Linkseed/hacker_news_with_comments · Datasets at Hugging Face

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48,655	48,642	SwellJoe	Rails vs. Django	kyro	Deployment of Rails sucks.Django is far better thought out, and can be deployed in a very sane manner. A fleet of Mongrels is just an embarrassingly bad way to handle concurrency. "I know, let's write a crappy barely functional web server, spawn a metric ass ton of them, and then balance between them with a proxy. It'll be most leet and super fast! We'll call it a Best Practice. It'll be awesome." In fact, it's fragile, doesn't scale very well, and is complicated to configure. It's also a huge distraction from solving the problem in a sane way--people seem to think "deploying Rails" is solved by this and Capistrano, when really, it's just a new stack of problems.Otherwise Rails kicks ass, and I like Ruby better than Python (but I'm a perl monger, so I might be brain-damaged into not seeing the beauty of Python). But I do tend to feel like Django is being written by grownups who've got years of development experience, while the Rails folks are making it up as they go along...sometimes going down really poorly chosen paths (I believe Mongrel is an example of this, but I'm no expert).Then again, I think if I were starting an app from scratch I'd pick Catalyst. But I haven't spent enough time with any of them to know which one is really most productive for the way I work. I think you'll want to try them out, and not take advice from random dudes at news.yc.	Just curious, and I want to see which framework I should pursue more aggressively.So, how about pros/cons of each.	0	18	2007-08-31 09:06:19 UTC
48,656	48,606	Tichy	Paul Buchheit announces new iPhone with 8 megapixel camera	herdrick	Interesting: how did you hook up the camera with the iPhone? If I know Apple, there won't be any connectors on the iPhone, and also no API you could use to access the connected camera.	null	3	14	2007-08-31 09:08:50 UTC
48,660	48,610	Tichy	Reality Is What It IS	vlad	What if there is no way to perceive reality? At best we can perceive our own reality, but other people's realities will probably differ. So that reality approach might simply fall short of realities. I mean it doesn't give us a way to solve problems, because individual realities might have too many discrepancies to be resolved by pure logic alone. The only way it could work is with the omniscient super computer that understands all of our individual realities and always choses the optimum common dominator. Not sure if we want that, though.	null	0	4	2007-08-31 09:27:24 UTC
48,664	48,642	rms	Rails vs. Django	kyro	What about Pylons?	Just curious, and I want to see which framework I should pursue more aggressively.So, how about pros/cons of each.	8	18	2007-08-31 09:47:45 UTC
48,665	48,294	vikram	How Not to Die	subhash	What counts as not dying? If you drop the initial idea and start work on a very different one does that also count as dying?	null	23	169	2007-08-31 10:00:10 UTC
48,668	48,294	damir	How Not to Die	subhash	I read lot's of biographies (of self made rich pepople). Almost every single one finishes at least one chapter (or book) with "... but don't give up!". PG, you just scored.	null	20	169	2007-08-31 10:15:26 UTC
48,669	48,657	davidw	Is Scheme as good as Common Lisp?	Tichy	Yes, but both are widely considered inferior to Visual Forth ++.	I think Scheme doesn't have the all-powerful Macros, so would one be missing out on all the LISP goodness for choosing Scheme? How usable are Macros, anyway? Does their use tend to produce readable code?	3	10	2007-08-31 10:16:27 UTC
48,672	48,553	kingnothing	Silicon Valley aside, why are Americans more willing to risk a startup?	weebro	I believe another part of it has to do with the cost of incorporation. In most places in the US, you can do it yourself for under $100. Comparatively, in most of Europe, it costs between $2,000 and $10,000 to form a company.Also, with America's long standing tradition of entrepreneurship comes easy money for financing a new venture. In Europe, the spirit isn't there so to speak, so I assume the money would likewise be harder to come by. I don't know anything about European law. Are companies in Europe afforded the same rights as in the US?	I'm based in the UK and am hoping to apply to YC in Oct. We are currently looking for strong hackers to co-found with us, if they like the idea. We cannot, however, find anyone in the UK even remotely interested. The concept of 'it's not what you do but when you do it' simply does not exist here. What does the US have that we don't?	4	10	2007-08-31 10:21:23 UTC
48,673	48,553	uuilly	Silicon Valley aside, why are Americans more willing to risk a startup?	weebro	American's love David and Europeans love Goliath. The British believed in their Empire. They believed that it was right to put Squash courts and Polo fields in far flung countries. They believed that Britishness was the most natural state of man. The French, Russians and eventually the Germans felt the same way about themselves, only more so and less sucessfully. These empires were Goliaths and their people were proud of them. The US was the first major colony to successfully break free from the Brits. The most formidable military force ever deployed sailed into the East River and bore down on a bunch of un-uniformed barefoot rabble representing our (at that time) pathetic revolution. Yet somehow we won. That picture was chopped up and burned into the DNA of every American. We re-live it when Bruce Willis crawls through air-ducts and elevator shafts to outwit German terrorists. And again when he leads his band of blue collar drillers to blow up a merciless asteriod. And his goals are simple too. Bruce just wants to get home in time for dinner whereas James Bond is "keeping the British end up." Americans are wary of higher causes which makes them distrust things bigger than themselves.It's everywhere in this country, Big is bad and small is good. We hate Wallmart, Microsoft, Nike and Exxon. Nevermind that Target, Adobe, Reebok and Shell are doing the exact same thing as their bigger counterparts. They're not big so we can't hate them. The only thing that will "kill" Google (IBM / MS style) will be bigness. We will turn against them once they become Goliath. Our people (formerly your people) banded together way back then and forged our ideals in violent reaction against bigness. And so it's been ever since. We were the 12th biggest army just before WWII and few thought we would outlast the Soviets. But once the Soviet Empire fell we became Goliath and we have hated ourselves ever since. The Brits and Russians in their prime would have no problem with Iraq. The Russians would roll in and kill everyone and the Brits would pit the Sunnis against the Shias and colonize what's left. We have gone in half cocked and we don't truely believe that it's our place to tell other people how to live. It is cruely ironic that we may have to sail back across the pond and ask our British cousins how we can best play the part of Goliath. This is all a long way of saying that revering startups is just natural to us. It's what we've always done and for better or worse, it's all we know. I'm actually not sure why they were ever called startups. Upstarts is way more fitting...	I'm based in the UK and am hoping to apply to YC in Oct. We are currently looking for strong hackers to co-found with us, if they like the idea. We cannot, however, find anyone in the UK even remotely interested. The concept of 'it's not what you do but when you do it' simply does not exist here. What does the US have that we don't?	0	10	2007-08-31 10:22:58 UTC
48,674	48,642	dood	Rails vs. Django	kyro	Pylons is deserving of attention. There is a small comparison of Django and Pylons here [http://wiki.pylonshq.com/display/pylonscookbook/Concepts+of+...]. I'm playing around with Pylons and have been impressed so far. The whole approach strikes me as more of a hackers framework; less magic, more flexible, extensible. Though the docs need a little work, and the community isn't as big as Django yet, Pylons seems to be blossoming into quite an excellent framework.	Just curious, and I want to see which framework I should pursue more aggressively.So, how about pros/cons of each.	2	18	2007-08-31 10:23:06 UTC
48,681	48,553	andyn	Silicon Valley aside, why are Americans more willing to risk a startup?	weebro	Out of curiosity, where have you been looking and what would you expect from people if they joined you? Is it a part time thing?(You have an interesting looking product there so I think you could do well out of it if you get it going)	I'm based in the UK and am hoping to apply to YC in Oct. We are currently looking for strong hackers to co-found with us, if they like the idea. We cannot, however, find anyone in the UK even remotely interested. The concept of 'it's not what you do but when you do it' simply does not exist here. What does the US have that we don't?	9	10	2007-08-31 11:29:55 UTC
48,685	48,606	brlewis	Paul Buchheit announces new iPhone with 8 megapixel camera	herdrick	This may not be integrated enough for some, but those people can just loosen the knot, pull a little, and retie for tighter integration.	null	1	14	2007-08-31 12:24:42 UTC
48,686	48,606	joshwa	Paul Buchheit announces new iPhone with 8 megapixel camera	herdrick	Reminds me of the 16MP, $25,000 Holga:http://www.holgadigital.com/blog_2/about.html	null	4	14	2007-08-31 12:25:19 UTC
48,687	48,657	brlewis	Is Scheme as good as Common Lisp?	Tichy	R5RS hygienic macros qualify as LISP goodness, but a lot of Scheme implementations also implement defmacro (like CL) and/or syntax-case.Use of macros makes the code reflect the programmer's thinking about the problem domain. Whether this is readable or not depends on the programmer.	I think Scheme doesn't have the all-powerful Macros, so would one be missing out on all the LISP goodness for choosing Scheme? How usable are Macros, anyway? Does their use tend to produce readable code?	2	10	2007-08-31 12:42:46 UTC
48,693	48,671	pg	Cory Doctorow defends Scribd	phil	Wow, this has some serious weight:"I am a former Director of SFWA""SFWA has exposed itself to tremendous legal liability."	null	0	21	2007-08-31 12:59:17 UTC
48,694	48,609	brlewis	Why You Need Accountants, and How Much They Cost [pdf]	vlad	N.B. The cost ranges given are from December, 1995.	null	0	3	2007-08-31 13:04:14 UTC
48,695	48,657	pg	Is Scheme as good as Common Lisp?	Tichy	Scheme has a way of defining macros that's supposed to be better than old-fashioned defmacro. These "hygienic macros" seemed to a lot of people (though not me) to be a good idea when they were invented. They got into the Scheme standard then. I think people don't like them so much now, but once something gets into a standard it's impossible to get it out.However (a) all the Scheme implementations I know of have implemented classic defmacro macros as well, and (b) if one hadn't, you could easily write it yourself. So in practice there's not much of a decision to make.The Arc implementation you're using to read this is written on top of Scheme. Currently Mzscheme.	I think Scheme doesn't have the all-powerful Macros, so would one be missing out on all the LISP goodness for choosing Scheme? How usable are Macros, anyway? Does their use tend to produce readable code?	0	10	2007-08-31 13:09:09 UTC
48,700	48,642	yrashk	Rails vs. Django	kyro	Rails looks to be more DRY than Django. Though I'm on Rails and don't really use Django.	Just curious, and I want to see which framework I should pursue more aggressively.So, how about pros/cons of each.	7	18	2007-08-31 13:40:56 UTC
48,704	48,553	jsmcgd	Silicon Valley aside, why are Americans more willing to risk a startup?	weebro	I'm not convinced that there are fundamental differences between attitudes in the US and Europe or at least Britain. The industrial revolution began in Britain and was a time of immense innovation and entrepreneurism. Us Brits still point to that as an example of our inherent entrepreneurial spirit however I reluctantly feel compelled to pour cold water on that idea. I think that period in our history could have taken place in any country given the same economic, educational and scientific conditions etc. So my point is basically that you can find people with the right attitude anywhere. But that also is kind of the problem; unlike in the US, we don't have a Silicon Valley to gravitate towards. Some entrepreneurial people gravitate towards London but unlike Silicon Valley every other person you meet isn't going to be a budding empire builder. So in conclusion, they are there but you'll just going to have to look that much harder to find them.	I'm based in the UK and am hoping to apply to YC in Oct. We are currently looking for strong hackers to co-found with us, if they like the idea. We cannot, however, find anyone in the UK even remotely interested. The concept of 'it's not what you do but when you do it' simply does not exist here. What does the US have that we don't?	6	10	2007-08-31 13:56:26 UTC
