skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
2hrs/day * 2 ppl for 2 months == http://unripped.com (OpenID-based file storage and sharing)

The application works well and we hope to break free of part-time mode this summer. Opportunities for improving our product and exposure are limitless, so I guess that means the time we can/should spend on it is also limitless. ;p

fp's comment is right on: "The limiting factor in startups does not seem to be time: it's attention."
Devin the Dude, and/or a Pandora channel seeded similarly.
I would be interested in going, but will be there the 18th-20th.
Hah, yah I asked this Q last week and somebody told me it had been asked just a few days earlier...

Nevertheless, I was pointed towards Magnet whose album I have since purchased and now recommend to you.

I like the YC community because you don't get flamed for "noob-ish" activities, but you do get informed of them.
Thats correct, you can save your state just before a Service is killed. The onDestroy() method is always called by the OS first. And Android will automatically try to restart your Service, when resources are sufficiently available again.

I also prefer Android approach, even if theoretical performance might be lower not being native.
Do you have examples of good articles that weren't noticed?
A Python dictionary is a hashtable structure. It's kind of perverse to iterate over the keys to find the value when you can just do the hash lookup directly.

A PHP array() is also a hashtable structure. The PHP equivalent of the described code would be to do a foreach() over the array rather than doing an array[key] lookup.
Less useful but related idea: twitterfight. When two people send a bunch of direct messages to one another, that suggests a potential fight. So one day I hacked together a yahoo! pipe to highlight twitter battles. The trouble was that polite conversations kept getting through my filters. Short of manually cleansing the data, I concluded there was no utility. Smart work, Ben, on fixing the larger problem of twitter threading.
then where would all the intellectually curious, web 2.0 hackers go for their news?!?!
Ask YC: Startup healthcare and dental?
I'm only 24 and (thankfully) still covered under my parents' healthcare and dental until I'm 25. I can’t say the same for my two partners who are without coverage at the moment. That being said, it's time that we start looking into healthcare and dental for our startup as and I was wondering if anyone out there in the YC community had any thoughts on the matter? Does anyone know any good small business healthcare/dental services that are affordable? Is it a waste of money? Should we not be worried and go without coverage? Any thoughts would be appreciated.
25 Ago 2003: Rackspace launches "hacker-proof" anti-DDoS system. Issues self-congratulatory press release.

26-28 Ago 2003: Most of Rackspace offline due to hackers taking them up on their challenge.

:( To be fair, they did some hand-holding afterwards but we had already moved out.
I'm in if I get in to SuS; I suggest a meet somewhere with lots of whiteboards :)
calling it a clone is misleading. exciting since personally i'd like to see some more VC action in the Pacific NW
I think cyclomatic complexity might be what he's looking for.
Compare and contrast with: "To raise your voice is to confess you have run out of arguments."
Before I vote more I need a "this belongs here" vote that is different from my "this is good enough that I might want to find it in my 'saved' list" vote. My saved list is already unwieldy as is, so I don't want to start voting more using the current system.

An adequate solution would be a way to prune items from my saved list without undoing my vote.
How about Saturday night the 19th (after Startup school) in SF?. Our office (with wifi and a large conference room) @ 240 2nd street can hold about 35-40 comfortably.
No.

And your proposal baffles me. The term "Hacker News" is just a text descriptor. It appears no where in the URL of the site or stories. Renaming it would both be pointless and inaccurate, as the not every story is about Web2.0.

Right now, Web 2.0 might tend to be the dominant underlying topic, because Web 2.0 is the dominant outlet for most hackers to practice their craft. Over time, you should expect this to change to roughly reflect the state of current hacker primary employment paths.

10 Years ago, your text might have read `Should "Hacker News" be renamed to "Telecom and Networking News" so that the "Hacker News" moniker can be freed up to be used by a site that provides news of interest to hackers and the intellectually curious in general?'

