skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What's the alternative?

He's writing AI programs that reason about events: ergo the need for temporal reasoning.
Woot has been submitted before so submitting it again wont create a new article...
Seriously boring.Why even try if it ain't different or better?
"copying the Y Combinator site without making silly mistakes."

Copying is great. Cost: cheap

Copying and visually cloning something successful while insulting the original site while quoting friends of the original site? Priceless.

Good grief. Do they think the kind of people they'll "catch" with this won't figure it out?
This must be satire.
Much like the internet, mythology is serious business.
They can kill Yahoo as the #2 search engine by leaving them unable to do anything, halfway between being bought out and with employees leaving in droves before they are fired and as Yahoo is floundering take there #2 spot.

Then MS could take pity on Yahoo and buy them for real, breaking them up and selling off any pieces they don't want.
If you're running a web site with any amount of customers, you're going to want to let people manage their own subscriptions with no intervention required on your part. If you don't have a way to integrate CC payments in to your product, then you would have to do everything manually.

You still need to have a merchant account in addition to a billing service, and for that, you could just use your local bank if you wanted to. I'd imagine that an online bank would have cheaper fees since there's no brick and mortar side of the business to maintain, though.
Apparently they copied thumbnails of images to put in the flash scroller.

Pixelization is not pretty.
If I apply to Y Combinator with my new start-up, Y3 Combinator, a start-up that writes web apps for companies that help companies that help companies get started, will we be in an endless loop?
But that higher median means that you get less variation in the kind of people around you.

That is an illusion. To someone poor it might seem like everyone in Silicon Valley is "rich" and thus the same. But that's just an illusion caused by being an outsider, like the feeling children often have when they see people from some very unfamiliar society: how do they tell one another apart?

You'd feel there was even less variation in the people around you if you moved to a city in China, because the people there would be way more like one another than they were like you.
They burned me for somewhere around $300 when I sold some stuff on eBay. Allegedly, the account that I was paid from was "hacked", so they took money out of my account about a week after the transaction took place. I will never give that company another dime of direct or indirect income again in my life, be it from my personal or business life.
We got our very first users through friends of friends, or by cold-calling them. The first two users were two technical bookstores. One was run by a guy who'd worked at Interleaf at the same time as me. The other one we probably cold-called.

We started working on Viaweb in July 1995, and I think we got the first users in November or December. We didn't publicly launch till January, though, because we felt we had to have 5 or 6 stores already online before we launched, or we'd look lame.
It is. The guy behind it is a Co-Founder of YCombinator Startup Auctomatic:
http://collison.ie/
Is there any research to back the time-suck problem up?

I believe 8aweek's name is derived from such a study, in fact.
Couldn't get it to load, so I had to find Google's cached version.

The site was apparently created by http://collison.ie/ which is by Patrick Collison, who also is a part of auctomatic (Chief Bottlewasher, according to their site) - a YC startup I believe.

So in the end this looks like a just-for-laughs project by a former YC goer. (I don't know if these people are real or not, but did you notice their names? Paul Blackwell, Trevor Graham.)
ycfolks: "Alright we'll fund you, but for FSM's sake change that name!"

They said that for the name "Reddit" too I believe.
reddit + del.icio.us + netflix recommendations = jaanix
Woot-off going on right now! Cheap bags of crap galore!
Yes. as a lousy programmer and lousy administrator myself, I am pretty impressed at 3 9's for a new system that support HTTP DELETE, PUT under heavy load can reach such record. I am too ignorant to know any WEBDAV based system can be that reliable under the same load. And I am also amazed that the downtime for my PCs/Macs is far inferior than an immature s3! And I am also wondering the day those systems can be as reliable as telecom's 5 9's (5 minutes/year).
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=116683

you're not very good with this url thing
No it isn't. My startup, ReCurse, was accepted. We encourage our client's competition to fragment into many meta-startups, which our client can then acquire for next to nothing. So far we've been very successful and are taking applicants.
Musta have been a slow friday afternoon.
ASK YC: Where to find standard user agreements and other boring legal stuff for my startup?
After a lot of fruitless searching, I thought I'd ask the YC community for tips on where to find the standard agreements and policies for our web startup. Things like privacy policies, user agreements etc. Of course we can write our own and most likely will do so, but are there any templates out there? Can I just take some good ones and modify them?
Bug-finder gets no credit from Microsoft
At no point would he have felt trapped or hopeless because had no debt and he knew he could leave at any time.