48,709	48,347	Goladus	TellThem: MySpace Kills Another Startup	terpua	This article is obviously poorly researched and the writing is extremely sloppy.	null	1	7	2007-08-31 14:07:00 UTC
48,712	48,610	extantproject	Reality Is What It IS	vlad	What a convenient meta-narrative...	null	1	4	2007-08-31 14:24:37 UTC
48,719	48,713	pg	Enough with the Boston Start-up Inferiority Complex	byosko	I wish I could agree with this, but as someone who switches back and forth between the two every year, Boston is way behind.	Boston is tied with San Jose in Q2 for total number of venture-backed IPOs.	0	15	2007-08-31 15:01:40 UTC
48,724	48,720	kirubakaran	Instant Word Search : Something I wrote for fun	kirubakaran	It is silly, really. But I just thought I'll share anyway.	null	1	2	2007-08-31 15:05:39 UTC
48,728	48,707	chmac	Google Maps Nighttime	charzom	Not sure what the point is, but it sure looks pretty!	null	2	8	2007-08-31 15:15:51 UTC
48,729	48,705	chmac	Entrepreneur's Toolkit	markpeterdavis	In my view, it's a pretty useless list, it contains a total of 10 links, 4 of which are NYC specific.	I just created a page that lists services that every entrepreneur should know about. It's called the 'Entrepreneur's Toolkit'...	0	1	2007-08-31 15:16:31 UTC
48,731	48,414	oditogre	The Startup Game: How Anywhere.fm is building a hit niche	dhouston	Anywhere.fm is really cool...but how do they make money? That's what I'm not really understanding. I don't see any ads or anything...	null	0	34	2007-08-31 15:19:39 UTC
48,734	48,707	mpc	Google Maps Nighttime	charzom	Check out South Korea and North Korea. Yikes, what a difference.	null	1	8	2007-08-31 15:22:00 UTC
48,738	48,720	ivankirigin	Instant Word Search : Something I wrote for fun	kirubakaran	Not so instant for me :-P	null	2	2	2007-08-31 15:28:07 UTC
48,742	48,657	omouse	Is Scheme as good as Common Lisp?	Tichy	Macros produce kickass code: http://neverfriday.com/blog/?p=10#more-10If I didn't create a string-case= macro, I would have to write the final expression over and over again. With multiple string-case matches I would have to write string=? many many times: (cond ((or (string=? "hello" my-string) (string=? "world" my-string)) (print "match"))) To do that with the string-case= macro: (string-case= my-string (("hello" "world") (print "match"))) Saves quite a bit of typing and now I have a good example of why macros are good to have around :Dedit: formatting ftw.	I think Scheme doesn't have the all-powerful Macros, so would one be missing out on all the LISP goodness for choosing Scheme? How usable are Macros, anyway? Does their use tend to produce readable code?	1	10	2007-08-31 15:33:26 UTC
48,745	48,713	champion	Enough with the Boston Start-up Inferiority Complex	byosko	I think I read recently that the VC money invested in Boston-area is about 1/4th that of Silicon Valley. (For "IT" tech, not biotech.)I like how Scott Kirsner, Globe reporter, compared it to the Red Sox vs. Yankees rivarly. The Sox have a huge budget compared to most teams, except the Yankees. And while the Sox have a complex about the Yankees, the Yankees barely know their is a rivalry. Can't go wrong with Red Sox analogies ;-)	Boston is tied with San Jose in Q2 for total number of venture-backed IPOs.	2	15	2007-08-31 15:45:15 UTC
48,747	48,642	kashif	Rails vs. Django	kyro	What are you designing? One might be better suited.	Just curious, and I want to see which framework I should pursue more aggressively.So, how about pros/cons of each.	6	18	2007-08-31 15:48:21 UTC
48,755	48,752	pg	Paul Graham's near-death experience	nickb	The fact that Viaweb happened to be at the mercy of its investors at that moment hardly meant it was worthless. In fact it generated lots of revenue for Yahoo. I believe roughly the same amount as Broadcast.com, which cost 100x as much.	null	0	10	2007-08-31 16:05:52 UTC
48,763	48,707	pg	Google Maps Nighttime	charzom	Having built something like this would help if you apply to YC. It doesn't take too much work, but shows you can make cool things.	null	0	8	2007-08-31 16:21:57 UTC
48,772	48,771	abstractbill	Eulisp, lisp dialect: lightweight and carefully designed like scheme, with object system like CL	nickb	Not that new... from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EuLisp"Language definition process first began in a meeting in 1985 in Paris and took a long time. The complete specification and a first implementation (interpreted-only) was available in 1990."Anyone care to speculate on why it didn't take off?	null	0	2	2007-08-31 16:32:58 UTC
48,784	48,739	nostrademons	How does karma work?	chmac	As far as I can tell, it's just [total submission points] + [total comment points]. Each vote is one point, each downvote is -1 point. And no, people with more karma do not have their votes weighted more heavily; my votes still count for 1 point like anyone elses. (There appears to be a karma threshold for downvoting comments, though.)	How does the karma and points system on this site work? I can't figure it out. Do people with more karma generate more points per vote? How are the points generated, I've seen some comments which are worth 17 points, where does that number come from?	0	4	2007-08-31 17:08:52 UTC
48,788	48,642	hello_moto	Rails vs. Django	kyro	kyro, why don't you do this instead:1) Pick a very easy tutorial for both of them 2) Do them 3) ChooseFramework will only get better each day so if today Rails deployment sucks, tomorrow it'll become better unless the growth is stagnant. Same case with Pylons or Django or the 100000000000000001 python frameworks out there.Now if you're looking for a job, Rails would be a better choice because the hype marketing has converted a lot of people (they drink the kool-aid straight from the hose).	Just curious, and I want to see which framework I should pursue more aggressively.So, how about pros/cons of each.	5	18	2007-08-31 17:11:36 UTC
48,791	48,718	PStamatiou	Got Arachnophobia? Here's Your Worst Nightmare	ajbatac	what is this doing on hacker news? I see no reference of spiders coding, juggling startup finance issues or learning how to be productive while not eating for days on end.	null	0	2	2007-08-31 17:20:27 UTC
48,793	48,770	palish	Aaron Swartz: Perfectionism (and his new startup, Jottit)	abstractbill	Like Artix, Chain would have failed in its current form no matter how smooth it was polished. It was very important that we failed fast so that we could focus on morphing it into something that works. You lose that with perfectionism.So you'd better be a Steve Jobs.	null	12	48	2007-08-31 17:22:36 UTC
48,794	48,770	nickb	Aaron Swartz: Perfectionism (and his new startup, Jottit)	abstractbill	I notice a lot of animosity towards PG in Aaron's writings...	null	6	48	2007-08-31 17:25:54 UTC
48,796	48,770	whacked_new	Aaron Swartz: Perfectionism (and his new startup, Jottit)	abstractbill	I have reservations about that name.	null	21	48	2007-08-31 17:26:26 UTC
48,801	48,770	far33d	Aaron Swartz: Perfectionism (and his new startup, Jottit)	abstractbill	The problem w/ perfectionism is that it's only perfect in the eyes of one person...	null	8	48	2007-08-31 17:36:14 UTC
48,803	48,770	zach	Aaron Swartz: Perfectionism (and his new startup, Jottit)	abstractbill	Yes, I'm coining a new term - "pefectionism." Don't know what it means, I'll let the audience decide.	null	10	48	2007-08-31 17:39:25 UTC
48,804	48,770	marketer	Aaron Swartz: Perfectionism (and his new startup, Jottit)	abstractbill	That open library project didn't last too long...	null	9	48	2007-08-31 17:40:37 UTC
48,806	48,752	zach	Paul Graham's near-death experience	nickb	I like how they have to add "a rich sum for the time." It's like "You kids out there getting $50M Series C's, understand that $50M was a lot of money back then!"	null	1	10	2007-08-31 17:44:05 UTC
48,810	48,671	palish	Cory Doctorow defends Scribd	phil	This is an excellent opportunity for Scribd to counterattack. I hope they're on the phone with Cory.	null	1	21	2007-08-31 17:50:34 UTC
48,812	48,752	palish	Paul Graham's near-death experience	nickb	"We suspect Paul Graham will not be very popular in Sunnyvale today."What's that even mean? Who is "we"? This post is sensationalist to the max.	null	2	10	2007-08-31 17:51:22 UTC
48,814	48,713	bharath	Enough with the Boston Start-up Inferiority Complex	byosko	In many ways, both Boston and Silicon Valley have a lot in common -- cities with character that attract likely startup founders, world class universities, a well developed VC community and so on. But they differ in a couple of ways (1) Boston is unbearably cold 6 months of the year (2) Silicon Valley has a more vibrant immigrant community. While (2) may not matter much in the case of Web related startups (for reasons that I cant really figure out, I have seen fewer immigrants gravitate towards founder positions in web based startups), the effect is more pronounced in the case of Enterprise startups. Every other enterprise startup in the Bay Area seems to have an immigrant as a co-founder -- often in the role of CTO or VP of Engg.	Boston is tied with San Jose in Q2 for total number of venture-backed IPOs.	1	15	2007-08-31 17:53:16 UTC
48,817	48,799	run4yourlives	Are taller people smarter?	luccastera	From the comments... >I went to law school. Everybody was short.Yup, pretty much confirms it! :-)	null	2	9	2007-08-31 18:00:57 UTC
48,819	48,752	run4yourlives	Paul Graham's near-death experience	nickb	Wow, that's a post with zero substance. I can't possibly vote this up.Out of all the great stuff in Paul's last essay to comment on, this is the best they could do?	null	3	10	2007-08-31 18:03:20 UTC
48,820	48,799	amichail	Are taller people smarter?	luccastera	I think this is related to the brain volume being larger for taller people. Another paper showed that larger brain volume results in smarter people.http://www.people.vcu.edu/~mamcdani/Big-Brained%20article.pd...	null	5	9	2007-08-31 18:03:28 UTC
48,822	48,816	dpapathanasiou	The Living Room of the Future, from 1979 (pic)	abstractbill	Just goes to show how difficult making predication about the future is: except for the domestic robot, none of those have been realized yet.	null	1	3	2007-08-31 18:04:41 UTC
48,824	48,799	epi0Bauqu	Are taller people smarter?	luccastera	Hmm...the average height at MIT is definitely significantly on the short side, even across all ethnic backgrounds.	null	4	9	2007-08-31 18:06:16 UTC
48,828	48,800	wozer	Troublesome manager.. what would you do?	PStamatiou	First talk with your manager. If necessary, talk to your manager's manager (or whoever has a say in it). Explain the situation. If possible, refuse to work on the "horrible mess". That's risky, but it's better than letting your name be associated with that project forever.	So I'm a senior at top 10 engineering university and since January I have been working as lead webdev on a large, sponsor/government-funded project. I've done everything from focus groups, usability studies, surveys and have been creating a top-notch site. I was away for two weeks in the time between summer semester's end and the beginning of fall semester and got an email from my manager saying essentially "hey, I've been working with someone else on the site". What was created from that was a complete bastardization of the design and was all new code. I had lots of PHP for general ease of dev and the new guy did all 50+ files in html.Fast-forward to yesterday, new guy won't be working on it anymore and my manager wants me to take over. I've looked at this guy's code and it's a horrible mess - I want nothing of it. Deadline is in about a week.Going back to my code is an equally large task as he had been adding other pages, content and "design features".What would you do? I'm sure I am not the only one that has had this problem.	4	8	2007-08-31 18:11:20 UTC
