skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We use them commercially too, and I am very happy. For a system that is under development (and presumably iterating internally), support has been nothing short of fantastic.
Paul Graham doesn't sue - he just delivers an arc kick to his opponents
does anyone else think that xobni will be the biggest ycombinator success to date?
YC Meetup in SF next week?
I'm a New York based Rails hacker in town to talk to a bunch of startups and to check out the scene in SF/Mountain View and was wondering if like minded folks wanted to get together for a meetup next week (I'm there between 2/20 - 2/27)

I'm completely new to the west coast so ideas on where and when would be greatly appreciated! A bar or some equally social setting should work.
Nice example of using TDD + Ruby's dynamism to design better methods
Paul Graham: Six Principles for Making New Things
Where were you searching? Hire a lawyer who specializes in startups, and you'll get them done in no time at all.

And before you ask, if you need graphic design, get a graphic designer, and if you need good PR, hire a PR firm.

Of all the things a startup has to do, this is quite possibly the easiest.
Sun turns to Neil Diamond for Amazon utility 'killer'
Yes, not open source, more like free, um, free publicity for REM.
There's one paragraph in there that I think sums the entire essay. When I read it I was so stuck by it that I put that paragraph on my desktop image (http://www.cocunderground.com/desktop.jpg).

Here it is: I like to find (a) simple solutions (b) to overlooked problems (c) that actually need to be solved, and (d) deliver them as informally as possible, (e) starting with a very crude version 1, then (f) iterating rapidly.
EU seeks to extend copyright protection for artists to 95 years
What I did in college:

I wrote a compiler (for a Java-like language) that compiled to x86 instructions. The last week, we were writing nontrivial programs in this language, compiling them, linking the result with a GUI library the instructor wrote, and seeing it put graphics on the screen. It was not a required class, but one of a fairly small set of which a certain number (3 of 5?) were required. It was easily both the best and hardest class I took.

I wrote the guts of an ACID database (basically every part of a simple RDBMS except the query language). Again, this particular course was optional, but among the small set which were required.

The OS course, by the time I took it (1999?), was no longer having students write an entire OS, sadly. But we did have to implement several major components. I'm not sure I'd call any component of a real kernel "non-trivial" -- there's no black magic here -- but I did have to deal with many real issues. Required course.

I had to design and implement a CPU (at the gate level) for a pipelined MIPS-like instruction set. This was a required course, and in fact the big weed-out course for the computer science department. The last week, we got to actually put it on an FPGA and let it run real code, which probably would have seemed pretty cool if I had gotten more than 15 hours of sleep that week.

The ones I didn't do:

I took the first half of a graphics course (which involved writing things like rendering loops), but dropped it because it was just too boring. The graphics geeks I lived with ate that stuff up, and they did some amazing things, but I just couldn't get excited about it.

I never did anything with crypto in school. I don't even know if it was offered, but it doesn't really interest me, on a technical level, so I wouldn't have taken it, anyway.

I don't think any of these could be described as "a professor holding your hand". The professors at my school were, overall, notoriously bad. In some classes, there was no point in going to lectures. Even when the lectures were good, they were just about the theory; you still how to derive how to build the sucker yourself. Think "an hour discussing the differences in power between LR/LL/LALR/...; OK, now here's the BNF for a language, write a parser for it by Thursday, bye".

I guess some will take this to mean that it's not worth going to school for computer science. For me, at that age, though, the learning experience was (a) having hard deadlines, and (b) being surrounded by other young people interested in learning the same thing. I might never have written a compiler on my own, though it helped me as a programmer immeasurably.
I'd add the closing paragraph to this as well:

So when you look at something like Reddit and think "I wish I could think of an idea like that," remember: ideas like that are all around you. But you ignore them because they look wrong.
I remember reading Paul's essays, pre YC. When he wrote the essay announcing it, I remember thinking, "This guy is crazy, all he's gonna get is a bunch of school projects." Sure enough, he did, and wrote about it. I felt vindicated by that, saying to myself, "I knew THAT was going nowhere." People like to be correct in predicting failure for others, for whatever reason.

After reddit, loopt, zenter, anywhere.fm, etc., however, I don't think I was completely accurate in my prediction....
Anybody who is highly specialized, and considers themselves more of an artist than an engineer cringes when you say 'make this super generalized' Try telling a graphic designer to make a template for a few dozen random sites.
Maybe once is enough...
So what was their problem (or some of their problems, if they were all different)?

Talk to them: scary if I think they are crazy.
"... your solution can benefit from the imagination of nature, which, as Feynman pointed out, is more powerful than your own."

