skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
old apps on old hardware are a similar speed to today's apps on today's hardware.

Maybe, but very often they don't do the same thing, which makes the comparison useless.

I don't remember being able to search and rank billions of documents in sub second time back in the 90s or mine terrabytes of data to find cures for cancer. We now do predictive analytics where we did quarterly reporting in the 80s and 90s.

Let's not view computing primarily as word processing with 500MB of bloat added in each new version :-)
received my invite, can be taken off the list!
Er... I meant the throbber which appears in the place of the favicon on the tab header, rather than the throbber which appears on the menubar.
Looks like Larry and Sergey were rated as worth $1B each by Forbes in 2004. (List was published in February, Google IPO happened in August) http://bit.ly/549cO
Is Starbucks a Cannibal?
Unfortunately, continuations are not supported in Ruby as of 1.9. They might come back in 2.0 though.
Thrillophilia-Adventure Sports India
THRILLOPHILIA deals with adventure-related activities on a pan-India level. Be its Rafting in the Tons or in the Kali River at Dandeli, Camel Safari in Ladakh or in the Thar Desert, Trekking around Bangalore or Ladakh, Scuba Diving in Lakshadweep or Andaman, we cater it all. We also have some fabulous Biking trips, Caving, Wildlife, Paragliding and many more adrenaline pumping adventure sports. India, having varied landscapes happens to be one of the finest destinations in the world for adventure.
More than just think, we know that it's a conspiracy, and we have the proof: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wedge_document
Because this guy was very thorough in detailing how to manipulate amazon's dynamic image generator.
I am glad you liked it :-) I was left "your moma".
20 Awesome and Free Fonts for Web Designers (Serif Family)
In this post I'm sharing a bunch of some new and exciting fonts for web designers and desktop publishers (for printing) like Serifan, Serifab, Serifat, Vaground, Bitstream Vera Serif, Stonsans, Bastardus Sans, Museo Sans, Ambrosia Demo etc.
I don't know Objective C very well (the last time I looked at it was in 1998, when it was probably at its low point, between Next and Apple), but with Java, Hecl definitely provides a more compact API to deal with many of the system API's.

In other words, the compactness translates to dealing with system APIs in many cases too.

BTW, dove sei? Io vivo a Padova. Non sarebbe male fare un HN Italy qualche volta...
your startup will force you to make sloppy compromises.

I agree that when you balance your startup and your work/school, one or the other will suffer. I know I have not given my heart to any of the contracting projects I was working on. I mean, I worked on what I was paid to work on when I was getting paid to work on it, but they just weren't getting the same value they would have if I was thinking about their problems in the shower instead of mine, you know? I didn't feel good about that.

So yeah, I feel a lot better about myself now that I'm full-time on my company. But even then, you have sloppy compromises. I don't have investors, so I always have the option of the 'honorable death' rather than doing something slimy, but the market forces you to make sloppy compromises.

Me, I have always had a deep hatred of marketing in nearly all its forms. And guess what, now I'm the marketing guy. Granted, I am a fairly truthful and transparent marketing guy; I generally try to avoid (or at least tell you ahead of time) if I have any 'perverse incentives.' but still, I now spend probably 20% of my time bragging about myself, an activity I maybe enjoy, but certainly don't admire. I mean, really, my biggest flaw is my massive ego. In my heart of hearts, I believe I can do anything. You have to carefully control that sort of thing.

edit: removed baseless speculation about running a company with investors.
Sure would be great to get an invite, Wave looks revolutionary!

hellotylerhushhush @ gmail . com
No it isn't. As I said below, Hecl works fine on phones much slower than the iPhone. Ok, you don't want to do a big, huge complex app in a dynamic language, but they would be just fine for quick one-offs. Just like with regular computers...
I didn't downvote you because I never downvote, but I do think your opinion is confused and off topic. You seem to think that the occurrance of the word "freedom" in both US foreign policy and the FOSS soap opera makes this a good enough reason to plug your political opinion. It's not.
I would say it is rather a saturated market and you'll probably find it hard to compete with monsters like sharepoint.
That certainly would be a reminder to get something out the door and solicit user feedback. However, I believe it helps to stay positive, so I would also tape up something motivational like "Success seems to be connected with action. Successful people keep moving. They make mistakes, but they don't quit." –Conrad Hilton
If you run a startup, even a 'exchange goods and services with customers' lifestyle company like I have that ignores investors completely, you will need to market yourself. If your customers are other startups, news.ycombinator.com is an excellent place to market yourself.

Yes, writing about your activities is marketing yourself. Until you become much bigger than I am, a 'personal relationship' with your customers is a huge part of marketing.

