skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Chyrp and Tumblr are two different markets..Tumblr is hosted, Chyrp isn't."

Not entirely (I mean if you look at it rhetorically, you have to host Chyrp somewhere but I understand the dichotomy you argue). If essentially the bottom-line of both applications is to allow the end user to publish content, they're not at all different. They are different in the way you mentioned, hosted vs. non, but not by much. Tumblr does allow you to use a line of Javascript and transcode a Tumblr feed to another site with very little effort.

Chyrp has all the same functionality that Tumblr does, text posts, links, video, audio, and conversations. In that sense, they are almost one in the same; the only differentiation is that yes, Tumblr has more "traction" if by traction you mean 'userbase'.

I think the issue we debate here is market dominance. Tumblr clearly has this, however Chyrp is still an up and coming engine that performs the same tasks with more options for server-side customization, and user interaction. This alone has granted Chyrp a very respectable number of users.

Marketing is less about budgeting, and more about effectiveness and utility of your product. The WoM movement proves this everyday, and with more and more flexibility in social content development and usage, marketing is essentially being performed everyday on YouTube, even Facebook by the users - much less large, seasoned companies.
If you fail will you be happy with going back to your old life? Will you all of a sudden enjoy being in a "cage"? What happens if you're only happy when working on startups and every single one of them fails? Will you be poor forever? What if your current startup succeeds? Will you stick with it as it becomes a large company or leave and try to recreate the startup environment you enjoyed so much? (it seems to me that YC might be a way for PG to relive his startup days, which is why he tries to reproduce the Viaweb model so closely).
How can you take "the environment in big companies is toxic to programmers." and say "Paul makes no claim about employees being unhappy [...] the absence of something you don’t even know you’re missing is hardly likely to make you unhappy on its own" ?

I can see how someone might have difficulty making the connection, but I think the food analogy addresses it. Most food that people eat is in fact toxic to humans. However, its toxicity, on average, is fairly low; it is only in aggregate over an extended period of time that the consequences become apparent. In some cases, it will never even cause a problem.

Eating this "toxic" food doesn't cause anyone unhappiness in the short term, it may even cause a great deal of happiness, but it can have long term consequences.
What do you mean by a proper trust metric? I see systems of karma on sites like these eventually evolving into reputational economies so I'm curious about any way of making karma more complex.
Is Ruby surpassing Python, Perl any time soon?
I wasn't quite sure about posting it, but I thought the contrast between Carr and Arrington was interesting, and highlights a very important issue: what to do about intellectual property, and what the consequences are for various concerned groups. It is a very sensationalist title though. I guess it would have been better to change it to something like "Carr vs Arrington on IP".
Thanks for the examples. Those are all good points. Maybe if the market trends keep going and there's less of a market for session players, Abraham Laboriel will be more likely to tour...
The past few months I have been working my FT job, and also working on my start-up every spare moment I have (I would say 25 - 30 hours per week. Come June, I will be quitting the FT job and focusing exclusively on the startup.

I have been working FT for a large company for the past 5 years (past year remotely from home) and am really excited for moving to full time on my startup.
Not everyone is meant to be or want to be a startup founder either.

If you look at the history, most substantial technology innovations are not from startups but universities and research labs of large companies.

Startups are more about the right idea (in business sense), the right time and the right place than innovation and quality work. It's more like a monopoly game than truly substantial and creative technical challenges. It attracts more people who think they're good than they're actually good.

Been there, done that, got the t-shirts. For real hackers who're incited/excited by the article to be a "founder", here're a few notes based on real experience:

1. Many top hackers are not interested in and bored by the financial aspect of the business. But you have to learn the basics in order not to be taken advantage of. It's not that hard to crack once you decide to bite the bullet.

2. Pick your business partners carefully. Not just someone who's smart but someone you can trust. To use a cliche, it's a jungle out there, which I could only appreciate after experienced it the first-hand.

3. If you want to go through the Y route, talk to the previous founders (esp. not so successful ones). You learn the most from failures.

4. Make sure you understand and make copies of every thing you sign.

5. Beware of business people who boast photoshop chops.
i have a fulltime job and freelance...
i spend the time i have left after doing freelance at home to work on my "idea" - building something i need (and hopefully others would want it too...) and for the experience. basically it is like hitting two birds with one stone.
And that type of layered electronic music could mostly be reproduced "live" if the artist was up to it, by playing live on keyboards and making loops then mixing them up with prerecorded samples. Of course, most DJs would rather just push play when they have live shows because it most take a lot of practice to master live looping. I saw Justice live recently and they were very good at pushing play.
Personally, I'd go the mefi route and charge $5. That seems to work there, and (since this site is primarily about YC's aims and its potential founders) I'm sure serious entrepreneurs wouldn't think even once about paying.

