skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
yeah, i don't believe any of that. and i'm surprised to see so much of this attitude here, of all places.

you could have used all those same arguments to claim that guis are bad, let's just stick with ms-dos. back in the eighties, i remember many people making exactly that argument. heck, in the back of my mind, i was sort of thinking that myself! i had a great deal invested in the status quo. i'd spent years learning 8086 assembler and all the tricks necessary to write a dos tsr that wouldn't bring down the operating system. it was an ugly, stupid, convoluted system, but i was a master of it, and so i wanted things to remain the same.

apple is never going to stop throwing out old stuff and replacing it with new stuff, no matter how much of the market they get. not so long as steve jobs is alive, anyway. that's what makes the mac a healthy, thriving ecosystem. once an idea has outlived its usefulness, it's chucked for something better. the fact that the people in charge of windows are not willing to do that means that it is just a matter of time before the entire operating system is obsolete.

i'm not saying there shouldn't be a windows. it caters to a certain crowd that i am not a part of, thankfully, and i think that holds for most of us around here. but the idea that it has to be pretty close to the only operating system is a bad thing. fortunately, microsoft doesn't wield the kind of power that it once did, so there's a chance we'll get to see some real alternatives in the next decade or so.
I was sitting right behind you and was trying to figure out your t-shirt. Was it some kind of MUD joke?
It does make sense. It is simply odd the baggage which seems to come with the Harvard name, something which you acquire at 18 and yet seems to follow you and define you more than any other institution I can think of.
i concur. there is room on the shelf for a "survey course" of paradigms
Free money too good to be true
"... No matter how great a shape you get into, there's always something artificial about the gym. ..."

Better air, less people.
Choose Your VC Investor Carefully
"These are my people" -- Zuckerberg.

Fucking stud. Period.
I'm surprised this comes from the NYT and not something like the Daily Post.

It seems like totally unconstructive fear-mongering to me.

"Health Officials may have to ration critical resources in case of catastrophe, here are some horrible scenarios to consider! But please, let's not panic folks."
Is pretty awesome how "muslim countries" has to be pre-fixed with the word radical.
He probably checked by other means, but mood swings are a good hint.
For me this comment hits the nail on the head...

You either offer to pay all/half of the year's rent in one go (and ask for a discount for the privilege) because you have it now and u prob don't expect to have cash flow during that time

..or you actually can't afford a year's lease on current savings, in which case it's unlikely you can afford the place assuming no real cash flow during the first year of a start up.
I sincerely disagree.

I had a class on programming languages in college. It was one semester and went into very little depth of each language and paradigm covered. That said, I didn't know that half of the stuff that we were taught about existed before that class, and it spurred me to learn more and to learn at a greater depth.

I doubt that there's going to be any illusion about what this book is. Surveys are vital for new learners to help them build the cognitive maps of the knowledge space they need to be able to understand what they don't know. Maybe you don't talk to a lot of working programmers, but there are a frighteningly large number of people who just don't know anything about programming language syntax and paradigms not descended from Algol-68
Yes, it was great to meet so many fellow HN readers.

Thanks to everyone who tool the time to organize, speak, or throw parties!
Belgians ftw
Probably at school, starting at the age of 11 something. Like everyone else at his age in Flanders.
Quote: http://www.supermemo.com/articles/sleep.htm

As it has a profound effect on the central nervous system by blocking adenosine receptors, caffeine is widely used to tackle drowsiness. However, majority of people little realize that it works well in your struggle with the adenosine-related homeostatic component of sleepiness, while it is quite inefficient in overcoming circadian sleepiness! Moreover, used against the latter, it can actually be quite unhealthy!

If you abuse caffeine or use it at the time when your body clock tells you bedtime, you will only experience the symptoms that gave caffeine all that bad rap. These include: heart arrhythmia, irritability, overwhelming tiredness, depression, and a typical coffee abuser's "sickness in the stomach". No wonder the popular myth says that coffee is bad for health and can contribute to a heart disease.
Sun's ZFS lead developer on the reason behind Apple dropping ZFS
Google vs Microsoft, who will win?
Given the circumstances, the latest article on his blog (from 2008) is amusingly out of date.

http://blogs.sun.com/bonwick/
Hmmm. I think it's tempting to appear jaded in these instances. To poke fun at the omg-I'm-seeing-famous-people-in-the-flesh mentality. I know I have thought about what makes social interactions different when one person is known by reputation or "claim to fame" and the other person is relatively anonymous. I think about this most acutely because I'm effectively nobody... so when I meet someone I and others look up to, it's definitely awkward. I second guess everything I say and every gesture I make... and I hate myself for it.

It creates an asymmetrical dynamic. The whole interaction depends on the magnanimity of the so-called 'famous person' to ignore the awkwardness. It's interesting and weird and (at least for me) relatively rare and novel.

