skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am also thinking of household as having at least 4 people, if not 5 to support and 3 family members income. So mommy makes 25-35k daddy makes 25-35k and bobby/sally(the kid) makes 5-8k.

That's just my personal definition of lower income seeing as how places even in bad parts of downtown are about 800-1000 per month for 2 bedroom. Add 300 more for 1 more bedroom.
Though I disagree with what you say, I'll defend to the death your right to preface it with "blogga PLEASE".
No Google Analytics API? No Problem
ERECTION can be hard
http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/WD-html5-diff-20080122/#absent-att...

Look at the things that are depreceted in HTML5: noshade attribute on hr, nowrap attribute on td and th, width attribute on hr, table, td, th, col, colgroup, iframe and pre, etc etc etc because "they are better handled by CSS". What do they mean by "better"?

In other words, things that are used most are deprecated and must be replaced with much more verbose syntax, just because it's right. This is so committee-ish. Do they seriously think they can change the way Internet works?
I used Lexus vs Toyota b/c they're basically the same car plus some extra plush and a slanted L. It was an example of paying a higher price just to signal wealth. Certainly not as ostentatious as a Maybach or a McLaren.
Venture Capital Climbs In a Web 2.0 Burst
You're right. I do have about 50+ ideas. I would love to get out of the health care profession for a while, though. I think the key is in making Doctor's/nurses lives easier without having to sell to hospitals. Hospital budgets usually run on a 1-2% profit margin, so IT budgets are usually pretty thin, and their tolerance to failure is really very thin. We'll see what happens next year after I'm done with school, though.
An embarassing outage turned into yet another marketing opportunity... WTG, Joel!
This is basic information theory. If there's a smaller way (a formula, a pattern, etc) to represent data, then the larger representation has wasted bits (wow, that was a frightfully poor explanation, sorry).

OK, how about this - lets say there is an ideal smallest way to represent a problem, and you can generate any other view of the problem based on that ideal representation. Well, that's just a DSL - pg is always saying "write a language for the problem, then write your program in that language". That's about as small as you can get. Other views of the same problem are accidental complexity or Steve Yegge's rants about code compression (Java vs Ruby/Javascript vs Lisp).

As far as your stock market example, you could use a genetic algorithm to predict a formula to invest with. But as they say, past performance is no guarantee of future results. This is a problem that humans can't even figure out, let alone computer programs.
We're an educated bunch. Could we not talk about stock price changes in percentages? AAPL fell 17% today.
> IMO, hand coding a known algorithm in a generic fashion using Java does not involve meaningful thought.

Nope. But doing it in assembly might... :)
Thanks for Helma. Which book/website would you recommend to gain the minimum Java knowledge needed to effectively use JS+Rhino?
A high price tag on the product is the least worst downside you can have if the margins are high. You can always lower the price, but you can't improve the product in other ways if you lack the expertise.
Just email feedback@reddit with "omg me please" as the subject and I'll see if I can sneak you onto the list...
Things that other languages should take from Haskell
A suggestion: what if YC opens the database of summer 08 applications?
A suggestion: what if YC opens the database of summer 08 applications to the public after selecting the interviewees?

Upsides:

-Applicants get a minimal-effort chance at other funding sources

-YC gets goodwill

-Could become de facto seed funding protocol, bringing YC more press and applicants

-Foundling YC-like organizations get a free applicant base, and prosper. More startups get funded, tech progress accelerates, utopia, etc

Downsides:

-YC must implement system and host data, or delegate

-Could become de facto seed funding protocol, bringing YC more press and applicants

-YC-like organizations prosper: YC faces competition

Preemptive rebuttals:

-It's opt-in: privacy and secrecy concerns are left to the applicants

-Simple captcha keeps mass spamming at a minimum

What do you think?
> ... namely that some users will downmod all other rising stories than their own?

Reddit's new "create your own subreddit" can have moderators that can ban users, or make it private with invites. Maybe what you'll get is something similar to flickr groups. "You contribute great stories and provide insightful comments, please come join us in our private subreddit."

