skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Making stuff people want isn't always the hardest part. Sometimes it's figuring out how you're going to collect from it.

It's sad the number of great ideas I hear that end with "And we'll make money from advertisements."

I think YC is the closest thing you'll see to a startup that creates ideas for startups.
Here is the Vonnegut short story on the same subject made into a movie http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-175006468841636088
"What do you want me to do? LEAVE? Then they'll keep being wrong!"
Wish google would buy it an digitize it for the good of mankind. An earthquake, flood, or fire would be a very sad thing in this case. The photos of the collection don't instill a great deal of confidence in its continued survival.
Short vonnegut story which i believe relates.

http://instruct.westvalley.edu/lafave/hb.html

also, made into a decent film

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-175006468841636088
The #1 value added app for lots of people, whether they know it or not, is exportability insurance. Make an app that tracks everything externally so that if Facebook starts to suck, you can migrate the next platform.

The existence of that portability might actually ensure things never start sucking.
If and when that time comes I'll consider using Facebook.

Until then, I don't care that, e.g., Joey H. who I took 9th grade English with is totally stressed out about finals or whatever.
I have a theory: You can learn to be smart.

Granted some people are gifted with intellect just as others are naturally handicapped and there exists an entire range in between, but I suggest that those with normally functioning brains who actively strive to increase their knowledge and understanding will discover that they are getting smarter.

The post goes along with this theory, in a way, by stating that curiosity - an active attempt to understand things - is above natural intelligence.

This is just a theory I came up with when comparing certain friends who haven't made the greatest choices in life or gotten the best grades in school (not a good intelligence indicator, by the way). I'm interested in hearing what others think about this.
What would the UI for that look like, though? Let people do arbitrary edits, and reject them if they changed too much? That would make people mad.
ASK YC: What is a fair equity share for a designer?
I know enough CSS to make a pretty website, but I have no patience for it right now. So I am hoping to work with a designer.

As far as I can tell one can buy a really nice design for an order of magnitude less money than a really nice web app. So, something like a 90-10 split seems like it could be fair.

But, I think that a lot of people would expect a 50-50 split. What do you think is a good compromise?
I don't; so don't steal my lunch :)
Google Launching AdSense for Video - Minus the Video
Is Xobni the next Google?
Rebuttal?
I think those are too low. At $0.05 CPM, 300 million page views would earn just $15000 a month. I doubt that that many pages could be served for a few thousand dollars. Look at their hardware and bandwidth costs and work out what a profitable CPM would be from there.
Where's the fun in that? :)
The myth of the Ninja Hacker
3E8 * .05 = 15 million, not 15000
Loopt isn't in stealth mode. They just started out on a niche carrier.
Maximizing efficiency by exploration
...and for that matter anything in life...
CPM = cost per mille

300 000 000 / 1000 * 0.5 = 15000
Is this going to be a static site? because someone has to develop server-side code, database, and intergration of back-end code with the static design. so in this bigger picture I'd say 10% would be fine.
Flattery is getting you more karma ;)
Xobni is a product we need more than we think we do. i can't wait for the gmail plugin.
No:-)

Google is the starting point on the internet for many users, Xobni is not. And, in any case, it's not a fair comparison.

That said, Xobni is a kick-ass product as a plugin for outlook and can be extended to the web ala plaxo and integrated as an overlay with any other social network.

In a more generic sense, the next google will probably not be the one everyone talks about, it would be the one people start using -- anyone remembers how people started switching from altavista to google?
JavaScript timers fixed in FireFox 3
Xobni's at a natural disadvantage for now, because all of the so-called "early adopters" -- well many, not all -- don't use Outlook.

For those who do use it, they can imagine how easily it could become one of those apps everyone talks about when it releases its other products.
I had my heart set on Ignorant Iguana...
wtf is with that picture?
Interview with Jason, BIID sufferer and self-amputee
I don't have experience with this myself, but focusing on not sucking seems like the #1 best resource. Perhaps that's slower/too slow though.
Possibly. Of course, can you really judge something to be rubbish after listening to part of it once? In any case, I'd imagine that to be somewhat tedious on vinyl records. None of this precise track skipping business we have nowadays!

