skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Could you please share the name of the lawyers you approached. You are quite true that the lawyers can make or kill it. The application process will be at least half the trouble if you have a good lawyer representing you. Also, I have heard the lawyer fee can run up to $10K. Is this true?
I was hoping to see the book review here.
Are VCs threatening lawsuits to stay spotless at TheFunded?
Did Greenspan Cause the Crisis?
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: March 11, 2008
The Books of The Times review in Weekend on Friday, about “Gusher of Lies: The Dangerous Delusions of ‘Energy Independence,’ ” misstated the author’s surname at several points, and a description of an online excerpt from the book misstated his surname as well. As the review noted elsewhere, he is Robert Bryce, not Bruce or Boyce. The bibliographical capsule with the review misidentified the publisher. It is PublicAffairs, not Basic Books.
Google's Design Guidelines
I tend not to make meals that quickly, as for me, cooking is one of the things I do to relax and think. :)

And I usually end up spending near to an hour in the kitchen, most nights :D
Jeff Atwood blogging about another writer's narcissism is the epitome of irony.
Actually, when the article says:

> people who are chronically sleep deprived, like people who've had too much to drink, often have no sense of their limitations.

What it means is that people don't realize the degree to which they are being inhibited (although the studies did not test this, this is based on one piece of anecdote.) The article is not saying that people think that their limitations are greater than they otherwise would, as is the case with alcohol or testosterone.
I was paying $550 a month in NY for United PPO while I was doing freelance/contract work. I ended up in the hospital for a week. Bill came out to something like $45,000, I didnt pay a cent. Lesson here is it's not worth getting cheap junk insurance.

I don't think I would get coverage from healthy new york based solely on their website appearance. I'm shocked they aren't using the blink tag, seems so appropriate.
Users from non-US IP addresses never want to apply for US jobs?
"Participatory Narcissism"

Never have so many syllables been used to incite so many about so little.
http://appreciativeinquiry.case.edu/uploads/whatisai.pdf A Positive Revolution in Change: Appreciative Inquiry

I started reading this and was amazed. It's written for organizations but it rings true when read as applying to an individual as well.
It is pretty easy to level the "Participatory Narcissism" attack at most people with extensive, opinionated writing.

Quite often I will look at comments I have made and reflect at how skillful I had been (before being methodically torn to shreds by smart people), so I hope narcissism is a common phenomenon. And I also hope (for my own sake) that for most people the matter at hand is trying to suppress self-gratuity in their writing, rather than not having it in the first place.
I have to agree with Atwood, sort of. I actually see it as a wider condition.

You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss has a very specific "you" in mind: the kind of people who are aching to become founders (well, obviously). That's in no way a bad thing, but it is worth noting that earlier essays by pg had a wider audience.

It's not narcissism, it's focus. It's a symptom of "nearly all the programmers I know are startup founders".
Out-of-the-can salad: chickpeas, black beans, maize, lettuce, cottage cheese, sunflower seeds and a diced avocado. Sprinkle with balsamic vinegar and olive oil and eat with bread
Visual technology enables brain to learn in new ways
How better aesthetics in hospitals can make for happier—and healthier—patients
I guess he never read Hansel and Gretel.

The candy store would be really cool, IMO. Has anyone ever read Chitty Chitty Bang Bang? Of course you've read Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. If I ever did a startup, the whole point would be to earn enough money to open something like that, or maybe a toy company. I'd want enough money that I wouldn't have to bow to market forces and could make candy and toys that are actually good (Lego RIP).
37 signals' apps and last.fm
No, that's not the only question. Silicon Valley is littered with great teams who built stuff that people didn't really want.
Jeff Atwood could certainly have made his case in a better way, but I think he has a point here.

