skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
(a bit off topic, NOT intended to be flamebait...honest question)

He's smart enough to be tech savvy but he advocates the gold standard....

Paul's a chill guy, and this isn't meant to be political, but what is all this about going with the "Gold Standard" ??? The "Gold Standard" hasn't existed since the 60's... anyone know what's up with that or what he means when he talks about the gold standard?
this might sound a little...retarded...

but honestly math.com is a great site. I've used it for enrichment and if you start at a topic that seems useful, it can be a great place to learn. Of course books are good for practice problems and all...
Ask YC: Would YC.Newsers try a web service that works only on IE?
If currently a web site doesn't support Firefox/Safari/Opera would you still try it out?
Hmm the only reason I even know about AOL now is their instant messaging client. Besides that...I can't think of anyone in my neighborhood...or any of my friends for that matter...who uses AOL internet service. Time Warner owns other assets though right, so are they almost out of the dialup business? I don't see those amazingly annoying free CDs anymore...
No, I'm on a mac, don't have access to IE.

It's definitely ok to release an alpha that only works in a certain browser, but make sure you tell people, and be prepared to cut some people off.
It's not so much a question of would as could. I'd have to install IE first. And it would take a lot to make me do that.
Yes, that's true. But I still have a requirement for a schemaless db, so sql doesn't cut it.
Culture clashes that happen in integration are the most destructive parts of acquisition. Sure, yahoo and microsoft culture may not mix all that well, but if they do it the right way it COULD work. Whether they pull it off right is really anyone's guess. Cisco's success was integration. Microsoft is no Cisco, thats as much as I can really say.
I thought the graphics were fine, but I was confused about the purpose at first. Seed it with a wide range of interesting stuff, I almost found something interesting (not the armpit licking) and the map mashup was good, but wrong city for tonight. I'd work on seeding, filtering and showing connections before I'd worry about the 'sheen'.

Hmm, a points system for new things, how cool/hard/prestigous and and points for doing one. But then be careful to moderate dangerous options. Hmmm, yea, lost an arm, but whoa I got a lot of points... Don't wanna see that comment in your forum, eh?
Great point; I was hoping my per-action cost to be around $0.09, which is roughly 10 times FreeRice's (pre-increase) cost of 10 grains, since it takes awhile to solve a sudoku puzzle.

Do you have any ideas on what would be a good single click or trivial action? I don't want to copy FreeRice outright, but I am having trouble brainstorming for other activities for the user. Perhaps a quiz about water cleanliness?

Thanks for the feedback!
Thanks for the feedback - could you be more specific about the scoring system? What doesn't work well? What would you like to see implemented?
I disagree. This is a guaranteed sale. Ebay, you pay for the listing and then you have to hope someone buys it. The premise of using this service is a little different.
A little too random. My first reaction (without realizing what it was) -- went to the site, read a few of the "interesting" things that people recommended...and left. Hmm.
No, it's not the dissection fallacy, it's a different trick. I gave some details on another post on this thread...
They're certainly not agile, nor are they perfect. No question about that. But they do have a long history of ignoring Wall Street while working on building long term profitability. The Xbox360 and the Zune are good recent examples. Though the Zune has yet to materialize as a major profit source, and honestly may never, they're definitely going against the wishes of investors to try to become more of a player in the consumer space.

My personal feelings aside as to whether or not MS/Yahoo is a good idea, Cuban is right in that it will allow Yahoo to focus on the long term in a way that remaining independent (if that's even an option, which it probably isn't) will not.
I would not! Though I could use my IE for Wine, why would I go through the trouble just to visit a site? If they're not going to cater to me as an Ubuntu user, then they can count me out of their target population.

Its like what paul said, except for me, even though I technically "can," I won't go through the extra trouble.
If it didn't support any browser than IE, I'd pass. Those guys are digging themselves a hole if it is dependant on IE centric code from day one.
Sure... are you providing the Windows machine to test it? I'll send you my shipping address.