The "Hacker News" moniker does not need to be freed up. If you have an idea that seems to be more "Hacker News" than "Hacker News", go build it and draw and audience and trounce this site. That's the beauty of Web 2.0 ;)
I just purchased "TRANCE" on itunes ... pretty good so far.
Mozilla says Firefox 3 ready for prime-time
My experience indicates the ideal group size to be five. The same holds for board of directors. I will not serve on boards larger than five,
I recently passed 25 and also quit my day job to work on a startup, so had to enlist my own heath coverage. I did it as an individual and used Blue Cross Blue Shield. I dont know if its the best available in terms of cost, but considering all of the factors it seemed like the best choice at the time.

Unfortunately, individual health insurance is expensive. So it will definitely increase your burn rate. Regardless, I dont advise skipping on health insurance. Even if you are not a particularly active person, you just never know what can happen. ~$100 a month is not worth risking your life over.
Enough already. I don't see why we should waste our time on arguing with a large group of people who don't get it. No matter what you say, if it is not obvious and carries any insight at all, people are going to be insulted. This is their problem, not ours. It only takes 10% of the readers to turn a good story into a flamefest. Personally, I found this essay as insightful and interesting as any of PG's essays, and I'm sure that most of the other people who read it feel the same.

All this no-restraint bashing of an interesting article ("you shouldn't have used the 'lions in cages' metaphor! Now I feel terrible! Bghwaaa-waaa-waaa") is really getting on my nerves. Sometimes someone says something that insults you. Get over it. Paul Graham isn't out to get you, and he has explained at length that he didn't actually imply that cubicle workers are losers.

With that in mind: people complaining on this scale about "mere" words is usually a sign that there is an unpleasant truth being uncovered. I think everyone who had their feelings hurt should stop and think about that for a while.
If there is a lesson, sure.

But the point of "WTF?!?" is that the stories include blatant, astonishing incompetence.

I've never seen one end "but it turned out there was a genuinely good reason for what made me think 'WTF?', so I learned something".

They're all, "<nelson>Ha-ha</nelson>, even a slightly competent programmer can feel better than those poor saps!"
A thread in the WatchGuard article, which I didn't see in the original, starts in the 1st line: "...highlights the risky side of relying on freeware and shareware for any mission-critical purpose."

I would attribute the risk more to a lack of knowledge and experience with ones software than the free-ness or non-free-ness.
is there a twitter feed for yc news? it might help for things like this. twitter.com/jdavid
Quit Microsoft in January (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=110792) and I am loving working full-time on my own ventures.

I did build all products: (http://www.phonemyphone.com, http://www.craigslistautoresponder.com, and http://www.emptyspaceads.com) while working full-time at Microsoft, it seems really hard to succeed working part time on your startup.
I'll have to look into Blue Cross Blue Shield.

What do you do about dental? Do you just pay that out of your pocket?
What about generating more 2 front pages versions:

- One page listing the top posts, but only counting votes from the leaders, say, 10% of all users. So if Hacker News has 100,000 users, only the votes from the first 10,000 users would be counted.

- Another page listing the top posts counting only votes from the oldest users. So from 100,000 users, only the votes from the 10,000 oldest users would be counted.

I'd like to see pages like that, and notice the differences between the actual front page and those counting only the fist 10% users slice by these criteria. And also, because of their antiquity or karma, the 10% slice would receive a sort of reward.
Hacker News "Submit" functionality needs a Digg-like duplicate alert
Do you guys agree? I hate posting dupes ... but this site doesn't exactly discourage it.
Problem is I'll probably won't be until the 19th :( But anyhow I can meet some people on the 16th and then you can organize the official meet up on the 19th.

I wished I could extend my dates but it's going to be very difficult.
Gah. The blood's in the water, eh? What a nasty, self-serving piece of work.
Should we setup a google group to keep everybody informed?
Here you go [http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=132026]. I agree, I enjoy the responses every time and I actually have the above mentioned link as one of my tabs on FF for a week or so now. I have been meaning to collect some names and head down to the public library and grab a few CDs...

