skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
#1 for me is on your list in indirect form:

The dinners with a bunch of equally intensely focused people.

Every single dinner we were exposed to something new that caused us to look at our product differently. I can point at about a dozen features in our product and tell you what interaction they sprung from. Google Analytics support was written while AT a dinner in response to something someone said earlier in the evening. Everything mobile in our product (quite a lot, at this point--alerts, mobile access, etc.) came from discussions with the guys from Tsumobi and Heysan. And the UI is still undergoing a massive transformation that started last year during those dinners.

So, for me, the other founders were the most valuable part of the experience.
I think it is already happening, there are artificial hearts, for example?
then make that clear to them, perhaps with a good employment agreement contract.
you can do this easily enough with websnapr as well
Isn't it like estimating the length of the Emperor's nose?
Moral support
What would you dream up if you didn't have to implement it?
8) free tshirt :)
I guess the poster is asking if the metaphorical boyfriend is wearing a metaphorical condom.
What is a HMO? In any case, if an insurance company would default to "Let patient die", it would probably lose a lot of customers - shareholders would not be pleased.
Ask PG: Is vote weighting on?
Posts that are voted up seem to have improved since yesterday. I'm curious if it's the people or the algorithm that changed.
The first t-shirt is free, but the second will cost you your soul. :-)
Nuclear Energy FAQ - John McCarthy
My order:

8, 3, 4, 2, 5, 1, 6, 7

where 8 is

8) Peer network. It makes you feel pressured to work, launch, and get investment. It also makes it seem almost normal. Like you're not crazy for doing this.
Linus Pauling died.
Didn't you consider his behaviour a bit peculiar?
If you don't have set (< python 2.4):

def distinct(l):

d = {}

map(setitem, (d,)*len(l), l, [])

return d.keys()
laser eye implants and a hover-board like back to the future.
No, it is not.

The only place where the email can actually be a single point of anything is either my local Inbox or an Inbox at my mail provider. Latter is temporary, so compromising provider's systems does not jeopardize all my web accounts. And compromised local Inbox is an indication of a far more serious security breach, not isolated to the email. So, no, your analogy is wrong.
i noticed that too. i think it has. i've seen comments with fewer points higher than posts with more points and such.
OpenID to Save Anti-Spam, Anti-Spam to Save OpenID
Living on the edge (of Rails) #13 - Git script/plugin install, has_one :through
Chad Fowler: Great Ruby Code?
If you have questions about Rails and git you can come hang out in #github on freenode. There's usually some Rails core members or Rails plugin authors there that are experienced git users.
Scout: A Ruby Powered Web Monitoring and Reporting Service
That was a great post, and I recognized themes from the books: "The Tipping Point", and "Freakonomics". What I like the most about Y combinator, from an observers standpoint, is that there is an offered solution to the entrepreneur's inability to raise capital with no track record. Other micro-investment and advisory groups are popping up all over the place, and this will stimulate more entrepreneurs to take a chance on themselves.

Couple comments here and what's written in Paul's post allude to our capitalistic consumption-based society. I think Annie sums the state of our world's affairs up pretty well, and you can see the relation to different aspects of your lives and big business at, http://storyofstuff.com/.

My problem is the lack of solutions that I see offered by those that raise objections to the status quo. Its good to make others aware, but always go the extra mile and offer a suggestion to change what you feel is so messed up.

That is what is missing in our 2008 elections. Just look at Obama and Hillary sputter about what they intend to do, with great passion. However, they never actually say how America will get out of Iraq and what will become of the Iraqis, how to fund the health care and education programs they propose, or what solution they’ll put in place to get the economy rolling again. All I hear is why race and sex matter so much in this election, and how historic it will be when a woman, or black man becomes president.

Those are not reasons to be America’s president! I don’t care what color, size, sexual preference, or country of origin our next president has. I want to know how they’re going to fix this mess.

