skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What is the problem you are trying to solve? What are your potential customers forced to do now?

The front page is all over the map: it mixes close friends, family, "a special one" with budgets and emails from "the team". What is it you're selling to a first-time visitor?

I am trying to give you healthy, productive criticism. Good luck with your project.
Forgive me for asking the obvious, but what is the DOS defense on the application? Just a captcha?
According to the site, they use "panel-based information," which is culled from voluntarily shared anonymous user statistics. Maybe the correct assumption here is that the women who visit ycombinator are more likely to share usage statistics than the men?
yeah it's a hint of what's to come - right now we're just laying out the foundation for what we really want to do
I hate to ask for more stuff but this would help us out

if you don't mind - how often do you actually talk to/see the 30 on your list (beyond 2 liner ims and throwing virtual sheep)? what percentage is very often, sometimes, not often?
How Mailinator searches for the word "pen1s" in 185 emails every second
My latest submit to YC News brought 1500 people to my blog. This 2000 uniques a month is so far off.

Is it in (000)s?
Meg Whitman's Exit Interview
Agreed.

If I wanted to see how quickly someone else could reverse engineer and clone my app, this is the first place I'd go.

Hell, there is so much talent (and attitude) here, it would almost be a little contest.
I agree.

Wealth begets wealth, but unearned wealth begets expensive taste :)

Looking at the uberwealthy is deceptive, because they're a product not only of their own skill and ambition but the circumstances where they made the fortune. 5 years earlier or later and Bill Gates wouldn't be a billionaire (ditto most computer billionaires - they were the right person in the right window of time). They are outliers, black swans, etc. Hard to make theories based on them.

If you look at (to draw an arbitrary line) people making more than $100,000/yr, I'll bet they are either a) business owners or b) highly educated (college and above).
After reading this post when it came out, I started learning about compilers. I bought the dragon book from AbeBooks.com (which cost just $3.50 there; Amazon = $85) and I am reading it now.

I found 'Incremental Approach To Compiler Construction' [pdf] (http://scheme2006.cs.uchicago.edu/11-ghuloum.pdf) to be really great.

Anybody else here learning compiler construction? Any suggestions?
Playgrounds for Data: Inspiration from NYTimes.com Interactives
It depends on the idea one has. For the idea of my company, I would have no problem making it public. It's based on solving fundamental research problems. Anyone is welcome to the area if they dare. :-)

If the idea is more about what could make a quick and easy splash on the Internet, then no way should people give away their ideas. That would be nuts.

A similar thing happens in the research world. Only an idiot shares their funding proposals will colleagues in the same area who might put in a proposal before the same board.
For someone that tried making something similar before, I immediately knew what chaos was trying to build (I think), despite the responses about "I'm not sure what I'd do with it".

I'm notorious at not being thoughtful, mostly because I can't remember what the hell other people are doing, and even when I do, I can't act on it in a timely way. I once called up a friend around May and congratulated her for graduating. She said, thanks, but proceeded to inform me that she graduated last year. And that I had called last year to congratulate her too.

I was far too ambitious when trying to build it. I wanted it to import my inbox and tell me things about friends without me having to explicitly write it down. In addition, it'd be able to let me know who I was neglecting and compare it to who was doing the same to be based on their frequency of reply and timeliness of reply. When doing PIM (personal info management) stuff, it's always far too easy to want to do too many things. So hopefully, you guys don't go down that path and keep things tight.

Anyway, this thing isn't for everyone, and it depends on what your social network looks like and what your attitude towards relationships to people are.

If your social network is comparatively small (within dunbar's number), then it's easy to keep track of people you care about. Our brains can personally keep track of the purported 150 people or so.

If your social network consists of mostly people that know each other, then you also wouldn't need it, since you'd get what's going on with your friends through hearsay and gossip. And you can act on that information if need be (however inaccurate it might be).