Another thing I find interesting is the rate at which records must have been bought for this collection, which is close to an average of 'realtime' music buying. (you buy a day of music each day)

I know my estimate is 34 years of music, but there are more than 6m tracks, and average track length is probably more than 3 minutes in most genres. According to the ebay listing, the collection was started 50 years ago.
absolute minimum would be $.5
Google is not the starting point for many. Search is, and Google happens to be the leader in Search.. And i bet you Email is more a starting point than Search is. If Xobni established itself as a leader in this segment they have created through Email, then they can definitely be the starting point and maybe as big as Google one day......
At least for me, Google is the Google of personal information.

Xobni makes Outlook search less painful, but my Outlook only has my boring work emails. Gmail and Google Docs (and Facebook) is where I keep my personal information.

Also, don't forget that Google has desktop search, which goes even farther than Xobni in searching Outlook as well as all the documents on your hard drive.
Yeah, cant wait for the gmail plug in here too, cos I stopped using outlook express when I quit my previous job, and now that have the xobni installable, i cant use it :(.
They really need to integrate with AT&T/Verizon as soon as they can! Their service looks awesome, but... Exactly 0 of my 273 (thank you Facebook) college friends have Boost, Sprint or Nextel, and we're the kind of people who always want to know where everyone is "at" on the weekends.
What's funny is if you told those two thirds that the bible could be put on the head of a pin it would probably change their minds.
They do want registration. One strategy in these cases is to put the title in news.google.com and then access the story from there.
I think reading news is like drinking coffee. I'd prefer to not be addicted, though.
Principles of Beautiful Web Design
Wicked sweet idea, why didn't I think of that?
Is previous the next next?
Jayde Steele began modeling in fashion shows
she is a godess walking
to die for
All models vae a flaw find hers
Square Watermelons : Great ideas are always obvious in hindsight
14 Greatest Eengineering Challenges for the 21st Century
All they need to do is develop an iPhone app (after the SDK is released) and bypass the carriers all together. Integrating with carriers is quickly becoming a pointless effort... And its about time if you ask me.
Ask YC: Anyone using Google Gears or any other client-server sync solution for their startup webapp?
If so, how has your experience been?
Beer is Bad for Science
10 Best-Designed Websites of the World
How to Work The Room 4.0: Getting “Man-Charm”
When the Internet Is My Hard Drive, Should I Trust Third Parties?
Good idea. I am unavailable, but keep us posted on what you come up with! I see a huge market for this. And the monetization is a no-brainer: sponsored cards.
Is Xobni the next Google? No. Burger Pipe is.
From the elegant simplicity of its site design to the game-changing nature of its burger-meets-hotdog product offering, it's easy to see why Burger Pipe has become the darling of the TechCrunch 50000. BurgerPipe.com's understated use of navigational system beeps alone has already created massive economic synergies. Yahoo, Microsoft, Facebook, and Xobni are all pretenders to the throne. At the end of the day, there's only one Google-killer, and it happens to be a burger in the shape of a pipe.
From the elegant simplicity of its site design to the game-changing nature of its burger-meets-hotdog product offering, it's easy to see why Burger Pipe has become the darling of the TechCrunch 50000. BurgerPipe.com's understated use of navigational system beeps alone has already created massive economic synergies. Yahoo, Microsoft, Facebook, and Xobni are all pretenders to the throne. At the end of the day, there's only one Google-killer, and it happens to be a burger in the shape of a pipe.
Box.net Now Uses Scribd’s iPaper for Previews - Sorry, Adobe, but this thing just works better
I would not say, that PS3 was a flop. Sale numbers are in the millions. And, since we are talking about high-def video, as high-def player PS3 whoops ass (in sales) compared to any other high-def player.