As a startup founder, I keep confidence by following several principles:

1) "Success is merely others recognizing what you knew you had inside you the whole time."
- Will Smith

2) "Plan your solutions for the worst, and leave hope to others."
- Craig Benson, founder of Cabletron

3) "Champions take chances and pressure is a privilege."
- Sharapova speech after winning the last Australian Open
Thanks for putting this aptly, it does sound convincing to me and I do agree very much that YC puts startups at very strong position and holds the metaphor correct that it helps a kid become an astronaut. May be we will see this astronaut touch the mars, one day.
Extreme User Research
I find this to be the case often -- if you don't reality check your product ideas with real users, you will find yourself spending insane amounts of time and energy on features that don't matter.
Thanks. I just picked it up from the library.
Recent talk on xmonad, a window manager in Haskell (video)
It's refreshing to see a subscription based site making a go of it. I was beginning to wonder what happened to them. Good luck!
A recent talk given at FringeDC on xmonad, a window manager written in Haskell.

More information at the speaker's site: http://byorgey.wordpress.com/2008/03/27/fringedc-talk/
YC startups are like Moroccan restaurants. it is a four course meal and i takes 4 hours to eat diner. they start small, but by the time they serve the entree you have been prepared enough to know how to eat it right. (EDIT: plus throw in the belly dancers)
If you have been following the YC startups you will surely get that what you see at launch is not what you get 9 months later. Just take a look at justin.tv. certainly when it launched you could be like wtf is them dudes thinking. why would i want to watch his life live when i got my own to worry about. off course a few months later you when they launch the live video streaming platform, you say "oops, i did not see that one coming" then they assault you every week with new features including mobile streaming then you are like "ok these guys saw something n months ago that i am just seeing now".
An anti-troll gimmick poster?
5 Traits You Will Need on Your Way to Becoming a Leader
I don't think so. The top 10 stories are ranked in the same order that they would be according to the algorithm in the arc2 source.
Thats just it. Downtime is expensive if you rely on your web site to make you money. If you are a small eCommerce shop with all your eggs in the EC2 basket, downtime can be expensive.
Vintage Logos
Well if you want Python there is pyzor. But the grand-daddy of them all is SpamAssassin, and that is perl. :) FTW!
Why the personal attack? I mean there's no reason for that.
I would probably have added an "allow maybe" checkbox to the event creation dialog, but "maybe" doing the polarising thing is actually better.
Really? So if you lived in a post-Singularity world, in which clinical immortality was an unquestioned human right, you would periodically get your face wrinkled, inject yourself with bone-brittling nanobots, induce dementia, and then wither away?

If you tried to inflict that fate on anyone else, it would be a terrible crime. If you wanted that for yourself, it would be evidence of mental illness. If you consider it anything but the status quo or an inevitability, it's indefensible to desire it.
How to Lay Off Your Developers the Right Way
yeah, I almost forgot justin.tv, they too had quite a success.
Our goal all along has been to make the site as intuitive and easy to use as possible so that users can create events without being slowed down by a multitude of features. We agree that there are a lot of little features that people would like, but if we added all of them, the usability of the interface would definitely diminish...something we've been working hard against.

In that regard, we've taken a page from 37signals' book "Getting Real":

"The best software has a vision. The best software takes sides. When someone uses software, they're not just looking for features, they're looking for an approach. They're looking for a vision. Decide what your vision is and run with it."

Hope that kind of explains where we're coming from and why we haven't given creator's the choice of response types.
Thanks much for the much better articulation!
My company is using it for all our projects now and we are absolutely loving it. We are also using GitHub for remote storage of the git repos, you should look into it. It has a nice interface and personally I like having an RSS feed that shows me all the recent commits.
Client-side encryption wouldn't protect you against that site turning evil and deciding to steal your passwords - they'd just have to change their code to decrypt your passwords and then post them back to the server.
silly me, all this time i've been using x[~-1] to get the first element, x[~-2] to get the second element, and so forth!
I'd make sure it's not one of your affiliates.
I don't see your point. If I steal the password for your e-mail somehow, I can access your inbox (through webmail or POP or whatever) and then use "I forgot my password" on sites you use to steal your accounts there. If you use webmail and don't delete your e-mail I can search through your inbox to figure out what those sites are. Seems like a pretty serious single point of failure to me.
LispWorks: Advanced Lisp Programming Environment
I'm actually developing a similar system, that will also be a subscription model.