Which Feynman quotation is this referring to?
So what's wrong with 1975 programming?
If Viaweb didn't process credit card transactions for the first year I'm curious what initially attracted merchants to using it.
You're right in that, usually high housing prices are a symptom of scarcity, not a cause.

But from what I understand, in Palo Alto, much of that scarcity is artificial. The city, in the process of fending off the rapid, misshapen development of the rest of the Santa Clara Valley, passed a number of zoning laws which restricted height, imposed 'setbacks', and limited the subdivision of lots. While this did work to preserve the community to some extent, the population density is forced downwards.

At some cost to the residents who already live in Palo Alto. Berkeley was lain on an older pattern, with much influence from works such as 'a pattern language', and latin american towns. Consequently there's a high enough pedestrian density to support a town that's much more pleasant to walk in.
A better laptop stand for bed
http://www.google.com/search?q=feynman+imagination+of+nature
Maybe the ability to reach customers around the world much cheaper than any other way? Remember that the first (and most of the) customers were already-existing businesses, hence they presumably already had a method for processing transactions.

At least, that's my guess.
I agree on general principle, but there's a big difference between Viaweb & YCombinator vs. Arc:

Market.

Viaweb and YC were each aimed at the overlooked low end of a market. Small businesses may not be sexy, but they had a pressing need for a web presence, and the can't write it themselves.. College students and young professionals may not be experienced, but they have a real need for money and advice, and they (usually) can't fund it themselves.

Arc, however, is explicitly aimed at the high end. It's meant to be a "LFSP". And smart people can write Arc themselves (and have ;-)). They don't need a new programming language; if they wanted one, they could invent it themselves.

Hence the contemptuous reaction, and why I think Arc is in more trouble than either Viaweb or YC. It's not really a problem when your peers are contemptuous, because that just means they're less likely to compete with you. It's a big problem when your users are contemptuous, because that means they don't need your project.

If I were in charge of Arc marketing, I'd position it as the "PHP for the ones that PHP forgot". PHP initially got its start as a way to throw a quick & dirty webapp prototype up on the web, and then incrementally refine it. But around version 5, it started getting complex and adding all these features from Java. That's left a vacuum at the bottom of the web language market. Rails and Django tried to fill it, but the average Django user is quite a bit more sophisticated than the average PHP user circa 1999. And Arc's design is already pretty well-suited to throwing a design up on the screen quickly.

Right now, the majority of Arc users seem to be disenchanted Lispers. Disenchanted Lispers tend to be smart people, and they also tend to be interested in language design. So instead of doing things with the language, they do things to the language. On arclanguage.com, I've seen one person write an app with the language, and several dozen people write enhancements of the language itself, either in the form of macros or as hacks to the interpreter itself.
People like to be correct in predicting failure for others, for whatever reason.

I know there are a lot of people like this, but there is also a perhaps equally-large number of people who feel the opposite way. Personally, I love to be proven wrong when I predict failure, unless I have some other reason for wanting someone to fail (they use unethical practices, they're my direct competition, etc.).
Misleading headline. It is more "how five people made a million before they turned 20". I was expecting something more along the lines of "Rich Dad, Poor Dad" type advice.
The Law of New Inventions by Mike Rozak (game designer) : http://www.mxac.com.au/drt/LawOfNewInventions.htm

It fits perfectly with your essay. Good write btw.
Is it just me or Twitter fits perfectly in that definition?
Does this really make sense? Nuclear processes are used to generate power to drive a process which produces gasoline from CO2 in the air. That gasoline is then used... to generate power. Why not just cut out the middle step?

I don't think fully-electric cars are too far off, and when that is the case, the nuclear energy will be able to power the cars directly (or at least their batteries), along with solar power or whatever else.

Electricity is simply much more flexible since it can be produced and used in so many ways and distributed relatively cheaply. Gasoline only works for combustion engines, and it has to be manually transported. Our current infatuation with gasoline is going to look pretty stupid when we finally get to the point that it's hardly used anymore.
I know what you mean, and I was happy to be wrong in this case.
Upmodded for your first half. But Arc is definitely not drop in replacement for PHP. And you can use PHP 5 in basically the same ways you could use PHP 3.
Hi! I didn't install the app, as I should have mentioned in my suggestions. I'm thinking of the two paragraphs on your splash page.
I don't think anyone was really processing credit cards through the web at that point, at least not unless you paid out the nose for a custom system. "Sales" could still be made over the web, you just couldn't receive payment for them - like an online catalog really.
Underwater City Proposed for Amsterdam
Web-Based Translation Service Lingtastic Launches in Closed Beta (Invites)
Agreed. Electric cars need the high performance Li-Ion batteries, the 3 minutes charge = 3 hour play kind that you get in MP3 players. I mean, if they merely got it to the point where you could go to a fuel station, plug it in to charge and go in to grab a coke and by the time you get to the cashier your car is charged.