48,830	48,800	run4yourlives	Troublesome manager.. what would you do?	PStamatiou	1. What is your direct stake in the project? (tied to your grades? Large monetary investment?)2. What is your extended stake in the project (manager have lots of connections? Is this industry leading and highly visible?)3. What are the chances you will succeed if you start work again?Based on the answers to these three questions (which I know will be difficult to obtain) you should make one of the following choices:1. Politely refuse to work on the project, saying you've committed to other things and do not want to over-extend yourself.2. Bite the bullet and fix the project based either on you code or the current mess. (and shut up about things until you're done) Walk away once released.3. Perform some type of negotiations with the manager: (e.g. extend the deadline (all deadlines can be extended), limit the scope of the release, limit the expectations of you) and schedule a post-release evaluation of the project and your role in it.	So I'm a senior at top 10 engineering university and since January I have been working as lead webdev on a large, sponsor/government-funded project. I've done everything from focus groups, usability studies, surveys and have been creating a top-notch site. I was away for two weeks in the time between summer semester's end and the beginning of fall semester and got an email from my manager saying essentially "hey, I've been working with someone else on the site". What was created from that was a complete bastardization of the design and was all new code. I had lots of PHP for general ease of dev and the new guy did all 50+ files in html.Fast-forward to yesterday, new guy won't be working on it anymore and my manager wants me to take over. I've looked at this guy's code and it's a horrible mess - I want nothing of it. Deadline is in about a week.Going back to my code is an equally large task as he had been adding other pages, content and "design features".What would you do? I'm sure I am not the only one that has had this problem.	0	8	2007-08-31 18:13:03 UTC
48,836	48,770	dottertrotter	Aaron Swartz: Perfectionism (and his new startup, Jottit)	abstractbill	Personally I used to be like this. I would never launch anything, because nothing I did was ever good enough for me. However, recently I learned my lesson. I launched hackrtrackr with only one feature, and without and going back and rethinking what I had done. The result an insanely simple website that has taken off very well. Also by launching with only one feature and minimal code it allowed me to quickly add the features I received requests for, because I didn't have to wade through a bunch of lines.	null	2	48	2007-08-31 18:22:16 UTC
48,837	48,713	herdrick	Enough with the Boston Start-up Inferiority Complex	byosko	Is San Francisco included in the San Jose metro region? If not, then probably the entire upper half of the peninsula isn't included in the comparison. Looks like it is, though. That's weird.	Boston is tied with San Jose in Q2 for total number of venture-backed IPOs.	3	15	2007-08-31 18:23:14 UTC
48,843	48,816	pg	The Living Room of the Future, from 1979 (pic)	abstractbill	Interesting. Every one has happened, except that perennial tarpit, the robot serving drinks. Predictions about the future are driven by a mix of what we expect to happen and what we hope will happen. Domestic robots, flying cars, and apps that take natural language commands are dangerous to work on because predictions about them are driven mainly by hope.	null	0	3	2007-08-31 18:33:29 UTC
48,848	48,770	jey	Aaron Swartz: Perfectionism (and his new startup, Jottit)	abstractbill	http://www.lockergnome.com/nexus/windows/2007/02/07/jottit ?	null	17	48	2007-08-31 18:37:29 UTC
48,851	48,720	aston	Instant Word Search : Something I wrote for fun	kirubakaran	If you're actually into making this more awesome, you almost certainly want to put this together with some in-memory data structure. And that data structure should probably be a suffix tree/trie. Check it out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suffix_tree. You'd need to modify that to deal with having more than one word, but that's not too bad (you just lay the trees on top of each other).	null	0	2	2007-08-31 18:40:04 UTC
48,852	48,770	omouse	Aaron Swartz: Perfectionism (and his new startup, Jottit)	abstractbill	"There is something to this, of course. But I have a contrary proposal: users love perfectionism."Wrong. I would love to see more new features on reddit rather than waiting for them to re-write everything. The search function is still somewhat broken!There is even competition of sorts: http://redditmedia.com/ That site displays thumbnails for stories...why doesn't reddit.com have an extra section or option/setting for that? So many good things could be done if not for this perfectionism bullshit.Another good story: 37signals took a long time fixing Backpack and finally released a new version. Too late, I had already switched to Simple GTD. I don't get why they didn't incrementally improve things...I bet they've lost many more users due to their slowness.Perfectionism is paralyzing.	null	0	48	2007-08-31 18:40:08 UTC
48,856	48,798	muerdeme	Researchers aim to make Internet bandwidth a global currency	kashif	Didn't Enron have this idea before the shit hit the fan?	null	0	4	2007-08-31 18:44:31 UTC
48,857	48,770	champion	Aaron Swartz: Perfectionism (and his new startup, Jottit)	abstractbill	Funny, since Aaron had exactly the opposite strategy when he launched Infogami, blogging about launching a new feature everyday and taking a very incremental approach. I don't think that lasted very long though. Everyone is free to change their mind, of course...	null	7	48	2007-08-31 18:46:45 UTC
48,859	48,684	vegashacker	Korea's incubator, Litmus, looks familiar	tomh	The red flower graduation icon looks like it's dying. That's kind of funny.	null	1	4	2007-08-31 18:47:18 UTC
48,861	48,799	mynameishere	Are taller people smarter?	luccastera	Taller people are indeed smarter if you don't remove the malnourished from your sample. Useless information, one way or the other. It's sort of like...well, X race has a lower average IQ than Y race. As long as you're not shaping policy around the contrary, it doesn't matter at all.	null	1	9	2007-08-31 18:50:06 UTC
48,865	48,849	nostrademons	Cut the Fat to Get to Lean Productivity	danw	This completely misses the point about productivity. In my experience, the #1 reason why workers are only productive for 2/3 of the working day is they have no incentive to do otherwise. After all, you go home at the same time regardless of whether you finish your work quickly or not. You probably get paid the same (module a small % raise) regardless of whether you do good work or bad work.People who want to get lots done typically get lots done. They don't need to resort to productivity tips. And companies with incentive structures that reward hard work typically get it. Nucor consistently has some of the highest productivity in the steel industry - their compensation structure involves salaries that range in the $40K range, but bonus that can total up to $130K. Management consulting firms consistently elicit high effort from employees, because they don't have face time: once you finish your work, you can go home. Hedge fund managers never seem to goof off, because they get paid 20% of the profits, often amounting to billions of dollars. Startup founders work for incredibly long and focused periods of time, because they enjoy all the upside of their work.	null	0	1	2007-08-31 18:56:54 UTC
48,873	48,800	mynameishere	Troublesome manager.. what would you do?	PStamatiou	I can't imagine two weeks causing too much trouble. I've seen crap rewritten over and over on 6-month iterations that could make you weep.Just say the other guy's design is bad and you're going back to your own. If it's an "equally large task", obviously you're better off with a familiar code base. Suggest to the manager that he should not swap devs in and out of a project in time frames normally smaller than those used to ramp up new workers.	So I'm a senior at top 10 engineering university and since January I have been working as lead webdev on a large, sponsor/government-funded project. I've done everything from focus groups, usability studies, surveys and have been creating a top-notch site. I was away for two weeks in the time between summer semester's end and the beginning of fall semester and got an email from my manager saying essentially "hey, I've been working with someone else on the site". What was created from that was a complete bastardization of the design and was all new code. I had lots of PHP for general ease of dev and the new guy did all 50+ files in html.Fast-forward to yesterday, new guy won't be working on it anymore and my manager wants me to take over. I've looked at this guy's code and it's a horrible mess - I want nothing of it. Deadline is in about a week.Going back to my code is an equally large task as he had been adding other pages, content and "design features".What would you do? I'm sure I am not the only one that has had this problem.	2	8	2007-08-31 19:07:47 UTC
48,877	48,800	paul_reiners	Troublesome manager.. what would you do?	PStamatiou	I would ask for a lot more money to finish the job (a lot more) and say "take it or leave it". If he isn't willing to pay the extra money, I would just walk away.There's nothing to be gained from debating with a troublesome manager who doesn't understand programming. You would just be wasting your time.	So I'm a senior at top 10 engineering university and since January I have been working as lead webdev on a large, sponsor/government-funded project. I've done everything from focus groups, usability studies, surveys and have been creating a top-notch site. I was away for two weeks in the time between summer semester's end and the beginning of fall semester and got an email from my manager saying essentially "hey, I've been working with someone else on the site". What was created from that was a complete bastardization of the design and was all new code. I had lots of PHP for general ease of dev and the new guy did all 50+ files in html.Fast-forward to yesterday, new guy won't be working on it anymore and my manager wants me to take over. I've looked at this guy's code and it's a horrible mess - I want nothing of it. Deadline is in about a week.Going back to my code is an equally large task as he had been adding other pages, content and "design features".What would you do? I'm sure I am not the only one that has had this problem.	1	8	2007-08-31 19:12:54 UTC
48,878	48,792	brett	College Drinking Game Spurs Cottage Industry; Mr. Best's Backup Career	nickb	Where I come from (UCSB) we had a different take on the nomenclature. The game the article describes was called "Beirut", as the article notes. "Beer Pong", by contrast, was much closer to an actual game of ping pong, paddles and all, each player having a beer on the table that served as a target.	null	1	10	2007-08-31 19:13:19 UTC
48,882	48,770	oditogre	Aaron Swartz: Perfectionism (and his new startup, Jottit)	abstractbill	What's Jottit going to be, then?	null	19	48	2007-08-31 19:18:27 UTC
48,886	48,770	ecuzzillo	Aaron Swartz: Perfectionism (and his new startup, Jottit)	abstractbill	Watching this get abandoned will be enormously humorous.	null	5	48	2007-08-31 19:21:58 UTC
48,890	48,770	rms	Aaron Swartz: Perfectionism (and his new startup, Jottit)	abstractbill	http://beta.jottit.com/	null	3	48	2007-08-31 19:25:13 UTC
48,891	48,798	rms	Researchers aim to make Internet bandwidth a global currency	kashif	Internet bandwidth will make a terrible currency because historically the price of bandwidth decreases every year.A much better currency would be energy, water, or refined energy.	null	1	4	2007-08-31 19:26:53 UTC
48,893	48,799	gscott	Are taller people smarter?	luccastera	Napoleon was 8 or 9 feet tall after he got onto his horse. So it is about height! Or maybe drive & passion are more important... oh well so confused.	null	3	9	2007-08-31 19:31:20 UTC
48,894	48,684	SwellJoe	Korea's incubator, Litmus, looks familiar	tomh	Looks like a complicated home pregnancy test.	null	0	4	2007-08-31 19:31:55 UTC
48,895	48,876	ivankirigin	Python 3000 Alpha 1 Released	mattculbreth	I liked this overview by Guido on Python 3000. I like the changes http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=208549	null	0	26	2007-08-31 19:33:23 UTC
