skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There is lots of promising non-web startups -- the fact that this question even needs to be asked is evidence of how insular the YC news community can be at times.

The field I know best is database systems -- there are a number of interesting startups in this area. There's an emerging market for "complex event processing" (essentially database systems that operate on live streams of data as well as static historical data), which has applications to algorithmic trading, network monitoring, real-time business intelligence, military applications, etc. I work for one startup in this field (http://www.truviso.com -- we're hiring!), but there are several others (Corel8, StreamBase, Aleri, etc.)

There's also data warehousing, in which there are a lot of startups challenging the existing players: GreenPlum, ParAccel, Vertica, DATAllegro, C2 Appliance, etc.

More broadly, I think non-web startups are typically trying to solve harder and more interesting problems than the web guys. The time-to-market is often longer than with a typical consumer-oriented web startup, and if you're trying to sell to enterprises, that brings a very different set of sales challenges than selling ads on a website, for example. That often means you need a founding team with a deep technical background, and you've often got to take the traditional VC route (rather than bootstrapping). So I can understand why it's not a good fit for the traditional YC model. Still, there are a ton of startups out there, and many (most?) of them aren't developing web apps.
Google Tech Talks: The Secret History of Silicon Valley
How can a robot express emotion without a face?
Perhaps there are some entrepreneurs that prefer a dedicated office environment as a way to focus and get things done. You may not like the office environment, but the same doesn't hold true for all entrepreneurs.
>French people just don't get economics.

The fact that they do not agree with you does not mean they do not get it.

>They're not really good at rational thinking or logic, either.

This is so presumptuous it makes me puke.

The comments on The Reg's article (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/01/16/amazon_ignores_frenc...)
on the subject offer many gems. I have chosen this one, as it explains my feelings pretty well:

"The law they put in place may seem like protectionism (it probably is), but if you go to any French town you don't see their supermarkets or major chains taking over, there are always independently run shops. It's not like over here in the UK where you are pushed to work out which town you are actually in because all high streets look the same these days.

You have to ask yourself what you want, nice looking towns with interesting shops run by locals (as well as a few larger chains) that aren't being driven out of business by aggressive supermarkets and their internet equivalent; or, as in most UK towns: mobile shop, bank, mobile shop, discount shop, Next, shoe shop (schuh, natch), dixons, another bank, tesco metro, boots, Greggs, Pret a Manger, sainsbury's local, etc. etc. And a couple of massive out of town supermarkets.

The French made their decision, we made ours, or at least the supermarkets et al made it for us, I know which I'd rather have."

Oh, by the way, why are books cheaper in France than in the land of the free (and of cutthroat competition) ?
We use Bank of America. They offer online payroll for $15/month. Free if you pay with direct deposit and all of your employees have BofA accounts. They will prepare and file fedaral and state tax forms and payments as well. That's a very good deal.

We use Quickbooks online (QBOE). Clunky interface. MSIE only. But it's a webapp (don't worry about backups).

We use PayPal for credit cards. They are not "unprofessional" and their API is simpler than any bank or merchant company that I know of.
Proof that the sum of squares of the first n whole numbers is n^3/3 + n^2/2 + n/6
In the thread about Bobby Fischer there was a short discussion of the number of squares on a chess board. I couldn't resist tackling the general nxn problem and deriving the proof. Turns out a picture really helps.
Hacking google street view
Turns out that drawing a picture really helps: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=101532
>I even remember having been taught, in biology classes in middle-school (something like 10 years ago), that AIDS was designed by the Pentagon or some other US agency to kill people in the third world (supposedly, for some imperialist or racist purpose). In history classes, I've been taught that the US basically went to WWII just to "steal" the world's gold reserves.