There are many perfectly legitimate reasons for working at a large company; family responsibilities (yes, there are mid-twenties and early-thirties programmers with a spouse and children), a chronic medical condition (if I were living in the US, my medical bills would be upwards of $20k/year, and I know I'm not alone), or being dedicated to a non-economically-profitable pursuit (if you want to spend 2 months a year volunteering in sub-Saharan Africa, many employers will let you have the time off -- a startup won't) are a few possibilities. Comparing people who decide to work for a large company to caged animals, and suggesting that they are "ten times [less] alive" is condescending, and ignores the fact that they might seem far more lively when they are with their families or pursuing whatever activities they enjoy -- or that if they worked for a startup, they might not be able to afford the medicine which keeps them alive.

I consider myself fortunate that I can do something I enjoy and have a reasonable chance of making money doing it; but not everybody is so lucky, and we should not insult such unfortunates by suggesting that they made poor choices or are somehow behaving unnaturally.
I don't think so. This comment by Peter on the original article summed it up well:

"What gets PG's goat, it seems, is that relatively privileged, smart, hard-working kids should want to participate in this awful existence known as 'the 9 to 5', rather than strike out on their own and attempt to do something great -- possibly something even world-changing. And watching these clones root around some cookie-cutter downtown Palo Alto cafe performing some absurd exercise is more than he can stand. These kids could _be_ something -- they could _do_ something, but instead, some nutjob decided it'd be cool to send them on some wacky easter egg hunt. They could be busy trying to save the world, but instead, they're busying conditioning their brains to be subservient to the dictatorship that is modern corporations."
Paper Is Out, Cellphones Are In
Is developing mobile phone application as a ID verifier the next hot trend?
The essay does take advantage over the common "naturalistic fallacy", where people imply something as being "good" from its being "natural". As a simple counterexample, many diseases are "natural" and many antibiotics, not.

However, I think it's only fair that Paul's motivation for some of his essays is, at least in part, PR work for YC, and hence the fibs (that being the harshest word I'd use) are understandable.
All I had to do was trade some beads for Manhattan.

(Scratches head).
Is developing mobile phone application as an ID verifier the next hot trend?
The things that usually bring down startups tend to be team related. Even though having a good idea is important it's not as critical. By focusing on the team YC is attempting to combat what is most likely to hinder success.
I came here in 2001 to join Microsoft on H1. Worked there for almost 4 years, then got fed up and left.
Joined a small company in Los Angeles, transferred my H1 there. My GC process was restarted.
Finally received my green card in the end of the last year. It took me almost 7 years.
I have MS in Economics and PhD in CS from foreign universities.
How do you delete your data when "your" data is mostly other people's relationships to you? For just one obvious problem, other people "own" messages you post to their wall (they get the deletion rights to them, not you.) It's like deleting yourself from others' e-mail archives or RSS feeds--just doesn't make much sense.
I've been doing some research into bio-deasel production. It's very neat stuff.

non-software companies require a lot more capital, So you won't see many first time entrepreneurs in those fields.
I wrote one of these at one point; I called it Persona. Its target audience was authors, tabletop RPG players, and people who like both soap operas and virtual pets. The main interaction was a sort of interview where users submitted to a pool of questions, then characters (to which each user had a one-to-many relationship) volunteered answers for them--I entitled it "Phase 1: Direct Characterization."

Phase 2 would obviously character interaction, but I never got to that point.
Thanks a bunch for that dhamma.org link. I was just bitching the other day about how charging $200 for weekend retreats keeps Buddhism on the fringes here.
If anyone is interested in someone with C++ skills and a background in finance for their project, feel free to contact me.
Regardless of how the thing is skinned, the person using it is still a foot too tall, wearing a helmet and gliding around like the nun from Blues Brothers. The operation of these things looks infinitely more unusual than the device itself.
As long as there can be group and "public/everyone" keys, I'm sold. That is, one "user" could in fact be a single user, or it could represent a collaboration between any number of known or unknown users. (Even if you don't like it, people would still manage to do it this way somehow. May as well make it easy to exchange/publish keys to other users on the site.)