48,917	48,898	SwellJoe	Who uses a CMS to manage their sites?	bmaier	Our website started on OpenACS, and then moved to Joomla. I've also built a large website with Zope/Plone.All of them suck so bad they make me want to kick someone.If I were starting today, I'd probably choose Drupal, but I'm sure I'd live to regret that as well. The smart money is probably on picking a "good enough" implementation of all of the individual features you need, and then make them all share session, and then write a custom login and user management page or two. You shouldn't imagine that any of them is a cohesive set of tools with a standardized codebase using a common set of functions.That's pretty much what our Joomla site ended up being, only with the added pain of having to manage all of the content through Joomla (which is atrocious...give me flat files over that any day). So, I've spent months learning this big pile of code only to end up using it as a glorified session and authentication handler--the more I use the "native" Joomla tools, the less I like them. And it forces horrible URLs onto you unless you build a custom URL mapper for every application and use one of the SEF tools.Admittedly, I'm not a fan of PHP, and so my discomfort is increased by working in a language that makes me feel a little ill (no first class functions? how does that even happen in a modern language?)...but nonetheless, the more work I do with websites like this, the more I think content management systems are a bad idea unless you're using them for the very, very, very specific set of problems the developer first set out to solve (I can't figure out what that is for Joomla, since it's so painful to use for just about anything, including managing content, but I'm sure there's a core of useful functionality in there that the project was first started to provide).I'm going to try Drupal for a community site I'm planning for our Open Source tools, but I may end up giving up on that. It's just hard to know how painful things are going to be until you have users banging on it, and you have to dig deep to address problems they find. It wasn't until we'd actually launched our new site that all of the bugs in Joomla, Fireboard, Flyspray (mainly the bridge), VirtueMart, and other components came to light. Many still remain...If I knock out one bug a week, I'm pretty happy (the system is big, and the bugs run deep). Note also, that all of those apps have their own stylesheets and templates--you aren't even getting cohesive styling, unless you build the templates to match for every single application.My ideal would be if every application out there had a very simple authentication callback interface, so you could tell it to get the session state from anywhere (maybe OpenID will make this a reality). It'd make it so easy to build a full-featured website--and no big over-arching framework needed. You could even use different languages for your apps...	Anyone run an open source cms to manage their startup's site? What do you guys use? Drupal? Joomla? something else? any huge downsides to running a cms and not going from scratch?	0	2	2007-08-31 19:53:14 UTC
48,920	48,752	nmeyer	Paul Graham's near-death experience	nickb	One of the dumbest posts I've ever seen on valleywag.	null	5	10	2007-08-31 19:55:48 UTC
48,921	48,770	gscott	Aaron Swartz: Perfectionism (and his new startup, Jottit)	abstractbill	A previous company I worked for split in two, one half took on an online training site project and my half built an online website development system. The half that did the training site all hated me because I code by the seat of my pants, sometimes put out work that needed a tweak or two and I wasn't there because I was just up for 24 hours writing it. They took 6 months designing and mapping out there project, they took another 6 months to build it and by the time they were done they had 3 months of money left to make it successful and thus went out of business while my side is still going strong 6 years later. I don't exactly advocate treating users like beta testers, but if you can`t find any more errors put it out, fix anything you didn't find that gets reported by the users, then move on.	null	1	48	2007-08-31 19:56:31 UTC
48,924	48,770	ph0rque	Aaron Swartz: Perfectionism (and his new startup, Jottit)	abstractbill	hmm... how about a compromise: release early, release often, keep things as simple as possible, but get those details perfect.	null	18	48	2007-08-31 20:01:01 UTC
48,925	48,901	procrastitron	What is a Hacker?	nickb	The way I look at it now is that a hacker is the dual of an engineer.An engineer first makes sure that something is correct, then tries to build it. A hacker first builds something, then tries to make sure it is correct.	null	0	8	2007-08-31 20:01:09 UTC
48,929	48,770	philh	Aaron Swartz: Perfectionism (and his new startup, Jottit)	abstractbill	What's the difference between "adding a feature" and "improving the site"?I always took them to be the same thing. In that sense, you're either adding a feature or you're stagnating. (Or, I suppose, going backwards.)	null	13	48	2007-08-31 20:05:28 UTC
48,930	48,876	mattculbreth	Python 3000 Alpha 1 Released	mattculbreth	The print(x) instead of print x thing is going to kill me in interactive sessions. I can feel it now. It's those little things that get ingrained in your daily work that are hard to break.	null	2	26	2007-08-31 20:05:36 UTC
48,931	48,752	rms	Paul Graham's near-death experience	nickb	I think they're posting from Burning Man, so I would blame this nonsensical post on the drugs.	null	4	10	2007-08-31 20:06:07 UTC
48,936	48,910	onceageek	Is it OK to copy terms of service/privacy policy from another site?	picnichouse	I don't see any issue with copying the terms. Most of all End-user agreements and service policy are similar. Pay attention to substituting your company's name :)	What do you think? I see it done all over the place...	3	19	2007-08-31 20:12:04 UTC
48,938	48,910	weebro	Is it OK to copy terms of service/privacy policy from another site?	picnichouse	What is your alternative; get a lawyer to draw them up? Where do you think they get them from? Only 10% of legal documents are drawn up from scratch. Lawyers have a service called Westlaw. This service allows them to copy entire briefs/submissions made to the court by a lawyer in the past. They don't even need to come up with what to say in court, they just copy the person who was successful in the past. I spent 18 months in a NY law firm cutting and pasting.IF IT AIN'T BROKE.....My advice, take it from many websites, piece together the bits you want and use examples from other sites for different ways of saying the same thing. Change its wording slightly and put the sentences back to front sometimes. If it's altered, not in the same format and slightly different it's ok.	What do you think? I see it done all over the place...	0	19	2007-08-31 20:15:33 UTC
48,942	48,766	fallintothis	Simply Scheme (now a free ebook from UC Berkeley)	nickb	Am I missing something, or are the only "free" parts the sectional introductions? I can't seem to get to the actual chapters...or I'm being really slow.	null	0	4	2007-08-31 20:27:22 UTC
48,950	48,910	jey	Is it OK to copy terms of service/privacy policy from another site?	picnichouse	That sounds like copyright violation. See if you can find a legit free source instead.	What do you think? I see it done all over the place...	4	19	2007-08-31 20:38:48 UTC
48,951	48,916	arasakik	Service Oriented Architecture is your Ticket to Hell	nickb	While the article makes some interesting points about the perceived flaws of SOA, I'm not sure that I agree that they are specific to SOA itself. Perhaps some of them only apply depending on the context of the situation. His first point with respect to the up-front design needed for service interfaces - how is this any different when creating any public API that other services will consume? This is a challenge for any public interface. If the interface needs to change, mark the relevant sections as deprecated.The second point with respect to strange dependencies - this could certainly be a problem with disparate services spread across many organizations. Again, I'm not certain that this issue is specific to SOA - it sounds like the author is pointing out that finding relevant documentation about service dependencies is the flaw here. Again, I'd like to point out that this is a challenge for any project calling on other code - documentation could be distributed across many different open source libraries, etc.SOA definitely has its benefits. Companies such as Amazon.com have scaled successfully because of their Service Oriented Architecture, before it became a buzzword. The author is correct, though, in stating that a lot of the buzz around SOA is bullshit. This is typical of any method/solution that receives a lot of hype. For example: http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/09/good-agile-bad-agile...	null	1	9	2007-08-31 20:40:25 UTC
48,955	48,910	pc	Is it OK to copy terms of service/privacy policy from another site?	picnichouse	Just steal some free (= Creative Commons licensed) documents: http://wordpress.com/tos/ http://automattic.com/privacy/	What do you think? I see it done all over the place...	2	19	2007-08-31 20:48:26 UTC
48,957	48,876	amichail	Python 3000 Alpha 1 Released	mattculbreth	Why is Python still interesting? Just use Scala.	null	7	26	2007-08-31 20:49:48 UTC
48,959	48,944	vlad	If you were to write Wikipedia today...	ph0rque	Wikipedia evolved over time, as users thought it was a cool idea. Nobody writes a complete project like they might write a function for an assignment because most "functions" of the type of converting one lossless image to another lossless format, or capitalizing all the letters in a string, have already been written for you.You can't write something that happened at a certain time and place and expect it to fair better. But, if you want to write something in September of 2007, pick and language that allows you to prototype and iterate your features quickly.	If you were to write Wikipedia today using available languages and frameworks, what language/framework would you use? And why?	1	3	2007-08-31 20:51:52 UTC
48,960	48,910	rokhayakebe	Is it OK to copy terms of service/privacy policy from another site?	picnichouse	f??k yeah it is.	What do you think? I see it done all over the place...	11	19	2007-08-31 20:57:26 UTC
48,967	48,876	davidw	Python 3000 Alpha 1 Released	mattculbreth	> We're switching to a model known from Java: (immutable) text strings are Unicode, and binary data is represented by a separate mutable "bytes" data type.Tcl had that something like 5 years ago. Of course, that's one of the reasons it's slower...	null	4	26	2007-08-31 21:11:39 UTC
48,970	48,906	palish	Apple slaps back at NBC in iTunes spat (Apple won't sell NBC shows)	nickb	Anyone know why Universal is being so stubborn? Even Jobs can't work his magic on them.	null	2	4	2007-08-31 21:16:35 UTC
48,972	48,294	knewjax	How Not to Die	subhash	Nice essay. A nice moral booster.	null	45	169	2007-08-31 21:23:02 UTC
48,976	48,876	mattculbreth	Python 3000 Alpha 1 Released	mattculbreth	I guess this will cause ANOTHER Reddit rewrite.	null	3	26	2007-08-31 21:26:19 UTC
48,978	48,800	jey	Troublesome manager.. what would you do?	PStamatiou	Throw away his two weeks of work, and negotiate the deadline. It's not your fault that your boss went out and hired someone entirely incompetent without even consulting you.If the deadline is a must, just work with the awful crap he has to get to the deadline, and scrap the crap immediately after the deadline.	So I'm a senior at top 10 engineering university and since January I have been working as lead webdev on a large, sponsor/government-funded project. I've done everything from focus groups, usability studies, surveys and have been creating a top-notch site. I was away for two weeks in the time between summer semester's end and the beginning of fall semester and got an email from my manager saying essentially "hey, I've been working with someone else on the site". What was created from that was a complete bastardization of the design and was all new code. I had lots of PHP for general ease of dev and the new guy did all 50+ files in html.Fast-forward to yesterday, new guy won't be working on it anymore and my manager wants me to take over. I've looked at this guy's code and it's a horrible mess - I want nothing of it. Deadline is in about a week.Going back to my code is an equally large task as he had been adding other pages, content and "design features".What would you do? I'm sure I am not the only one that has had this problem.	3	8	2007-08-31 21:27:04 UTC
48,979	48,770	eusman	Aaron Swartz: Perfectionism (and his new startup, Jottit)	abstractbill	looks like so 1999. come on this is 2007. and the name is like a hit train got over it ...g(j)ot it?	null	20	48	2007-08-31 21:28:50 UTC
48,980	48,906	altay	Apple slaps back at NBC in iTunes spat (Apple won't sell NBC shows)	nickb	I'm starting to suspect that both these companies are run by a bunch of 12-year-olds.	null	3	4	2007-08-31 21:29:04 UTC
48,982	48,944	ks	If you were to write Wikipedia today...	ph0rque	I would probably make Wikipedia a front end to a Subversion repository. Then I would get all the data handling for free.I would of course add caching, to limit the number of reads to the Subversion server.	If you were to write Wikipedia today using available languages and frameworks, what language/framework would you use? And why?	0	3	2007-08-31 21:29:20 UTC