Oh please, get a grip on yourself. Can you half seriously suggest this was official curriculum? I can see some abysmal maverick teacher speaking about this, but he wouldn't last long.
Why talking about women needs to bring along dating? No wonder women hide away.
Of course it wasn't part of the official curriculum. But you're wrong about the "wouldn't last long part"; you simply can't fire a teacher in France.
Heroes Call Me Friend: Discussion Karma, Formal Reputation, and Google
Also the "more" link to the next page doesn't work if you have been on the current page for some time.

Look like it breaks when the fnid variable is updated to reflect changes in the next page as stories are moving up and down the page.

Should be easy to fix.
> why are books cheaper in France [...]

I buy quite a lot of books, both in France and from other countries through amazon.{com,co.uk,ca} and I see no indication that books are any cheaper in France. The problem is that I don't buy the same kinds of books, so I don't have a good comparison point.
I've searched for book price statistics in different countries but I wasn't able to find them.

But, since powerful distributors such as Amazon.fr negotiate big discounts with publishers anyway, I'd rather have a piece of the cake than letting Amazon take all the profit for itself. What's interesting is that the main competitor to Amazon.fr, the french company FNAC, offers free shipping as well but, for some reason, wasn't attacked :)
One thing I notice living here in France is that many business people seem to not actually want to do business. Opening hours (with random closing) are just the start.

There are many businesses for whom the customer appears to be a nuisance. In fact, businesses that work stand out like a sore thumb (for example, I've had nothing but great experiences with Darty and their after sales service).

My guess is that there are not more such businesses because French people (in general) don't actually expect good service, and hence they don't get it. The one thing that makes US businesses actually work IMHO is that Americans are willing to complain about bad service. In France, people will grumble, or they'll complain and the businessperson will insult them back.

It's all rather baffling.
Is 3i pulling out of early stage tech startups?
Is there any UK start-ups here? And would they care to say where they got there funding from?
>But thanks for the pointer to ConceptDraw, looks like Visio replacement I've been searching for now that I use a Mac.

What you really want is OmniGraffle.

http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omnigraffle/
Even if you favor that sort of outcome, there are different ways of accomplishing it. The best ways would be the most direct and the most transparent, or else you end up with things like the farm subsidies, where, in the popular image, it's the small farmers producing local products that everyone wants to help, but the big agribusinesses that reap the benefits.

Off the top of my head, an alternate method of promoting small local shops would be tax discounts for family owned stores with only one location. This would help them compete without absurd, ham-handed intervention like the government dictating prices and opening hours.
Great read, even if it's really no such thing as "web2.0 design".
Spoke with a friend who helped Brad Feld start Techstars. Although I still see YC as the best of all these a seed funds, he said TS has three differences:

1) Not PG rigid. He characterized PG as treating investors like the devil in the early stage. They think otherwise, bringing more mentors from the investment arena.
2) laid back location- Although silicon valley is a great place, they value creative environment over competitive atmosphere. Boulder is the place for that according to TS.
3) Hands-on mentors- YC brings them in and they talk, but TS brings them in and then you still have access later on. He asked, how many times have YC founders talked to Joe Kraus after he came and talked.

Both PG and Brad Feld (Techstars creator) have their own blogs and their college groupies (and then some), but I think it depends on the experience you want.
What a great idea! An airplane that goes nowhere just to give the experience to those who have never had it.

Someone should do the same thing for computing. Oh wait, never mind. We have Windows.
How much time should be given to a start up to succeed?
If after 2 years your site does grow just a little, but stays around 1,000 daily users, would you call it quits?
I believe the answer lies somewhere in our DNA. Please direct your complaints to Mr. Darwin.
Don't be like Wikipedia
Scaling Up the Innovation Ecosystem
I hope the code I'm writing today will be bringing someone value 20 years from now.

(5 years ago, while working on a local company's packaged software, I came across a program that I had written for the software vendor 10 years earlier. Weird.)