Look at it this way: people will pay for the privilege of an intelligent conversation, but trolls feel so entitled that 99% of them will never pay.
i began working on http://markkit.net after hours. it took me about 9months to have first version online. then, beginning january 1st 2008, i negotiated with my boss to work part time (i had a good argument for negotiation : if he did not accept, i would go full time on markkit).

now i feel like i have the best possible situation.
Trust and reputation are always in context, current karma system ignores it. But once you add context visualizing and interpreting karma becomes hard. Take a look of how we're trying to deal with this problem (link in my profile, sick of being accused of spamming, sorry).
i think going social and "asymmetrical" is the way to go.

think twitter. their subscription system does not obligate you to follow people following you. this is the key to good content filtering.

of course we can keep a "public timeline" (for new users which don't know where to begin)
More important is to routinely rotate strong root passwords. What most people neglect to mention, when denying root access to an SSH server, is that people then login with a second account, (you still need ssh), and then su - to root. So, all you've really done is moved the difficultly in logging onto the server from the root account, to the secondary account+root account. Your security is now based on the strength of that bi-pair of passwords. As others have mentioned, moving logins to RSA keys (very easy) is probably a better approach.
what's with the 2005 articles?
Lines Of Code - Dispelling The Myths
I have an account there but I'm unclear on what you're doing differently with reputation..
A cruise missile with a 2 Ton anti-personell warhead that homes in on anyone who utters the words "I voted for Bush."
Utilizing reputations through clustering of voting histories in order to produce their recommendations is a pretty good description of what's going on there now. Next they're planning on giving you even more control by allowing you to control who you trust directly. This combined system should be the special sauce that really solves this problem, I think.
Simple text watermarking with unicode
deny by default and trust only people that need to know
Google Distorting Info on 20% Time?
The correct analogy would be suicide -- stop eating, drinking, and breathing, and you enter the "rest state"

Murder, because it involves another actor, misses the point.

That is, unless you believe that some people "make" other people poor during the course of regular life -- an odd and unsupported statement.

I would agree that there are plenty causes of people losing what they own. Seems to me, however, that no matter how much money you have, you cease to be poor once you move beyond looking to external actors for the source of your internal pain. Or perhaps that statement is a bit too Zen for the board. Dunno.
Once I conquer the known universe and establish domination over the laws of physics, I'd like to run a sub shop. On the beach.

People walk in wearing t-shirts and flip-flops, I make them a sandwich, and they go away happy. Immediate gratification for both of us, plus I get to invent cool sandwiches. And fresh bread too!
this is good analogy to http://www.wundrbar.com/ a YC startup
I am interested in this "It was really easy, though, because this class stored the data internally in a dictionary but the lookups on it were done by sequentially iterating through all the keys to find matching one. All I did was replacing the iteration with normal dictionary lookup."

can someone explain how to do a normal dictionary lookup?

what is that? and is there something similar in PHP?
So for startups, what is consider to be a good-sized project? Are we talking about thousands, tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands lines of code?
http://www.google.fr/trends?q=ruby%2C+perl%2C+python
Probably by storing the keys in a hash table structure instead of an array.
It may seem flippant to just say OpenBSD but it's an awesome piece of software. I tend to deploy FreeBSD for historical reasons but I totally respect OpenBSD for it's complete and utter no nonsense approach to everything.

FreeBSD comes pretty locked down but OpenBSD is locked down as tight as a gnats arse. It's pretty safe to say that if your OpenBSD server is compromised it's something _you_ have done rather then something _you_ have NOT done. It's a good starting point.
I've been doing this for years.

The best metric I have for you is hours of work per dollar of value to the customer. Paul G makes an observation in one of his many essays about having customers call up with problems and being able to fix the problem immediately -- while the customer was on the phone. No muss, no fuss. That's direct value to the end-user in a minimal amount of time. That's what you want.

Somehow we always get into these "terseness of language" discussions. It reminds me of the old game show "Name that tune" in which contestants made wagers on how few notes they needed to name a popular song. Programmers are like that -- "I can write an entire TCP stack in just 3 lines of code!"

Something about this seems to miss the point, but what do I know? At any one point when programming on a modern operating system, I'm responsible for hundreds of thousands if not millions of lines of code. Hopefully 99.999% of that I never touch. But guess what? Those three-line-code guys are responsible for just as much, it's all just a matter of how you want to count things.