Good on ya. Glad to see other startups in the market.
The yachting business might be interesting.

You need insulation on your yacht, have very little space so normal methods won't work, and you can encapsulate it in between the hull and a layer of fibreglass, which is what most yachts are made of nowadays. And often price is a secondary issue in this market.
The belief to take on a huge market and think you can win
Calacanis startup employee interview technique: "I try to scare people"
Is there some reason I only see an upvote arrow (and not a downvote one)? Have I not met some heuristic yet (like submitted some number of articles)?
This is great recruitment tactics if he ever needs to hire in the future. The word of something like that gets around.
haven't met the karma requirement
I completely understand, I actually hate having too many options in software.
Would Developers Take More Care If They Knew THEY Will Be Maintaining The Code?
"21", Movie about MIT Las Vegas Card Counters Opens Tomorrow
Not really. EC2's much more expensive.
Here's a followup to that post:

http://parlezuml.com/blog/?postid=609
Could you do the same thing with startup names please.
I think I must be misunderstanding you, then, and what you've just said feels like it conflicts with your previous statement that I was addressing.

My assertion was that serious hackers don't lose their love or interest for technology. I wasn't talking about the entrepreneurial spirit, at all. Merely saying that nerds are nerds for life, but they might pick up other skills along the way (and those other skills are probably valuable in starting and running a business). The fellow I was speaking of was always without entrepreneurial ambition (he was happily an IBM guy for years, in fact...a private office with a view and a good salary was all he ever wanted)--and actually perfectly fits the description I gave above about nerds over 40--but his interest in and passion for software development never waned.

So, perhaps you could clarify what you were trying to say about aging hackers above, since I didn't understand you the first time?
Safari 3.1 on OS X. I tried it in Firefox and double click works there.
New Names, Same Story: Another $100 Million SAP Failure
Cal Henderson gave a pretty good talk at FOWA Miami that involved some talk about how Flickr does their deployment, you can listen to the mp3 here: http://cdn4.libsyn.com/carsonsystems/Cal_Henderson.mp3

deployment stuff is about 3/4 of the way through if i remember correctly.
I think you might be mistaking a lack of blockbuster success (so far) for a lack of ambition. Sometimes success is what makes the company or person look ambitious after the fact.

If Google had not succeeded, it would be easy to say that they lacked ambition - they just tried a me-too search engine when Yahoo! and AltaVista were the titans. But Google caught fire and now, we all think they were audacious and ambitious to try what they did.

Ambition alone does not guarantee success: sort of a necessary-but-not-sufficient ingredient.
"undeveloped, untested, and defective"

Untested and defective I understand. But "undeveloped"?
Street View in the API (or, How I Spent My Summer "Vacation")
Can Google Stop the Brain Drain?
i won't say the startup are less ambitious because i think almost all of them wants to reach the level of success of google/facebook , but then it is all about your idea/product, team, execution, timing, funding, luck, mentoring, etc.

Also YCombinator is a king-maker but not every king can have huge empire and not everyone can become Alexander, though everyone would like to become one, but then they all have some kind of limitations which is sometimes is out of your control.
Send an email to the future with time machiner
I sent myself an email tomorrow. I'll let you know how it works out.
Only 1.36 GB this time around.