Somehow, "2008 Color Trends" seems pretty unimportant in the grand scheme of things.
Sheez... I disagree with hollerith too, as it's not really that big a deal to have some off topic conversation like that (that might benefit other non-native speakers), but there's no need to vote people down so much for the occasional sub-par comment, unless it's really beyond the pale or the person is a troll - neither of which is true in this case.
Startup hopes to lower cell phone costs within the enterprise
Reasons For Attending Startup Weekend
Good question, what does everyone think?
No future for functional programming in 2008
How Do You Have Time To Do All That?
best two replies ... ever
Depends on the growth trend, and the money it's bringing in, and the founders' needs.
Hey, don't shoot the messenger.
Networking Pays Off for LinkedIn Founder
No, it couldn't - your rewording loses the critical "reportedly" that lets the reader know that this is a rumor, not fact. I am not a reporter, and don't know the threshold for libel, but for a rumor you definitely want to write that, just like newspapers always use "the alledged criminal" before the trial is over.
Technical Writing For Profit - Don't do it
After reading John Resig's post on this topic, I have to somewhat disagree. Thus, here is my experience on this after 11 technical books.
Google Giving Away $25 Million to Make the World a Better Place
Cool. Reverse engineering at its finest.
Arithmatica licenses portfolio for $1.7M
Why not ? that's totally counterproductive, but so distressing :)
2 Questions about RoR
1. Can anyone recommend any good books on beginning Ruby on Rails? I have good general programming knowledge (I can do ASP/ASP.NET/PHP etc) but I've never used Ruby and I want to add it as another string to my bow.

2. How come RoR has taken off so much with startups? Admittedly I can only name Justin.tv and Twitter off the top of my head right now, but it seems to be the startup language of choice at the moment. Why is this?
Each request to Rails block a Mongrel while it servers it, but even on my home server I am getting upwards of 50 requests per second on my app (all logged in pages, so no caching). That means you could have 50 people all requesting the page at the same time and each of them will have it returned inside a second even with a single Mongrel.

You need to be careful that you don't tie up some of your Mongrels doing long running tasks - if you have actions that cause tasks to run that take on the order of seconds, consider queuing them up to be serviced by some other background process (which is what I decided to do).

As someone else mentioned here, try to cache as much as possible - cached full pages take the load off Rails completely, cached fragments reduce the time to serve a request inside Rails, so you can get more from each Mongrel. Make sure and not cache logged in pages though!

Other general advice for a database application - hit the database as little as possible - in Rails don't do things like:

@user = User.find(params[:id])
@products = @user.products.find(:all)
@profile = @user.profile.find(:all)

That would result in 3 database queries, while this will do it in 1:

@user = User.find(params[:id], :include => [:products, :profile])

etc ...
How Widgets go Viral
#1 still seems broke to me, using NetNewsWire on OS X.
> If you apply by March 3rd, you'll be invited to TechStars For A Day, which gives you a chance to discuss your application with us personally.

If they give any feedback on applications then that will be very useful. This would be something that YC doesn't seem to have the time to do if you're not a finalist.
Depends on how important it is to you.

If after 2 years, your kid still isn't walking, would you quit trying to teach him?
This is Arc alpha, I believe. Stuff happens...
Easy - as long as you can stomach. Longer if you or people you trust still think there's any way at all to succeed.

With stagnation - don't call it quits, find out what your users want and give it to them. Completely redesign your product if you need to.
1) What do you (and anyone else involved with the site) want out of life? (could be enough money to camp on a beach in Thailand or your own private jet, bringing satisfaction to people, starting a media empire, having money taken care of so you have time for family and friends, etc)

2) Does this site provide that for you?

3) If it provides some but not all of your needs/wants, could you continue running it on the side while you start a new project?
Civilization is a hack: should we plan to "throw one away"?
1. Agile Web Development with Rails

2. Because it's been designed by smart people who "get it" with regards to agile development, which is what startups need. In addition, the community has a "culture" which many startups identify with.
1) I've used the Agile Ruby on Rails book along with the free Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby online. (Cartoon Foxes!) I suggest checking out Why's Guide first and learn Ruby before you hit Rails. Ruby's a fairly easy language to learn while Rails is a totally different programming scheme you may be unfamiliar with (ActiveRecord).