So focus on time-to-value, not lines of code. You can add-in time-to-unique-value, which is the time it takes you to provide unique value to your customers. This is a little more interesting, but not all software projects have to be unique. In fact, some guy right now is probably writing the next million-dollar app and the code base probably is something like printf("Hello World");
Guys, I think he is talking about a different kind of alone. Do not worry man, good things happen to those who wait.
Ingress and egress packet filtering ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egress_filtering ). Remove default route on all internal servers.
Replacing Wire With Laser, Sun Tries to Speed Up Data
http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=ruby%2Cpython%2Cperl%2C+ja...
What about the unsaid scam of the day, that the US banks have actually tried to con other nations banks into paying for their crisis, by fraudulently selling 'financial products' that were in effect nothing more than black holes.

If you buy something that is unfit for the propose it was marketed, then that is fraud.
> 1. Expose the absolute minimum number of services (and even then only software with a good security reputation).

Perform a minimal install of your operating system then source compilation of latest services, with minimal features enabled. It is possible to compromise this configuration but it harder because there are less dormant features to exploit and it doesn't utilise widely used binaries.
Gouged by Sprint - The Smoking Gun
It is not the yuppies that decent people care about. A yuppie who's revenue goes down 20% will simply keep driving his BMW for another year before buying the next one. Nobody's (except luxury products manufacturers) heart is breaking for them.

But working class people who lose 20% of absolute revenue in a year? Out goes their health insurance, no more saving, and things get ugly pretty fast. And any society who ignores this deserves to go down.

You can judge a society most not by how it treats his most powerful members, but by how it helps the least powerful. And in a society as rich (in all senses), inventive and powerful as today's Western World, it is a pity that we cannot offer our least able dignity in their life. Economically difficult, you say? Give me a break.
1)Limit SSH logins to specific users

2)Get a proper /etc/sudoers

3)Use IP tables to limit SSH connections to trusted IP's/networks. Setup a port knock if you roam around a lot.

4)Read your daily logwatch

5)Turn off ports/services that are not in use (this is somewhat less necessary with a halfway decent iptables setup)

6)Use SSH keys instead of passwords!

7)Log to a syslog server that is highly secured as well

8)Run a nessus scan on your box regularly

9)Minimize how much specific information about your underlying OS various services display
One thing that might be useful is for users to be able to block other users. If I don't want to read any more posts/submissions by WakeUpSheeple or AlienFromPrisonPlanet, I can just block them.

One could combine this with flagging accounts for possible deletion if they are blocked by too many people (as WakeUpSheeple probably would be). Deletion would occur only after editorial review.

This wouldn't work for that other site, since trolls have critical mass. But it might work for us.
At the same time, many people (we'll call them "left-wing") claim that there is no agency behind wealth or poverty, and that therefore we should punish the "lucky" rich people to help the "unlucky" poor. This attitude is utterly simplistic and destructive in a society when taken to the extreme (the left-wing tends to be extreme).
Very informative link. You can see Python's poor PR at work in the headline on the right, "Python eats Australian family dog."
More iPhone background app analysis
Yeah, a different, more literal kind of alone.

I got burned last summer by bringing people on board too early. I'm the hacker-type.

The other people were the kind whose strengths too were different from mine. One was a high-powered client-interfacing guy, who has since taken a full time job as an IA, after the failure of his own Web 2.0 startup (all in under a year!). The other, and the troublemaker, was a high-powered marketing person who wanted to fasttrack the branding campaign before I even had a product or clients. We'd all worked together well in the context of a larger company, but we couldn't reconcile our directional aspirations for a startup.

So this year, I'm alone. In Northern Virginia's technology corridor. I would love a hackerly co-founder, or at least someone to bounce my ideas off of. All my friends from CS classes keep moving to the West coast to work for the Googles and Microsofts of the world. I have a feeling my YC application this year is going to be rejected simply because I'm a sole founder.
The murder suicide analogy is perfect, both end in death (poverty) but you can get their either by youself (suicide) or by the actions of others (murder). Calling poverty a rest state is to ignore all the outside forces that can be impairing a persons ability to create wealth. You can indeed make other people poor, and its not always a crime to do so, nor require them to be complicit in it. I think most people here find some truth in the idea that food aid makes farmers in developing countries poor.
> rejected simply because I'm a sole founder.

The application certainly makes it seem that this is the case.
I really think I can prove myself and my ideas. I wish I were better at networking.
This is great advice. I will simply add one more thing (and two bonuses):

4. Disable password authentication for SSH and use a public/private key. Of course, use a good password on the private key.

5. (bonus) keep the installed software to the bare minimum. Less software, less bugs.

