skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'll go fulltime when I need to. Right now I think it's healthy to not be cooped up at home all the time. It also gives me an outlet for working on other things so I don't get a numbed-brain from staring at the same stuff every day.

Although I've been live for two weeks and the money has been pretty good! We'll see if it's sustainable.
This is in the same genre of something that a couple of old former oil field managers said to me once (after they had left the oil and gas industry to start a company doing water table analysis for municipal water supplies):

"You're going to bust your ass no matter what. You might as well bust your ass for $10 million instead of $10 thousand."
Scouta tops the Australian Startups Carnival
I've used Sphinx in one of the PHP/MySQL projects, and its much faster than any other (free/open) data indexing platform I've used. Althought configuring Sphinx and getting it to run takes a bit of an effort, but its worth it.
Facebook apps are web 0.5, a.k.a. AOL, a.k.a. walled gardens that won't survive against real open communities. (I'm half kidding.)
Olin Shivers: Anatomy of a Loop (first few minutes have amusing anecdotes)
It is possible for one or more good programmers to be managed by a better programmer. However, there are two disadvantages to this technique. Firstly, it borders on micro-management and it would take a large number of sub-ordinates to make the process worthwhile. Secondly, there's a large number of small business decisions that get made when you're programming. If you're happy with the latter then you may as well throw dice to decide your business model.
startups are like everything else. you have to do a risk/benefit analysis. If a person feels they are getting enough (salary + benefit + job security) from being employed what is the point in creating a startup?
startups have their own benefits. working for yourself, the potential for a huge payoff. But you have to decide if it's worth the risk. On this site, and in the silicon valley in general, creating a startup is considered a good thing regardless of the individual circumstances.

With the salaries as they are in california, people in high-demand salaried positions don't need a startup to get rich. all you need to do is forgo rampant consumerism and keeping up with the joneses and you'll be a millionaire in about 20 years with a decent investment strategy.

In the meantime there is no shortage of time for side projects, and you get the added bonus of not having to stress about something you truly enjoy doing because you aren't doing it as your main source of income.

I'm not anti-startup, but working for yourself isn't a universal good.
old fashioned play involved mimicing what the children saw in the adult world on a much simpler level. What do you do when you want to understand something? You make a simplistic model of it and go from there.
Are the children of today not doing this and thus not building an understanding of the world? Is WoW and MySpace the same thing?
Sounds a lot like the reasons I use OS X (except the free as in beer or speech part)
Ask YC: What's The Oddest Thing On Your Colleagues Desks?
Us geeks have unusual interests, spend long hours in the office and have distinct ways of expressing ourselves. Therefore, it is fairly common for us to have models of spaceships or anime characters on their desks. However, this is quite tame. I'm sure you've met people with far stranger stuff on their desks.
If the RIA you are developing solves a real problem efficiently in a way that appeals to end user, it will take off.

But the adoption rate of a RIA depends a lot on the platform you use for development.
Gmail is a succesful RIA and it uses JavaScript and Flash.
The advantage of sticking on to JavaScript/Flash over Sliverlight is that, they are already very popular. If efficiently done JavaScript and Flash can reside side by side delivering a great user experience.
So for the time being,because of Silverlight's low adoption rate,a SilverLight only product may not be a great idea.

Regarding Adobe Flex, Flex its nothing more than another development tool for churning out swf files.The end product is plain old Flash. Adobe Flex allows rapid flash development for those unfamiliar with Flash CS3 (CS3's timeline concept doesn't appeal to most developers). Thanks to Adobe's marketing efforts,most people mistakingly think Flex is something RIA exclusive,while its just a development environment that churns out Flash.

SilverLight does solve a lot of headache and reduce learning curve for the traditional .NET developer when it comes to building RIAs.But from a enduser's perspective, it doesn't really bring in any specific advantage. Anything that can be done in SilverLight can be done using Flash or a combination of Flash and JavaScript. I really dont see any enduser specific advantage for using SilverLight, as it is now. Why force users to install new plugins , when the existing infrastructure(JavaScript and flash) can deliver the same user experience?