I also do not agree completely about irrelevance of high-def format. If it's not that important, then why were Toshiba and Microsoft pushing with their own format ?
The only reason I got into it was http://www.csszengarden.com

Knowing that you can change a layout in that many ways just using CSS...its quite humbling.
Quote [Wikipedia]: An ibex, commonly called by its French name: bouquetin also called steinbock in German[citation needed], is a type of wild mountain goat with large recurved horns that are transversely ridged in front. Ibex are found in Eurasia, North Africa, and East Africa. The name ibex comes from Latin, borrowed from Iberian or Aquitanian, akin to Old Spanish bezerro "bull", modern Spanish becerro "yearling". Ranging in height from 27 to 43 inches and weighing 200 to 270 pounds (90 to 120 kg), the ibex can live 20 years.
http://files.bjorkoy.com/blueprint/tests/sample.html
"This box is aligned with the sidebar"

Not on my screen, unfortunately. (Firefox 2, Ubuntu, 1280x1024)
Hmm big words right now, being that most of my peers haven't even heard of Xobni. I doubt there will be the next "google" for some time...
It this a type of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharecropping
Theres even a facebook lolcats plugin now...wtf
Tesla Gets $40M, Says We'll See Sedan This Year
The Common Trait of Highly Productive People, Companies, and Countries
Microsoft-Yahoo deal: What about developers?
Richard Feynman, the Challenger Disaster, and Software Engineering
Interesting point, aside from capitalism/wealth/zero-sum etc:

The game created a classic case of cognitive disequilibrium: Either the system is skewed and unfair, or the winners played unfairly. To resolve this by deciding that the system is unfair would call everything into question; young children are committed to rules and rule-making as a way to organize a community, and it is wildly unsettling to acknowledge that rules can have built-in inequities. So most of the children resolved their disequilibrium by clinging to the belief that the winners were ruthless — despite clear evidence of Liam and Kyla's compassionate generosity.

The game was patently unfair, so why did the children blame the winners rather than the system? I suspect there is a general tendency among people (not only children) to blame other people, as opposed to abstract causes. That's more important here than any positive commitment to rules and rule-making.
Six minute nap 'may boost memory'
5 Emacs Tips for Windows Users
Beer is also bad for my brain!
True dat. If someone is dumb enough to make a PDF, then I will be slightly less annoyed if I can view it in Scribd. Still doesn't top FoxIt, though.
So it's a french thing?
These days it's all about friendship bracelets. And ball bearings.
Or use a freelance designer. And keep your equity. Unless they were materially part of the conceptual process. Or you really, really can't afford it.

Respect equity. If you haven't read Felix Dennis "How to get Rich" you should.
14 Ways to “Profound Knowledge”
M stands for mille, which is latin for thousand (think Roman numerals). Thats also where you get the prefix, as in milliliter.
Yahoo Search Wants to Be More Like Google, Embraces Hadoop
i think it is quite clear that a purely capitalist society is unjust and oppressive.
Most of already posted resources are great for learning seo tricks.
And the best one for tracking results of your optimization is
http://www.semonics.com
With this I'm able to track hundreds of keywords.
They do not. At least, not when I went through the public school system 10 years ago.
Opera: Browser market is broken—thanks to Microsoft
Yahoo protects employees in case of Microsoft takeover
Retro (Soviet?) Tech Gadgets 
Why is looking back at the technology of the past always so entertaining? I wonder what the bluetooth Apple keyboard I'm typing on now will be viewed as 25 years from now...
Looks like spam to me.
Why is looking back at the technology of the past always so entertaining? I wonder what the bluetooth Apple keyboard I'm typing on now will be viewed as 25 years from now...
PowerMonkey Charger: No Dead Gadget while traveling
As a moderately frequent traveler for work, this thing would've come in handy for me on several occasions.
The Most Useful StumbleUpon Feature You May Not Have Known
Reg Braithwaite does Daily WTF
How convenient -- my head just happens to hurt from all the beer I drank yesterday.
There has already been some good conversation in this thread over that, which I think at the least means that it isn't quite clear at all.
Only if its a circular linked list of two elements.
Here's a possibility:

I've noticed that the more time I spend here, the less tolerance I have for other sites. So while I spend more time here than I used to, I spend much less time on other, less relevant sites than I used to. The time I have to do work is actually the same or greater.
the best advice from shoeomoney was not to worry too much about the indepth SEO stuff - 99% of SEO is keyword research, inbound links, title tag, H1 tag, URL ... the rest doesnt really matter if you are building a valuable service rather than trying to spam google in ultra-competitive keyword areas (travel, finance, electronics etc)
yeah http://www.backlinkwatch.com/index.php is a good way of checking out how your competitors build their rankings
The article specifically mentioned that most of the kids simply chose not to play the game, which is a choice with some obvious metaphors in adult society. Only a few kids were explicitly asked to stay out, and the article doesn't explain the circumstances behind that.