48,655

48,642

SwellJoe

Rails vs. Django

kyro

Deployment of Rails sucks.Django is far better thought out, and can be deployed in a very sane manner. A fleet of Mongrels is just an embarrassingly bad way to handle concurrency. "I know, let's write a crappy barely functional web server, spawn a metric ass ton of them, and then balance between them with a proxy. It'll be most leet and super fast! We'll call it a Best Practice. It'll be awesome." In fact, it's fragile, doesn't scale very well, and is complicated to configure. It's also a huge distraction from solving the problem in a sane way--people seem to think "deploying Rails" is solved by this and Capistrano, when really, it's just a new stack of problems.Otherwise Rails kicks ass, and I like Ruby better than Python (but I'm a perl monger, so I might be brain-damaged into not seeing the beauty of Python). But I do tend to feel like Django is being written by grownups who've got years of development experience, while the Rails folks are making it up as they go along...sometimes going down really poorly chosen paths (I believe Mongrel is an example of this, but I'm no expert).Then again, I think if I were starting an app from scratch I'd pick Catalyst. But I haven't spent enough time with any of them to know which one is really most productive for the way I work. I think you'll want to try them out, and not take advice from random dudes at news.yc.

Just curious, and I want to see which framework I should pursue more aggressively.So, how about pros/cons of each.

0

18

2007-08-31 09:06:19 UTC

48,656

48,606

Tichy

Paul Buchheit announces new iPhone with 8 megapixel camera

herdrick

Interesting: how did you hook up the camera with the iPhone? If I know Apple, there won't be any connectors on the iPhone, and also no API you could use to access the connected camera.

null

3

14

2007-08-31 09:08:50 UTC

48,660

48,610

Tichy

Reality Is What It IS

vlad

What if there is no way to perceive reality? At best we can perceive our own reality, but other people's realities will probably differ. So that reality approach might simply fall short of realities. I mean it doesn't give us a way to solve problems, because individual realities might have too many discrepancies to be resolved by pure logic alone. The only way it could work is with the omniscient super computer that understands all of our individual realities and always choses the optimum common dominator. Not sure if we want that, though.

null

0

4

2007-08-31 09:27:24 UTC

48,664

48,642

rms

Rails vs. Django

kyro

What about Pylons?

Just curious, and I want to see which framework I should pursue more aggressively.So, how about pros/cons of each.

8

18

2007-08-31 09:47:45 UTC

48,665

48,294

vikram

How Not to Die

subhash

What counts as not dying? If you drop the initial idea and start work on a very different one does that also count as dying?

null

23

169

2007-08-31 10:00:10 UTC

48,668

48,294

damir

How Not to Die

subhash

I read lot's of biographies (of self made rich pepople). Almost every single one finishes at least one chapter (or book) with "... but don't give up!". PG, you just scored.

null

20

169

2007-08-31 10:15:26 UTC

48,669

48,657

davidw

Is Scheme as good as Common Lisp?

Tichy

Yes, but both are widely considered inferior to Visual Forth ++.

I think Scheme doesn't have the all-powerful Macros, so would one be missing out on all the LISP goodness for choosing Scheme? How usable are Macros, anyway? Does their use tend to produce readable code?

3

10

2007-08-31 10:16:27 UTC

48,672

48,553

kingnothing

Silicon Valley aside, why are Americans more willing to risk a startup?

weebro

I believe another part of it has to do with the cost of incorporation. In most places in the US, you can do it yourself for under $100. Comparatively, in most of Europe, it costs between $2,000 and $10,000 to form a company.Also, with America's long standing tradition of entrepreneurship comes easy money for financing a new venture. In Europe, the spirit isn't there so to speak, so I assume the money would likewise be harder to come by. I don't know anything about European law. Are companies in Europe afforded the same rights as in the US?

I'm based in the UK and am hoping to apply to YC in Oct. We are currently looking for strong hackers to co-found with us, if they like the idea. We cannot, however, find anyone in the UK even remotely interested. The concept of 'it's not what you do but when you do it' simply does not exist here. What does the US have that we don't?

4

10

2007-08-31 10:21:23 UTC

48,673

48,553

uuilly

Silicon Valley aside, why are Americans more willing to risk a startup?

weebro

American's love David and Europeans love Goliath. The British believed in their Empire. They believed that it was right to put Squash courts and Polo fields in far flung countries. They believed that Britishness was the most natural state of man. The French, Russians and eventually the Germans felt the same way about themselves, only more so and less sucessfully. These empires were Goliaths and their people were proud of them. The US was the first major colony to successfully break free from the Brits. The most formidable military force ever deployed sailed into the East River and bore down on a bunch of un-uniformed barefoot rabble representing our (at that time) pathetic revolution. Yet somehow we won. That picture was chopped up and burned into the DNA of every American. We re-live it when Bruce Willis crawls through air-ducts and elevator shafts to outwit German terrorists. And again when he leads his band of blue collar drillers to blow up a merciless asteriod. And his goals are simple too. Bruce just wants to get home in time for dinner whereas James Bond is "keeping the British end up." Americans are wary of higher causes which makes them distrust things bigger than themselves.It's everywhere in this country, Big is bad and small is good. We hate Wallmart, Microsoft, Nike and Exxon. Nevermind that Target, Adobe, Reebok and Shell are doing the exact same thing as their bigger counterparts. They're not big so we can't hate them. The only thing that will "kill" Google (IBM / MS style) will be bigness. We will turn against them once they become Goliath. Our people (formerly your people) banded together way back then and forged our ideals in violent reaction against bigness. And so it's been ever since. We were the 12th biggest army just before WWII and few thought we would outlast the Soviets. But once the Soviet Empire fell we became Goliath and we have hated ourselves ever since. The Brits and Russians in their prime would have no problem with Iraq. The Russians would roll in and kill everyone and the Brits would pit the Sunnis against the Shias and colonize what's left. We have gone in half cocked and we don't truely believe that it's our place to tell other people how to live. It is cruely ironic that we may have to sail back across the pond and ask our British cousins how we can best play the part of Goliath. This is all a long way of saying that revering startups is just natural to us. It's what we've always done and for better or worse, it's all we know. I'm actually not sure why they were ever called startups. Upstarts is way more fitting...

I'm based in the UK and am hoping to apply to YC in Oct. We are currently looking for strong hackers to co-found with us, if they like the idea. We cannot, however, find anyone in the UK even remotely interested. The concept of 'it's not what you do but when you do it' simply does not exist here. What does the US have that we don't?

0

10

2007-08-31 10:22:58 UTC

48,674

48,642

dood

Rails vs. Django

kyro

Pylons is deserving of attention. There is a small comparison of Django and Pylons here [http://wiki.pylonshq.com/display/pylonscookbook/Concepts+of+...]. I'm playing around with Pylons and have been impressed so far. The whole approach strikes me as more of a hackers framework; less magic, more flexible, extensible. Though the docs need a little work, and the community isn't as big as Django yet, Pylons seems to be blossoming into quite an excellent framework.

Just curious, and I want to see which framework I should pursue more aggressively.So, how about pros/cons of each.

2

18

2007-08-31 10:23:06 UTC

48,681

48,553

andyn

Silicon Valley aside, why are Americans more willing to risk a startup?

weebro

Out of curiosity, where have you been looking and what would you expect from people if they joined you? Is it a part time thing?(You have an interesting looking product there so I think you could do well out of it if you get it going)

I'm based in the UK and am hoping to apply to YC in Oct. We are currently looking for strong hackers to co-found with us, if they like the idea. We cannot, however, find anyone in the UK even remotely interested. The concept of 'it's not what you do but when you do it' simply does not exist here. What does the US have that we don't?

9

10

2007-08-31 11:29:55 UTC

48,685

48,606

brlewis

Paul Buchheit announces new iPhone with 8 megapixel camera

herdrick

This may not be integrated enough for some, but those people can just loosen the knot, pull a little, and retie for tighter integration.

null

1

14

2007-08-31 12:24:42 UTC

48,686

48,606

joshwa

Paul Buchheit announces new iPhone with 8 megapixel camera

herdrick

Reminds me of the 16MP, $25,000 Holga:http://www.holgadigital.com/blog_2/about.html

null

4

14

2007-08-31 12:25:19 UTC

48,687

48,657

brlewis

Is Scheme as good as Common Lisp?

Tichy

R5RS hygienic macros qualify as LISP goodness, but a lot of Scheme implementations also implement defmacro (like CL) and/or syntax-case.Use of macros makes the code reflect the programmer's thinking about the problem domain. Whether this is readable or not depends on the programmer.

I think Scheme doesn't have the all-powerful Macros, so would one be missing out on all the LISP goodness for choosing Scheme? How usable are Macros, anyway? Does their use tend to produce readable code?

2

10

2007-08-31 12:42:46 UTC

48,693

48,671

pg

Cory Doctorow defends Scribd

phil

Wow, this has some serious weight:"I am a former Director of SFWA""SFWA has exposed itself to tremendous legal liability."

null

0

21

2007-08-31 12:59:17 UTC

48,694

48,609

brlewis

Why You Need Accountants, and How Much They Cost [pdf]

vlad

N.B. The cost ranges given are from December, 1995.

null

0

3

2007-08-31 13:04:14 UTC

48,695

48,657

pg

Is Scheme as good as Common Lisp?

Tichy

Scheme has a way of defining macros that's supposed to be better than old-fashioned defmacro. These "hygienic macros" seemed to a lot of people (though not me) to be a good idea when they were invented. They got into the Scheme standard then. I think people don't like them so much now, but once something gets into a standard it's impossible to get it out.However (a) all the Scheme implementations I know of have implemented classic defmacro macros as well, and (b) if one hadn't, you could easily write it yourself. So in practice there's not much of a decision to make.The Arc implementation you're using to read this is written on top of Scheme. Currently Mzscheme.

I think Scheme doesn't have the all-powerful Macros, so would one be missing out on all the LISP goodness for choosing Scheme? How usable are Macros, anyway? Does their use tend to produce readable code?

0

10

2007-08-31 13:09:09 UTC

48,700

48,642

yrashk

Rails vs. Django

kyro

Rails looks to be more DRY than Django. Though I'm on Rails and don't really use Django.

Just curious, and I want to see which framework I should pursue more aggressively.So, how about pros/cons of each.

7

18

2007-08-31 13:40:56 UTC

48,704

48,553

jsmcgd

Silicon Valley aside, why are Americans more willing to risk a startup?

weebro

I'm not convinced that there are fundamental differences between attitudes in the US and Europe or at least Britain. The industrial revolution began in Britain and was a time of immense innovation and entrepreneurism. Us Brits still point to that as an example of our inherent entrepreneurial spirit however I reluctantly feel compelled to pour cold water on that idea. I think that period in our history could have taken place in any country given the same economic, educational and scientific conditions etc. So my point is basically that you can find people with the right attitude anywhere. But that also is kind of the problem; unlike in the US, we don't have a Silicon Valley to gravitate towards. Some entrepreneurial people gravitate towards London but unlike Silicon Valley every other person you meet isn't going to be a budding empire builder. So in conclusion, they are there but you'll just going to have to look that much harder to find them.

I'm based in the UK and am hoping to apply to YC in Oct. We are currently looking for strong hackers to co-found with us, if they like the idea. We cannot, however, find anyone in the UK even remotely interested. The concept of 'it's not what you do but when you do it' simply does not exist here. What does the US have that we don't?

