skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wrote about recommendations/reviews this morning, in the context of major changes that would be made to social network services from 2010 to 2015.

"Many may not realize it, but Facebook's Beacon 'service', in which purchases you made were displayed to your friends, was a poorly thought out, horribly misguided attempt... at something we all want (even if we don't admit it): our friends' opinions. But in addition to the privacy-infringing implications of Facebook's premature program, they failed to realize that a purchase does not equal praise. Sometimes we buy things because we have to, or for other people. Sometimes we buy things everyone else is buying and spend months thinking 'what a waste of money that was'."

[...]

"Benefits of Social Network Reviews

[...]Your friends get reliable data on recommendations for and against from a context that's meaningful to them. If enough of their network has reviewed a product/service, they might even have the option of segregating those reviews into more narrow contexts (coworkers at business A, friends from school G, contacts in area L).

You can establish yourself as an authority. Drink a lot of wine? The SNS should offer you the option of displaying your wine reviews prominently on your profile. An SNS tracking review trends across networks can recognize: "These two people have the most dissimilar views on wine that are still agreed with by the most people in region Q. Let's display their reviews as a kind of point/counter-point to everyone in that region". [...]"

If you're interested, the whole post is available at: http://socialstrategist.com/2008/01/27/social-networking-ser...
HyperCard Forgotten, but Not Gone
I'm actually asking about Startup School, not the Funding Program -

www.startupschool.org
Is the recession because of 9/11?
BUG, for the record: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=105464
It will be in March, West Coast. The new site will be up soon.
Ribbit injects phone, voicemail features on to Web
Man arrested in eBay sale of historic documents
Amazon to begin international roll-out of MP3 store
Music labels say no deal with Qtrax
Curiously enough, they were the first print publication ever to write about YC, the very first summer. But the editors killed the story, presumably because at the time we were so obscure. They could have scooped the NYT.
PayPal to buy Fraud Sciences
probably not too well

the most important metrics it uses to determine if your code is bug prone according to their tech paper are: # of comments, file size, javadoc usage, and using { } after if statements.

These kind of metrics probably do statistically correlate to correct and incorrect programs. Careful programmers often use javadoc and heavy commenting.

However, just because you don't use comments doesn't mean your code is incorrect. And programmers already know if they use javadoc and comments, they don't need a tool to tell them.
Honour for Colossus code-cracker
Locking down open computing
voodoo meta-programming

...spoken like a true Blub programmer.
PC sales lift Microsoft's profits
Web worries after suicide spate
Searching for the truth online
How to stay safe on social sites
D'oh. Knew I should've lurked more. Sorry aboot that.
iPhone helps Apple ring up profit
Thanks! Definitely looking forward to it.
I've had a subscription to Inc. for 10-12 years. I can attribute a great deal of time/money savings to things I've learned or found out about in Inc., especially regarding general management and HR issues. I consider it a solid investment. Granted, quite a bit of what they publish is common-sense type stuff, and their slant is definitely NOT towards the small tech startup...although I've bought a few companies I've read about in Inc. and I've discovered new business trends by reading it over the years. It's a great way to get a feel for the small business market, which is my primary customer base in many ways...it also helps me figure out when niche products/services I'm already following are likely to break out into more mainstream popularity. Many internet startup guys tend to have 'Silicon Valley goggles' on and they would laugh at the technical expertise of the average Inc. reader, yet the Inc. readers are often slightly ahead of the tech curve when compared to the broader small business market. Anything that helps you to get into the shoes/mindset of your potential small business customers is worth the time. Even if you don't market DIRECTLY to small businesses, you would be a moron not to be aware of their purchasing power.

You can also learn a great deal from the less 'glamorous' industries featured in Inc. - lessons that you can transfer to software startups in sometimes surprising ways.

Regarding the ads/advertorials: that is their business. The advertorials are marked as such. They are not going to turn away ad dollars unless the ad is clearly illegal. I wouldn't either if I were in such a competitive industry. I wouldn't judge, say, 37Signals based on the customers they accept money from...so I feel it would be unfair to do so to a magazine. You just have to think for yourself and view everything with a critical eye. Just like anything else. I don't think their ads unduly influence their actual editorial content.

I also read Entrepreneur magazine, which is even sleazier ad-wise (and I must say I lost respect for them when they started publishing the lies/idiocy of Robert Kiyosaki in an actual monthly column) but the occasional gems I learn more than make up for the time spent reading magazines like that and the sleaziness/crap factor.

I read almost every business magazine I can get my hands on (Fast Company, Fortune, Forbes, Business 2.0 before it was killed, FSB, etc. - as well as about 30 industry-specific business magazines.) I think the more you read, the more likely you are to understand business and to see new opportunities before others do.