IMO, most poor people are not mentally stable and living on the edge tends to unbalance them even more. Take an educated person with zero mental of physical issues who is willing to do without TV, Drugs, etc and they can climb out of poverty quickly. However, for whatever reason many don't so saying they can leave does not let us understand why the bottom third of our nation is so marginalized.
Conspiracy theorists are debunked (maybe): Meaning of dollar revealed
It is inspiring if you as an individual decide you want to be more disciplined and use a tool like this.

I was referring to their plan to sell the product to businesses, who would then impose it on their employees en-masse.
The Solar Revolution: How the spirit of Silicon Valley may save the world
This brings up an interesting point. What does downmod-ing "mean?" Is it something other than "I disagree?" Is a downmod to be reserved for trolls? Or fools? Where do you draw the line? I saw it as a yay/boo button, not an anti-troll feature. Thoughts?
"S3 is still more reliable than a couple of dedicated servers, though "

Maybe. I've had colo or dedicated servers since 2000, and the last time I had one fail in any way was in 2001. I move servers every 2-4 years to newer, faster hardware, but even so, my current uptime is longer than S3 has existed.
Your email address is already a single basket for all your keys...

Yes, painfully true, and if OpenID solved this problem I would be marginally more excited about it. However, "OpenID is no less secure than what we do now" is an excuse, not a selling point.

That Blogger doesn't support OpenID suggests nothing about its security.

Well, I don't know why Blogger doesn't support it. But I have a guess. I don't think it's merely about security; it's more fundamental than that. It's about control.

Once you implement OpenID logins, the security, reliability, and confidentiality of your site's authentication procedure is out of your hands. You can't improve your login security: the provider controls that. You can't improve your site's reliability beyond a certain point: when a provider goes down, a certain percentage of your users go down, too. You can't protect your traffic data: the OpenID providers are inevitably collecting samples of who logs in to your site and when.

If the administrator of an OpenID provider goes rogue and sells the password file to the Romanian mafia, you can't fire the guy. You probably can't even sue him. You'll probably never even know there was a security breach. You probably don't even know that your site depends on his. But when a user's login on your system is compromised, who do you think is going to get the phone calls, to say nothing of the lawsuits? Do you really think that you're going to tell your angry users "I'm sorry; security is out of my hands; talk to your OpenID provider" and expect them to go away happy?

And what's the payoff? You're adding moving parts to your system, decreasing your reliability and increasing your tech-support costs, and for what? The alternative -- using usernames and passwords -- is well understood, and well established, and is something that you'll have to support anyway for the foreseeable future. How much additional money is OpenID really going to bring in?

If OpenID does become widespread I predict that it will be in the form of a handful of "trusted" providers whose IDs are universally supported. On most sites, you'll get to choose between using your Facebook ID, your Google ID, your Microsoft ID, your Verisign ID, and an ID from the site's trusted network of partners. (Of course, there will be dozens or hundreds of these partner networks -- so much for "one universal ID"). In other words, it will be Microsoft Passport 2.0, only with extra market confusion and the nice reassuring word "Open" in the name.
Bad assumption. I've spoken with some homeless people, and every story is completely different. Most of the homeless I've spoken to were neither addicts nor mentally ill.

That's how to do it, BTW. Just talk to them. They're real people, and people generally like talking about themselves.
well after much googling I couldn't find any reference to it. Can anyone help me out, it appears my google ninja skills are not up to it for this. Paul you invested in them maybe you can point us in the right direction. I am still not convinced this is a problem.
What about Y^n Combinator? Y^n convinces our client's client's competition's competition to spend time thinking about meta-startups, thus preventing them from producing anything useful, which obviates the need for acquiring them in the first place.