6

10

2007-08-31 13:56:26 UTC

48,709

48,347

Goladus

TellThem: MySpace Kills Another Startup

terpua

This article is obviously poorly researched and the writing is extremely sloppy.

null

1

7

2007-08-31 14:07:00 UTC

48,712

48,610

extantproject

Reality Is What It IS

vlad

What a convenient meta-narrative...

null

1

4

2007-08-31 14:24:37 UTC

48,719

48,713

pg

Enough with the Boston Start-up Inferiority Complex

byosko

I wish I could agree with this, but as someone who switches back and forth between the two every year, Boston is way behind.

Boston is tied with San Jose in Q2 for total number of venture-backed IPOs.

0

15

2007-08-31 15:01:40 UTC

48,724

48,720

kirubakaran

Instant Word Search : Something I wrote for fun

kirubakaran

It is silly, really. But I just thought I'll share anyway.

null

1

2

2007-08-31 15:05:39 UTC

48,728

48,707

chmac

Google Maps Nighttime

charzom

Not sure what the point is, but it sure looks pretty!

null

2

8

2007-08-31 15:15:51 UTC

48,729

48,705

chmac

Entrepreneur's Toolkit

markpeterdavis

In my view, it's a pretty useless list, it contains a total of 10 links, 4 of which are NYC specific.

I just created a page that lists services that every entrepreneur should know about. It's called the 'Entrepreneur's Toolkit'...

0

1

2007-08-31 15:16:31 UTC

48,731

48,414

oditogre

The Startup Game: How Anywhere.fm is building a hit niche

dhouston

Anywhere.fm is really cool...but how do they make money? That's what I'm not really understanding. I don't see any ads or anything...

null

0

34

2007-08-31 15:19:39 UTC

48,734

48,707

mpc

Google Maps Nighttime

charzom

Check out South Korea and North Korea. Yikes, what a difference.

null

1

8

2007-08-31 15:22:00 UTC

48,738

48,720

ivankirigin

Instant Word Search : Something I wrote for fun

kirubakaran

Not so instant for me :-P

null

2

2007-08-31 15:28:07 UTC

48,742

48,657

omouse

Is Scheme as good as Common Lisp?

Tichy

Macros produce kickass code: http://neverfriday.com/blog/?p=10#more-10If I didn't create a string-case= macro, I would have to write the final expression over and over again. With multiple string-case matches I would have to write string=? many many times: (cond ((or (string=? "hello" my-string) (string=? "world" my-string)) (print "match"))) To do that with the string-case= macro: (string-case= my-string (("hello" "world") (print "match"))) Saves quite a bit of typing and now I have a good example of why macros are good to have around :Dedit: formatting ftw.

I think Scheme doesn't have the all-powerful Macros, so would one be missing out on all the LISP goodness for choosing Scheme? How usable are Macros, anyway? Does their use tend to produce readable code?

1

10

2007-08-31 15:33:26 UTC

48,745

48,713

champion

Enough with the Boston Start-up Inferiority Complex

byosko

I think I read recently that the VC money invested in Boston-area is about 1/4th that of Silicon Valley. (For "IT" tech, not biotech.)I like how Scott Kirsner, Globe reporter, compared it to the Red Sox vs. Yankees rivarly. The Sox have a huge budget compared to most teams, except the Yankees. And while the Sox have a complex about the Yankees, the Yankees barely know their is a rivalry. Can't go wrong with Red Sox analogies ;-)

Boston is tied with San Jose in Q2 for total number of venture-backed IPOs.

2

15

2007-08-31 15:45:15 UTC

48,747

48,642

kashif

Rails vs. Django

kyro

What are you designing? One might be better suited.

Just curious, and I want to see which framework I should pursue more aggressively.So, how about pros/cons of each.

6

18

2007-08-31 15:48:21 UTC

48,755

48,752

pg

Paul Graham's near-death experience

nickb

The fact that Viaweb happened to be at the mercy of its investors at that moment hardly meant it was worthless. In fact it generated lots of revenue for Yahoo. I believe roughly the same amount as Broadcast.com, which cost 100x as much.

null

0

10

2007-08-31 16:05:52 UTC

48,763

48,707

pg

Google Maps Nighttime

charzom

Having built something like this would help if you apply to YC. It doesn't take too much work, but shows you can make cool things.

null

0

8

2007-08-31 16:21:57 UTC

48,772

48,771

abstractbill

Eulisp, lisp dialect: lightweight and carefully designed like scheme, with object system like CL

nickb

Not that new... from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EuLisp"Language definition process first began in a meeting in 1985 in Paris and took a long time. The complete specification and a first implementation (interpreted-only) was available in 1990."Anyone care to speculate on why it didn't take off?

null

0

2

2007-08-31 16:32:58 UTC

48,784

48,739

nostrademons

How does karma work?

chmac

As far as I can tell, it's just [total submission points] + [total comment points]. Each vote is one point, each downvote is -1 point. And no, people with more karma do not have their votes weighted more heavily; my votes still count for 1 point like anyone elses. (There appears to be a karma threshold for downvoting comments, though.)

How does the karma and points system on this site work? I can't figure it out. Do people with more karma generate more points per vote? How are the points generated, I've seen some comments which are worth 17 points, where does that number come from?

0

4

2007-08-31 17:08:52 UTC

48,788

48,642

hello_moto

Rails vs. Django

kyro

kyro, why don't you do this instead:1) Pick a very easy tutorial for both of them 2) Do them 3) ChooseFramework will only get better each day so if today Rails deployment sucks, tomorrow it'll become better unless the growth is stagnant. Same case with Pylons or Django or the 100000000000000001 python frameworks out there.Now if you're looking for a job, Rails would be a better choice because the hype marketing has converted a lot of people (they drink the kool-aid straight from the hose).

Just curious, and I want to see which framework I should pursue more aggressively.So, how about pros/cons of each.

5

18

2007-08-31 17:11:36 UTC

48,791

48,718

PStamatiou

Got Arachnophobia? Here's Your Worst Nightmare

ajbatac

what is this doing on hacker news? I see no reference of spiders coding, juggling startup finance issues or learning how to be productive while not eating for days on end.

null

0

2

2007-08-31 17:20:27 UTC

48,793

48,770

palish

Aaron Swartz: Perfectionism (and his new startup, Jottit)

abstractbill

Like Artix, Chain would have failed in its current form no matter how smooth it was polished. It was very important that we failed fast so that we could focus on morphing it into something that works. You lose that with perfectionism.So you'd better be a Steve Jobs.

null

12

48

2007-08-31 17:22:36 UTC

48,794

48,770

nickb

Aaron Swartz: Perfectionism (and his new startup, Jottit)

abstractbill

I notice a lot of animosity towards PG in Aaron's writings...

null

6

48

2007-08-31 17:25:54 UTC

48,796

48,770

whacked_new

Aaron Swartz: Perfectionism (and his new startup, Jottit)

abstractbill

I have reservations about that name.

null

21

48

2007-08-31 17:26:26 UTC

48,801

48,770

far33d

Aaron Swartz: Perfectionism (and his new startup, Jottit)

abstractbill

The problem w/ perfectionism is that it's only perfect in the eyes of one person...

null

8

48

2007-08-31 17:36:14 UTC

48,803

48,770

zach

Aaron Swartz: Perfectionism (and his new startup, Jottit)

abstractbill

Yes, I'm coining a new term - "pefectionism." Don't know what it means, I'll let the audience decide.

null

10

48

2007-08-31 17:39:25 UTC

48,804

48,770

marketer

Aaron Swartz: Perfectionism (and his new startup, Jottit)

abstractbill

That open library project didn't last too long...

null

9

48

2007-08-31 17:40:37 UTC

48,806

48,752

zach

Paul Graham's near-death experience

nickb

I like how they have to add "a rich sum for the time." It's like "You kids out there getting $50M Series C's, understand that $50M was a lot of money back then!"

null

1

10

2007-08-31 17:44:05 UTC

48,810

48,671

palish

Cory Doctorow defends Scribd

phil

This is an excellent opportunity for Scribd to counterattack. I hope they're on the phone with Cory.

null

1

21

2007-08-31 17:50:34 UTC

48,812

48,752

palish

Paul Graham's near-death experience

nickb

"We suspect Paul Graham will not be very popular in Sunnyvale today."What's that even mean? Who is "we"? This post is sensationalist to the max.

null

2

10

2007-08-31 17:51:22 UTC

48,814

48,713

bharath

Enough with the Boston Start-up Inferiority Complex

byosko

In many ways, both Boston and Silicon Valley have a lot in common -- cities with character that attract likely startup founders, world class universities, a well developed VC community and so on. But they differ in a couple of ways (1) Boston is unbearably cold 6 months of the year (2) Silicon Valley has a more vibrant immigrant community. While (2) may not matter much in the case of Web related startups (for reasons that I cant really figure out, I have seen fewer immigrants gravitate towards founder positions in web based startups), the effect is more pronounced in the case of Enterprise startups. Every other enterprise startup in the Bay Area seems to have an immigrant as a co-founder -- often in the role of CTO or VP of Engg.

Boston is tied with San Jose in Q2 for total number of venture-backed IPOs.

1

15

2007-08-31 17:53:16 UTC

48,817

48,799

run4yourlives

Are taller people smarter?

luccastera

From the comments... >I went to law school. Everybody was short.Yup, pretty much confirms it! :-)

null

2

9

2007-08-31 18:00:57 UTC

48,819

48,752

run4yourlives

Paul Graham's near-death experience

nickb

Wow, that's a post with zero substance. I can't possibly vote this up.Out of all the great stuff in Paul's last essay to comment on, this is the best they could do?

null

3

10

2007-08-31 18:03:20 UTC

48,820

48,799

amichail

Are taller people smarter?

luccastera

I think this is related to the brain volume being larger for taller people. Another paper showed that larger brain volume results in smarter people.http://www.people.vcu.edu/~mamcdani/Big-Brained%20article.pd...

null

5

9

2007-08-31 18:03:28 UTC

48,822

48,816

dpapathanasiou

The Living Room of the Future, from 1979 (pic)

abstractbill

Just goes to show how difficult making predication about the future is: except for the domestic robot, none of those have been realized yet.

null

1

3

2007-08-31 18:04:41 UTC

48,824

48,799

epi0Bauqu

Are taller people smarter?

luccastera

Hmm...the average height at MIT is definitely significantly on the short side, even across all ethnic backgrounds.

null

4

9

2007-08-31 18:06:16 UTC

48,828

48,800

wozer

Troublesome manager.. what would you do?

PStamatiou

First talk with your manager. If necessary, talk to your manager's manager (or whoever has a say in it). Explain the situation. If possible, refuse to work on the "horrible mess". That's risky, but it's better than letting your name be associated with that project forever.

So I'm a senior at top 10 engineering university and since January I have been working as lead webdev on a large, sponsor/government-funded project. I've done everything from focus groups, usability studies, surveys and have been creating a top-notch site. I was away for two weeks in the time between summer semester's end and the beginning of fall semester and got an email from my manager saying essentially "hey, I've been working with someone else on the site". What was created from that was a complete bastardization of the design and was all new code. I had lots of PHP for general ease of dev and the new guy did all 50+ files in html.Fast-forward to yesterday, new guy won't be working on it anymore and my manager wants me to take over. I've looked at this guy's code and it's a horrible mess - I want nothing of it. Deadline is in about a week.Going back to my code is an equally large task as he had been adding other pages, content and "design features".What would you do? I'm sure I am not the only one that has had this problem.