Alternately, one could sign a modification of an article rather than the article itself, allowing for one of the greatest benefits of Wikipedia: the three thousand pedants correcting everyone else's spelling, grammar, punctuation and word usage.
Apparently the voters disagree.
I talked to some people who wrote code for it a while back, and it's actually a lot more important than us western-free-state-inhabitants might think. Over 50 % of the world has more or less of a dictatorship, and that estimate was not including russia. Dictatorships imply no free press, not even free face to face communication. No knowledge of how the government works. A continuous filter in the back of your head that judges whether you'll get into trouble for saying what you say.

Freenet not only guarantees load balancing, but more importantly untracability of file storage and originator.
Agreed. Cooking up something inventive in the kitchen, chopping ingredients as pans fry minced onions and garlic, throwing new spices together; it's a whole lot of fun. Whenever I have the time, this is something I love to do.
A lot of the comments I've read about this essay remind me of the comments on the idea that being in the silicon valley is an advantage for startups. 98% of the negative comments are from people who are responding defensively out of pure emotion.

> I work with young startup founders in their twenties. They're geniuses, and play by their own rules. Oh... you haven't founded a company? You suck.

The guy that wrote this is saying more about himself than the essay.
It'd be interesting to put handles with faces too.

Anyways, the get together looks like a lot of fun. All the best to the new YC founders!
I don't think you're arguing here that they're not caged animals, just that they've elected to work in a cage for some good reason.
Maybe they felt pandered-to? ;)
School kills creativity
Eulogies
Yes, the language and P2P was part of it. The platform, it turns out, required a new language (don't ask me how that math works...but I saw the language with my own two eyes--sort of a Ruby/JavaScript hybrid running on the mobile JVM).
No, no, I'm just expressing an opinion, like mixmax. It's up to the voters whether they actually think they're so smart. For example, here is another opinion: icky is the best handle ever.
If I made the scheme mud, would anyone find it interesting? Or is that sort of thing old hat with this crowd?
Worse, my first thought was "you have to soak a cedar plank for at least an hour!"
Can of black-eyed peas, pat of butter, frozen hamburger patty (read, bubba burger.) Boil. Not fancy but good eating. And it keeps well.

Realistically though, we all owe it to ourselves to eat well. I've lost 10-20 lbs this year (depending on the day) by avoiding carbs and eating my vegetables. Who knew?
Looks expensive and complicated. I still think a clear plastic gizmo that just uses the sun to distill that merely cleans most toxins, especially biological is better than some giant refrigerator sized, patent encumbered, machine that needs to be plugged in that cleans all toxins.

The little plastic thing could be made so small, so light, and so cheap that they could just be dumped out of the back of airplanes where they are needed.

How do we teach the villagers how to use them? Call them on their cell phones.
http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/03/03/africa/AF-FEA-GEN-...
Comment++ for most original re-quote of Churchill I've seen yet.
> It's tough to imagine 'what it could be' unless you actually see it.

The obvious exception being people who create things like the iPod or MBP :-)
You've misinterpreted his comment. YC doesn't tell founders what to work on. No one is going to pg and saying, "OK, you said our idea sucks, so what do we work on now?" Instead, pg says, "Your idea sucks." And the founders either say, "We disagree, but why do you think so?" or "Yeah, we noticed. We're thinking about switching to this...what do you think?"

In fact, pg is very likely to think your idea sucks at some point in the process. I still think he's a little iffy about ours over a year later.
I thought this was really insightful. The other posts on zellunit's blog are really good too.
Want a sure way to be featured on HN or reddit? Stir up controversy by bagging on geek culture.
I think I would build software and robotics tools for the handicapped intelligent. I'm blown away by what some people have done recently with computing for autistic people. Unlocking minds. Does it get any better?

I'd rather make an impact in space exploration, but I'm not sure how an individual would do that, yet. But I'm watching Cringely.
I never read his essays, but if anyone here is able to arc-ify them (say max. 1-3 sentences each), maybe I would start reading (the arc versions).
My "quick" meals are complicated by having an aversion to microwaves (I don't even own one...they make food taste like crap, and I love food more than most things in life, so I would never use it if I had one).