This probably leads to other problems...

> Probably one using a multitude of technologies, of which the above may be some.

While I agree that stopping spammers from hitting the front page would be a great addition to any social news sites, I'd hate to see the other, not so popular uses, of these sites suffer as a result of combative strategies.
3.87 months - but to be fair, the rescuetime founders use rescuetime all day and have since last summer... otherwise I'd be upset that people were wasting all their time on RT. ;)
Put a link to the markup syntax next to all text boxes.
Google Trends understands the "or" operator
Heh - yeah we do work in a fashion driven industry. Like all fashion industries, trends come and go, and there are frequent "retro" trends that bring up past ideas (and put a new twist on them).
Like their $1800 laptop that has about as much utility as the $300 ASUS EEE PC? (ducks)

Steve Jobs has done an amazing job turning around the company and much of this enthusiasm is warranted. However, the stock got way ahead of itself.

I considered shorting the stock also, but that is just way too risky. A stock only has to double to wipe out the entire investment. And, if a stock is already irrationally high, it could very well go substantially higher in the short term. However, put options may be a good way to bet on the downside while limiting risk.

At this point, I do think they are pretty close to an appropriate valuation. If they get another hit with their iPhone and their computer market share increases, they will do very well. But, I think this is far from a sure bet.
Wordpress.com gets influx of VC money, launches video publishing tool
A question about using scheme ( or any other flavor of lisp)...

To me (management type, with some tech knowledge) it seems as if there are some serious downsides to using not-so-mainstream languages, such as scheme. In my position I would be worried about the following:

- hiring - will I be able to find talented people to work on the codebase? Especially if I am not located in a startup hub.

- Scaling - I haven't seen many sites using scheme or other flavors of Lisp that are able to scale. As a management type I would want to see more than just 3 or 4 sites that have scaled well.

- available libraries - the more traction a language has, the more libraries will be available for it. Can a (supposedly) better language make up for this?

And yes - I have read Paul Graham's essays on the subject and find them insightful, but since I am sure that almost all hackers have and I see no large sites written in anything but mainstream languages I am not convinced.

Disclaimer: I am in management, and I am merely curious - not bashing scheme or any other flavor of lisp. Just thinking that this is probably the right place to post this question.
People generally shell out a lot more than that for many tests.

I thought it was pretty cool. The only reason I'm not paying is that they do not seem to have a service to keep my info updated based on new discoveries.
Indian IT Services to Reach $11 Billion by 2011
As the iPhone stands, with a web app your user interface options are limited to onclick(). No drag, no drop, no respond to the touch to give feedback, nothing until until the finger is removed and you get the click.

Compare this to just the first few seconds of iPhone experience...

1) Press button to turn on. (no buttons for you)
2) Slide to unlock. (no sliding for you)
3) Enter unlock code, notice how the buttons highlight as you touch them. (no highlighting for you, no click feedback)
4) Touch an icon to run it, notice the feedback highlight (no highlighting for you)
5) Kept my finger down too long, icons are now jiggling (not for you, no notion of how long the finger was down)

I took that limit as a challenge and wrote a sudoku player that is designed for click-only. I enjoy the interface more than the traditional web sudokus to the point where I won't play them anymore, but it is limited. I don't support marking (I don't mark) and cheating is trivial (I don't cheat), but within those constraints it is a peaceful user experience.

http://sudoku.lunarware.com if you want to peek
Y'all be my bloggas.
One of the nurses I work with is Indian, and she's married to a manager at Yahoo. Their plan is to get their citizenship in a couple of years and move back to Bangalore.

Why? She said it was because salaries and cost of living are pretty much the same between Bangalore and Silicon Valley.

I thought that was pretty amazing.
Does Your Company Have Geek Cred?
Funny thing about time: you never use it the right way when you have it. When you don't have it, you can only imagine all the right things to do with it.
Europe: Your I.P. Address Is Personal Information and Should be Protected
Google and Ad Conglomerate Teaming Up
GOOG http://finance.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ:GOOG and JAVA http://finance.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ:JAVA too, brace yourself people.
Broadband: Open up those highways
Well, those kits from the DNA ancestry project are like $100.