4

8

2007-08-31 18:11:20 UTC

48,830

48,800

run4yourlives

Troublesome manager.. what would you do?

PStamatiou

1. What is your direct stake in the project? (tied to your grades? Large monetary investment?)2. What is your extended stake in the project (manager have lots of connections? Is this industry leading and highly visible?)3. What are the chances you will succeed if you start work again?Based on the answers to these three questions (which I know will be difficult to obtain) you should make one of the following choices:1. Politely refuse to work on the project, saying you've committed to other things and do not want to over-extend yourself.2. Bite the bullet and fix the project based either on you code or the current mess. (and shut up about things until you're done) Walk away once released.3. Perform some type of negotiations with the manager: (e.g. extend the deadline (all deadlines can be extended), limit the scope of the release, limit the expectations of you) and schedule a post-release evaluation of the project and your role in it.

So I'm a senior at top 10 engineering university and since January I have been working as lead webdev on a large, sponsor/government-funded project. I've done everything from focus groups, usability studies, surveys and have been creating a top-notch site. I was away for two weeks in the time between summer semester's end and the beginning of fall semester and got an email from my manager saying essentially "hey, I've been working with someone else on the site". What was created from that was a complete bastardization of the design and was all new code. I had lots of PHP for general ease of dev and the new guy did all 50+ files in html.Fast-forward to yesterday, new guy won't be working on it anymore and my manager wants me to take over. I've looked at this guy's code and it's a horrible mess - I want nothing of it. Deadline is in about a week.Going back to my code is an equally large task as he had been adding other pages, content and "design features".What would you do? I'm sure I am not the only one that has had this problem.

0

8

2007-08-31 18:13:03 UTC

48,836

48,770

dottertrotter

Aaron Swartz: Perfectionism (and his new startup, Jottit)

abstractbill

Personally I used to be like this. I would never launch anything, because nothing I did was ever good enough for me. However, recently I learned my lesson. I launched hackrtrackr with only one feature, and without and going back and rethinking what I had done. The result an insanely simple website that has taken off very well. Also by launching with only one feature and minimal code it allowed me to quickly add the features I received requests for, because I didn't have to wade through a bunch of lines.

null

2

48

2007-08-31 18:22:16 UTC

48,837

48,713

herdrick

Enough with the Boston Start-up Inferiority Complex

byosko

Is San Francisco included in the San Jose metro region? If not, then probably the entire upper half of the peninsula isn't included in the comparison. Looks like it is, though. That's weird.

Boston is tied with San Jose in Q2 for total number of venture-backed IPOs.

3

15

2007-08-31 18:23:14 UTC

48,843

48,816

pg

The Living Room of the Future, from 1979 (pic)

abstractbill

Interesting. Every one has happened, except that perennial tarpit, the robot serving drinks. Predictions about the future are driven by a mix of what we expect to happen and what we hope will happen. Domestic robots, flying cars, and apps that take natural language commands are dangerous to work on because predictions about them are driven mainly by hope.

null

0

3

2007-08-31 18:33:29 UTC

48,848

48,770

jey

Aaron Swartz: Perfectionism (and his new startup, Jottit)

abstractbill

http://www.lockergnome.com/nexus/windows/2007/02/07/jottit ?

null

17

48

2007-08-31 18:37:29 UTC

48,851

48,720

aston

Instant Word Search : Something I wrote for fun

kirubakaran

If you're actually into making this more awesome, you almost certainly want to put this together with some in-memory data structure. And that data structure should probably be a suffix tree/trie. Check it out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suffix_tree. You'd need to modify that to deal with having more than one word, but that's not too bad (you just lay the trees on top of each other).

null

0

2

2007-08-31 18:40:04 UTC

48,852

48,770

omouse

Aaron Swartz: Perfectionism (and his new startup, Jottit)

abstractbill

"There is something to this, of course. But I have a contrary proposal: users love perfectionism."Wrong. I would love to see more new features on reddit rather than waiting for them to re-write everything. The search function is still somewhat broken!There is even competition of sorts: http://redditmedia.com/ That site displays thumbnails for stories...why doesn't reddit.com have an extra section or option/setting for that? So many good things could be done if not for this perfectionism bullshit.Another good story: 37signals took a long time fixing Backpack and finally released a new version. Too late, I had already switched to Simple GTD. I don't get why they didn't incrementally improve things...I bet they've lost many more users due to their slowness.Perfectionism is paralyzing.

null

0

48

2007-08-31 18:40:08 UTC

48,856

48,798

muerdeme

Researchers aim to make Internet bandwidth a global currency

kashif

Didn't Enron have this idea before the shit hit the fan?

null

0

4

2007-08-31 18:44:31 UTC

48,857

48,770

champion

Aaron Swartz: Perfectionism (and his new startup, Jottit)

abstractbill

Funny, since Aaron had exactly the opposite strategy when he launched Infogami, blogging about launching a new feature everyday and taking a very incremental approach. I don't think that lasted very long though. Everyone is free to change their mind, of course...

null

7

48

2007-08-31 18:46:45 UTC

48,859

48,684

vegashacker

Korea's incubator, Litmus, looks familiar

tomh

The red flower graduation icon looks like it's dying. That's kind of funny.

null

1

4

2007-08-31 18:47:18 UTC

48,861

48,799

mynameishere

Are taller people smarter?

luccastera

Taller people are indeed smarter if you don't remove the malnourished from your sample. Useless information, one way or the other. It's sort of like...well, X race has a lower average IQ than Y race. As long as you're not shaping policy around the contrary, it doesn't matter at all.

null

1

9

2007-08-31 18:50:06 UTC

48,865

48,849

nostrademons

Cut the Fat to Get to Lean Productivity

danw

This completely misses the point about productivity. In my experience, the #1 reason why workers are only productive for 2/3 of the working day is they have no incentive to do otherwise. After all, you go home at the same time regardless of whether you finish your work quickly or not. You probably get paid the same (module a small % raise) regardless of whether you do good work or bad work.People who want to get lots done typically get lots done. They don't need to resort to productivity tips. And companies with incentive structures that reward hard work typically get it. Nucor consistently has some of the highest productivity in the steel industry - their compensation structure involves salaries that range in the $40K range, but bonus that can total up to $130K. Management consulting firms consistently elicit high effort from employees, because they don't have face time: once you finish your work, you can go home. Hedge fund managers never seem to goof off, because they get paid 20% of the profits, often amounting to billions of dollars. Startup founders work for incredibly long and focused periods of time, because they enjoy all the upside of their work.

null

0

1

2007-08-31 18:56:54 UTC

48,873

48,800

mynameishere

Troublesome manager.. what would you do?

PStamatiou

I can't imagine two weeks causing too much trouble. I've seen crap rewritten over and over on 6-month iterations that could make you weep.Just say the other guy's design is bad and you're going back to your own. If it's an "equally large task", obviously you're better off with a familiar code base. Suggest to the manager that he should not swap devs in and out of a project in time frames normally smaller than those used to ramp up new workers.

So I'm a senior at top 10 engineering university and since January I have been working as lead webdev on a large, sponsor/government-funded project. I've done everything from focus groups, usability studies, surveys and have been creating a top-notch site. I was away for two weeks in the time between summer semester's end and the beginning of fall semester and got an email from my manager saying essentially "hey, I've been working with someone else on the site". What was created from that was a complete bastardization of the design and was all new code. I had lots of PHP for general ease of dev and the new guy did all 50+ files in html.Fast-forward to yesterday, new guy won't be working on it anymore and my manager wants me to take over. I've looked at this guy's code and it's a horrible mess - I want nothing of it. Deadline is in about a week.Going back to my code is an equally large task as he had been adding other pages, content and "design features".What would you do? I'm sure I am not the only one that has had this problem.

2

8

2007-08-31 19:07:47 UTC

48,877

48,800

paul_reiners

Troublesome manager.. what would you do?

PStamatiou

I would ask for a lot more money to finish the job (a lot more) and say "take it or leave it". If he isn't willing to pay the extra money, I would just walk away.There's nothing to be gained from debating with a troublesome manager who doesn't understand programming. You would just be wasting your time.

So I'm a senior at top 10 engineering university and since January I have been working as lead webdev on a large, sponsor/government-funded project. I've done everything from focus groups, usability studies, surveys and have been creating a top-notch site. I was away for two weeks in the time between summer semester's end and the beginning of fall semester and got an email from my manager saying essentially "hey, I've been working with someone else on the site". What was created from that was a complete bastardization of the design and was all new code. I had lots of PHP for general ease of dev and the new guy did all 50+ files in html.Fast-forward to yesterday, new guy won't be working on it anymore and my manager wants me to take over. I've looked at this guy's code and it's a horrible mess - I want nothing of it. Deadline is in about a week.Going back to my code is an equally large task as he had been adding other pages, content and "design features".What would you do? I'm sure I am not the only one that has had this problem.

1

8

2007-08-31 19:12:54 UTC

48,878

48,792

brett

College Drinking Game Spurs Cottage Industry; Mr. Best's Backup Career

nickb

Where I come from (UCSB) we had a different take on the nomenclature. The game the article describes was called "Beirut", as the article notes. "Beer Pong", by contrast, was much closer to an actual game of ping pong, paddles and all, each player having a beer on the table that served as a target.

null

1

10

2007-08-31 19:13:19 UTC

48,882

48,770

oditogre

Aaron Swartz: Perfectionism (and his new startup, Jottit)

abstractbill

What's Jottit going to be, then?

null

19

48

2007-08-31 19:18:27 UTC

48,886

48,770

ecuzzillo

Aaron Swartz: Perfectionism (and his new startup, Jottit)

abstractbill

Watching this get abandoned will be enormously humorous.

null

5

48

2007-08-31 19:21:58 UTC

48,890

48,770

rms

Aaron Swartz: Perfectionism (and his new startup, Jottit)

abstractbill

http://beta.jottit.com/

null

3

48

2007-08-31 19:25:13 UTC

48,891

48,798

rms

Researchers aim to make Internet bandwidth a global currency

kashif

Internet bandwidth will make a terrible currency because historically the price of bandwidth decreases every year.A much better currency would be energy, water, or refined energy.

null

1

4

2007-08-31 19:26:53 UTC

48,893

48,799

gscott

Are taller people smarter?

luccastera

Napoleon was 8 or 9 feet tall after he got onto his horse. So it is about height! Or maybe drive & passion are more important... oh well so confused.

null

3

9

2007-08-31 19:31:20 UTC

48,894

48,684

SwellJoe

Korea's incubator, Litmus, looks familiar

tomh

Looks like a complicated home pregnancy test.

null

0

4

2007-08-31 19:31:55 UTC

48,895

48,876

ivankirigin

Python 3000 Alpha 1 Released

mattculbreth

I liked this overview by Guido on Python 3000. I like the changes http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=208549

null

0

26

2007-08-31 19:33:23 UTC

48,917

48,898

SwellJoe

Who uses a CMS to manage their sites?