Quite simply, the students established their own meritocracy, which the teachers replaced with a form of socialism.

That may indeed be a more peaceful solution, but I can't remember any age at which that wouldn't have pissed me off. I used to play with Legos as a kid, and Construxx, and even an old erector set. I probably would have been one of the central kids in the story, one of the ones establishing rules and hoarding (and bartering for) pieces. I had to share a room with my younger brother at about that age, and that's exactly what we did.

I would have protested loudly at the change of rules, and then I would have lost interest in playing with them altogether.

There were many better solutions to the problems developing in that game, but the teachers chose instead to teach the kids that regardless of your skills, interest, passion, or ability to barter, at the end of the day, everybody gets the same thing.
No no no its burgers no SPAM!
As you say, systems are abstractions, and people are tangible. It takes a greater maturity to be able to look at a system and find fault with it, rather than with the people involved in the system. There are a lot of adults walking around that never reach that particular maturity, and certainly it's not something you'd see in a lot of 8-year-olds.

Being able to blame a person for something comes back to a peculiar kind of satisfaction: you can confront the problem!
A Structured Discipline of Programming
Google to Store Patients' Health Records, Raising Concerns
Navy: Missile hits dying satellite
Agree2 opens up their beta
How do you benchmark real-world work?
Your IT project is toast when…
Where are meaning-enabled authoring tools for the Semantic Web?
Will you trust your medical information to Google?
HP may be launching an ASUS eeePC mobile PC competitor
Cry me a river
Muni's 'Connected Bus' is about to go online
Scientists find believing can be seeing
that's harsh. think of how many school kids could get a kick out of this and start thinking about the why's of maths and calculus rather than the tedium of the 'how'
Hmm...I'll let you know what I think about this in 7 minutes.
What a coincidence! Every time I clicked a link on this site, I got a text message on my phone.
Change "Opera" to "Netscape" and "2008" to 1997", and what's different?
natural resources are used in the process of creating wealth.they are not unlimited.
america uses a lot more natural resources than it's entitled to(europe as well).
and:if you make 200 k a year in a country where avg income is 500 k i'd say that your a lot worse off than if you make 100 k in a country where the average is 100 k
Ask YC: Anyone in Chicago going to TechCocktail Tonight?
I remember jdavid said he was coming down from Milwaukee. Other Chicago people (Shooter, speby, there, rrival, bmaier, cstejerean)? Does anyone want to meetup? I don't know the venue so I can't recommend a good way to meetup.

Venue: John Barleycorn Wrigleyville (Map)

Time: 6:30pm -9pm

Date: Thursday, February 21, 2008

Cost: FREE

RSVP Info at: http://techcocktail.com/blog/2008/01/22/tech-cocktail-chicago-7/
i think it's very obvious that a purely capitalistic system produces a lot of very poor people.that is it is a bad system.
To rule the world?
Demonstration of a new group concept for high score lists in online games
FWIW, a friend of mine recently showed me his Streamy account. Big apologies to the people of Streamy!
After tying it, I wouldn't say it works better than Reader or FoxIt.
I'm all about it but what's with the name? iPaper? When is the "i" thing going to die? Product is great but they could have put a little more work into the name imo...
$1.31 for 24 hours! Do you freelance?
You end up with a lot of people who are relatively poor but practically rich, whereas socialism promotes a system in which nobody is richer (or poorer) than his neighbor but with the nasty side effect that everyone is practically poor.

Hence it's a relatively good system :)
Yes, I'll be there, but unfortunately I don't know the venue either. I believe its upstairs at Barleycorn. Anyone else going?
Funny, after reading about the NSF's top engineering challenges, I was just thinking about this. There are a number of challenges in this problem:

* privacy
* interoperability with existing systems
* ease of use (for patient and doctor)

I'd rank privacy as the most challenging problem. You have to create a system that can guarantee privacy from the government, system compromises, and other snooping third parties, while keeping the ability to share selected information with selected individuals. Not just that, but if you do it right, you have to make it so that somebody can access a person's health records in a time of emergency, without compromising trust.