Even though those guys have a horrible track record, I can't imagine good customer service costs $900 more to implement.
Advertising: What Is Not Seen
Publicly declaring an idea starts the clock ticking on patents in the US. You have 1 year to file.

International patents are worse: in public at all == immediately no patent.

For that reason alone, this is a bad idea. People opting in might have no idea they can't get a patent by making it open.

People should just start a blog about their idea if they want it public
10 Ways We Get the Odds Wrong -- Our brains are terrible at assessing modern risks
As someone has suggested before -- this should be a 'sticky' thread, since it keeps reappearing in slightly varied forms.
I thought they only tracked ancestry.

I don't want to know if my ancestor was Genghis Khan. I do want to know when they can confidently estimate my risk of getting diabetes.

edit - reliably, not confidently.
No barrier to apply - If you want your application/idea in public just blog about it and stick up a demo.

The rest of us will selectively and privately apply to programs we really want to be a part of.
Brunette.
Pssh, that's alright, I got in around $7.50 / share back in '03.

Also, it's "only" down $16.75 at the close.
1) Oh, I should read and study these

2) uhh... I'll bookmark this to look at later

3) [and I never open that webpage again]...
"Publicly declaring an idea starts the clock ticking on patents" -- Only if the disclosed information is patentable. Few applications will describe ideas in patentable detail. In any case, if the system is opt-in, it is isomorphic to general web publishing: why stop people from being stupid here when they can be stupid anywhere?

"People should just start a blog about their idea if they want it public" -- blogs aren't centralized. Foundling YC-like orgs can't access them in any scalable way.
"just blog about it" -- (copy/paste) blogs aren't centralized. Foundling YC-like orgs can't access them in any scalable way.

Similarly, applications and ideas/demos aren't identical: even when you can extract an application from an idea/demo, the process doesn't scale.

Selective and private application is not exclusive with this idea.
I very confidently estimate your risk of getting diabetes to be exactly 34.57%. That will be $100, please.

Oh... you mean accurate? Well, I'm confident that you don't.
Yeah, why is that?
Web 2.0 Is Reminiscent Of Marx
Market takes knife to Apple, determined to find worm
Go to alcatraz, dude. I've lived in SF my whole life, and I didn't get around to it until I was over 30. My third grade class went, but I was in detention that day, heh heh.

It is actually really, really cool.
This is an email conversation I had with the company:

http://kirubakaran.blogspot.com/2007/12/introspection.html
[SF] PHP Hacker? We're building the world's greatest mobile IM service and need your help.
Helloooo?
I wonder if the OP is short AAPL ;)
publicpitch.com is still available...
Palestinians blow hole in border wall...  to go shopping.
I know that this is off topic for Hacker News, but it was just too weird to let it pass.
I know this is off topic for Hacker News, but it was just too weird to pass up without sharing.
Interesting. I would say Lexus is a signal of higher middle class wealth though, more than upper class.

Clearly, this is an opinion.
Sadly, that's what the lower echelon uses credit cards for.
Yeah, but there's a reason that traditional genetic tests are expensive: they're carefully developed, calibrated and tested to tell you something reliable about a specific gene or condition (they're also usually FDA-regulated, and therefore subject to clinical trials. This is not a trivial expense. It also happens to be an expense that 23andMe has bypassed.)

If a regular genetic test is equivalent to obtaining the contents of a single page in a very large book, what 23andMe is doing is closer to quickly skimming the index. It's cheaper to do on a large scale, but much less detailed. It's therefore a vanity expense, which has to affect the price point.
Love him returning -666 as his error code in one of those.
Virgin Galactic Tourist Spaceship Design Unveiled in New York
I love the title
Why integrate this in YC instead of making a separate site for that? A bookmarklet will submit the app. form to the new site instead of YC and you are done.
If you're going to relocate to SF, want a flat, and are hoping to keep costs down, I'd recommend Glen Park, Sunnyside, Mission Terrace. They're not highly young neighborhoods like the marina (young and preppy) or mission (young and bohemian), but still pretty fun. The great advantage to them is 1) you're near the Glen Park Bart station, and 2) they're south of most of the city traffic, so you can hit 280 or 101 and get to silicon valley fairly quickly.