But they are human beings.

It's almost nice, being anonymous as I am, if you don't know who the hell the person is. Then you don't have to spend so many brain cycles going "wow WOW I'm talking to insert-celebrity-here".

It's like Mark Pincus. I could have walked up to him randomly during a break and had a conversation and thought "wow, that was a cool guy with interesting perspective". But even the label on his name tag... "Speaker" gave him away as 'someone important'. Suddenly you feel like the emperor with no clothes... you start trying to justify why the heck you should be wasting this guy's time. It's funny how you don't have that concern with someone you don't look up to.

So yeah, there is a lot of ooh-ing and ahh-ing in the crowd. You can't get around that really, but the day wasn't a PG worship-fest. If anything, it seemed less centered around him than last year's SUS (although I might just be projecting).

The biggest collective inhale comes with someone like Zuckerberg or Fried walks in the room... and there is no real avoiding that. They are the current players that inspire and lead by example.

And that is ok. There is always going to be someone serving that role. We as a species seem to need celebrity both for motivation and allegiance. People pick sides because it's natural to back a champion.

But really, I promise you, there was no prostrating. ;) I respect PG and YC and thank them for putting on the event, but I, for one, come here for the conversation, just like I came to Startup School to talk to motivated people trying to make cool stuff. Randomly bumping into 'famous' people is a bonus I guess.
I am self employed, have proof of good earnings, have tax return from last year of more than $350k and an almost-800 point credit score -- and I've still had problems renting here in San Francisco.

My gf and I applied to a $3700/month place we can easily afford on my earnings alone and the landlord was really concerned by the fact we were both self-employed. She wanted to see all of my tax return from last year, all invoices from this year, etc etc -- which I wouldn't show as it's too far IMHO.

It's not legal to discriminant here in SF, not even on income type -- but its difficult one to argue.

The rental market is hot here, even now and good tenants can be found. I also know two cases of friends working on startups and not having a year's personal runway on the places they were renting during a startup. With no income, things got too tight and they had to walk away from a place and break their lease.

A lot of landlords have had this happen to them over the years in SF, and the irresponsible behavior of these particular tenants has damaged things for all of us.

Finally, a lot of my industry friends who have sold companies are landlords themselves here in SF -- they know the risks and (sadly) won't expose themselves to the same risks that they won big on. It's a shame. One company I advise, however, rents their place in return for stock in the company as the property owner is a VC.
I had the same initial reaction to the idea; however on second thoughts it actually sounds like an interesting book for someone like me that is stuck with a PHP, Python, C/C++ background.

It would be nice to touch briefly on 7 other, very different, languages (especially Scala and Ruby) and see what they taste like.

So, yeh; I reckon this would be a good book for an already proficient programmer to pick up the beginnings of a few new languages.
Summary books like this are great as long as you know you're not an expert by the time you finish them. The goal is to let you know what you don't know, and to help you recognize a problem that would be easily solved by one of these languages (which would then spur deeper learning of the language).

Reminds me of one of my favorite books ever, Gershenfeld's "The Nature of Mathematical Modeling".

http://www.amazon.com/Nature-Mathematical-Modeling-Neil-Gers...
Another idea might be to rent in Oakland/East Bay - the rental market is much different there and you will get more for your money. Landlords are, frankly, less snobbish then in SF from what I've seen second-hand via friends who've rented there.

I know a lot of startup'ers who BART in from the East Bay to hang out in SoMa during the day and then travel back out -- it's quite convenient and cost-effective.

The downside is that many parts of Oakland are not ideal to live in, esp if you have a girlfriend (personal safety, etc) -- however you might feel the sacrifice is worth it in this situation.
Highly conjectured and some difficult assumptions throughout.

Bing isn't competing with Google Search because that is only a side-factor in Google's main revenue stream. Adwords and Adsense give Google unbelievable coverage and THIS is what MS would have to challenge.
Why Python is not there in the list?
because it overlaps almost completely with ruby. And Io, probably.
They should talk to google for investment (by letting google house servers there - ocean is a great place for renewable energy and water cooling).
All the knock-offs at one fifth of the price probably helped too...
The problem is the SF rent control laws make it extremely difficult to evict non-payers which causes landlords to up-regulate their choosiness to avoid any possible problems until risk and reward once again meet.

Sadder still is that SF law makes it next to impossible to evict the physically challenged. I have a blind friend who has told me this has made it impossible for him to rent a decent place in the city.
Ask HN: Startup school 2009 videos ?
Can anyone post the startup school 2009 videos ?
Eventually it all merges into the same thing. Look at music to the way video will go. iTunes, Amazon MP3, physical discs from brick&mortar or online locations, there are lots of places to acquire the same music from different channels. Video tends to be a bit more difficult to negotiate the rights to so it's lagged behind in this trend, but it'll get there eventually.