A rice cooker is a godsend. I finally broke down and bought one of the fuzzy logic ones when I moved to California a little over a year ago. Many wonderful things are possible with trouble-free rice. Takes only a couple of minutes of prep time, though the cooking time is 20-45 minutes (depending on quantity and type of rice).

My quick meals:

Fried rice - Scramble an egg, set it aside; dump in frozen vegetables (or fresh, if you have an extra five minutes for washing and chopping) saute in hot oil (as hot as your stove will go) until bright and slightly tender; dump in the rice and some mushroom flavored soy sauce (the good kind from an Asian market); stir it up; dump the egg back in and mix it up. Serve with a handful of cashews, for an interesting texture and flavor.

Black bean burritos - Heat up a can of refried black beans with about a quarter of a jar of good salsa mixed in. Roll it up in flour tortillas with shredded cheddar and/or pepper jack, lettuce, and tomatoes (the veggies are optional, as the salsa adds some tomatoes and onions and peppers). Optionally add sour cream and/or guacamole. Also makes a great dip for tortilla chips.

But usually, meals take me longer than ten minutes, and I'm OK with that. I like to cook most of the time.
I don't really agree with Mr. Horror, but sometimes I do wonder what PG does to, shall we say, "stay challenged". Surrounding yourself with younger, less experienced people (albeit very smart ones) who owe you is not an environment I would think of as one likely to create a lot of pushback. Maybe it shouldn't, either, as that's not what YC is for, but you do need that kind of thing from somewhere in your life if you wish to continue your intellectual growth.
I much prefer the somewhat healthier alternatives of pita bread or thick slices of fresh sour dough bread. Have you read what's in those canned biscuits?

I also get pretty picky with my mozzarella. I've gotten hooked on mozzarella fresca--the really soft, whole milk, kind. It makes me like pizza (which I've never been a huge fan of).
Living in a bifurcated market; part of NYC will suffer due to the recession, and part of it won't.
Olive oil in a hot pan does magic on lots of simple/cheap foods. Pastas, vegetables (onions and garlic in particular), legumes, etc.
Never underestimate a man with a lathe, a mill, a bandsaw, and an attitude. All of those tools together can be had for less than the cost of a Xeon server.
matt, try laying off that caffeine.
I've worked in Silicon Valley as an ER nurse for the past 2 years, and I've seen a lot of Software Engineers come and go through my department. And, I'll have to say, at the nurses station, when the patients aren't around, there is a stereotype that we have about Software Engineers, and often snicker at.

If a man in his 20's and 30's comes in to triage looking haunted and complaining of chest pain, problems sleeping, or weird psycho-somatic complaints, one of the first questions we ask is, "Are you a software engineer?" The answer is invariably, "Yes." And, around the nurses station, we all share a chuckle and a "tsk, tsk" at this poor, overworked, overstressed man.

There is a stereotype, and like all generalizations, it has it's exceptions. But, it's enough of a stereotype that the nurses I work with have been very concerned about my going back to school for Computer Science. Most of the nurses that haven worked in the Valley for years thought that being a software engineer was a crap job compared to being an ER nurse. And, that's saying something since a substantial portion of our job involves actual crap. It's wasn't until I explained that I want to start a company that my coworkers became a bit more supportive of the idea. I even had doctors talk to me in concerned tones about the unhealthy levels of stress that engineers work with in the Valley, to try and talk me out of my second career. In the ER, we see the same haunted, caged look that Paul refers to in this article.

I think that what PG was referring to was the idea of a powerful animal who's behavior and demeanor changes markedly in different environments. I don't really think that he was trying to put people down who work at a 9-5 for whatever reason. Paul didn't refer to the 9 to 5'ers as caged monkeys, or caged rats, he called them caged lions for a reason.

I don't think that it just applies to Software engineers, either. I saw the same change in my father when he left his job at 60 to pursue managing his investments 10 years ago. There was a very marked change in the man. A great metaphor for that would be describing as the difference as that of a caged lion vs lion roaming free on the savanna.