I listed them in order of desirability. Glen Park is pleasant, and has a small village with good restaurants and a good vibe. Now and then people get mugged coming out of the bart station, which really sucks, but I walked home from it for a year and a half, no problems whatsoever. Sunnyside is a bit more boring, and not quite as nice. Mission Terrace, where I live now, is just a bit edgy. I love it, but you'll be a stone's throw from some blight. You might also want to check out bernal heights (nicknamed "maternal heights" because of all the young families that thundered in when rents/prices got too high elsewhere).
Quote from MPAA

"Although college students make up 3 percent of the population, they are responsible for a disproportionate amount of stolen movie products in this country."

That couldn't be because (gasp!) they are young, have exceptionally fast net connections and tiny disposable incomes... could it?

In other news, most wheelchair owners can't walk on their own.
What about a guy with no diploma that shoots his company to the stars and makes billions?

Steve Jobs doesn't have a diploma, IIRC. And he's not as much an exception as you'd think (on that particular aspect).
Very few sites actually need to scale all that much and the majority of the remainder scale in a very decoupled way (which makes in-language scaling irrelevant), so scaling is almost always a red herring.

That said, why do you need more than one example of a large site written in Lisp to demonstrate that large sites can be written in Lisp? (Orbitz certainly counts as large, so I'm not sure how much weight I should put on "I see no large sites".)

Common Lisp comes standard with many of the things that are found in libraries for other languages.

More important, CL comes standard with many of the things that folks never bother to put into libraries but end up writing themselves, over and over again.
"A friend of mine at Apple reminded me yesterday that they made 300m on just the interest of their war chest. A few years ago, they were having trouble making that much just on their products."

That's evidence that they'll stick around, but it's a bad sign when a company makes most of their money from depositing cash in the bank. It's irrational to value $1 of Apple-cash at much more than $1 if the main selling point is that they won't spend it: you can do just as well putting your own money in the bank, and save the brokerage commission.
Your comment makes sense to me. However, it also contradicts the notion that ideas are pretty much worthless (it's all about the execution). Are they really worthless, or are we just saying they are worthless?
> Few applications will describe ideas in patentable detail.

However, many applications will describe patentable ideas with enough detail to enable litigation.

The goal isn't to win the lawsuit, it is to avoid the lawsuit.
Well if there are laws that restrict call centers from recording and storing the phone number that dialed in (are there?) then I guess the same argument can be applied to IP addresses. In the mean time, use a proxy if you're paranoid.
Yes, a separate domain would definitely work. This idea needs the data and possibly an endorsement from YC to work, but it doesn't need to be hosted by YC. I'd be happy to implement the platform if that was the best option.
"Ooops, forgot to mention that info on the new subscription stuff is only visible/available in our launch countries today (US, UK, and Germany). Apologies!"

Anyone in one of the launch countries care to tell me what the info shown here: http://www.last.fm/subscribe/ says?

I wonder if this is a move towards them selling their music?
I think I will have a home office for some time. I want to spend the most of my time for my startup and doing some remote job over the Internet.
Teens form suicide pact on BeBo with seven victims so far
Steve Jobs is an uber-capitalist, of course. He is the largest shareholder in the world's third largest media company. Even without the media ownership, a billion dollars pegs you as a solid uber-capitalist.
This works, except both working class and independent class each cover the full income spectrum of the traditional lower, middle, and upper class.
You don't understand! The MacBook Air fits in a manila envelope.
I think that would land him in the elite class described above. By definition only few can be so well rewarded.
You can already buy some tracks from last.fm on a purchase rather than subscription model, via 7digital.