6. (extra bonus) look apache's mod_security, it's an application level firewall (filters requests to the application, so, for example, you can filter SQL injections or invalid characters before they reach your app).
I don't know that could go both ways: Those who post in order to spread information for information's sake may continue to do so, while those who spam may simply go away because there is no "reward/recognition" anymore. However those who spam may also feel that they now have nothing to lose and may post more worthless stories even more often.
It felt funny how different my reaction was to the idea of paying at Metafilter vs news.yc. I scoffed there, but I'd pay $5 here in a heartbeat. If that's all we have to do it seems a small price to pay.

Maybe if it added up to enough there'd even be a YC company funded by it :-)
Do you mean to tell me that "The Lumberjack Song" and the "Power Rangers" theme song dosen't attract women?
I like my regular f/t job as well, especially since I get moved within the company ever six to twelve months. It has given me a lot of freedom to do things that won't show a profit instantly like write and get some accounting qualifications.

However looking at what I really want to achieve I have decided that a startup is the way to go for me. Exit planned for September. Unfortunately it's not something I could run concurrently with a full time job, or else I might launch earlier to reduce risk :)

To answer the original question: Specs, use cases and UI mock-ups were 12 hours a week for 3 months. I wrote the first prototype this weekend (60 hours), so now I will be doing increments towards a stable production version, planned 12 hours per week.
Why We Borrow Until It Hurts?
Arthur C Clarke: predictions
Everything's Blub All Over Again
Just a random observation, but the recent founders vs. employees kvetch-storm reminds me strongly of the response to Paul's original Blub Languages article.

"Blub's a great language! And there are lots of jobs programming Blub! Why would I be happier using that weird language? Not everybody wants to take risks using an unpopular language. And how dare you say I'm inferior for not using something else!"

I'm not passing value on the essay or its critics, but I just think it's interesting how much the two essays and their responses have in common.
I would suggest we be careful with definitions here. Certainly certain policies impact certain jobs. My grandfather was a farmer. That is, until the economy changed. Then he wasn't a farmer any more.The policy may have had negative impacts on farmers, but it could only have a very limited impact on my grandfather.

I would also distinguish between "making somebody poor" and "poverty", which is a state of existence. Likewise, I would also distinguish between internal poverty, ie, despair, and external poverty -- lack of money.

The definitions always get you on these things. For instance, most people are familiar with studies that show "the rich get richer while the poor get poorer" in some western societies like the United States. What readers fail to gleam from these studies is that while the numbers for the quintiles do show those movements, people move around between quintiles a lot more than is acknowledged. So when we say the poor get poorer, we are confusing the statistical average of a category of random people with actual, real people. Actual, real people move about in income levels quite a bit. The statistical bottom fifth of people in general, however, is not doing so well.

Likewise when we talk about poverty, or the economy, or social policy, we're dealing in large, averaged groups of things, not individual people. It makes a difference because we are individual, unique people, not statistical clumps.

I'm not saying that the internal attitudes of a person is enough to overcome any external obstacle. What I am saying is that the way we internalize external challenges is a better measure of anti-poverty and future happiness than the amount of money we have in the bank. Therefore, you cannot "kill" me, make me poor, by taking away my money. My internal wealth is outside of your ability to change.
I'm also a sole founder. I don't feel _that_ disadvantaged because I have a mixed business/tech background, but in terms of applying to YC it's clear that being on your own is a major mark down.

It could be fairly interesting to see if a couple of technical people, working on different products, could act as one company. Both parties get the benefits of having someone to look over their shoulder (as they have a financial stake). You also get the sum of both sets of secondary skills and contacts. The downside would be a split in focus, but that should be no worse than the two working individually.
I'm a full time student so time comes and goes-- however, the Oxbridge term calendar (I go to Trinity College Dublin; the Oxbridge tag-alonger) gives us one hell of a summer holiday.

Hopefully something will come of this summer.
Ha!
In all seriousness, Ruby doesn't fare any better.
yes, it was a long time ago though. I used powerplant (old style macos class library from Metrowerks). The best thing was it had classes to deal with POP/SMTP.

What I learned:
* don't write POP/SMTP/IMAP - it's been done
* don't write for the home user, it's been done (IMHO)
* the corporate world loves Exchange and Lotus Notes but they are not ideal solutions so you could look there. You will find it hard to get corporate customers to move from exchange/notes for company email though.
* maybe look at customer support systems where emails are handled by many, many people. A lot of them have clever pre processing and flow control heuristics in them. You may have a new angle to help those guys.

The app I wrote was for fun because surely it can't be that hard. Well it was and I was a fool.

good luck.
Young hackers who start companies in cahoots with YC are mentored by old hackers who start companies.
True: "JFK Documents Include Reported Ruby, Oswald Conversation."
JP Morgan possibly raising bid for Bear Stearns