In any case, hope the link helps.
Isn't that what this site is already for? How many sites do we need?
Well as long as we're throwing around rash generalizations, Engineers don't get involved on campus, except occasionally with engineering groups. That is why they don't realize that there are other majors out there that work their asses off. I know a couple of theater majors who, while my engineering roommates and I are tailgating, are spending the entire morning working on a show or are actually in class on a saturday morning.

In response to point 2, it seems like a lot of engineering grades are basically arbitrary. Usually the average ends up being between 55-70, so the professor just has to set some sort of curve, which they can put wherever - they are, however, generally less forgiving when doing so.

To point #1 Last semester, I had to make up an idea and design an interface from scratch. Right now, one of my roommates is working on hypothesis testing for a tetris AI system, one is working on creating his own just in time compiler, and there's a number of other projects going on at any given time. This article seriously sounds like it was written by a 19 year old sophomore that hasn't yet gotten over the bitterness/arrogance of being in a really challenging field and hasn't even tried to find something to do in college other than his homework. You can be an engineer and enjoy yourself, both academically and socially, it just takes a little bit of |oh no| creativity.
Where's my down arrow? I was hoping for an update on how the Zenters were faring at Google and when we'd get to use something derived from their work. Instead I just got this vitriolic ramble.
http://www.ehealthinsurance.com/

Tell them to buy their own plans. High deductible.

I pay 150 a month for aetna. So its not that bad. I'm lucky to have no chronic health problems and I am young,single, and live in a low cost area.

If you don't have insurance a freak car accident or disease can really ruin you financially for a long time.

They really need to get universal health care in this country so that people with diabetes or kids can afford to start startups.
Link temporarily broken, but you can read it at
http://www.centernetworks.com/
Nice marketing stunt, lady
Yeah, skimming the Wikipedia article, it seems that they are classifying social-insurance programs like Social Security as "welfare", whereas most people would define "welfare" as programs that are specifically targeted to poor people.

And one of the reasons Social Security is so politically secure--even at the height of the Dubya Administration's influence, a proposal to privatize it went down in flames--is that middle-class as well as poor voters expect to benefit from it.
I'm curious, for those who have gone fulltime on their startups, are you making any money at it, and if so how much?
I live and work in SF as well. Would be glad to help out with a meetup in April.
I didn't find the essay insulting, but I do disagree with several of the core arguments.

I worked at startups for several years in the late-90's and early-00's, and then set off to run my own company, and discovered one unfortunate and unavoidable side-effect of self-employment that pretty much killed the idea for me: I hate dealing with all of the business BS that comes with working for yourself.

Incorporation, accounting, taxes, contract negotiations, etc., etc., all distract from the interesting work of building things, which as the original essay so rightly suggested is the #1 priority of most good hackers.

I think that there's a smaller intersection of folks who enjoy both the engineering and business sides of building software. Not everyone who like to hack on code likes the idea of picking out their own corporate structure and office carpets, just as not everyone who eats a healthier, more "primitive" diet enjoys gardening and hunting for their own wild game.
Can Google Fix Its MySpace Problem With Demographic Targeting?
Indeed, but right now this site doesn't signals you (AFAIK) when a new comment has arrived so if you don't refresh it you won't get the latest news. We can always send another post with the final date, time and venue though.
Even music "in and of itself" says something about the perception of sound. Note that I am talking specifically about "awareness." Not politics or philosophy. If you are a refined listener, then you are aware of these things on at least a subconscious level. I also hate it when artists and musicians spout muzzy-headed nonsense. But there are others who have had their awareness informed by what they practice. Sometimes they even have something good to say in interviews. Sturgeon's law applies here as well.
Whatever day it is, count me in.
Hah, I beat you by 1/2 an hour http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=144730
35-40 maybe more. There is a large assembly room downstairs if we need it that holds 100+, but I doubt we would need that.
Usually when I've submitted a dupe story, if it already exists it just adds a vote to the pre-existing story.