C'mon. What is it, ActiveX, or does the layout just break horribly in a proper web browser?
@0% affiliate fees on US$100 niche videos sounds really good. However, if the management doesn't understand their market then you'd be a fool to associate with this venture.
http://www.teenwag.com

http://www.hi5.com

http://www.skype.com
I suppose this will be the general reaction here. If it's possible we could we have of an insight to YC.news stats of what the majority uses here, I guess Firefox/Safari wins over IE?
I've messed around with it for some classes that had projects in it at GaTech, but that's about it.
Long before the advent of computers, mathematical notation provided a way to more precisely express ideas than natural language. Of course, if you are verbose enough, you can express mathematical ideas with prose. But the corresponding mathematical notation will probably be more clear and easier to manipulate than the prose version for someone well versed in both "languages."

Programming languages can similarly provide for precise, concise expression of ideas.

Your example is a huge leaky abstraction waiting to happen. What if something about the resulting program is very different than what you expected or wanted? How do you know at what point things went wrong? How do you fix it? What if there were ramifications that were not clear at the high level of your conversation, but the machine dutifully did what you "wanted", with repercussions like Mickey in the Sorcerer's Apprentice?

The only way programming languages will no longer be useful in the future is if algorithmic thinking is no longer useful. Is that your assumption here?
You are of course in an enviable position... I would hope that most people actually working on a web site use something like Wine to be able to test it in IE.

No way do I use it one minute more than I have to, though.
comp.lang.prolog is the prolog newsgroup. The comp.lang.prolog FAQ contains information about the various implementations: http://www.logic.at/prolog/faq/

SICSTUS Prolog ( http://www.sics.se/isl/sicstuswww/site/index.html ) is a widely used commercial implementation. There are others.

FOSS alternatives include:

- Ciao-Prolog, which might be noted for it's various extensions (breadth-first search, fuzzy logic, WWW programming interface, concurrency, persistence, and more) http://www.clip.dia.fi.upm.es/Software/Ciao/

- SWI-Prolog http://www.swi-prolog.org/
Probably not. The only time IE gets run is when I need to test a design.

Your service would really have to offer something amazing that I simply could not live without and that there were no competitors.

So far, I haven't found a single service like that.
it's not much of being IE centric as to designing an api first and insteaad of losing time on stupid JS/DOM dependancies (things you can fix later for less cost), just get it maybe to most users for whom IE is the internet.
It may be unfair to change the platform just before the deadline. Likewise, it is unfair to change the deadline. It looks unco-ordinated and it could run afoul of some contest laws. It would have been best provide a stable platform during the competition then release updates afterwards.
I tend to agree with you.

The problem with this business model is that consumer electronics is some of the easiest stuff to sell on eBay. The units are standardized, so they are easy to describe to potential customers -- when you eBay an iPod [1], the site even offers you canned descriptions and photos of iPods to include in your listing. And, if you keep the original boxes in your basement, consumer electronics is easy to pack up and ship.

iPods are an extremely liquid asset: I eBayed two of them a couple months back, and both of them sold within $10 or so of the price that I had predicted based on earlier sales figures. The trading volume is large, and the market value well known, so there's really very little risk that, for example, you'll put the thing online and it won't sell at all.

So paying TechForward amounts to a gamble that their promised buybacks are miscalculated in my favor. But that's unlikely, partly because they put a lot more effort into the prediction than I, partly because they presumably build in a factor of safety, and partly because, if they do guess wrong, they may well go out of business before I can collect my winnings. Once these guys declare bankruptcy my $9 is gone forever.
Have you ever been prevented from doing something you wanted to because of patents?

I've had to take software out of production and replace it with non-infringing software.

What evidence do you have that we're in a mess?

EOLAS v Microsoft, Amazon v Barnes&Noble, Sun v NetApp..
NVIDIA to Acquire AGEIA
Well... your own essay suggested that the motivation in Yahoo v Xfire was personal.