Look at CakePHP to get familiar with ActiveRecord for PHP. I don't really recommend CakePHP as a development platform, but it's a great way to understand Rails if Ruby+Rails at the same time is too complicated.

2) My opinion of why RoR has taken off is because ActiveRecord makes normal day-to-day activities simple. Verification is already handled. Although PHP and Ruby are roughly equal in speed (Ruby 2.0 is going to be a lot faster though!), Rails isn't. But once you're done, built-in caching features help it scale at least a little bit. Of course if you're worried about scalability, just program the whole thing in C. :P (That's what Amazon does!)
I have been doing this forever. Tried other things, but always came back to this. Not quite sure why.

Maybe because I have always "internalized" better when using pen and paper than when typing or mousing.

Maybe because my "hardware" is always on and always with me.

Lately, I use 4 x 6 index cards wrapped in a rubber band and 3 different color markers. Perfect fit for a standard shirt pocket, right shape for a screen shot, and always ready to serve. It's surprising when (and where) inspiration hits.

People in the supermarket or on an airplane think I'm nuts when I drop everything and pull out my "shirt pocket computer". When I tell them that I'm a programmer, they seem to understand.
It varies.

From "why not to start a startup":

"If you start a startup that succeeds, it's going to consume at least three or four years. (If it fails, you'll be done a lot quicker.)"

I'd say that's accurate. If you're not going to make it you'll know within a year or two. But don't expect instant success.
iPhone Now Wears a Suit: AT&T Unveils Business Plan
My current toy idea is a real-time captcha trading market. On the one hand, spammers might pay to use it. On the other hand, it will inspire websites to come up with something better than captchas.

In any case, making a real-time market is too fun to worry about implications, don't you think? :)
Facebook Applications, The New Spam
What is Your Social Media Plan?
Researcher Discovers Vulnerability In Skype
I do it for every new application, you may think that you can do the same with a computer but it is not true, in the process of drawing the feeling is very different, there is no zoom, it's not trivial to erase, so you are forced to think in more pure terms every line you are going to trace.
Just as an FYI, but I believe Justin.tv switched to Python.
+1 for Agile Web development with Rails.

Getting the Programming Ruby 'Pickaxe' book for Ruby is good too.
1) I've never gotten much utility out of Rails books. I've generally gotten much more use out of the API docs and blogs. That said, the Agile Web Development with Rails book is pretty much standard, and Rails Recipes is good for code examples. However, if you're doing something in Rails Recipes, there's probably a plugin for it by now.

2) Because it is very easy to implement an idea in a day and see if it sticks. More than that, when you're faced with a task that might not have much reward, it is easier to do if it doesn't feel like work. Programming in PHP/Java/C#/etc generally feels like work. Programming in Ruby generally feels like fun.
Last uncov ever?
I strongly recommend Beginning Rails by Jeffrey Hardy. I liked it even more than AWDWR. Here's the companion site: http://beginningrails.com/. The author is active on the Google mailing list for this book as well.
Is there a RSSlike standard for Posting? What about NNTP?
So often when I'm reading a blog or news site (Such as news.yc) in my feedreader, I wish I could easily read the full set of comments, or easily hit reply, and leave a comment right on the site.

I understand that the preferred model is to then "push" my reply to my own site, but it seems easier for everyone if there were a standardized API that could be used to posting replies to the site.

I'd also love to be able to read the various comments, fully thread them, and the like.. The Natural solution that comes to me is integrating a NNTP-like service into the popular website hosting software.. NNTP has allowed people to post replies and read through those of others easily for decades. It supports moderated on non-moderated posting, and it's lightweight enough to be supported everywhere.

Are there any other solutions that are in the works? Perhaps a simpler API that's based on HTTP post, rather than Sockets?