Where the logic either breaks (or allows people to subvert it) is where different URL's can get you to the same story. Often times URL's contain some superfluous flags that don't change the content served, but just serve to log some referrer or layout type data (I'm sure everyone reading this site gets how this works). Adding, removing, or changing any of this data seems to pretty much break or confuse whatever dupe-detector logic exists.
"If you have an idea that seems to be more "Hacker News" than "Hacker News", go build it and draw and audience and trounce this site. That's the beauty of Web 2.0 ;)"

I'm thinking about it. The problem is that I don't want to spend any time thinking about nor running a news aggregator site.

And no, Web 2.0 is not "the dominant outlet for most hackers to practice their craft" -- it is the dominant outlet within the self-selecting set of hackers who follow Paul Graham. For the most part this means web developers in their early 20's -- which is also Web 2.0's core audience.

I didn't intend the question seriously, it's more just to poke fun at the Web 2.0 centric stories that appear here. It depresses me that this site focuses so incredibly much on Web 2.0 and not on science/software in general. If the site wasn't so damned Web 2.0 centric, neither of the Quotably stories would have made it to the front page. I'd say 95% of Web 2.0 stuff is made just to appeal to other Web 2.0 enthusiasts and not really to any large audience. I'm not saying that there shouldn't be niche stuff to serve Web 2.0 enthusiasts -- just that it's disproportionately large.
Google's 'Android' may be launched by fall
This is a good hypothetical. I like it. The "easy" win in such a procedure is to decide which debater is self-consistent. Unfortunately a consistent argument based on faulty premises yields false conclusions. However, since we're allowed to look at past debates for context, I think we can sidestep that issue. We need to determine which past debate-winning arguments led to objectively advantageous actions. This is a non-trivial problem. Let's additionally sidestep it by allowing the human being to weight outcomes based on past arguments.

Aside: Are we defining a 'settled' debate as one where the resultant action came from one side of the debate over the other, or are we additionally taking into account whether we consider the outcome of said action is positive or negative?

I think that it would be simple to identify logical arguments (well, fallacies anyway) which imply that the position being asserted is actually untenable. Identifying arguments which satisfy the inverse - that is, that the style of argument correlates with an advantageous action as a result, falls back into the trap where false premises lead to false conclusions.

Aside: I wonder if there are arguments where objectively false conclusions still lead to advantageous actions? Now there's an interesting question.

I suppose that if you could semantically dissect an argument and then correlate its structure against weighted outcomes of previous arguments this system could yield intriguing results. I would very much like to see what logical constructions correlate with poor outcomes. Perhaps it would reveal self-defeating human tendencies, or arguments which push aside rational behavior?

Then again, the strength of the Bayesian filter approach is that it is dumb. It doesn't have to do a semantic analysis. So we avoid going down the path of strong-ai or special-cased rules when using it. Does the purely textual content of a debate correlate strongly enough with the semantic content to distinguish between good arguments and bogus ones? I think the only way to tell would be to try.

I suspect that many of the most vigorous debates would end up revealing that the relative advantagion or bogosity of a given argument correlate most strongly with what your individual desired outcome is. Then we've just led ourselves to the question of which outcome is superior to the other.

Thanks for an interesting few moments of introspection!
HN is effective because it's so narrowly focused. Yes, there are submissions that deviate somewhat, but because of the initial focus, the outliers remain (for the most part) intelligent and interesting. If you broaden the focus, you also broaden the range of the outliers, and we'll start getting completely unrelated posts.
Google Proposes Plans for Mobile Use of TV Airwaves
How to get accepted for a Y Combinator interview
If one of these is no longer useful to you, look to the community of users for a new maintainer. If no one steps up, perhaps it's not as useful to them as you hope.
Human dupe-detection would be an excellent extension to this process.
I fully agree, but I wish the "narrow focus" was on Hacker News instead of Web 2.0 News.
Firefox + Proxy Autoconfig considered harmful
Nothing stops you from visiting more than one site; I still go to reddit.com my daily dose of conspiracy theories and funny pictures. :-)
The best voters are going to be the ones who take the time to read and evaluate what they're voting on. They're naturally going to get outpaced by people who vote reflexively based on titles (Ron Paul syndrome) or who go for short attention span content. So even if you somehow manage to convert habitual readers into active participants over the long term you're fighting an uphill battle in terms of numbers.