bmaier

Our website started on OpenACS, and then moved to Joomla. I've also built a large website with Zope/Plone.All of them suck so bad they make me want to kick someone.If I were starting today, I'd probably choose Drupal, but I'm sure I'd live to regret that as well. The smart money is probably on picking a "good enough" implementation of all of the individual features you need, and then make them all share session, and then write a custom login and user management page or two. You shouldn't imagine that any of them is a cohesive set of tools with a standardized codebase using a common set of functions.That's pretty much what our Joomla site ended up being, only with the added pain of having to manage all of the content through Joomla (which is atrocious...give me flat files over that any day). So, I've spent months learning this big pile of code only to end up using it as a glorified session and authentication handler--the more I use the "native" Joomla tools, the less I like them. And it forces horrible URLs onto you unless you build a custom URL mapper for every application and use one of the SEF tools.Admittedly, I'm not a fan of PHP, and so my discomfort is increased by working in a language that makes me feel a little ill (no first class functions? how does that even happen in a modern language?)...but nonetheless, the more work I do with websites like this, the more I think content management systems are a bad idea unless you're using them for the very, very, very specific set of problems the developer first set out to solve (I can't figure out what that is for Joomla, since it's so painful to use for just about anything, including managing content, but I'm sure there's a core of useful functionality in there that the project was first started to provide).I'm going to try Drupal for a community site I'm planning for our Open Source tools, but I may end up giving up on that. It's just hard to know how painful things are going to be until you have users banging on it, and you have to dig deep to address problems they find. It wasn't until we'd actually launched our new site that all of the bugs in Joomla, Fireboard, Flyspray (mainly the bridge), VirtueMart, and other components came to light. Many still remain...If I knock out one bug a week, I'm pretty happy (the system is big, and the bugs run deep). Note also, that all of those apps have their own stylesheets and templates--you aren't even getting cohesive styling, unless you build the templates to match for every single application.My ideal would be if every application out there had a very simple authentication callback interface, so you could tell it to get the session state from anywhere (maybe OpenID will make this a reality). It'd make it so easy to build a full-featured website--and no big over-arching framework needed. You could even use different languages for your apps...

Anyone run an open source cms to manage their startup's site? What do you guys use? Drupal? Joomla? something else? any huge downsides to running a cms and not going from scratch?

0

2

2007-08-31 19:53:14 UTC

48,920

48,752

nmeyer

Paul Graham's near-death experience

nickb

One of the dumbest posts I've ever seen on valleywag.

null

5

10

2007-08-31 19:55:48 UTC

48,921

48,770

gscott

Aaron Swartz: Perfectionism (and his new startup, Jottit)

abstractbill

A previous company I worked for split in two, one half took on an online training site project and my half built an online website development system. The half that did the training site all hated me because I code by the seat of my pants, sometimes put out work that needed a tweak or two and I wasn't there because I was just up for 24 hours writing it. They took 6 months designing and mapping out there project, they took another 6 months to build it and by the time they were done they had 3 months of money left to make it successful and thus went out of business while my side is still going strong 6 years later. I don't exactly advocate treating users like beta testers, but if you can`t find any more errors put it out, fix anything you didn't find that gets reported by the users, then move on.

null

1

48

2007-08-31 19:56:31 UTC

48,924

48,770

ph0rque

Aaron Swartz: Perfectionism (and his new startup, Jottit)

abstractbill

hmm... how about a compromise: release early, release often, keep things as simple as possible, but get those details perfect.

null

18

48

2007-08-31 20:01:01 UTC

48,925

48,901

procrastitron

What is a Hacker?

nickb

The way I look at it now is that a hacker is the dual of an engineer.An engineer first makes sure that something is correct, then tries to build it. A hacker first builds something, then tries to make sure it is correct.

null

0

8

2007-08-31 20:01:09 UTC

48,929

48,770

philh

Aaron Swartz: Perfectionism (and his new startup, Jottit)

abstractbill

What's the difference between "adding a feature" and "improving the site"?I always took them to be the same thing. In that sense, you're either adding a feature or you're stagnating. (Or, I suppose, going backwards.)

null

13

48

2007-08-31 20:05:28 UTC

48,930

48,876

mattculbreth

Python 3000 Alpha 1 Released

mattculbreth

The print(x) instead of print x thing is going to kill me in interactive sessions. I can feel it now. It's those little things that get ingrained in your daily work that are hard to break.

null

2

26

2007-08-31 20:05:36 UTC

48,931

48,752

rms

Paul Graham's near-death experience

nickb

I think they're posting from Burning Man, so I would blame this nonsensical post on the drugs.

null

4

10

2007-08-31 20:06:07 UTC

48,936

48,910

onceageek

Is it OK to copy terms of service/privacy policy from another site?

picnichouse

I don't see any issue with copying the terms. Most of all End-user agreements and service policy are similar. Pay attention to substituting your company's name :)

What do you think? I see it done all over the place...

3

19

2007-08-31 20:12:04 UTC

48,938

48,910

weebro

Is it OK to copy terms of service/privacy policy from another site?

picnichouse

What is your alternative; get a lawyer to draw them up? Where do you think they get them from? Only 10% of legal documents are drawn up from scratch. Lawyers have a service called Westlaw. This service allows them to copy entire briefs/submissions made to the court by a lawyer in the past. They don't even need to come up with what to say in court, they just copy the person who was successful in the past. I spent 18 months in a NY law firm cutting and pasting.IF IT AIN'T BROKE.....My advice, take it from many websites, piece together the bits you want and use examples from other sites for different ways of saying the same thing. Change its wording slightly and put the sentences back to front sometimes. If it's altered, not in the same format and slightly different it's ok.

What do you think? I see it done all over the place...

0

19

2007-08-31 20:15:33 UTC

48,942

48,766

fallintothis

Simply Scheme (now a free ebook from UC Berkeley)

nickb

Am I missing something, or are the only "free" parts the sectional introductions? I can't seem to get to the actual chapters...or I'm being really slow.

null

0

4

2007-08-31 20:27:22 UTC

48,950

48,910

jey

Is it OK to copy terms of service/privacy policy from another site?

picnichouse

That sounds like copyright violation. See if you can find a legit free source instead.

What do you think? I see it done all over the place...

4

19

2007-08-31 20:38:48 UTC

48,951

48,916

arasakik

Service Oriented Architecture is your Ticket to Hell

nickb

While the article makes some interesting points about the perceived flaws of SOA, I'm not sure that I agree that they are specific to SOA itself. Perhaps some of them only apply depending on the context of the situation. His first point with respect to the up-front design needed for service interfaces - how is this any different when creating any public API that other services will consume? This is a challenge for any public interface. If the interface needs to change, mark the relevant sections as deprecated.The second point with respect to strange dependencies - this could certainly be a problem with disparate services spread across many organizations. Again, I'm not certain that this issue is specific to SOA - it sounds like the author is pointing out that finding relevant documentation about service dependencies is the flaw here. Again, I'd like to point out that this is a challenge for any project calling on other code - documentation could be distributed across many different open source libraries, etc.SOA definitely has its benefits. Companies such as Amazon.com have scaled successfully because of their Service Oriented Architecture, before it became a buzzword. The author is correct, though, in stating that a lot of the buzz around SOA is bullshit. This is typical of any method/solution that receives a lot of hype. For example: http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/09/good-agile-bad-agile...

null

1

9

2007-08-31 20:40:25 UTC

48,955

48,910

pc

Is it OK to copy terms of service/privacy policy from another site?

picnichouse

Just steal some free (= Creative Commons licensed) documents: http://wordpress.com/tos/ http://automattic.com/privacy/

What do you think? I see it done all over the place...

2

19

2007-08-31 20:48:26 UTC

48,957

48,876

amichail

Python 3000 Alpha 1 Released

mattculbreth

Why is Python still interesting? Just use Scala.

null

7

26

2007-08-31 20:49:48 UTC

48,959

48,944

vlad

If you were to write Wikipedia today...

ph0rque

Wikipedia evolved over time, as users thought it was a cool idea. Nobody writes a complete project like they might write a function for an assignment because most "functions" of the type of converting one lossless image to another lossless format, or capitalizing all the letters in a string, have already been written for you.You can't write something that happened at a certain time and place and expect it to fair better. But, if you want to write something in September of 2007, pick and language that allows you to prototype and iterate your features quickly.

If you were to write Wikipedia today using available languages and frameworks, what language/framework would you use? And why?

1

3

2007-08-31 20:51:52 UTC

48,960

48,910

rokhayakebe

Is it OK to copy terms of service/privacy policy from another site?

picnichouse

f??k yeah it is.

What do you think? I see it done all over the place...

11

19

2007-08-31 20:57:26 UTC

48,967

48,876

davidw

Python 3000 Alpha 1 Released

mattculbreth

> We're switching to a model known from Java: (immutable) text strings are Unicode, and binary data is represented by a separate mutable "bytes" data type.Tcl had that something like 5 years ago. Of course, that's one of the reasons it's slower...

null

4

26

2007-08-31 21:11:39 UTC

48,970

48,906

palish

Apple slaps back at NBC in iTunes spat (Apple won't sell NBC shows)

nickb

Anyone know why Universal is being so stubborn? Even Jobs can't work his magic on them.

null

2

4

2007-08-31 21:16:35 UTC

48,972

48,294

knewjax

How Not to Die

subhash

Nice essay. A nice moral booster.

null

45

169

2007-08-31 21:23:02 UTC

48,976

48,876

mattculbreth

Python 3000 Alpha 1 Released

mattculbreth

I guess this will cause ANOTHER Reddit rewrite.

null

3

26

2007-08-31 21:26:19 UTC

48,978

48,800

jey

Troublesome manager.. what would you do?

PStamatiou

Throw away his two weeks of work, and negotiate the deadline. It's not your fault that your boss went out and hired someone entirely incompetent without even consulting you.If the deadline is a must, just work with the awful crap he has to get to the deadline, and scrap the crap immediately after the deadline.

So I'm a senior at top 10 engineering university and since January I have been working as lead webdev on a large, sponsor/government-funded project. I've done everything from focus groups, usability studies, surveys and have been creating a top-notch site. I was away for two weeks in the time between summer semester's end and the beginning of fall semester and got an email from my manager saying essentially "hey, I've been working with someone else on the site". What was created from that was a complete bastardization of the design and was all new code. I had lots of PHP for general ease of dev and the new guy did all 50+ files in html.Fast-forward to yesterday, new guy won't be working on it anymore and my manager wants me to take over. I've looked at this guy's code and it's a horrible mess - I want nothing of it. Deadline is in about a week.Going back to my code is an equally large task as he had been adding other pages, content and "design features".What would you do? I'm sure I am not the only one that has had this problem.

3

8

2007-08-31 21:27:04 UTC

48,979

48,770

eusman

Aaron Swartz: Perfectionism (and his new startup, Jottit)

abstractbill

looks like so 1999. come on this is 2007. and the name is like a hit train got over it ...g(j)ot it?

null

20

48

2007-08-31 21:28:50 UTC

48,980

48,906

altay

Apple slaps back at NBC in iTunes spat (Apple won't sell NBC shows)

nickb

I'm starting to suspect that both these companies are run by a bunch of 12-year-olds.

null

3

4

2007-08-31 21:29:04 UTC

48,982

48,944

ks

If you were to write Wikipedia today...

ph0rque

I would probably make Wikipedia a front end to a Subversion repository. Then I would get all the data handling for free.I would of course add caching, to limit the number of reads to the Subversion server.

If you were to write Wikipedia today using available languages and frameworks, what language/framework would you use? And why?

0

3

2007-08-31 21:29:20 UTC