However, if you know a large number of people who don't know each other, ie. lots of little groups of friends that don't know each other, then you'd have a use for something like this. In addition, if the nature of your job/life requires you to have lots of little loose confederations, this is the sort of thing you might use.

whacked is right that people MAKE time for what/who's important in their lives. However, I think the value of a CRM for your personal life is not for the people who's really important you that you'd remember with your brain, or for the people you meet once and don't really care about. It's for the people that you like, but they are not in your daily lives that you wish to keep in better touch with. In a way, it's trying to be a tool to expand the upper limit of the dunbar number for users.

Anyway, I found it a tough sell, as most people only have 2 minutes to spare at parties, and not half an hour. I also did everything wrong from not releasing early to not simplifying and focusing the system. I eventually moved on to work on another thing. So good luck to ya'll and keep us updated on your progress. Chaos, feel free to email me if you want to bounce stuff off of someone.
Disharmony in the spheres: the militarization of space
ycombinator gets more female views than myspace [1]?

[1] AKA "The rest of the internet"
+1 for 'anticompetitively good' :)
http://coworking.pbwiki.com/
Bill Gates Calls for "Revision of Capitalism"
I think it's interesting and (if it were free) I'd want to know (even the me 10 years ago who wasn't married would).

But what problem does it solve? Why (besides curiosity) would I want that? Is it for HIV positive people to who might be hoping for a slow progression? For people who just want to feel a little more comfortable having lots of unprotected sex?

I guess I can see the former... Though I would think that the audience is relatively small (and hopefully getting smaller) and would be looking to their doctor for stuff like this.
Is the Higgs boson lying in data already collected at Fermilab?
The Truth About the iPhone Sales Numbers
Nice lecture... I am sending it on to my students.

But did anyone get a load of that old lisp machine? You could just feel how sluggish it must have been :-)

20 years on and things are much snappier! Thanks Intel and AMD!
Fix the "Huntingdon's disease" typo, for heaven's sake. You're asking people to view your company as an authority on the topic. Typos detract from that credibility.
Reddit Gets Personal With Customizable 'Reddits'
I wonder if they get this by doing an analysis of the text. There are a couple ways of doing this, one involves looking at grammatical and syntax features (a la Gender Genie) and the other is more qualitative, looking at certain subject keywords and emotional keywords as well as comment length. It wouldn't surprise me if comments on this site, analyzed using either method, tended to be more free of gender tells than the writing of the general population. That being said, it's difficult to get more than 65% accuracy no matter how you do it.
Tufte on the iPhone
We check the HTTP_REFERER to make sure it's coming from linkherd.com.
Like my girlfriends and me, we feel so betrayed that Sun bought MySQL. My best friend Sarah said that she felt like she had a real relational database situation, commits and all. Sometimes I just want to cuddle with my PHP manual, especially when I have a headache from looking at my screen so long. Maybe after I finish refactoring this program, I settle down with a nice cup of green tea, then go shopping for a USB cable and some new shoes. After a long bubble bath, I'll get back to the rest of my code.

(Sorry, I couldn't resist)
Yes, the idea to have some kind of revenue-sharing model with networks that want to show ads. Wasn't sure if this plan was worth mentioning at this early stage, but since you asked.

Of course, no one will be forced to show ads -- we can't, since network owners control their own stylesheet.
> So you're saying that 50% of your potential customers are too careless to enter their own credit card details correctly?

Have you watched/listened to the (real world) news lately?
I suspect Gates doesn't really understand what capitalism is. All of his fortune has been built on the back of legislative protection. And - specific to charity - I have several times noticed Microsoft gaining positive media for the 'charity' of giving away free software that costs it nothing to give, and which only has value in that form due to an arbitrary ruling from the relevant government.

Here are some good starting points for helping the world's poor:

1) End the practice of propping up corrupt foreign governments with aid

2) Stop subsidising first world farmers and thereby killing the markets for the second and third world (including flow-on effects coming from ludicrous things like ethanol subsidy)

3) Governments cease support for rent-seeking measures like copyright and patents.