I think the door might still be wide open on this one.
3 birds with one stone.

1. Yahoo employees are greatly benefited in case they get fired

2. All those distracted Yahoo employees have some motivation to stick around and see how this Yhoo-msft thing pans out

3. The acquisition just became more expensive for microsoft

Looks like yahoo is not going down without a fight -- good for yahoo.
Well, we have spam, burgers with spam, spamburguers, spamburgers with spam, cheeseburgers with spam, spamcheeseburguers and spam with spamcheeseburgers with spam.
I've always thought the pigeon hole principle guarantees the existence of numerological coincidences.
Google Health Begins Its Preseason at Cleveland Clinic
I'll be there wearing a Mashable schwag shirt (http://tinyurl.com/2xs7c2), black jacket. I look like this guy: http://tinyurl.com/yw4bet

It's upstairs. There's a circular bar in the middle, a wall of windows on the east wall. The elevated area along that wall is probably the easiest place to meet as there's just one way to get there.

See you guys there!
Rubbish. Beer is good for you. Well, maybe not if you write science papers. I don't. But I've met a lot of interesting and smart people in my local pub who do help my with my startup (or some other things I'm not really good at). Czech beer rocks! :)

Btw avian ecologists aren't the hard partying types. Geeks and doctors are.
How big is the problem of interoperability really?

I'm the people guy in my company, not the computer guy - but I do a bit of programming for the web in my freetime in order to keep up and being able to deal with programmers on their own turf, so this question is out of curiosity - not trolling.

In my sparetime I often do small sites that include javascript and CSS, which seem to be at the heart of the problem, and I have found that once you know a few hacks it is pretty easy to work around. If I can do this, then surely programmers will be able to as well.

So my question is: Am i missing something? Why is everyone talking about the huge amounts of work involved in interoperability between browsers? Isn't it just a question of a few simple hacks in your css and javascript?

Or am I missing something?
I just saw an ad on dice for a contractor with COBOL/CICS and AMAPS and it was local. 20 years ago there were probably 8 of us with that combo. Am I the only one left? Dare I reply? Naa...I don't even remember where I left my IDENTIFICATION DIVISION.
Robotics - The Uncanny Valley
Five a day
I already trust Google with my medical information, whenever my doctor tells me I have something, I always run home and Google it.
Success? US claims to have hit rogue satellite
I'm sorry but I've never seriously studied biology and you've lost me. How is that theory germane?
Tuition free MIT? [NSFW]
FeedBurner: Alive and Well
Companies Can Make Money With Widget Ads
isn't the idea of CSS to separate design from semantic content? putting <div snap="span-10"> (spans 10 grid columns) in your HTML entirely defeats the purpose.
i didn't say that a purely socialistic society is any better.and, as long as you make more than 100k/year(which is enough to fullfill your physical needs), it really is your relative income that counts.
Great to see this float to the front page. blader announced their launch right here on news.yc: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=74993

That said, is this YC-funded?
haven't tried FoxIt, but I would say it is faster, less clunky, and more responsive than reader at least on my box
Sorry Adobe? You realize iPaper is Flash based, another Adobe product.

Long live Adobe!
i just read a blog post taking the other side of this argument:

http://jeffcroft.com/blog/2007/aug/09/myth-content-and-prese...
I think a couple of our guys (thepoint.com) are going. Please say hello! We look like this: http://www.bandrew.com/rampage/
Recipe: Easy Baba Au Rhum
I sure hope so.
some individuals are wealthy enough to pursue war. i really do think this is a very serious problem with unlimited capitalism.
examples:al quaida,blackwater
Google will manage to do what the KGB and CIA where unable to.
OpenSolaris' Fielding leaves developer community, slams Sun
I'm a little skeptical of Google Health. If a patient doesn't even remember to take their medicine, how do you expect them to go update their medical record? I think this will only catch on for a small subset of active patients.