But this is only the precursor to Ackerman(Y) Combinator. But even thinking about that one makes my head spin.
I don't get it.

Is this Duh! 2.0?
seems like a smart hire.
R.E.M. open-sources its music videos: The future of content?
...or obama independents
The point about NYC is spot-on (it's also one of the reasons I've been thinking about making the move to SV myself).
I've never found really good templates online. My process was always something along the lines of:

1) Dig into my cache of legal docs I've amassed from other companies over the years (understandably, this probably isn't an option for you).
2) Google around for quasi-competitors, look for the AUP/TOS docs online for inspiration
3) Blend all this into a doc I write sort of from scratch, sort of from copy-paste-tweak
4) Send to corporate counsel for final review/approval.

Because I've created my fair share of legal docs over the years, I don't usually end up spending more the $200-$400 on step #4, but it is VITALLY IMPORTANT. Even when I was sure I had an air-tight doc (and believe me, I'm cynical, crafty and paranoid, makes for a good legal-doc writer), I've been made aware of significant things I've missed or mis-stated. A document that would never hold up in court, or doesn't enforce what you think it does can be worse than no doc at all.

There are places that will charge you money for access to their legal templates, but the couple I've looked at were too boilerplate for my needs.
Checkout http://docstoc.com they have fairly good repository and it is free. They encourage sharing among the community.
I think the last time this question was asked the standard answer was "find the site that is most like yours and copy their privacy policy". It's not like these agreements are highly original, proprietary works. Lawyers copy phrasing from each other all the time.

Of course, you get what you pay for. I'd consider paying a lawyer to glance through the results of your scavenging before you make any legal commitments.
Brutal Feedback on our new facebook app?
While our main applications are b2b, we decided to create a Facebook app in Ruby on Rails that targeted consumers.

I'd love to hear any feedback about bugs, anything that's unclear, and how the concept can be improved.

http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=20356475262

Thanks so much!!!
I think that already exists: http://www.angelsoft.net/
While I am tired of people bitching about Redditization and of people bitching about the bitching about Redditization, I still want to bitch that giving away the punch line wasn't very nice at all.
I have already begun development of BusyBeaver(Ackerman(Y)) Combinator.

I'm hoping to complete it sometime in the next lifetime of the universe.
The Path to an Acquisition (Brett Crosby - Cofounder Urchin, now Google Analytics)
It will be until the call stack overflows.
Last time: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16764
okay I disagree but its a matter of taste, I prefer strong, bold flavored espresso and drip, and to me, starbucks has always tasted light and watery - obviously someone (everyone) likes it.
Today was the day I was going to tackle the S3 component of our application... and I wake up to see this.
My fiancee's a lawyer. She cringes when I ask this stuff. Her response was:

"It's like asking 'Where to find standard software and other boring technical stuff for my startup?'"
Carlin says it so well:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8evsSNdXcs
That it's no less secure than what we do now is not a mark against it, though.

Giving up control can be a good thing. I don't need to keep up to date on password hashing techniques, or worry about sending passwords in the clear.

As a user, I can improve my login security unilaterally; I can use a hardware token without every site I use needing to implement support for it. As a user, sites that want as much control as you seem to scare me.

I think it's too early to say what the marketing/tech support/social effects will be. Clearly nobody is going to use OpenID for Really Important Stuff in the near future, but there are a lot of use cases between toys and RIS.

Your last paragraph coming true is a very real risk, and it would disappoint me tremendously. In the meantime, I think that OpenID shows a lot of promise.

edit: We're coming at this from different angles. OpenID will first be adopted by (is being adopted by) small sites that don't care about the things that you do. Bug trackers, wikis, forums, blogs, sites like this one. Once it's well established there, then we can start talking about the kind of sites you're talking about.
Put a log of recent prizes on this page. I would also make the text less salesy, but what do I know? At least A/B test it.