From the UK the subscribe page says:

Unlimited Listening Subscription

We're publicly beta testing our new free listening service. You can listen to most tracks up to three times for free.

When the beta is over, we'll offer a subscription package with unlimited access to a catalogue of music built on partnerships with Universal Music Group, Sony BMG, Warner, EMI and over 150,000 independent labels and artists.

We will continue to offer our existing Basic Subscription.
Facebook moves into international translation efforts
My favorite part is that they applied for inclusion in the Guinness Book of World Records. That is crazy smart marketing.
You're right! The W3C has never had an effect on the way the Internet works...

(Sorry couldn't resist.)

I generally like the idea of moving stuff into CSS, but I think it goes overboard when you have to define stuff in CSS for a unique occurrence... like defining rules for the one div that wraps my whole page. Why can't that just be defined as attributes to that div? Why do I have to put it in a separate place in CSS-land when it's only used for that specific div element?

I'm still hoping for someone to come along and make the whole html/css thing sane. It seems awfully hacky now.

Cue flame war
"I would say its more like a republic (with the representatives elected via Reddit karma points, the powerful getting more powerful) "

What do you mean by this? As far as I know, karma doesn't have an effect on 'power', besides ridding you of CAPTCHAs.
ZOMG! Apple stock is going in the the wrong direction! The interwebs will crash! Start buying bottled water and stock your bunker!

Seriously, who cares. Markets move in more than one direction.
For the most part that's by design. After further consideration, though, I have to add the caveat that this system only makes sense in first-world economies. It doesn't make much sense to put a subsistence farmer in the second-highest of four classes.
Of all the bad economic news I've read over the past few days, "Starbucks considering $1 coffee" is somehow the most depressing.
Could be okay, although 'working' might be a term you should reserve for the super-rich, many of whom get that way working insane hours. Bill Gates lost a girlfriend because of his "7-hour-turnaround" rule: he had to be back in the office within seven hours of leaving, every day. I'm not sure many people in your version of the working class have that issue.

Perhaps the "working but not saving class" would be more appropriate.
So put the rules in a style attribute on that one div. That's hardly a reason to clutter HTML up with presentational things.
Finally a sudoku that is fun! When I played it, it just filled in the correct numbers wherever I clicked. Solved the puzzle in no time - I feel so smart now ;-)
Why the YC endorsement? I thought people could just pitch their venture if they feel so. What would YC gain from forcing applicants to publish their ideas?
Having lived most of my life in the US with its large gulf between the rich and the poor and in Sweden, which really is much more egalitarian, I have to say I prefer a society with more equality.

I was making a lot of money before I left the States in 2000, but I always found it to be an "embarrassment of riches" in front of friends and acquaintances who were not doing as well, but who were arguably contributing more to society (I am thinking of a Nurse friend and a elementary teacher friend of mine).

Large salary differences are a drag. At one level I feel a bit sorry for the grossly overpaid executive. If they have a moral sense they must tie their minds up in knots to justify their pay to themselves. The good thing is that most of them, once the 'win' and prove what they set out to prove, do become philanthropic to one degree or another. The problem is that sometimes that philanthropy does not extend beyond their immediate families. :-)
I thought 23andme was using an Illumina chip? There was a press release stating that they partnered with Illumina.

Certainly consumer level genetic testing has a long ways to go to become truly medically useful. But 23andme will be well positioned to make the transition to medically useful whole genome sequencing 10 years from now when it is economical.

And... 23andme definitely has intentions of some types of research. I think it's mostly the type of research that involves selling their database to pharmaceutical companies. http://venturebeat.com/2007/11/19/23andme-will-the-personal-...

Can you send me your email, please?
Schadenfreude: Larry and Sergey lost $10 billion in less than a month
That is extremely creepy.
23andme's test is decidedly non clinical and decidedly non FDA approved.
Understanding art for geeks
I have already seen this on an iPod Touch. Unfortunately I don't remember the name of the game.