I normally like Jeff's writing. I have to disagree with him this time. Perhaps the problem is that maybe Jeff hasn't been on safari. Perhaps he hasn't seen enough men change like lions set free once they don't have to work a 9-5 that they hate. Paul says that he's seen similar changes in a number of founder's they've funded over the past couple of years. As someone who feels rather caged in their day job, I hope I get to see those same changes in myself this fall as I start my first business.
You weren't missing anything by skipping this one. Iamelgringo's post in this thread is much more insightful.
IQ vs Occupation chart [jpg]
That's one way of looking at it, yes -- except that the comparison to caged animals has misleading connotations. A lion doesn't weigh its options and choose to live in a cage; so to compare someone to a caged lion carries with it the suggestion that they lack agency.
I think all of this is too simplistic. Follow your passion, and take bigger risks while you can (because when you're older it gets harder), is great advice. But Paul needs to understand that his passion is not everyone else's. I know many people who found a start-up for the wrong reasons. There's a get-rich-quick-scheme premise in a lot of Web 2.0 start-ups that I find sad. To look down on employees is to not understand that their passion may lie elsewhere, or that they're waiting for the right moment. I've had three start-ups and was an employee several times as well. None of it defines me.
Richard Dawkins: The Selfish Gene
Yes, this is far, far more severe than any credit card debt that that a student could possibly get into.

Related to this, I know several people who had to drop out of school recently because they hadn't built up credit and didn't have parents to co-sign on school loans.

Perhaps you should write on this some time, but I don't see how that could actually solve anything.
Django-SQLAlchemy
Maybe... is this gaining popularity in Asia now for various applications?
Ask YC: Can “a gay in a garage” compete with  big and established companies.
I am planing to create a startup product which is a server based software (finance messaging). Do you think that “a guy in a garage” can compete with big and established companies with such kind of product and what strategy to use to spread the product popularity (license (open source?), other products interoperability).
It is important for people to have a fighting spirit. Otherwise they'll be controlled by those who do.
Could YC somehow register as the corporation the founders work for? Then they'd have a "regular" job for loan repayment.
How is that phrase inspiring? It sounds very demotivating to me. (Other variation on the theme: "Want a friend? Get a dog").
New research finds some buckyballs can hold incredibly dense volumes of hydrogen
A revolution at the Federal Reserve
I didn't gain any insights from that cartoon.
> "A recession forces [constraints] on a start-up - but those constraints aren’t BAD."

A blind person becomes efficient at reading braille and learns to use their hearing in ways I can only imagine. But it still sucks to be blind. Constraints are almost always bad--if you have a choice, start your company during boom times, not during a recession.
Looks like he's getting some very useful responses right here. I'm amazed at all the shit the US foists off on these people, and am nervous the authorities are going to be a big hassle for my wife if we ever move back there.
I love the analogy about lions in the wild. When you are living by your wits, there is a sense of "apprehension" (not sure I would call it fear) but that is where the adrenaline comes from and also the sense of freedom. You are (more or less) in control of your own destiny.

I am a veteran of the tech industry. Started a few companies and consulted for a twenty year period. I haven't had boss (the wife excluded) during the entire time except for a stint with Shell Oil out of school. Just recently graduated from law school (went back as an "old man") and am in the process of launching a "digital law practice" that feels in many ways like a tech startup. We are doing it completing "on the cloud" with virtual offices in a couple of states.It has gotten a lot easier (still not "easy") to do!
Create a great product. Focus a lot on how you can be better.
Django snippets: utilize mysql's fulltext searching
Mutated HIV Suggests New Approach to AIDS
I'm guessing that there's a typo in the title... I imagine "a gay in a garage" is just as likely to be successful as any other guy in a garage.

But to answer the question: If you're going to get into a fight with an elephant, the trick is to avoid being directly in front of it when it charges. Yes, you can compete -- but compete by doing something different, not by duplicating what they're already doing.