Also, I see this on the right: "This application cannot be added to some of your Pages. Learn more." I don't know why it's there, but if you can get rid of it, do.

Of course, seed the app with 50 installs and a few discussion threads before you launch for real.
In light of this thread, it's interesting that he makes the point that SV is successful in part because it's not a very good place to live if you're not rich:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=116410
"Can I just take some good ones and modify them?"

I think that's the best approach. Look for similar sites/services or find a few that together do the things you do and copy bits and pieces from their TOS/privacy policy/etc. Depending on what you are doing that is probably good enough until you get some traction. If you take funding down the road I imagine this will all get rewritten for you.
Ask YC: Is Amazon Eating Sun's Lunch?
Seriously. I haven't heard so much as a peep out of the startup world regarding Sun's grid computing services (network.com). Back when Jonathan Schwartz was launching the thing in 2004, it sounded promising.

Crap, it's been 4 years already? Is anyone using Sun? Or is EC2 (still in beta, mind you!) eating Sun's lunch?
Part 1/4 of the debate on the standard for real-time web communications
"Actually n95 is in the hands of more than 2 million people compared to iphone that its in half of these people."

Actually, iPhone sales totalled 4 million as of last month. So it is the n95/s60v3 that, if your 2 million number is correct, is in half the number of hands.
How to Screw With People Who Try to Steal Your Wireless
During the last bubble's proliferation of 'incubators' (circa 2000), I joked with friends about starting 'Incubus', the incubator-incubator (and homage to the Shatner Esperanto horror movie).

The next step would be 'In^3' ("Incubed"), the incubator-incubator-incubator... and so forth.
And the answer would be: Sourceforge :-)

But I am with you man... Relationship is a tradeoff between sex and being a smartass :-p
wordpress/automattic made theirs with a creative commons license http://automattic.com/privacy/ that migth help ya.
Here are my notes:

* The error page seemed a bit cramped (I tried things like entering A points, or -3 points)

* Your Current Bid: 36 points. Bid More! (What does this mean? I'd like a breakdown of which gift cards I selected, rather than a running total. This information seems to be lost).

* I don't see how: http://99b600c6.fb.joyent.us/how-to-win.html explains that "The more you bid, the more likely you are to win a prize today. Your prize vote increases the likelihood of that prize being awarded today." In fact, it seems to contradict what you say on your "How it works page": "At the end of the day (Midnight Eastern) we collect all of the bids made throughout the da" ... (i.e. to prizes are always awarded, and do not correspond to the # of bids placed)....Plus that URL looks spammy for some reason (even though it's not)

* Your button after bidding says: "« Go back to Easy Money, and Bid More or Get More Points!" ... but I can't see how I'd get any more points. Sigh.

* I happen to hate the ads use Facebook style buttons to assault me with (that you see after you make a bid): "You Have 1 New Message Someone On Your Friends List Has A SECRET CRUSH on You. Find Out Who! www.Crushmessage.com"

* I like how you're not sure what gift card you'll get. Keeps it exciting and I think would cause people to want to invite others to bid on the gift card they want.

* As a counterpoint to above... I'd think that the more people got invited to this app, the less likely I am to win anything. So what's my incentive for sharing this with friends? Perhaps you could have a mechanism to give me more points for inviting users (or get a constant 10 point override whenever one of my friends whom I invited places a bid)

* Ok NOW I see that you did exatly what I mentioned above. However I had to click on the "Learn more about this game »" to find out that I could invite friends for more points. The invite friends and the more points div seems to be buried at the bottom right.

* So I just invited a friend, and I didn't get my 25 points as a referral. :( Sigh. If you're going to put restrictions on when my 25 points are rewarded, as I'm guessing you're doing (perhaps only when the user actually signs up as opposed to me sending the invite), you should let users know that clearly (which you currently don't do).

* Oh and even if I do invite a friend, its a net loss for me. I get 25 more points one-time, but my friend gets 50 points to bid... Assuming they bid, I'll be less likely to win anything. Plus if they continue to bid day after day, I'll just be even more in the hole.