Download link (requires ADC login)

http://developer.apple.com/iphone/download.action?path=/ipho...
A more balanced view is here: http://www.portfolio.com/executives/features/2007/11/19/Long...
I like the way you think :-)
You can just use x[-1] to do the exact same thing. ~0 = -1 though, hence the reason x[~0] has kind of a nice feel to it.
It's not how you failed; it's how you get up. Keep pressing on
Wow, this gives me a lot of hope in humanity. I'd be mad/sad if I was fired, but knowing that people are looking out for your ass once they drop you really says something about the integrity of that person.

Kudos to the boss, and I hope the ex-employees find some work. :D
Thankless work, but somebody's gotta do it.
It's early yet. There are many YC companies building their business, and right on schedule for where they want to go. A large business takes several years to build. Some YC founders opted to go the faster path and sell early. They're not wrong for doing so. They're richer than the rest of us now, and have fat jobs at Google, Facebook, Conde Nast, etc. In a couple of years, they'll all be vested, and have a ton of cash. They can shoot for bigger success, or they can lounge around eating bon bons all day.

I'd say the level of ambition and the level of success is quite high with current YC companies. It's interesting how your assumption seems based on the notion that having YC backing makes success automatic, and all these guys need to do is be more ambitious and stick with it longer and they could all build the next Google, or even Digg. As pchristensen pointed out, the math doesn't back this idea at all. YC is a great benefit--it brings additional media, a lot of great guidance, and a lot of peers that you can lean on and ask for help from--but it's not going to make building a business magically easy, if you just have enough ambition.
I've seen people get culled with a tap on the shoulder and a littany of basic platitudes. Seeing something like this really makes me believe in the decency of people.
If it's something you want to pursue you're welcome to shoot me a mail, it's in my profile. I might be able to help out. I live on a boat, so I know a little about the business.

I actually drew up a yacht in 3D the way I would have built it, just as something to do on sundays. You can see it here if you have nothing better to do: http://www.maximise.dk/yacht/
But they could be audited by looking at the JavaScript, so at least you have a way to prove to yourself they're legit.
If Clickpass servers are compromised, then so will be all my web accounts. And I have no reason to believe they will not be.

That's the point.
Reply to Edit 2:

I like doing it this way because it doesn't involve capturing the right screen shot and then pulling it into photoshop and then cropping and....

Plus doing it this way takes less time than it does to load Photoshop.
I was just reading the wikipedia entry on card counting the other day -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Card_counting -- if anybody has a passing interest in probability theory, this stuff is fascinating.
Gone in 2 Minutes: MacBook Air gets hacked first in contest
Here's the archived talk: http://www.justin.tv/hackertv/86574/Peter_Nixey_Clickpass__O...
http://www.lightsphere.com/dev/web20.html ?
I agree: developing a strong relationship with coworkers in every direction is highly important, and this is a stunning example!
It wasn't just THAT he did this or WHAT he said. It was HOW he said it. I feel like I practically know these 3 people already.

You can't make this stuff up.
We pretty much stopped going to the movies about a year ago, but I think this will make a nice exception this weekend. Pass the popcorn.
I didn't realize the vote weighting was included in the released code. Thanks for pointing that out.

I guess this means that people are upvoting better stories (at least from my point of view).
If you have different secure passwords at every single website and some how avoid email as a single point of failure then Clickpass/OpenID might not be the right solution for you. For everyone else its better then whats currently out there, and we are going to implement further security measures going forward.
I've read the book "Bringing down the house", really fascinating read. Definitely going to go to this movie!
it's no more a mental illness than being a luddite
I'm currently living in Buenos Aires as well and completely agree that city has a great vibe, not to mention how far you can stretch the dollar. Although I don't have experience working here (I'm here learning Spanish), I can say that travel has taught me more about the world and opened me up to more social interaction. And learning a new language isn't too shabby either.

btw, Colin - if you're interested in grabbing a coffee sometime, shoot me an email. My address is in my profile.
Oh, I'm not making a statement about aging hackers. I'm thinking about what is a good life strategy for young people making decisions about how to pursue a successful life. I'm also assuming that such a person would be flexible enough to walk into a party and not be seen as a nerd if they choose not be to.
That's awesome. I live near Herndon VA and if I was hiring I'd definitely give those guys a look.
"they may not survive a long commute"

That makes them sound VERY old and frail. Other than that, nice touch.
I didn't know this and I do like it. Especially if it caught on and became more standard.