4) Abolish government-enforced wage floors which subsidise the low income earners at the expense of the genuinely poor by preventing business from finding employment for them.

5) Don't make environmental policy until recorded facts genuinely point to a need for it.

Everywhere around us the invisible hand of the state is interfering in our lives through pork-barrelling schemes that benefit those close to power at the expense of the rest. The big lie is in the claim that we have now is capitalism. Even in the United States, what we first world countries have now is better referred to as 'mixed economies'. They have elements of capitalism but are some distance from actual capitalism.
Engineering a Compiler by Cooper and Torczon is probably better these days than the dragon book. The dragon book is of primarily historical interest imo. (Unless you really do need to write an LL(k) parser generator...)

I would say coding is more important than studying the books a lot.
Dropping out of college for your biz? Here are some things you should consider
Yep. If I thought a 3 month head start was the major competitive advantage for my team, I'd go find a day job.

If you think the stuff you write on that application (did someone call it a "BLUEPRINT"?!) has anything but the most tenuous connection to what your software/strategy will look like in 3-6 months, you're smoking something.

The problem with secret ideas is that they are secret to your users, too. We literally got onto TechCrunch with three speculative jpg mockups and barely a line of code... We were buried with amazing feedback and ideas and fairly quickly became very smart about the market we were playing in. We got offers to help. The level of interest was incredibly motivating.

Startup geeks are passionate about THEIR ideas. Not yours. The risk that a great team is sitting around waiting for an idea is absolutely minuscule compared to the reward of exploring the market.
Most of these panels are made up of computer novices who install these tracking programs without realizing what they do. Comscore works the same way.
This is a very long article, and it's founded on a false premise.

Compilers is not an important topic because there's nothing universal you can take out of it. Machine code as we know it is a pretty arbitrary construction. Register machines themselves are pretty arbitrary---they're just one way to make use of transistor circuitry. The conversion from C to machine code is not really worth remembering. It's true that this system forms the basis for all our computing, but like the nanoscale physics of semiconductors, it's not required knowledge for programmers. It's just a bag of rules...it's not even a bag of tricks.

If you work at Intel optimizing compilers, then maybe you need to know this stuff. If you never hunch down and program inline assembly, why do you care? You're too far from the bytecode to leverage compiler knowledge against performance, and in fact you'd probably be wasting your time to do so. Its workings operate below the required level of abstraction. Understand what's going on, but leave the details to someone else. I don't need to know how Firefox implements an HTML parser to render my webpage. I just need to know that it does so in a consistent way.

Compiler implementations are pretty arbitrary, and oftentimes they're filled with a lot of goofy stuff. We shouldn't still be carrying cruft like Please-Excuse-My-Dear-Aunt-Sally around in our languages---and this is half of what a compiler does. If there's anything beautiful to take out of a compilers class, it's that a compiler can compile itself. There---I've spoiled the ending, skip the course and take a theory class instead.
Thanks.

Is "Engineering a Compiler by Cooper and Torczon" good for actually coding a compiler?
Why the features and functionality of your product or service don't matter
Food for thought on how to speak about your features and functionalities in terms of benefits prospective customers value.
Will look into it -- saw the link you posted on linkherd.com/django
This is curious. I haven't studied compilers at all, but I always hear the Dragon book is the default. Can anyone second these recommendations (Cooper/Torczon, the Gholoum paper)?
In summary: they have computers, several monitors and some stickers. They also may or may not like to party.
It's hard to imagine calling myself a good programmer if I didn't know how to write a basic compiler.
Vista (Comparatively) Invulnerable
SE Radio: Richard Gabriel on Lisp
I don't know what to think of this post. I've definitely learned a whole hell of a lot from my compiler projects, but I don't see the point of turning compilers into a religion. I wouldn't go around telling people that they have to learn compilers to be a "real programmer", but it does seem like a pretty comprehensive litmus test: if you've written a compiler from scratch, it proves you really do understand something about algorithms, data structures, and systems software.