I mean, combine this with regenative braking and thin-film solar cells (so as not to add unnecessary weight and lower mileage), you could greatly improve over most current full-electric cars.
Why? Xobni is 14 person company, do they really need an external CEO?

Also, this particular hire didn't really succeed in social search @ Yahoo.
They don't need a new programming language; if they wanted one, they could invent it themselves.

Where is it, then? Where is the final, perfect Lisp that's so easy to write?

What you seem to be saying is that being smart automatically makes people good at language design. And you are just dead wrong. Being smart may make you a good language implementor, but there's little correlation between that and the kind of skills you need to be a good language designer. Some of the worst languages in the world were designed by smart people.

It's a big problem when your users are contemptuous, because that means they don't need your project.

The Arc users on arclanguage.org don't seem that contemptuous.

So instead of doing things with the language, they do things to the language.

That seems a good sign to me. Munging the language is what you do with Lisp, like numerical calculations are what you do with Fortran. So what this means to me is that the users are real Lisp hackers, using the language as Lisp is meant to be used.

Plus I explicitly said that at this stage I'm mostly interested in the core language, and that I want to hear new ideas in that department.
Alcohol Fueled Development
even if racism is still a big hurdle - as someone already mentioned; it didn't stop Oprah - she's in Chicago right?
They wanted to be able to generate a good-looking site with large numbers of products and a way for people to order them. Till about 1997 online order volumes were so small that it was no problem for merchants to manually punch in credit card nos on their POS terminal.
NetSuite’s numbers are not what they appear
Top Yahoo shareholders could support Microsoft
Time for a Bezos trustworthy cloud initiative?
Want iPhone Apps? Get Ready to Shop in iTunes
Facebook to lose $150 million next year
"When I first laid out these principles explicitly, I noticed something striking: this is practically a recipe for generating a contemptuous initial reaction."

Jeffrey Rosen has some good stuff to say about this in his book The Unwanted Gaze. One of his defenses of the right to privacy is that new ideas often seem wrong at first, especially when they're still only half baked. And because of this, progress is seriously impeded when the government has the ability to go through our journals and sketchbooks at any time. This is especially true in our made-for-TV society where most people won't put more than thirty seconds into trying to understand something, esp. considering the factors PG mentions. He suggests that for these reasons innovation may not be possible in a fully transparent society.
An ex-Yahoo's instructions for Microsoft
A sensationalist headline from a (lame) Facebook "competitor"... hmmmm.
Obama: A Bubble Sort is the Wrong Way to Go
I had a similar understanding of what YCombinator could be like last spring, with the same TV show format and YCombinator company involvement as you've thought.
Weebly on BBC's Webscape
http://www.bonforte.com/resume/

seems like he's effective enough that his lack of hard technical background isn't really a problem.
"If I had a choice between funding someone from a family who moved here from Vietnam whose father and mother run a 7-Eleven versus a descendant of a Mayflower passenger with “IV” in his name, I’ll give you half a guess as to my preference."

Racist bullshit.

Is he forgetting that Bill Gates has a III at the end of his name?
Reading PG's essays makes me very happy. Quoting again:

Here it is: I like to find (a) simple solutions (b) to overlooked problems (c) that actually need to be solved, and (d) deliver them as informally as possible, (e) starting with a very crude version 1, then (f) iterating rapidly.

Perfect.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C'est_la_vie
Yes, when Evan came to speak at YC recently I was struck by the similarities. Here was an idea that was literally right under everyone's noses for about 10 years, and everyone ignored it.

Evan is a great product designer. That's his secret weapon.
Growing up in the eighties, I distinctly remember Mad Magazine assuring me that soon the Japanese would own everything in America. Is this just the same thing again?
If at first, the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it.

- Albert Einstein
Thank you for sharing that -- it's quite inspirational.
Do I get a computer, internet access, a desk, and a quiet place to work?

I'd have a hard time building a startup by writing ruby in a spiral bound notebook and hoping to successfully pitch a VC with it. ;-)
I had 2 different users from the same client call me today that their system was too slow. (Had been running beautifully for years.) There were both trying to do the same thing - sort customer orders in product sequence on the executive dashboard. 300 records - what was the problem?

2 things: 1) It was an internal bubble sort I had written years ago. 2) They both selected a year's worth of data.

Doh! I shoulda listened to Obama.
Here's a link to a high-quality video:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/media/avdb/news/science_nature/video/1...
Unfortunately that was rather difficult to watch and follow. I'd rather read it, so thanks bayareaguy.
8 Best Ways to Get Power: Master Them to Negotiate Everything You Want
I assume that you guys have seen the Tesla Roadster (http://teslamotors.com).