I almost bid on Inc/Fast Company when they sold to Mansueto, but I knew I didn't have the time to follow-through on it. I now regret the decision not to at least bid.
Give me rice, but give me a laptop too
One day after launch, Webmynd finds competition
Teach-yourself game design site
The Shock of the New
Big companies hire based on experience, education, docility, and quality of handshake. A company can probably do better by "trusting their gut" and taking slightly riskier applicants, because risk is proportional to reward. Makes sense.

But I think there's a level beyond that where a company uses a hiring process designed to avoid biases. Biases based on age, gender, race, nationality, physical appearance, accent, etc. inevitably play a role in hiring decisions, and a company that could neutralize those effects could win big. This is the opposite of trusting your gut.

In fact, a company that specifically recruited ugly people (and other victims of biases) could probably get the same quality employees as their competitors, but much cheaper. It's like value investing. I'm not sure how legal that would be, though.

(This reminds me of Moneyball, by Michael Lewis.)
The Tao of Screen - In search of the distraction-free desktop
Build a Mac Pro equivalent workstation for 1/3 the cost
Didn't read a word past the author blurb:

Lawrence Kesteloot is a software developer working at a secret start-up in Palo Alto, California, where he does Java enterprise programming.

Roll that over your tongue a few times, just to get a feel for it: he works at a startup where he does Java enterprise programming. At his startup. Java programming. Java enterprise programming. There we go -- that sounds much more impressive...
There was PhotoSynth but that creates 3d photoscapes out of several photographs (http://labs.live.com/photosynth/). Unfortunately but predictably, their demo runs only on Windows :)
Video Interview: Trip Adler of Scribd
MySpace's Leaked Photos More Popular Than Sweeney Todd
Good News in the 1 Million Missing iPhones
NBC Universal Unit Acquires Video Start-Up
Palm to Close Most of Its Retail Stores
NotchUp.com Arranges Pay for Job Interviews
Target Tells a Blogger to Go Away
Webware: Cool Web 2.0 Apps for Everyone
Original Signal - Transmitting Web 2.0
Sony Ericsson Sets Deals With 3 Labels
Court Bars company From Online Sale of Phone Records
MacBook Air: Making the Migration
Amit's "point" about being able to tell what a Python form does by looking at it isn't true thanks to __call__ and properties,
Only to those who are smoking kratom.
Tape measure of success
I expected it would just be a keyboard where you could type in suggestions to the flight computer.

If all three fly-by-wire modules concur that you are not, in fact, a complete moron, the airplane will consider your request.

Then again, it would have been much cooler if there had been a "Kirk chair" right in the middle and scantily clad "ensigns" scurrying about.
Keep your CSS files clean with a tiny HttpHandler
Very good insight
Cash for answers
His "challenge" is totally missing the point. Just because it is difficult to identify the owner of a random picture doesn't mean that one couldn't use that picture against the wishes of the owner.
Tournament Theory
I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you were trying to be funny and let you know that comment reads a bit mean and petty.
You would think that just asking your potential users what they want is best, but then you have to worry about self-report errors. As has been noted. (Customers lie. To you and themselves. Accept it.)

I'm fairly stupid and I don't possess a crystal ball...but since I also don't want to waste my time on things that don't pan out financially, I've spent quite a bit thinking about this question. I like to keep things simple, so I will generally only start or buy a company if it does one or more of the following (the more, the better):
1. Make the user money.
2. Save the user time.
3. Save the user money.
4. Get the user laid.
5. Save the user's life/improve their health.

There are a few other rules. Numbers 2 and 4 should never exist only on their own. Number 5 is often one of the most difficult to execute because prevention is harder to sell than solutions. And all of the potential ideas have to be a superior enough solution that they outweigh the switching costs for the customer (including the switching cost from nothing, inertia is a bitch!) Number 2 is the most likely to suffer from the "unwanted solution" problem (for various reasons, an outlining of which I suppose would better address the original question.) Multiple streams of income and multiple customer bases are always good things, just to hedge your bets.
Mujahideen Secrets 2 Encryption Tool Released
Despite the sensationalist headline (which had little to do with most of the article) that was a pretty good overview of the current situation, in layman's terms.
Yea, pretty much sounds like me. Albeit with the ability the change. Now the Patriot act is a touchy subject because the revisions Obama wants are much better than the ones Bush had. The war on drugs, imho, is a good thing. Just because he did drugs doesn't mean a damn thing. He knows first hand how bad they are. If anything that is better than someone fighting something they haven't experienced.
Do we have computer hardware sufficient for AI?
Yes, clearly not all users understood "private" the way smugmug uses it. I think Don is feeling a little defensive now, but tomorrow he'll probably go ahead and change "private" to "unlisted".
Worse, the most common GUID is 128 bits formed from (I think) a MAC address plus a timestamp. They are designed for uniqueness, not non-guessability.