Adobe AIR is a way to convert your existing Javascript/flash/html based RIA to a desktop app. But this will require the end user to install AIR runtime first(approx 11 MB download). Compared to Mozilla Prism, Adobe AIR is super advanced in the kind of desktop integration it can impart to your web based RIA.A js/flash RIA can leverage on AIR without any tweaks.

In short, use Javascript/HTML as much as possible. Flash when you need to integrate rich media (or functionalities that require realtime user interaction like Chat ) to your js .I wont recommend Silverlight .
Viaweb nostalgia on bugbear.com
Viaweb was pg's startup that was bought by Yahoo. Based on the info page, this site was maintained by pg, but seems to not have been touched in years.
yeah instead of letting a few businesses fail let the whole economy take a stab in the gut. great idea.

these people got themselves into this with the same retarded thing humans always do: assume things will stay the same.
in this case the derivatives they were using as securities had a blip because foreign investors got cold feet. guess what? when you over leverage your securities and those securities dip it has a disproportionate impact!
"If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea." - Antoine de Saint-Exupery (from http://workhappy.net)
From the article: Thou shalt steer clear of the private use area.

Due to the necessity of fonts requiring code points, the private use area is becoming a de facto fictional language area: http://www.evertype.com/standards/csur/index.html
MIT's Siftables let you juggle your data... for real
You can solve the html rendering issue to some extend by using div overlays and flash-js-integration kit.
$ web --version

3.4alpha

You're a bit behind...
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=134703 ?
Researchers create sour milk alarm
fantastic quote: "We are programmed for scarcity and can't dial back when something is abundant."
VoIP Users Weekly Online Conference
Summary: Your Flash website sucks because it's a Flash website.
I guess it would depend on how you would define that "idea". Is it a generally good idea without any details? (i.e. create a better search engine then Google) It's a good idea but worthless if you don't have the details and any good algorithms behind it. Another point is that ideas develop from previous thoughts and ideas. there is metamorphism about them. And if you also add natural selection to it, for example to your auction site idea, then it could make it work better. but then of course, sometimes it is the unpopular idea that really works and worth something not what gets the most votes. Certainly true when you look at science's history. Yet another important part of an idea is its timing. many examples for this... but just to give one, sending dvd rentals by mail (Netflix) Good for now but perhaps will be over soon and sound ridiculous when more people get high speed internet and can stream.

anyway there are lots of things to conceder about an idea before declaring it worthless or not. And I would definitely not narrow it down to idea vs. execution.
'Do it Fu*king Now'

[http://seoblackhat.com/2007/01/29/do-it-fucking-now/]
"Go the extra mile. It's never crowded."
I have the cpu of my first pc. Intel 50mhz dx2
The dx2 if you remember was for having a 2 math co-proccessors I paid an extra $100 more for that feature.
Joel's list is indeed awesome. I think nearly every book I would recommend is already on it.
so Owen, any chance you'd build my app for 30/buck an hour now? hehe, did they overpaid you... When digg sells your going to be stinking rich, and I guess Kevin pays you a bit more now days.

It just goes to show that by working for next to nothing but on a good idea / team, you can not only change the world but rule it too.
No one can deny that there is a lot of truth in what you write. If battery life is not among the critical requirements, any laptop will do the job.

According to my experience the power management of linux is one of the severe shortcomings of that os (although I have tried only suse, scientific linux and fedora).
One guy has taped to his desk a piece of paper labeled "Stress Relief System". In the center of said paper is a large circle. Within said circle is the following bit of text:

"Bang Head Here".
No way are you doomed. I don't remember who it was, but a wise person on this forum posted the phrase "there is no one path" in response to another post like this.

However you may have to play to your strengths... if your Web application is doing something deeply technical, and you need deep knowledge of algorithms/data structures to make critical feature-level decisions, you're probably at a disadvantage. But if your product isn't too algorithmically flavored, and a lot of the work involves coming up with the right features for an end-user application (business software, greeting card maker, productivity suite, etc.), you can definitely kick some ass, if you have great knowledge of your target users.