Steve implies "Learn compilers if you want to be a Real Programmer(TM)!", but I'd say: Write a compiler if you want a project that will teach you a lot and will be a lot of fun with interesting challenges along the way.
That can be easily fudged, can it not?
You're focusing on all the wrong parts: the details. It's not like Steve is saying that you'll be greatly enlightened by memorizing how the IA-64 calling convention works. Steve is referring to the skills that you'd learn from solving any large and "algorithmic" problem, with the bonus that compilers will also teach you a bit about the low-level workings of your machine. You'll learn how to represent and manipulate complex data, you'll learn what a calling convention is, what a system call is.
I got about the same from YC News recently. I'd guess there are about between 5,000-7,000 uniques. Why?

1) My story (mike's too) got on the front page and had some decent discussion. I think 15-20% of uniques reading a featured story is a reasonable estimate.

2) The site is about news and community, so it doesn't make much sense to check infrequently. I'd guess that the uniques/week isn't much below the uniques/month. So it wouldn't matter that the story didn't stay up for a long time.

3) The leaderboard goes up to the top 50, with karma dropping by about 100 per 5 spots towards the end. If you take the rule of thumb that 90% just read, 9% contribute a little, and 1% contribute a lot, then if the top 1% is 50 people, you get 5,000. If it's 70 people, then you get 7,000. I recognize most of the names on the top 50, and I bet I'd recognize half of the top 51-100. So again, 5,000-7,000.

pg, care to give some guidance?
Bill Gates should stop looking at the failings of capitalism in Africa and start looking at its successes in China. And then he needs to ask the 60 billion dollar question: What is the difference between Africa and China?
definitely. also, i like the data that shows bicycling to be the most efficient form of urban transportation :)
I'll give you a dollar if you please change the site to use Verdana or some other font than the default you use now. (Please, please!)
actually I think you are right, however it was also something we were overtly specific about - of trying to build a site which helps make sense of already existing data rather than a community approach to solving things. More on the lines of google search rather than yahoo answers.

I think what you are getting at is that we need something more to engage the user for a longer term to keep him on the site. Definitely interesting, though not sure if it is good from loosing focus point of view.
why all this "pairing jazz" if i can simply click on "report spam?"

Too much effort for too less benefit, I believe...
No, no book is good for that. You just need to pick a project and start coding. Interpreters are a fun place to begin. I'd suggest getting a parser generator and reimplementing Lua or something. You'll want to look up stuff in the Cooper & Torczon book as you do this (like what an abstract syntax tree is), but I doubt it's useful to read it through or study it. Reading the code of existing compilers is also very helpful. (A word to the wise: Don't start with the source code of GCC or other industrial-strength compiler. :))

(This is my philosophy toward learning anything programming related, so maybe I'm just weird.)
Yeah, I think the new proposed spec is trying to addressing that, with namespaces and the like.
My open YC app Jan 08:

# of people working on project: 1
brief summary: todo list
monetizing plans: none
reason for site: personal use
competitors: lots of better products
other notes: Step 2 of the project is much more exciting than Step 1.

By the way, look forward to my site launch and press release congratulating our team of 20 developers sometime this month. It will be our little secret.
Am I alone in being wary of sites that show lots of faces?

To me it really sounds like: "Hey, you can trust us! Look, we've got plenty of happy people on our page!"

I noticed that trend especially with hosting providers...
He admits that situations 1-4 are pretty much solved once you have a parse tree. I think situations 5 and 7 are too. My perspective is that the compiler's work is only just getting started once you have a parse tree. I was hoping for a hint as to what about compilers was so important; if it's just parsing then no news here.
I don't think the millions of Chinese peasant farmers will agree that capitalism is a success in China.
Compilers is not an important topic because there's nothing universal you can take out of it. Machine code as we know it is a pretty arbitrary construction.