* I'd like to see a better countdown clock than a simple, static string: "Feb. 15, 2008 - 6h, 17m Remaining"... make it dynamic and thus more exciting.

That's all I have for now. Good luck with the launch!
Well, it doesn't have all the copycats just yet:

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/guide_to_seed_fund_incu...
There were nearly 85 million devices based on S60 in 2006. Today there are 20 different phones based on S60 3rd edition.

"18.8 million converged devices (S60) shipped in Q4 compared to 11.1 this time last year * Over 11 million Nseries devices and over 2 million Eseries devices were sold in Q4 * Market share in North America dropped to 5.1% while every other region except China experienced double digit"

http://www.nokia.com/results/results2007Q4e.pdf
God forbid that Google attempt to conduct its US datacenter operations in locations with adequate local cooling sources, with white foam roofs to reduce internal heat buildup, in an underpopulated area with existing hydroelectric power.

Build more of them near Dulles and in downtown Santa Clara, eh? This article is a fucking hit piece, and it discounts the enormous efficiencies that are realized by the death of the printed page, the standing-inventory retailer, the reversal of suburban car culture, and a host of other things that the 'Cloud' is helping to realize.
Earth's Most Customer Centric Company (Jeff Bezos' Talk at MIT)
Check our FAQ page: http://www.8aweek.com/learn/

Wasting time online is a universal problem that is only getting worse.
BugLabs: OS Hardware For Location Apps
I agree with you. They're having to dig pretty deep to try to trash Google. I'd like to see the corresponding article about the plant where Harper's is printed.
MIT World : Videos from talks at MIT
Requires real player unfortunately. A lot of the talks look like they're worth it though :)
Hey, I dunno if anyone is interested, but a year or so ago I create a site to get woot updates via Email or Text message.

Check it out at http://wootwatchers.com and let me know what you think.
Very naive. Don't they know that Paul Graham has patented all fixed point combinators, not just the Y Combinator?
thanks, for those who want the url its http://www.reuters.com/article/lifestyleMolt/idUSN2541395620...

I will give it a go to see if it gets me being more productive.
I was worried people were going to reply with a bunch of anecdotal evidence. Thank you for resisting the urge.
They're of dubious copyright. You also have no idea who came up with them and WHY they added certain sections.
It's funny. I found this on my own and thought about posting it here, then I saw this.
Po Bronson: Are Kids Copying Their Parents When They Lie?
Hello, Google, can you spell hypocrisy?
Just voluntarily go bankrupt every time a new company is funded, so it's tail-recursed.
Los Alamos says it can manufacture gasoline from CO2 in the air at a price of $4.60 a gallon
Hey David - thanks for the feedback! We're adding a lot to our project roadmap based on it.

I totally agree with the annoying ads. Do you have anything that can work on facebook? =) We might also do video ads from Google, if we can. We can most likely target according to the gift cards people want.

We're also going to add a history of bidding so you know exactly what you've done...

Perhaps we should be giving a LOT more points for friend invites :)

I'll throw it up on our todo list!
Thanks again man!
Hey Shawn, Thanks so much for the feedback! I'll start investigating the cannot be added to some of your pages... Which text was particularly salesly, in your opinion?

Thanks again so much!
" Lawyers copy phrasing from each other all the time."

Yes but they know which parts to copy and which parts to write themselves.

That's why you pay them $300 an hour.
How is this "open source"? Are they also releasing the complete original raw footage and audio tracks for remixing?

Seems a misuse of the term.

What might a better way to express what's actually happening here? "Open source" is catchy (or at least pity), and conveys a sense of user freedom, but there's no more or less "source" than would otherwise be available.

It would be nice to have an equally catchy, but accurate, phrase.

Open licensing?
Eh, I don't think the repr matters much. What does matter is actually getting all of the other methods implemented (stuff like cmp, eq, etc.). They're all basically pass-throughs, though. Even with that, I think it's still broken in some ways. I should learn more about what Python does for type conversions.
Hacker News trends
Getting Started Building a Cat Translator