If someone comes to YC with an idea you like but is incumbered by a technology and/or business model that you know infringes on specific patents held by a company like Microsoft, do you just fund them anyways and tell them it doesn't matter?

Are you saying it would have made no difference to Yahoo if Microsoft somehow patented the continuation-server idea Viaweb depends on before you did?
After I completed one puzzle, it said I still had done 0 puzzles.
Regional Bets Pull Ahead in Wireless Spectrum Auction
Running IE precludes an operating system and hardware on which it runs. If you asked about developing for Firefox only then I'd strongly recommend it. This browser can be run on many operating systems. Most importantly, early adopters who are likely to use this browser are more likely to be an early adopter of your service. For the same reason, I'd recommend developing a Firefox plugin rather than an IE plugin.
You could do something with high/low to bet if a water temp is going to be hotter or colder than a starting temp if you wanted to make it a game of chance. You could do something as basic as rock/paper/scissors, or tic tac toe. Pick n games that are that simple, simplify your sodoku to 1/9th the size, do multivariate / a/b testing to see how the CTR is for each game and let the traffic/users decide.

FreeRice is also nice because the domain is short =) although it looks like free/clean water/h2o variations are squatted (as far as instantdomainsearch.com knows) - good luck!
Here are some more lawsuits, some of which involved injunctions.

Tivo v Dish - http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1201779834291

Forgent v Audiovox, ePlus v Ariba, Immersion v Sony/Microsoft, EMC v HP, USA Video v Movielink, BroadVision v Art Technology, Electronics for Imaging vs everbody .... http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=492018
Yang e-mail reaches out to Yahoo employees
Random challenge -- yes, exactly. I'm thinking it would be good for people who are really bored. Also, it's good for new users who are trying to get an idea of what kind of things are on the site.

Terminology probably does need work, I think the history is holding it back a bit... as you can see I'm calling your things "challenges" or "things" because "scenes" just doesn't work for me.
great use of dropbox :P
I don't think the light running through the cables wears them down by much.
Thanks for the overview.

Is this really a "large" number of imitators? Would it be a stretch to say that many of these are traditional angel investing with a few small twists?
Yeah, unfortunately cookies are required for the site to track your contributions. Most people nowadays have cookies enabled so I think it should be okay, but good for you that you're very security and privacy conscious. Thanks again for the feedback, it's much appreciated.
Your assumption that it costs less to fix later is incorrect. It will probably cost you more.
Everyone loves a short girl (particularly Asian), you can throw them around the room and generally have a good time with them.

A short, hideous girl (Arc)? I wouldn't hit it.

I'm sticking to the short and beautiful (Python/Ruby).
The world's rubbish dump: a garbage tip that stretches from Hawaii to Japan
If you think your audience is primarily IE users than you can make a decision to just support IE.

But you asked Hacker News. For the people here I'm sure IE is a last choice browser.
Multi-language Support for the JVM
Would Y Combinator fund a company that makes a plugin to one kind of mail client?
A theory can be verified by a mass of facts, but it becomes a proven theory, not a fact.

This is a ridiculously bad description of how science and fallibility work.
"... If currently a web site doesn't support Firefox/Safari/Opera would you still try it out? ..."

What no Lynx support? No way man. Wouldn't touch it with a pole.
Too many steps in the value chain to make this work...
depends on what you consider cost. Cost to fix or cost in numbers of users.
>"If you asked about developing for Firefox only then I'd strongly recommend it."

I know that this is a tech site, and that I am probably get modded down for saying this: But that is absolutely ridicolous. Basically what you are doing if you are only developing for firefox is opening a shop where you only let 10% of your customeres through the door. The rest will have to go home, or go to you competition.

I mean, seriously... Business 101 guys ;-)
Notice in all three cases the guys on the receiving end of the patent suit were big companies. Big companies have lots of money, so they get sued over patents, and when people slip and fall in the parking lots, and when they fire people. Big companies getting sued over something doesn't mean it's an actual problem.