Money talks. A giant quantity of money talks loud enough for even those currently deaf to the promise of online distribution (due to prejudice, stubbornness, and fear) to hear it. Online distribution is easy and very profitable, there will come a tipping point where online distribution grows large enough to where the business potential becomes immensely obvious to everyone. And at that point every media publisher will flock to it like pigs to a trough. It's really only a matter of time at this point.
You can be separated by distance and still easily use paper to quickly iterate through ideas. 37signals themselves do this - they're geographically distributed yet use Sharpies to think through rough interface ideas:

http://37signals.com/svn/posts/466-sketching-with-a-sharpie

http://37signals.com/svn/posts/1880-the-different-sketch-sty...

All of my freelance clients in the last few years have been startups in the Bay Area (where I live) so I understand all of those reasons and the benefits of proximity. Hell, I wouldn't have moved up here if I hadn't read Hackers And Painters in 2005 - I wanted to be where the action was. But I've been slowly doing less and less on-site work and have gotten to the point where I don't do much more than weekly meetings and not even that with some clients, so I can't help but realize that I could've technically been anywhere in the world for all intents and purposes. And these aren't low-paying entry level portfolio builders either, it's real paying work with the same challenges as always.

So again, are the reasons for working with a local designer more important than overall skill and portfolio?
Perhaps you mean to say that the sad thing is SF isn't protecting the blind from being discriminated against?
There was a post recently about how hotmail took off. My friend in SF could email me here in Australia and hotmail would instantly be useful. Location stuff like this fails for that reason. What value do I have in being the first one in my city to adopt it. See also: Craigslist - anywhere but the few cities it dominates in.
AirBnB's electronic music rooftop dance party. Don't get me wrong, SUS it self was a great experience -- but it was reassuring to see that a tech start up crowd could throw a legitimate party!
I was with the author until almost the end, when I reached this line:

But it’s the job of the CEO to control the board tempo.

This is absolutely wrong. The CEO serves the board, not vice versa; it is the role of the board chair to keep things moving, not the role of the CEO.

It's easy to accuse board members of getting in the way because of their egos, but it's not necessarily true. In many cases board members become "activist" only due to losing trust in a CEO -- not necessarily losing so much trust as to want to replace the CEO, but enough that they want to "push back" against anything they see as an attempt to keep them in the dark.

Needless to say, I think the joint position of "President/CEO and Chair of the Board" is a very bad idea from a governance perspective.
For the East Bay I would look at Rockridge, Piedmont, parts of the Oakland Hills such as Montclair and parts of Emeryville. Rockridge is the most convienent to BART, however.
Because these apps all started with the idea: Location based mobile advertising is going to huge. I gotta get me some of that. Hmmm. Hey, social networks are big...what if we do a location based social network?

The problem is, it is a stupid damn idea. I mean, think about it. Not only do most of your friends need to be using Loopt (or whatever) they have to be at about the same place at about the same time, but not so close that you an already see eachother. There are just too damn many things that have to line up.

So, it is no surprise that they are trying to loosen constraints. Most of them ditched the time constraint earlier this year. The focus moved from meeting up to sharing experiences. They've also been ditching the constraint that you already need to know someone else using the service. Loopt Mix is about meeting new people.
Like the iBridge on the new USS Enterprise ;-)
Programming language choice - sometimes there is none.
Over in the discussion of this topic:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=901101
Seven Languages in Seven Weeks
http://rapidred.com/blog/seven_languages

people were talking about how useful it is for programmers to know non-mainstream languages.

jlgosse said:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=901335
I love that you are supportive of random
languages! I feel bad for you because you
will never find a job working in any of
those languages.

In the reply, dschobel said:

But there's a high correlation between
companies which trust their programmers
to use the right tool for the job and
companies which "get it" (*it* being how
to develop and maintain technology).

This is absolutely true, but there are two main points I'd like to make.

Firstly, the real benefits in having knowledge of (but preferrably experience and skill in) other languages, is not getting a job using them. The real benefit is to you, the programmer, having more ideas, knowledge, tools and skills under you belt. Even if you only ever program in C++ or Java or PHP, learning Lisp or Haskell or Prolog or Lucid will make you a better programmer. No longer will every problem look like a nail, because no longer will you only have a hammer.

Along with that, though, is the questionof experience. Reading about these techniques and ideas doesn't really help, you have to use them for real to get the benefit.

In medicine there is the mantra "See one, do one, teach one." It applies equally in programming.

Secondly, a point about companies employing programmers. When tendering for a contract in my field, it is often required that the bidder attest to the fact that the system is written in ...

> a well-known, mainstream language that
> supports modern programming techniques.

They then usually add a phrase that makes it clear that they mean C++, and if your system isn't written in C++ then you won't pass the first phase of reviews.