I, for one, would love for you to turn on vote weighting because I'm really curious how well it will work.
Implications Of How A VC Is Funded: Family Office
In my post, How A VC Is Funded, I listed four way in which VCs obtain capital to invest in startups. Each of these four sources of capital has slightly different implications for entrepreneurs. In this post, I will discuss the implications of a family office funded VC.<p>By family office I am referring to one family’s private capital. In this scenario the VC firm is essentially working for a very wealthy family to enhance the family’s personal endowment.<p>Capital Constraints
Some of these VC funds can have a relatively limited amount of capital under management. Since they typically don’t raise capital from third parties, they can only invest what the family allocated to them. Furthermore, once that’s invested they have to wait for a company to be sold in order to have access to more capital.<p>One risk in this situation is that if the fund has invested a large proportion of their assets under management they may not have the resources to continue to support your company in future rounds. The takeaway is that you should take a look at their balance sheets before accepting an investment.<p>At The Mercy Of The Family
There is some risk that families may
Thanks for your opinion colinplamondon. Not quite what I hoped for, but now I know what I have to expect.
Nice! I didn't know about the optparse module -- I'd been using getopt. After the last tool I wrote, I thought "man, it would be pretty easy to auto-generate the usage info from the getopt config." This seems to be what optparse does.
http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=jey

I think it's funny that the highest rated one in the top 10 is the one I just submitted on a lark as an experiment.
Google’s White Space Proposal
If I notice it early enough, I usually do what you just did and post the link to the original submission as a comment.
What database are you using?
I agree. I'm embarrassed for the people who are projecting their insecurities on the article.
Take the Next Step, Paul
Google only provides the apps for free to 501(c)(3) organizations, not 501(c)(4) or PAC groups. Unfortunately, many of the groups doing (IMHO) the most interesting, progressive non-profit work aren't eligible for C3 status, since they do some amount of political lobbying and campaign work.
Another typical Raganwald post where he nails it so precisely that there's nothing else to say!
Believe me, it's real. I've been on reddit for a long time and I've seen it go from a great site with quality links to kitten pictures and "Vote Up If You H@te Hillary" posts. It's not as bad as most people say, but it's certainly a different site than it was a year ago. I'm not sure how to prevent it here, other than manually editing the system and deleting certain users.
If you read that and think "I have 24 emails a day; he must be getting about 100x as many pings for his attention," it might be worth reconsidering how people react to his email policy. If I wanted to get in touch with this guy, I wouldn't send an email. I'd send five, spaced an hour or two apart, with varying subject lines. One joke, one brief and ambiguous ("re:requested") one with caps, etc.

He'd probably be getting 400 emails a day if he didn't force people to resend anything they expected him to read.
I swear that if I see this question posted one more time, I'm going to add a library-request-via-hacker-news feature to Reble.
Haiku.rb
Is IT becoming extinct?
Brand vs. Usability
Make sure you own your IP if you're working at a big company and part time on your startup.
Too Dumb To Fail
Web 2.0 Funding Jumps 88% in '07, Facebook Accounts for 22%
3 Important Usability Challenges for Designing Web Apps
Key rivals to Firefox are market leader Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Apple Inc's Safari browser.

It doesn't bode well for Opera when they aren't even included in the list. I'm not even an Opera user, but why doesn't Opera get more love? They have some critical flaw in their browser? Or is it just because it's not the default of a major OS?

I do really enjoy that the browser wars got started again because they are now development platforms. Shows that a seemingly dead market doesn't always stay that way if you innovate.
There's Gold in 'Reality Mining'