On ourdoings.com photos are given unique, random URLs. No nude photos allowed, though.
I took it as funny. :)

Speaking of which, kratom is out of stock right now, but all orders made until we restock will be upgraded for free to premium Malaysian kratom.
I don't want this to sound like a personal attack, but personally I'd consider the "prizes for invites" thing to be barely a step above the "forced invites" thing. Either way, you're encouraging people to spam their friends -- not because they think their friends would be interested in this particular app, but in order to get some miniscule personal benefit ($500 divided by how many users?)

Personally, I'd be happy to see the ability to send invites turned off altogether. If any friend of mine really thinks I'll be interested in a particular app, they can damn well take the time to write me a message about it.
Ordinary Skill in the Art: Jeffrey D. Ullman on Software Patents
Mozilla's mobile browser user interface prototypes
Feld Thoughts : When Is The Release?
But he shouldn't have. It's ridiculous to choose the President based on his opinion of net neutrality. There are much bigger things at stake.
Ask YC: Where do you work?
For those of you that aren't working on your own startups yet, where do you work right now?
Open() is an older construct but it isn't deprecated. I hate to sound like the language police but there it is.
Come back! Stay out of the shadows!
Politics are the WWE. Although we do need technology support, the best thing you can do is stay focused on your work. Stay independent.
There's a lot of wisdom in the saying 'when you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is stop digging'

His explanation isn't convincing, and certainly doesn't reassure anyone whose private photos were revealed
Nor it would happen in the C version. This code doesn't compile. The compiler will throw you a WTF at x = {1, 2, 3} ...
Evaluating High-Level Distributed Language Constructs
You've never seen anyone do it? Check out a subway escalator at rush hour... in any city in the world.
>2. Has said that bombing Iran and nuclear options are not off the table.

Very presidential actually. Why would you play your hand in any other way? The threat of nuclear annihilation took care of the Soviets, after all. Iranians aren't stupid.
So... Daniel, what have you been up to?

Congratulations guys, you've definitely earned and rightly deserve it. I'll see you all in a few days and give you your respective noogies and wedgies.
I thought the funniest part was the Sleep(86400) call.
I remember super long escalators with signs posted coming out of some of the catacombs of the Tube in London. A quick flickr search (for stand right/[walk left]) shows a lone woman on the ascending escalator walking.. http://tinyurl.com/2f4nta
I guess I'm in the minority on this opinion, then.
Dignity is Deadly, Part Two
I guess you're referring to Freenet and similar projects. I doubt it's BitTorrent's fault that most people don't care about Freenet.
I'm working at 1-800-Free-411, a company that's moving
through it's post-startup, not yet a midsized company
phase.

The company is actually a lot of fun to work at. The product is useful to a lot of people (Advertisement supported 411 Directory Assistance), and it's a great place to work, learn, and play.

What I like best about the company is that it has a very high engineer to manager ratio ;) That's always one of my metrics when looking at new companies.

Before that, I worked at Irrational Games (now 2k Games), as the IT manager of the US and AUS offices, working on Bioshock and other games.
Inc. is the only magazine I regularly read. If I don't have time to skim through the entire thing, I always read the section that documents an entrepreneur's story. Many of those stories are informative and inspirational. One of them a few years ago about the Xerox CEO's humble beginnings kick-started my entrepreneurial spirit, I guess you could say.

In my opinion: definitely worth subscribing, if only for that section.
Exactly, he mentioned it as an issue, not as the decision maker. Given 2 otherwise equivalent candidates (not that they are) who differ on one small issue that you have a stance on, you vote for the one who you agree with. This is certainly an oversimplification, but the point is that you shouldn't completely ignore _relatively_ small issues because of the existence of bigger issues. They may just agree (enough) on all of the big issues that are important to you. You only get to choose one though!
For the record, you're right the title is misleading and I shouldn't have been offended. I've got a nasty ear infection and my judgement is clearly off. My apologies.
Will this stop them just like their raid did? Oh noes! I recall someone from TPB saying that they have locations setup up all around the world that the site would switch to if this actually has a negative effect.
I agree, but I doubt it's a wild guess, and I would be surprised if it was over 5M.
Not trolling, but just asking a serious question. If HyperCard was the bee knees, why doesn't some make an open source version of it?
I article says that application popularity is declining, but could it also be that people are using a wider variety of applications?

I'd like to see the numbers on how many app's are installed total vs. time.