Last thought: make sure you completely trust your dev team, or do a thorough job with verifying the quality of their code.
hacker news,
techcrunch
myplaylist.biz
I'm a student and feel obligated to finish my undergrad degree, although if my startup takes off, I'll have no qualms about putting it on hold.

On the other hand, I have a couple of ideas that will be coming out in the next five years, and if I could get the right team and funding together, I would drop everything in a heart beat.
i've read the guidelines.

edit: heh, the thing i was replying to was removed by an edit
Open Source Growing At an Exponential Rate
Pretty sweet idea. This startup keeps finding innovative, non-copyright-infringing ways to make money off of music on the web.
Put me into the "trapped in day job for pay and benefits" category. I've got two small kids now, and I've got to think of them first. I guess that means I'm in categories #1 and #2. Perhaps a little bit of #5, "waiting for that killer idea." If my idea was killer enough, maybe I would be less afraid of looking for investors.

I don't want to turn this into a political discussion (it's one of the reasons I don't go to reddit anymore), but it does make you wonder how many more businesses could get off the ground if we had government-provided healthcare, and people didn't feel stuck at their day-jobs for the health insurance. :/
You cannot hide two things:
1. Talent
2. Itching
Plucene is slow as hell.

You better use Kinoseach, which also uses the same index format as lucene.

Some benchmarks are on this site : http://marvinhumphrey.com/kinosearch/benchmarks.html
Hm, is it good news that the Common Lisp Directory is basically only an experiment?
Programming Poker AI
"don't really make anything new possible" - hardly.

Flex allows easy integration of UI concepts like drag-n-drop, neat animations with low cpu usage, integration of streaming media, lowered response times thanks to model caching on the client... and the ease of development should NOT be discounted... Users tend to like an application that exists more than one that doesn't. Ease and speed of development are a huge bonus.

As for the "invonvenience" aspect, interestingly, I've found that the only people who resent Flash in some way are all geeks. The rest of the world is blithely ignorant as to the difference until you explain it to them, and even then they don't care. So, if your primary market is over-opinionated and out-of-date geeks (rather than the more forward thinking ones who are actively writing or learning Flex by now), then definitely don't use Flex.

If, on the other hand, you plan to target the rest of the world, Flex seems like a good bet!

PS: don't use Flex for writing your blog or news site! RIAs are for applications (gmail, gdocs, rescuetime, basecamp), not pure content sites (blogs, slashdot, reddit, NYTimes..).
a better CSS that highlights the person name in the thread.

it's such a pain to follow a conversation when you must scan a sentence like "7 points by vikas5678 11 days ago" to know who is talking.
Being good at execution counts much more than being a good programmer.

There are examples of this everywhere, Amazon, Ebay, Digg, etc.
You're not wrong. The real cost of things isn't so related to your bank balance, it's more relative to your current needs.
Craigslist cleared on discrimination claims
I have to disagree. I think you misunderstand what exactly an 'RIA' is. It's an application. From the ground up, and I can only speak on my experience with Flex/Flash, these are applications. Google doesn't index Microsoft Office binaries, why should it index text within any other application?

Additionally, right within the Flex dev environment there is an option to publish the source so a user can view it. Adobe is cool enough to automate this task where the end result is LiveDocs style documentation for your app. This is a decision left to the developer, not the underlying architecture of the shell it is running in such as AJAX/CSS/HTML within a browser which don't give developers a choice.

Lastly, do you actually think that Zoho(or any other AJAX/CSS/HTML application) will succeed or fail because one can view source? The users that matter just don't care.
I never said you didn't :)
The Flex SDK is free.
The Zen of GUI Programming
http://us.st11.yimg.com/us.st.yimg.com/I/bugbear_1976_452321...

Hey Trevor, good to see you. It's been a while.
Agreed. And from the above...

"But they seem just like a convenience to developers and an inconvenience to many users, and don't really make anything new possible."