If you don't mind my asking, where were you working when you had to replace this software?
TechCrunch is a good place to start. They're widely read and will generate at least that many visits for a day or 2. At that point its up to you to keep those incoming users and get more. Having a way for people to tell their friends (or some kind of other social/viral feature) helps, but the best thing to do that will actually ensure you get on TechCrunch in the first place is have a great app that people want to use. RescueTime currently gets >50% of what we got on TechCrunch every day - and we don't have any SEO and aren't doing any marketing or PR.
user pleeeease
That's what we advise startups, at least about software patents. If you've developed something very novel, it doesn't hurt to file a provisional patent application. But don't spend a lot of time on it, or waste any time worrying about other people's patents. That's not what makes startups win or lose.
xobni or inbox backwards
Not a chance.
What about convertible debt? If you plan on raising more money, this can be good for your early investors, because it's protects them from dilution.
No, the other option is for your customers to install Firefox. Now this isn't always something you can demand/expect of your users. But for example for a free service or during a beta period it's perfectly reasonable. Most IE market share is not early adoption friendly. If they wouldn't fear new technology they would be on Firefox already. Either they never heard of Firefox or don't want to try it out. Neither one is a quality that indicates early adopter.
Yes, we completely ignore patent questions in funding decisions. So do most software investors.

And yes, it would have made no difference to Yahoo. As far as I know, they didn't do any patent searches prior to acquiring us. In fact, I've never heard of patents torpedoing an acquisition. Acquirers (rightly) have a fatalistic attitude to patents.

Curiously enough, Yahoo did get sued by a patent troll over Viaweb. It was after my time, but it was something to do with shopping carts. A totally bogus claim, but I believe Yahoo settled, because they were able to pay them out of the money they'd held in escrow for us. (We were not that unhappy though, because the money held in escrow had increased something like 15x.)
IIRC there are more IE related JS/DOM bugs than Firefox ones. In FF you also have Firebug which makes development less painful. So why would it help to make an IE version only first? The only reason I can think is if you're using ASP.NET and the funky HTML generation that it and Visual Studio do.
I almost never test things in IE. I'm counting most of the time on the JS libraries I use to be cross platform and defer to a JS guru when some IE only bug shows up. Most of the time one of the many other people that have to look at a prototype will be running IE and report an issue. It's not worth it for me to bother (is it possible to run IE7 in Linux now? IE6 is obsolete).
I agree that this seems fishy, mainly because it's so far under the sea.

However, your conspiracy theory seems way too easy. But, maybe our government is just that sneaky...
We did a convertible debt round and it was great. No need to haggle over a valuation, and the legal documents are much much shorter, so you can save considerably in those pesky legal fees. I highly recommend this approach.
I agree with this, being able to do both would be best. For my PhD I have been using various AI techniques to get information out of Computational Fluid Dynamic simulations. Initially I wrote a whole bunch of scripts in python to do various tasks, eg make data files, monitor the progress of a simulation and extracting and processing data. Then I wrote more scripts to tie these scripts together (automate the progress of a CFD) and then more scripts that tied all these together, automating many runs simultaneous CFD runs and teaching the results to neural nets.

In the end it was hell. I had data going everywhere in 3 and 4D arrays, was getting confused which data was input data and which was output data and forgetting the return type of functions. I rewrote it all in Java and though it took some time, was definitely worth it. Creating a nice framework where you can label everything and see it in front of you makes understanding what you have done much easier, especially with Java's generics and a good ide that can predict what you want to type.

I got a lot done at the start, and that is thanks to python. But to understand what is going on and thus be able to tweak stuff you haven't touched in months or years, self-documentation in the form of a good type system is invaluable.