Just because the top 10 are losing market share doesn't mean all are. My guess is that more app's have been introduced into the market since developers have had time to make more, and that's where the users are going.
Commodity Grid Computing with Amazon's S3 & EC2
This is a case of serious disconnection with user expectations. You see this all the time - a software company (usually its developers) get so caught up in their code and the way the do things and their own terminology that they forget what users actually want and how they use the products. smugmug should use this as a learning experience, admit their mistake, and remedy the problem. I see this as a missed opportunity on their part.
Thank you! I still have no idea how to program a GUI app, or use a CGI interface. All my experience is in Ruby and PHP on the web, because it's well-documented enough that I can understand it.
Congratulations, guys!
Their web site looks quite neat!
Amazon S3 Service Level Agreement (SLA)
I don't agree. Specially when most users post anonymously.

For example, I participate here, digg, and reddit, but never give any personal information.

For me is more like the getting my turn at the podium without fear of anything, as what I say is not going back to the real me. Of course, if someone really wanted to know who I really am, he or she could find out. But it's not worth the effort.

What I really don't get is the people that are so active in these type of sites that it seems that it is all they do. And they are proud of the fact of being so active. I find the comments interesting; however, for me, they are not enough to cover all my social needs.

I guess with time, we'll know the full effect of "socializing" with cute user-names all day long.
This is great stuff. Thank you for posting this!

I normally have a dual-screen setup powered by desktops plus a nice keyboard + mouse.

But I'm in the process of moving abroad and will be living out of my laptop for a little while.

You see some people at startups working straight off their laptops, day in and out. After 1-2 days on my raw Macbook, I have no idea how they do it.
IRC as a Startup Incubator
This is hilarious, I think if anything it qualifies this blog for funding..
How is your company doing now that 1-800-GOOG-411 is out? A lot of Google's side businesses are just for the data but some are out to compete for real. It'd be interesting to hear from the inside.
Don't want to start a 'my database is...' rant, but have you given Postgres a whirl with said data? It tends to be fairly robust for very large datasets, and its performance tends to be excellent under these conditions. Migration from MySQL is straightforward; I use both DBs in separate environments.
The first thing that you should know and accept is that there are probably 10 other people working on the same application you have in mind or are working on.

Second, if you go the facebook route, the first app of its kind will likely be more successful--that incumbency thing. If it's a compeling app, hurry app and deploy it.

Finally, if you decide to create the website first, then your target market has to be well defined, i.e., you have a niche solution to a specific problem for a specific group of people. If it's too broad, creating the website first will not likely generate enough traction, unless you can create enough volume.
Masters of Collaboration
It's how I learned to do it back when I was being taught my multiplication tables.

Does that still happen anymore?
Is this a YC company?

This sounds like a good idea. I wonder how they decide if you get the money or not? I.e., how do you weed out people just doing this for the money?
Silicon Valley launches a takeover of the New York Times
I have invites which let you skip the "application" process; email me and I would be happy to give you an invite.
Today I find it a little ironic for any guy (including coding horror's blogger) who's running on Windows (or OS X) by choice to be bitching about freedom 0.

There are already plenty of viable alternatives if that's what you want. I don't see the point in further complaints. This isn't the 80's or 90's.
Not a YC company; the article says self-funded.

-

The company rates you post-interview, and one of the things they rate you on is how seriously you took the interview. So, basically, they can't weed out people just doing it for the money, as long as the person takes the interview seriously and acts professionally. Regardless, I think this is a good idea, it will definitely work as a self-funded company.
There is PythonCard: http://pythoncard.sourceforge.net/

Unfortunately it doesn't appear to be updated recently.
Ask YC: Dealing with DDoS
How do you do it?

At least once a week my load averages will stay at 5 or higher for about 30 minutes at a time. It's mysql that's eating up all the cycles even though page caching is setup for frequently accessed pages. netstat shows many blocks of IPs, each trying to connect to port 80 many times. I think it's coming from a zombie computer network.. one set of IPs included a Purdue connection.

My CS friends have told me about things ranging from iptables and manually adding offenders to my firewall - any automatic solutions that append offending IPs after X connections?

thanks
Ask PG: Qn on the 'More' link at the bottom of News.YC's home page
It changes with each page refresh now: from http://news.ycombinator.com/x?fnid=D5S0Tu4VK5 to http://news.ycombinator.com/x?fnid=ARW2OBvB6s... while pointing to posts 1-30. Any reason you are doing this?

Similarly, the More link at the bottom of Page 2 also changes each time but still points to Posts 31-60. And so on....

I think that at one time, the URL used to be just /page2 or something easily guessable.
Could be web crawlers for search engines (or research, at Purdue?)

They're supposed to play nicely, especially if you have a robots.txt file set up. Try that first if you don't.
I alternate between being a freelance programmer and a lighting designer for a band. A project I'm working on fuses the two; I'm writing better lighting control software.
I'm a freelance web developer.
What I do is take a weight and a workbench clamp. Then I take the center of the tripod out and put it though the hole in the weight. The clamp is used to keep the weight secured. It works relatively well.
Are you sure you are not being "dugg" or anything else similar?