Not acknowledging your presumption that it's an inconvenience to users, the above could essentially be said about any AJAX/Javascript framework too.
This might be only tangentially related, but I dig "How To Be Rich" by J. Paul Getty. He talks a lot about how he built Getty Oil, and about what's important in business and in life.
No, I don't like crashes and stuff. Thing is, Linux doesn't really crash anymore. And especially with Ubuntu, it does most things exactly right, no superfluous crap that just ends up getting in the way. For example, no spyware, because the apps I use are not commercial. That is why I use it.
Speed Up Your System With Preload On Fedora 8
you can use http://www.searchyc.com/

It helps when you're looking for stuff.
Has anyone compare Lucene to Xapian? I have never tried Lucene, but have been very happy with Xapian.

http://xapian.org/
Is this the end of the laptop?
Don't be afraid to try something new. Remember that a lone amateur built the ark and a large group of professionals built the Titanic.
Steven Levy is great, I would add his Crypto book as well.
I think news.yc needs a search.

Heres some we added 3 days ago :p

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=135185
But sometimes the GUI implements part (or just possible all) of the functionality. A clever GUI design can simplify a complex user operation to the point where the "back end" is left to just read and write data.

It's not all about writing API's although (to be fair) this post makes some valid points.
google, Microsoft etc :p
The future is parallel - start with string searches on multiple cores
I left the company in October. Still hoping for "stinking rich." I'd certainly be open to building your app, but I'd probably want some specific things in writing this time around.
i can has invitecodzzz?
Ask YC: what's the best way to model a threaded comment system like YC?
I'was thinking that maybe the best way would be use some king of nested set, but all the structures that i know are faster for reading purposes. And the tree here changes very often here, because voting changes it's structure.

Any idea?

This theory does not apply very well to a system like this (http://dev.mysql.com/tech-resources/articles/hierarchical-data.html)
I also put my office right next to the developer room, so I'm in on all the day-to-day issues too. Sales on the left, development on the right.
I think there will be other ways to distribute the app than the itunes app store. You have access to the users contacts, so with permission you can send the others an email/sms containing a request for the app. Similar to
facebook, myspace or twitter. You don't really need iTunes except for hosting the app for download.
started my own solo concompany doing business intelligence work (e.g. predictive modeling). current contract takes about 45 hrs per week and I need to work extra to getit's funny. I left the corporate world in August to become a business intelligence consultant (e.g. predictive modeling). I spend 40+ hours/week at my current client and looking to line up future work. yet, i don't consider this to be my startup (much to my wife's chagrin)

other reasons for not working on the start-up full time is that I'm not it will make money, I question my experience, and I am having trouble finding people to partner that have the skills needed including the passion and mindset to work hard and question things, including myself
it's funny. I left the corporate world in August to start my own biz as a solo business intelligence consultant (e.g. predictive modeling). I spend 40+ hours/week at my current client and looking to line up future work. yet, i don't consider this to be my startup (much to my wife's chagrin)

other reasons for not working on the start-up full time is that I'm not it will make money, I question my experience, and I am having trouble finding people to partner that have the skills needed including the passion and mindset to work hard and question things, including myself
I have a book left over from my b-school days that I often dip back into. It's called "The Entrepreneurial Venture" and it's sort of like "Founders at Work" if that had been written by Harvard Business School professors.

http://www.amazon.com/Entrepreneurial-Venture-Practice-Manag...

I know that in this group it probably provides an alternative perspective.
google: books site:http://news.ycombinator.com
for me, it would be number 2. I cant afford to lose the salary. Here in the Philippines, there are no YCombinators or Launchboxes (or i don't know one :P)... if there was funding, i would drop everything in a heartbeat and concentrate to work on my big "idea"... for now, this big-"idea" stays on the extra hours at home and on weekends...

sometimes i wish that people in the US would fund startups here in the philippines. 1USD == 40Pesos. the funding would go a long way here. and in case the startup succeeds, labor is dirt cheap here - people speak english and they have skills.
Is Amazon S3 pricing the risk of catastrophic data loss?
here, techmeme, nytimes. (money.cnn.com would be next).
Every single piece of MFC code I've had to maintain, both at my previous job and now during my occasional consulting work, has suffered from this problem really really badly. There is no excuse to mix presentation with logic. As far as I can tell, MVC is one of those extremely rare design patterns that isn't some overhyped OO klutz, and really is worth it.