Hah. I was going to link to some old twitter threads, but it seems 'older tweets are not available'... I search for my company name on twitter quite a lot, and help people who are complaining. I'm remembering a particularly amusing moment when one of my Chinese customers was complaining (in Chinese) of a down VPS. I used the google translate tool to figure out what they were complaining about, then I helped them with the problem. The customer was rather shocked that I was able to puzzle out the problem from the Chinese description.

One of the keys to marketing, though, is to not spend too much time on any one prospect until you know they are interested. It sounds like you feel the need to put a lot of effort into marketing yourself to PG before he has shown much interest. In the example above, because the conversation was on twitter, I was not only helping one customer, I was telling the world that I'm the sort of guy who is willing and able to help out my customers.

If your customers are on news.ycombinator.com (or if you are primarily marketing your startup to investors rather than to customers, which I personally think is bad) then yeah, put effort into building your image here. Otherwise, it probably is not worth the effort, unless you really enjoy it.

Uh, that's the other thing. Yeah, you could say that we are all building images of ourselves. But you know? people are pretty good at sniffing out fakes. If you want your image to feel genuine, you need it to be genuine.
You can, check out Mozilla Rhino. It's a javascript interpreter written in Java. You can use all the Java libraries through it, but I'm not sure if it'll be quite as nice for working with files etc
Great article-- When will we see a Myers-Briggs assessment on the application?

Our video will probably have the following flow:

* 5 seconds to introduce our co-founders

* 10 seconds on what we're going to create

* 10 seconds on how our product solves a major problem

* 10 seconds on why we're the right team for the job

* 10 seconds to demo our prototype

* 10 seconds on why we would be a good candidate for YC

* 5 seconds of witty banter mixed throughout just because

Thoughts?
A mitigating factor is that not much software is CPU-bound: many desktop apps spend most of their time idly waiting for input, and most web apps have already been dealing with concurrency by handling multiple users (and scaling out).
Most people don't have the time or energy to evaluate all the possible factors that determine something's quality, so we use "irrational" methods of rapidly gauging whether something is worth our time and attention.

That's great. If you aren't actually going to look at something in detail, you don't need to post a comment. Also, if seven other people have already posted the same comment, you can probably also not post.

(If you don't have the time to evaluate something in detail, you also don't have time to post a comment claiming you evaluated something in detail.)
I find it really hard to take these lists seriously.

How many billionaires (or even millionaires that you know) keep the fact close to their chest? There's probably a lot of quite rich people out there who are more than happy to let you think someone else is richer than them.

Keeps the vultures and losers away from them and lets them get on with enjoying life.

In fact I'm certain there's quite a few people to go to extensive lengths to stay OUT of lists like this.

EDIT: Oh and paper money does not count until you execute your trade. Just ask anyone who was "rich" before the crash.
50 Great iPhone Apps for Professional Bloggers
You can break news, stay on top of new developments, and keep up to date with your contacts. With the iPhone and these 50 essential apps, you'll be able to do just that.
There are an infinite number of colors that LCDs cannot display; this is one of them.
Really, it depends on your personality, and your ego.

See, some people are irritated or shocked by my self-deprecation. The thing is, I would be absolutely insufferable if I let my ego out. I do it every now and then, you know. Most startups are populated by people who have egos that can rival mine, in part because having an ego that large makes you think you can do it better than everyone else, and in part because investors tend to prefer confident people. (I personally think investors are morons in this regard, but what do I know? Managers seem to agree with them. I have seen my more capable but less confident peers get passed over for me or someone like me more times than I can count.)

For me, Yeah, I constantly need to remind myself I don't know everything, or else I end up doing something really stupid. You know I once got into a mailing list argument with Lee Felsenstein about how to run a computer club? Yeah, I looked pretty stupid. See, that's the sort of thing that happens if I don't keep my ego in check.

I know many people who are more capable than I am in every respect who don't have that massive ego. Yeah, for one of those people (who I think would be excellent founders, some of them.) 'you don't know shit' would be a bad thing to remind them. Yes, for them, you'd probably want something positive and encouraging. But for someone like me? "You don't know shit" is quite appropriate.
Great point. The problem of developing iPhone applications is that the API sucks. Let me say this again: the iPhone API is not good at all, it is a crude example of how try to be veryCoherentAndOrtogonal: is not enough. A good API is a matter of design, any amount of MVC can't change this fact.

What hurts me is that the limits are neither of Objective-C. Ok you have to deal with 1980 reference counting, but there are high level data types such mutable arrays, maps, and so on. It's not hard to imagine an higher level interface using Objective-C.