You, as I do, may howl and rage at such short-sightedness, but there are industries where such things are stated in contracts.

For example (and this is not my area) can you imagine supplying an Air Traffic Control system written entirely in Scala? Technically it may be a brilliant choice, but in the ultra-conservative world of ATC (and other safety-critical fields), systems written in what they will see as an untried, untested language, by programmers who by necessity only have a year of experience in that language, are a dangerous experiment.

"Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" is still a prevailing mantra, only now it's about langauges, as well as hardware. You can't supply anything other than COTS (Commercial off-the-shelf) hardware, by which they mean PCs.

In the fast-paced, nothing is the same week-to-week world of web development and web-based applications it doesn't matter, but in my world it does.

I just thought it might be interesting for some of you to hear about a different context.
The "premium" content is really the content they had at the beginning, but lost over time as the rights holders cracked down; e.g. movies you'd actually want to watch, and more than 5 back episodes of currently-running shows.

What we have here really is a failure of the advertising model Hulu uses. They just can't make enough money per viewer to displace traditional broadcasting or DVD sales. IMHO either Hulu or the advertisers are doing something stupid, because there really should be a gold mine there. The targeting and scheduling flexibility that's possible on a site like Hulu should make it more valuable per viewer than TV.
You won't learn a new programming paradigm in a week.

If Donald Rumsfeld were here he would say to you:

There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know.

The point of this book, obviously, is to turn people's unknown unknowns into known unknowns. Not for them to become competent programmers of 7 languages in 7 weeks.
The author's theory depends on the notion that markets are extremely efficient at disseminating information. Even information that traders would like to conceal. But this theory is under increasing scrutiny. You yourself might have noticed a few mispricings in the stock market lately.

Even Eugene Fama, the guy who coined the phrase "efficient market", now believes that it won't work in exactly the case the author describes. A few arbitrageurs in a very misinformed crowd won't correct the price.

Anyway, I know all this because I just finished the book The Myth of the Rational Market, by Justin Fox. It's the biography of the idea, from a tentative observation to dogma to just one tendency of the market among many.

At least the way Justin Fox tells the story, the stronger versions of the efficient market hypothesis just don't have a lot of evidentiary support anymore. Yes, markets try to get it right. But they can be persistently wrong in ways that efficient-market theorists think should only happen once in hundreds of thousands of years. This has happened multiple times just in the last 20 years.

Perhaps that information hasn't been efficiently disseminated to the WSJ yet.
after we have ruined the ground we set our feet on, it is time to start with the ocean. wtf. leave the ocean alone as is.
Oh but it is - Macs are often used for, say, video editing. SGI realized the importance of filesystem performance in this application space and developed XFS (which Apple could adopt easily) and GRIO.
Clickable:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=901101

http://rapidred.com/blog/seven_languages

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=901335
I agree that in many cases it shouldn't be a problem. But if everyone has one or two real friends who might be disappointed, that's enough to destroy the idea.

But it probably depends on whether people use social networks for managing a broad range of contacts or to keep in touch with close friends and family.

The general problem is that some things can change dramatically as soon as they become explicit, even when nothing of substance has changed.
TV and newspapers used to have an advertising monopoly. Possibly the competitive pressure outweighs the better targetting?
I've replied to this at length:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=901411
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=y+%3D+sqrt%28x%28x^2-2x...

The equation there has five different variables, you can generally only graph expressions with two. In the above link I've eliminated them, but if you play around with their values instead you'd be able to produce a more interesting graph.

I think. I may be misunderstanding this.
Lutefisk and Loot: Tax Records Open in Norway
Why do bankers make so much money?
Biofuel Crops Seen Contributing To Global Warming
You might also want to look at processing and try to develop some fun visualizations or animations of business data you care about. That might give you the incentive to actually dive into programming and processing is designed to give non-programmers quick sucesses. And if you grow out of the training wheels, it doesn't tie you down since you can easily move to full java using processing as a library.

If you want to start on the hip bleeding edge, there is also a project to make processing usable with scala, search for SPDE.

And there is processing.js if you want to include you animations in a web site.
Big thanks to UC Berkeley. As a current senior, it's incredible to see how the school has opened up to the idea of pushing entrepreneurship over the past 4 years. The Berkeley CSUA and ST@B worked their butts off to make this an incredible experience, and they'd do a lot to make sure that Berkeley gets the exposure that it deserves.

Hope to see Startup School 2010 return to Berkeley. :)
I faced this and after being denied I offered to write a check for the entire year right then. At that point it was insinuated that I must deal drugs. Fools are absolutely infuriating. I had luck finding an owner who's an actual human in the full sense of the word much like the people I normally work with in business. At that point it's like any other deal. I think the key, as always, is to keep trying.