What I'm hearing from them is that the critical feature that is holding electric cars back is the power system. This field is pretty experimental but someone who could come up with the magic battery that charges in 5 minutes would probably have a valuable system on their hands.

Another angle would be to have cars that run on batteries that can be swapped out at gas stations as needed. There are a bunch of issues that need to be considered for this approach but it's still a neat idea.
I think this article is entirely wrong. Trying to create another silicon valley is a bad idea full stop. The way to compete as a startup or a tech company is to utilize whatever natural advantages your location has. Be prepared to communicate remotely with other entities that are far away. I actually believe in the internet as a communication medium - that business can be effectively conducted outside of meatspace.

Also startups outside of SV will have to start actively discriminating against companies in SV in the same way that some companies from SV do to them. Apart from the collective benefits for non-SV'ers, I believe there is a good individual reason for doing this - information sharing.

Part of SV's advantage must be the 'informal flow of information' that can occur over a few beers. I'm sure a lot of things that one would be hesitant to permanently record are communicated. So it seems more likely that information shared with a SV company is more likely to find its way to competitor than with a non-SV company. Additionally the movement of employees between companies is another means for this 'information sharing' to occur.

Please don't get me wrong. I don't have anything against SV or companies in it. There very well may be a disadvantage for no-SV companies. But compared to the operational and cost disadvantages of moving to SV these are small. Or to put it another way -'We must fight where we stand. We have no other choice'.
I really felt welcome at Forbes' site after the lovely welcome screen. Running a great website is in the details.
The Right Tools
http://youtube.com/watch?v=k4RRi_ntQc8
Sun Grid and EC2 are quite different. Sun Grid is for batch jobs, which I think is inherently less visible, less flexible, and less cool than the Web 2.0 serving that people use EC2 for. Even if people were using Sun Grid you might never know about it. AFAIK Sun Grid is 5X the price of EC2, so even for batch jobs I don't know why anyone would use it.

Coincidentally, The Register just posted a story about a Sun project that could be quite competitive with EC2: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/02/15/caroline_sun_amazon/
(I have to wonder if this was a submarine job timed to coincide with the S3 outage.)
The saying I have for this negative reaction is "people see only what is in front of them." A good concept with poor presentation will be dismissed, and in the case of a language like Arc, presentation could also be defined to include "number of features, immediate utility, etc."

I know my reaction was similar to the crowd, but even so I recognize that it's the wrong thing to look for. If Arc's initial release state could be summed up as "Lisp with some cleaned-up and rearranged features," then it's really not that different from say, Digital Mars D, which is best described as "C++ with some cleaned-up and rearranged features." The difference is, D has a massive compiler backing it, and its scope is unlikely to change. Arc's minimal implementation substance only makes it easier to change tack midway.

I've only gradually learned to restrain my sense of ego and take a similarly minimal approach with my own projects(indie games) - my newest process is to always start the final implementation with a text console interface. Besides encouraging better architecture in preparing for a later graphical interface, it's easier to debug the key elements this way than to have "stuff moving on the screen" at 30 or 60FPS and get frustrated figuring out which of those frames is the one where you're getting an error, let alone what routine is causing the problem.
For the most part, just take them from your closest competitor and edit to your satisfaction. We did that in the beginning, and even when we finally got around to paying attorneys, they did more or less the same thing.
Awesome essay.
I do not like that I cannot customize the toolbar. Not only can I not move or delete the widgets supplied by 8aweek, I cannot even add a widget of my choosing to the empty space on the 8aweek toolbar.
That's a nice paywall they have set up.
Po Bronson btw wrote a classic called "The First 20 Million Is Always The Hardest." Great quick read.
I like to add a 7th - the ability to ignore problems that are irrelevant to the problem at hand. PG actually mentioned it all over the essay, but seems to have left it out.

btw, thanks PG, this essay has a very profound effect for me; makes me rethink some of the "ideas" I have and how I will approach them.
I'm not quite sure if you really think I resisted the urge (presumably because I used "maybe"), or if you were being sarcastic. :)
Since when is plentyoffish a facebook competitor? You should read his blog - his insights are valuable.
ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhbama :)
The American Middle Class
Huh? The NYtimes is completely free with a login.

Use BugMeNot if you have to.

They quit charging for TimesSelect some time ago; now all of their archives for 150+ years are freely available online.
Bingo. I try to keep my urban-planning nerdery out of Hacker News, but zoning is the big reason why prices are so high. I mean, there's zoning everywhere, but when you throw in the Bay and the mountains, there's just too little land to start with. When there's unmet demand due to artificially reduced supply, prices can go up very rapidly.