My guess is that what deserves to be tried is to build an higher level API on top of an higher level language, so you can write:

createUITable(0,0,400,300,lambda {|section,index| .... })
I think they mean giving the average person the opportunity of an education. Although the quality of education here is probably average too. It's probably a throwback to days when the elite were the only ones that had college educations.
Maybe you weren't, but most of these people are. It weirds me out.
Thank you in advance!

http://mailhide.recaptcha.net/d?k=01PIo-BeYPi2cB-yIcwtz8hA==...
Our startup has 6 people and an office. Office hours are pretty traditional (9am-6pm)

A regular weekday:

- Wake up at ~9am

- Walk to work at ~930am (2 blocks)

- 30 min lunch at ~2pm

- Leave work at ~6pm

- Dinner and relax with gf a bit till 8pm

- Work from 8pm till around 2-230am

Most my daytime is managing our devs, emails, meetings, user support, and some coding.

At night I work on coding prototypes, working on the next release, and specing out new features.

I've tried all sorts of schedules (all nighters at the office, 6am wakeup, etc). But I find my current schedule very productive and the important stuff doesn't get interrupted by phone calls and meetings during the day.
Most people will still want to buy cheap food. I buy organic from local quality farmers when possible, but it's just not always practical and economical. So if we massively import cheap food, we will lose a lot (most?) of the agricultural jobs in Europe and that's not politically tenable.

The other argument I've heard against abolishing food subsidies is a strategic one. We'd become dependent on food from countries that are often not politically stable. An oil crisis on the food level could be devastating.

I say, if that's the argument, then be honest about it and nationalize agriculture instead of pretending it's private businesses.
Yeah, but that's not very interesting, so I don't include it :)

You can do big complex apps in dynamic languages though. But iPhone is a somewhat restricted environment (not THAT restricted, really) where you are encouraged to use as small a footprint as reasonably possible.
Thanks for the link.

generic top-level domain = gTLD

As mentioned in the article, I do think one of the major issues with ICANN taking control has been the perceived idea that they will allow for a lot more gTLD.

As startups, the question will be do you buy out all the domains for with that name.

Or will an increase in gTLD create a semi "sorted" order. ( Perhaps categorised is a better word )

ie:
I sell cars, I will be buy a domain under ".car".

I want wine, so I will do a google search "red wine site:*.wine".

Not speaking chinese / japanese / arabic myself, what happens when they put forward a desire to have "foreign word" top level domain. How do us none readers of the language search/find or even know they exist.

Clearly, for my own knowledge I need to read more, but if ICANN's "only" funding is from tax of domain names. You would believe they will be less influenced by funders etc. Which ultimately is a good thing, I feel.
Create a Family Website
This basically seems like a table to compare attributes of languages that are much less different from each other than they are from everything else. I don't think it usefully captures any attributes that people actually care about.
Oh, twaddle. What differencse between "identical" twins challenge is the idea that being is purely genetic. Fortunately, no one actually believes in that idea.

All apples of a given variety are (I think) genetically identical, because of the way they're grown. (You start with a rootstock of some kind of apple tree that doesn't produce nice fruit, and then graft on the thing you actually want. This has to be done because if you grow apples from seed you tend to get trees that are very unlike their parents.) But -- gasp! -- not all Granny Smith (or whatever) applies look identical. Is this evidence for a non-physical component to applehood?
To-do lists: One large .txt file or paper for small lists

Projects: trac

Coding: vim
2008 AWS Start-Up Challenge Videos
The reason people have such trouble scaling web apps is that they think the above is true.
Perl and C have coroutines. Haskell and Scheme have continuations.

(Contingent upon library use, of course.)
Is anyone else surprised at the high production quality? I hope YC doesn't expect something like this-- if so, I many need to upgrade my 5 year old Casio digital camera!
Insulting, really? so you have 3 guys, and a business plan. you get $20K for say, 6% of the company. Are you really saying a $300K valuation on a company that is 'just an idea' is insulting? Personally, I'd call that high.

But yeah, you are right. it's not about the money. It would probably make economic sense for me to give 6% of my company to pg, even without getting any cash, just for the marketing effects.
You actively tried to convince your grandmother to undress in places she didn't want to?
I’m not presenting it as a reason or justification, but as a fact. You, personally, are unable to engineer the course of the language, and your resistance to a change does not stop the change from occurring. The language does not need your acceptance for change to occur. It may seem to you like it’s changing for no reason whatsoever, but that’s only because — sitting there in your armchair — you’re unable to come up with a good reason off the top of your head.

Saying that it takes you longer to parse the sentence is anecdotal nonsense, because there’s no way for you to measure that without doing a controlled psycholinguistics experiment.