I'll see if I can get my crew to try it out.
But it contains millions at the cellular level.
YC vs Reddit vs Digg: Orders of Magnitude of Difference, Literally
Homeopathy is based on the idea of taking a solution of some chemical, then diluting it so much that no molecules of the original solution can remain. The BBC did a documentary on it a few years back, and they found that lo and behold, under laboratory conditions, homeopathic solutions behaved indistinguishably from water.
Before we worry too much about news.YC becoming inundated with smelly vagrants, it's good to keep things in perspective. According to this obviously questionable source, we're not quite at levels of controlled chaos(reddit) or outright bufoonery (digg).
He's not the best example as he died at age 93.
Email is not a single point of failure as I just explained in another reply and Internet users with rudimental sense of security is not a rarity. I'm afraid the ignorant "everyone else" crowd you are planning to cater to might not be as big as you expect it to be.

Also you are tasking yourselves with handling confidential information, so stating that your "lips are sealed and encrypted" is not good enough. I fail to see how this is "better then whats currently out there". Sorry to be peeing in your punch on a launch day, but you do have a serious problem with a security disclosure.
New York Fed research paper: "Understanding the Securitization of Subprime Mortgage Credit" [PDF]
For those of you who are interested in learning what REALLY went on with the subprime mortgage crisis, the NY Fed has provided the best description yet. It's long (82 pages), but not too technical. You don't need to be familiar with securitization or the mortgage-backed securities markets to understand it.

Abstract: "In this paper, we provide an overview of the subprime mortgage securitization process
and the seven key informational frictions that arise. We discuss the ways that market
participants work to minimize these frictions and speculate on how this process broke
down. We continue with a complete picture of the subprime borrower and the subprime
loan, discussing both predatory borrowing and predatory lending. We present the key
structural features of a typical subprime securitization, document how rating agencies
assign credit ratings to mortgage-backed securities, and outline how these agencies
monitor the performance of mortgage pools over time. Throughout the paper, we draw
upon the example of a mortgage pool securitized by New Century Financial during 2006."
I knew it was faked because it was only uploaded once. However, it immediately made me laugh because it implied the impossible. Judging by the quantity of blue in the middle, I'd say that resizing was only done three times.
Where Do People Go After Visiting Wikipedia?
His goal is to help smart hackers solve "the money problem" so they can have the freedom to pursue other productive pursuits they wish.

Yeah, smart hackers who happen to be in US, what about us ;(
There's plenty of me to go around.

[Sorry!]

Today's billion-dollar markets are not tomorrow's billion-dollar markets. Building a better Digg or Facebook today won't help you kill those companies. First, it would need to be an order of magnitude better to convince anyone to switch. Second, your innovation would need to be hard to duplicate. You might stand a chance if you found some way of positioning a startup for people who don't currently use the existing services, but that's a hard problem.

Predicting tomorrow's big markets is a harder problem. The existing big companies go after the big predictable opportunities with vigour and vast resources, leaving us to chase the unpredictable opportunities. Thus, we can't consciously chase the billion-dollar opportunities because we can only guess at their nature.
It's possible to wish that things were different, or to want to have a closer connection to the results of one's labor by avoiding automation and seceding from impersonal organizations. But I don't think Luddites advocate smallpox or other debilitating, disfiguring, fatal diseases. Aging is a disfiguring, debilitating, fatal disease, and so as far as the scope of this discussion is concerned, the difference between it and smallpox is that it's not contagious and it's taken longer to cure.
No one has a downvote on submissions. Only on comments. Unless the karma requirement requires one to be in the top 25 users, and I just don't see them. ;-)

There have been some submissions that I would have downmodded the hell out of, if I could.