The article itself is so-so.
How do you even accurately identify technical talent if you don't have any?
The naïve approach is to give comments a parent (the reverse relationship gives you its children), and a boolean specifying whether it's a "front page" post. When selecting, order by votes. When rendering, do a depth-first search.

Is there any reason why that won't work?
Jacob Nielsen agrees with you: "Write articles not blog postings" -- http://www.useit.com/alertbox/articles-not-blogs.html
We're like _____ for _______. (comparison quote that almost guarantees failure)
It depends upon how technical what you are planning to do is.
New e-greeting card company? You might be OK. Scalable distributed computing utility? My moneys on fail.
Hacker News, Digg, Techcrunch
Thanks - I could watch other streams on justin.tv, but never this ad (tried several times throughout the day).
It's a little more complicated.

When you store the tree on the DBMS, you have some algorithtms to do it well. For Example, the Nested Set (check the link up).

In that algorithm, the nodes are stored in a hierarchy that does not have any information about the votes.

So, you have a perfect tree, but with the first vote, you must update all the structure to reflect the new order of the child.

Nested set is great for speed reading, but not for writing often.

Sorry if I'm not very clear.

I was testing rails plugins : acts_as_nested_set and acts_as_better_nested and all have the same problem.
Not a problem anymore with pervasive wi-fi. Go to the library or something and sniff away. Or, get fancy and use Ettercap.
Do you have references for "nothing even approaches"? Specifically compared to Sphinx? The only comparisons I've found are showing sphinx coming ahead in many indexing/search cases (if only slightly). See my other comment on this thread with links to benchmarks where sphinx clearly "comes close". We did a good bit of research on this, so it does feel odd that you'd say "nothing even approaches".

It was also ridiculously easy to get Sphinx up and going. Lucene is a killer engine, no doubt, but Sphinx's ROI alone won us over.
Ask YC: What do you use to stress test your app/db?
I am particularly interested in making database read/write requests through the web app.

My app is in Python(Pylons), the datastore is an ODBMS based on ZopeDB, server and client(me) are running Linux.
Original Star Treks online
Ask News.YC: Is there anybody here who uses sIFR and is it at all practical?
It is explained in detail here:

http://wiki.novemberborn.net/sifr/

http://www.mikeindustries.com/sifr

I've been thinking of using it as the main font and then having the default CSS-based font kick in in case javascript/flash is not available.

Anybody currently using it themselves?
Thoughts: 1) it's not relational data; is a database necessarily the right place for you to store it?

2) If you do decide to use the database, you can increase the write speed of the nested sets model by leaving large gaps between the left and right values.

That is, if the single child of the root node has left and right values of 0 and 1000, and you insert another child, you give it left and right of 1000 and 2000, and update the parent.

Then you'll only have to renumber if you get a wicked long thread.
Gates On Promoting Innovation
What I’ve Learned From Programming In Lisp
More thoughts please on a system with both many reads and many writes and an ever-changing order (i.e., sorted by dynamic rankings instead of "time posted," a constant)!
Yes. Your startup doesn't _have_ to be in tech. We have two founders, me (tech, business, sales), and kasey (graphic designer (UX), marketer, sales, evangelism, business, etc) And that's just how it works us, and we're in tech.
ab is a quick and dirty way: http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/programs/ab.html

You can send it particular URLs that do your desired DB read/write requests.

For more in depth testing, I've heard HttpUnit is good (http://httpunit.sourceforge.net/), though I don't have much experience with it.
Flickr adding video.  really.
Fruit theme company? Wonder who that could be? :)