What I said was fairly clear, but to be explicit, room and board is relevant to could care less because it shows that forms can fossilize. It does not matter that board doesn’t mean ‘food’ anymore, just as it no longer matters that could care less means the opposite of what it would literally. You don’t mention my example of a little bird told me, but it is relevant because it shows that idioms do not have to be interpreted as the literal sum of their parts (and, in fact, by definition, aren’t).

You’re missing the point of just about everything I originally said, and you really don’t address any of the arguments I brought up, other than to say you fail to understand them.
WTF is "Declarative" and how XSLT is declarative?

XSLT is functional!

XSLT/XPath can also be statically typed: XSLT compilers happily infer types of all expressions in their XPath.
Granted, but that would be a pretty awfully designed website, no?
Database, meet realtime data logging.
Only yesterday there was another submission about a twin who weighs 15 pounds (or kg?) more than his brother.

Really, what DO we know about twins? Most twins also grow up in the same environment and with the same education.

In fact when I looked up some IQ studies of twins, it turns out that there really aren't many cases of twins that have not grown up together. Usually some war happenings were the background. As a result, those studies don't typically look like what you would a scientific experiment to look like. Some separated twins might only be discovered in their 50ies, others in their teens.

You can not just go ahead and say "let's look at 50 pairs of twins, of which one grew up in a poor family and one in a rich family", because you will not find 50 such twins from the same era.

Maybe you find some poor twin who grew up in the 50ies, and another poor twin who grew up in the 80ies, or one grew up in Africa and the other in Europe, so comparison already becomes questionable.
Maan... I thought such things were happening to me only. Though my focus was on getting a partner for my research/hacking escapades. I joined up university in great expectations that I will have to pick people from a fair sized pool of like minded people based on their compatible attitude. But I was so disappointed when I got to see a bunch of uninspired students which care less about anything above and beyond there curriculum. Then one of my seniors bluntly told me to stop looking for such people because I am just wasting my time. There were people with entrepreneur attitude, he being one had started a cheap tech magazine, its successful just because students will rather by a Rs20 livewire with 50 pages than a Rs120 digit with 100 pages of which they read only 40-50%. But hacking and independent research was just not the cup of tea of these get-the-job type people. He gave me a very good advise, instead of finding people of such talent I should develop on my own and then show people how much fun it is. Chances are that some people may join in.
Given that T-Rex survived for about 3 million years, and that Homo Sapien is up to 0.5 million I'd say the jury is sitll out.
Much, much smaller than 1/(2^48). You don't get whole chromosomes from each parent.

Suppose one of your father's chromosome pairs is (ABCDEF,abcdef) and your mother's corresponding pair is (PQRSTU,pqrstu). Then you might be, e.g., (ABcdef,pQrSTu). Except that actually there are hugely many points at which crossover (i.e., a switch between ABCDEF and abcdef) can occur, and it can happen a variable (though usually not very large) number of times on each chromosome.

Oh, and after that you'll have maybe 100 mutations (which could be anywhere) relative to your parents.

Crude back of envelope calculation: you have on the order of 10^8 base pairs on each chromosome; there might typically be two crossovers per chromosome pair from each parent, giving you on the order of 10^16 possibilities for the chromosome you get from your father, the same for your mother, and hence ~ 10^32 possibilities for each of your chromosome pairs, so ~ 10^700 possibilities in all. Then you have ~100 extra mutations in your ~10^9 base pairs, giving another 10^900 possibilities; so there are ~ 10^1600 ways to make a typical human child's genome from a given pair of parents.

That's a super-crude calculation, of course, but it's much nearer the right order of magnitude 2^48.
I'd agree with this if we were designing something in a vacuum, but XML namespaces already exist, and HTML-only browsers already exist. It's a pain to have this mechanism available in XHTML only. To illustrate why, I think I have a better example than the ones from the proposal:

If you want to use just one namespace-based extension like MathML, then you have to make the whole page XHTML. That changes the way CSS and JavaScript work. It turns previously-uncaught syntax errors into site downtime. It makes legacy browser support more difficult (because, for example, the DOM API is incompatible between browsers that support XHTML and ones that don't).

This proposal would allow me to use HTML for my entire site so that I can support legacy browsers reasonably, but also add inline MathML to some pages for browsers that support it, while using the same stylesheets and scripts across all pages.

It also lets me use namespace-based extensions within content management systems where I don't control the doctype, and it generally improves the ease of moving or sharing content between XHTML and HTML web sites.
In the back of my mind I recall a study that said identical twins raised separately will often act differently to try to differentiate themselves, whereas identical twins raised separately have no such motivation and thus often end up more similar.

If anyone could verify my hazy recollection I'd be most interested.
Looking at twins that grew up in the same environment isn't all that appropriate for making statements about the dominance of genes. Of course, if the data doesn't fit our assumptions we could always cite Cyril Burt or do it like he did.