One of the main advantages of NNTP, is that it already has a HUGE base of Client Support- People have NNTP readers and don't even realize it.. Outlook, Thunderbird, Etc. What other app gets a huge installed base of users, who don't even realize they already have that functionality? ;)

I can understand reasoning that says that Spam might be a problem, but I have a hard time agreeing with it..
For one, there's technological fixes, such as HashCash, or even server-side IP filters.. Keep in mind, since each post goes back to the original server, who is running their OWN instance of NNTP, they can blacklist however they choose.

It seems like there's certainly an opportunity for this sort of development, I'm just curious if anyone knows someone working on it.

Unfortunately, I'm too busy approaching beta on Chron X to take on any new projects, but it seems like something desperately needed, and not a difficult technological problem.
1,000 daily users isn't too shabby, not able to make an income off that?
1) Beginning Ruby by Peter Cooper is a good one for learning Ruby, the Pickaxe book is a great reference for Ruby as well. Agile Web development with Rails is good, also the Rails Way is good for Rails 2.0.
"Programming in Ruby generally feels like fun" Thank you. That does it. I am going to buy a laptop (probably the Asus EEE, not the MacBook Air) and start learning Ruby on Rails code during my 53 minute train ride. I bought "The Rails Way" because Zed recommended it at the end of his rant, and it's pretty Greek to me. I'll start with beginningrails.com and the Pick-Axe book (Zed's criticism about it, aside)
The Secret History of Silicon Valley
Actually I think you're right. Didn't they develop their own flash server with python?

But they started with RoR didn't they?
Where I work there are like 25 guys and only one girl(She is super smart and pretty). We have been trying to hire girls but we can't find any. For some reason they don't want to be programmers. That is very unfortunate.
I'd highly recommend "Ruby For Rails" if you're learning Ruby and Rails at the same time.
The clarity, or lack thereof, of the way various languages define classes has nothing whatsoever to do with the utility of functional programming. I don't think these examples could have missed the point more.
Broadband Caps from Time Warner
I just got 'The Rails Way' and my first impressions are that it is a definitive reference work (covering Rails 2 no less). I already prefer what I have seen to a lot of other Rails books I have gone through.

In particular I am not a fan of the Agile Web Development with Rails book; apart from anything else it is way behind the state of the art at this stage.

I actually like to learn from reference books; maybe its just me.
I think the author of this article may have missed the boat on functional programming languages. After all, a functional paradigm is not the same as an object-oriented paradigm, so if a functional language is a little verbose when dealing with objects I don't think that disqualifies it as a useful language.
Not that I know of. I think there's a lot of stigma on both sides. There may be stigma against women in chat rooms like this one, and women may have a stigma against becoming hackers. These are just hypotheses, of course, and by no means do they apply to all hackers or all women. They're just general trends I've heard cited. That being said, the ratio of girl haxxors to guy haxxors in my dorm seems to be getting better. It's like 1:4 where it used to be 1:7.
Another problem is that hacking is not very glamorous.
Hmm... well, BSD init is easier to use than SysV init. The ports system is also known for its simplicity. The source code is contained in a single CVS tree and the entire OS can be built with a few commands. The man pages and handbook are consistent and well written.

Much of the difference is subjective. FreeBSD feels coherently designed, whereas Linux is a patchwork of programs written by different people with different styles and philosophies.

I don't know a lot about Gentoo (most of my experience is with Debian and Slackware) but from what I understand, its purpose is to be as flexible as possible. That's a legitimate goal, but it seems to conflict with ease of use.
I feel badly for her, for you just mentioned her attractiveness when it has no relevance. Perhaps when we (being the male gender we) start considering females' intelligence as the _only_ factor and not half of the equation things will change.

Out of the 26 coworkers, you mentioned the physical attributes of the one female.

Sorry to pick on your one quick post, but it is just very representative of our society's lingering gender gap.
This is so fucking retarded and ignorant I'm not going to dignify it with a point by point rebuttal.