Compilers have nothing to do with machine code, other than that's sometimes the output target. There are plenty of other (often more interesting) targets.
Some good points, although I would take a more nuanced view in some cases. For instance (and trying to keep this somewhat related to hacker news, lest it degrade into a political debate):

Intellectual property was and is a compromise designed to foster the private provisioning of what are essentially "public goods" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good). It's easy to argue that the compromise has tilted too far in favor of producers, but abolishing those protections instead of limiting them might be a step too far in the other direction.
If we can develop complex finacial instruments that manage to package up mortgage debts and sell them off then we can find a way to make capitalism work for the poor.
The Anti-MacBook Air Has All the Necessary Ports
50% of his statistics are made up.
Yes, but not to do the kind of attack simonw is thinking about. You can't set the header from Javascript or HTML. You can forge it from older versions of Flash, but Flash 9 has enough penetration now that it's safe.
I agree with some of your points. The most important problems to be tackled are corruption and political stability.
The "Work From Home" Generation
Well, it's very common at my university (Faculty of Information Technology, Brno university of technology: http://www.fit.vutbr.cz). We're in the 21st century after all. Lectures are streamed in real-time and also recorded and published later.
Why dozens? I thought our threshold was seven, in which case I would be surprised if that doesn't happen every year. In fact, I'll bet far more than seven teen suicides a year would, if they could be interviewed after the fact, cite suburban boredom (and thus the automobile and its transformative effects on society) as the reason for their suicide.

My point was just that this article is the same sort of garbage I thought we'd finally moved past ten years ago. In the 1990s, you could barely open a newspaper or watch TV news without seeing a story about all the scary dangers of the Internet. Child predators can reach through the screen and snatch your children away! If you ever buy anything online, you might as well declare bankruptcy now because your identity will be stolen! Images of breasts turn children into axe murderers!

Please.
maybe they have sex with women, too. then "gay" doesn't fit so well.
Yes, because an idea does not make a business. Its just a starting point of figuring out how to eventually create something useful and build a business around it. You are not really sharing your strategy/plan of how to build a business, because essentially if you dont know it yourself how can you put it down on paper. The hardest part is to create that path of making something useful over an year or so and its not something you know beforehand.
As they are replaced by machines I suppose they wouldn't, no. As they move to industrial or commercial areas they probably will.
What's Really Going Inside the Big Co. You Are Trying to Sell to
Read this book to understand what's really going on inside and how they make buying decisions.
Key to Innovation: Becoming an Observer
The Widget Kings
where is the office?
26 Things to Do When Business is Slow and in Downtime Mode
If I only read the book and don't watch the lectures will I be missing much?
I'm on my 3rd company (first web startup), and I've never spent more than $1500 to start. If you're willing to get down and dirty with legal docs, you can easily draft everything yourself (this of course takes great attention to detail and enough confidence in your ability to rid yourself of the notion that they're too difficult for common folk to write) and just get a lawyer to review it.

Then, if you're equally willing to throw yourself into the code and server setup, customer interaction, and the networking that goes along with starting a business, again, it doesn't cost much.

I like LLC's personally because they're simple, protective, and structurally transparent. Then again, I don't usually go out and seek investment funding. I like to startup out of pocket, launch early the agile way, and then fund development with revenue.
http_load - test your server for heavy load
Agreed. I know nothing about this gene, but I doubt it would be wise to go around having lots of unprotected sex just because a test from some random company said you were resistant to HIV. I think it would actually be irresponsible and dangerous if that were the explicit or implied message. A lawsuit waiting to happen. Make sure it's clear to your clients that that's not the case.
will do on the email - definite ly could use your insight
It beats the (somewhat) recently attempted (under Mao) alternative, despite its obvious imperfections.