Now if only there were a language that I could write a thesis in quickly...
Swiss experts say individuals with undetectable viral load and no STI can't transmit HIV during sex
Also, your friends said no to your 1.5MM valuation?
IE only isn't a web service ... it's crippled desktop software. My last company used an EXTREMELY expensive service called Windchill. It was used because CVS was free, worked cross platform, and relatively bug free. Fractal wrong, so to speak.

Windchill only comes available through IE. That meant that the 1/2 of the company on linux boxes needed dual boot machines to use it.
what, you wouldn't use Parallels just to use windows to use IE to try the service?!
Outside.in switches to Rails
This seems like it could be complicated - can we decouple the JVM from java? Assuming I have a lisp compiler for the JVM, an important question is how my lisp app will interact with some third party java app. Perhaps the language itself (lisp in this case) will have to come with some library for dealing with java classes and objects, in the spirit of dlls on win32.
I see. It's ok as long as it's someone else getting screwed.

As far as my own situation, the details are here: http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/0,1000000121,39194883,00.ht...

Ironically it was another "ARC" patent: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_Replacement_Cache
Programming languages can indeed provide for precise, concise expression of ideas, but how precise must the description of a problem be in order for the computational machinery to express it within parameters necessary to satisfy the user?

So what if the program is very different that what you expected or wanted? Is this such a new thing? A better question would be "what if I could be wrong eleven times in a week and finally be happy. Would that be better than taking a month to accomplish the same thing?" I think you're looking at the problem through the wrong end of the telescope. The perfect is the enemy of the good.

I think by marrying mathematical concepts to computers you're continuing down a path that may no longer be useful. While it's true that computers are mathematical creations, the question isn't whether a program is "correct enough", rather whether it is "useful enough"

We're already using poor, leaky abstractions to grasp and create programs -- it's called the English language. The guys who created E-bay didn't work out the calculus of various bidding strategies -- they implemented a simple online bidding system. We're not looking for mathematical perfection. We're looking for maximum value with minimum effort.

Or maybe I'm smoking crack here. Are you saying that the ability to make the most complicated precise programs using the least amount of syntax is a good thing? If so, why would that be?
of what i know of IE suffers from certain memory leakage issues and that alone makes you write more careful JS code, that is if you are aware of them. So, if you can avoid these and achieve satisfactory functionality between all recent versions of IE (especially when putting these on their limits) , you can later fix your code working for Mozzila. Of course you could do it simultaniously but would it worth to lose even more time in cotrast of going online. (not a .NET. fan)
Disqus does.
Article makes a fundamental mistake. From http://ycombinator.com/faq.html

Is Y Combinator an incubator?
No.

:)
Vote for the 2007 UserDriven Hall of Fame and Shame
What would make it gel more for you without the benefit of this forum? Themes? A blurb? Testimonials?
Thin is in: Ars Technica reviews the MacBook Air
"Have you ever been prevented from doing something you wanted to because of patents?"

1. Every year at CMU's Human Computer Interaction Institute, it appears someone reinvents something patented though not deployed by Xerox PARC.

An example is a "looking glass" feature for something like photoshop, where you can preview the result of an action like a filter -- or something like that.

From the anecdotes I've heard, PARC just sits on it, doesn't deploy or license it, and acts to block others from using it.

2. SIFT is a new object recognition technique built upon years of research. A recent patent on the best implementation has restricted groups from using the techniques. They grant exclusive licenses on the level of "for all robots in America", but that's pretty useless for a startup, isn't it?

I'll say it: nothing should be patented. Trade secrets, in the literal and legal sense, make much more sense. If a system can be reverse engineered and copied, you don't have a secret, and it isn't in the best interest of society to block copy cats from beating the originator.

The idea that makers wouldn't create due to the fear of competition is just wrong -- though it is the most often used argument to defend patents.

[edit: And another thing: people respect and fear patents, so despite my opinions, I'm going to act in my best interest to acquire any patents possible on my work. My goal is notably against the best interest of society as a whole: create unfair advantages for my company.]