News API or json data?
I like to write something similar to http://weeklyreddit.appspot.com/ for Hacker News. Does HN provide an API for the "top" new items (over the last week)? Or is it simply possible to use the existing RSS feed for this? Note that, I only want the answer to: "Give me the top 25 popular questions asked in HN over the last week."
GPL declines as open source moves to the Web
No, I'm planning to charge artists directly in order to promote their songs on the site. I have no plans to sell to advertisers, unless the site gets so popular that I need a sales force to sell ad inventory.

Artist can spend 10 hours promoting his songs on twitter, at shows, on myspace, in order to get 50 listeners, or pay $5 to get 100.
I listened to the audio version. The quality was good. There were a lot of good lessons from him and I thank him for sharing. I would have been interested in hearing more about the Rent-a-Coder developers he hired and how to better utilize the one-time hire system. As a freelancer on oDesk, I would also be interested in knowing if he thought he saved money in the long-run by only paying about $8-10/hour or if it would have been cheaper to hire someone more expensive but who could get the work done faster and better.

For those that didn't watch/listen, one of the problems he mentioned was having a bunch of different developers working on their website which caused it to turn into a big mess after some time.
viaweb made software for businesses to setup shop online. though it was not a b2b app, it was not not a cutesy consumer app.
Do you have any tips on best ways to solicit user feedback aggessively?

As for analytics, do you recommend anything more advanced than simply Google Analytics?
Google submits BFS to Android source tree
Caching Apple's Signature Server
I find the grafting of cocoa onto javascript a bit stomach turning. Its like watching a man read the news to you on TV. Different mediums require different methods. I don't think anyone has really gotten this right yet. I agree jQuery isn't the whole solution, I don't think Sammy.js is the whole thing either. But I do think there will be something built on top of this stack. I have started to try and create something like this http://github.com/voidfiles/BHive .
I know a few companies which have cut benefits to their employees while at the same time acquiring other companies and it makes perfect sense.

1) It's a buyers market because a lot of companies are looking for an out even at reduced valuation.
2) Employees are similarly not going anywhere in a climate like this so you can cut benefits for the time being because everyone is cutting benefits.

Look at the acquisitions as a long term investment whereas the reduced benefits are a band-aid.
Obama supports extending Patriot Act provisions
couchDB folks are trying to create auth in client, they haven't succeeded yet, the crypto algorithms are a bit taxing on the browser, but they are trying.
This lists the 'best' articles over a longer period than the front page does. It's not specific to 'last week' or 'questions asked in HN', but might be a start.

http://news.ycombinator.com/best
Pretty impressive. I don't know who to praise, if the people that do these amazing things or the people that design lego mindstorm parts in the first place...

BTW, although those japanese humanoid robots that run, climb stairs and whatnot are much more complex, I find the FlexPicker robot much more impressive. I wonder why...
If any of the musicians are ASCAP members, then you're going to need an ASCAP licence and you'll have to pay performance royalties unless you get legal agreements with all the artists to waive their royalties as a part of your fees.

There's also the whole copyright infringement issue and users uploading material they don't have the rights to. You'll need to monitor uploads constantly.
Omniture has diversified quite a bit in the last few years and has a decent suite of solutions for a full range of business / content optimization problems.

I think this, combined with Omniture's appeal to large corporations who understand that web analytics done properly is more than just throwing a ga.js tag on your page, was one of the major motivating factors for Adobe.

Adobe is primarily about creating a consistent user experience across multiple channels. Large content production teams driven primarily by creative energies still struggle with using data-driven optimization, but this is going to be a competitive differentiator for teams that can do it well. This move helps Adobe adapt to this new game with arguably the strongest analytics data provider in the market.
> My problem is finding time to be away from my current company long enough...

I don't know if this is your company you're talking about, or just a regular type job working for someone else. If it's your own company, then so far I've found that trying to clear time for a YC startup is forcing me to formalize and replicate other aspects of my current business, which is really good for it. So, it might be worthwhile to push for YC anyway; if nothing else, your existing business will thank you for it.
The fact that you've never heard of Omniture says more about you than it does about Omniture or Adobe.
Agree. It's an expensive lesson to learn but it's not going to help you trying to get back at him.

Next time make sure to do some code review early on, start with a simple task (not a whole project) and look into using an escrow service or hire through a outsourcing website which offers good protection against poor work.
Ah, yes. YC has never (to my knowledge) funded an enterprise service-oriented company, as you've described, and probably wouldn't. pg has also disclaimed having much good insight on enterprise businesses of this sort.

So, yes, if you're building that kind of company, YC is probably not the right choice of investor. The scale of investment is also too low...enterprise sales guys with specific industry experience cost more per-month than YC invests. So unless they're also a founder and not drawing much of a salary, the math isn't going to work out.
"only three times the cost"

...without an engine!
Does anyone know if blue-eyed people continue to have a 5% advantage?
Sex, Flies and Videotape: the secret lives of a Muslim creationist
I'd attribute it to the jerky, springy motion --- it appears not to have the sinusoidal velocity cruve we expect from a friendly mammal.