skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Since it's a PDF, here's a Scribd version:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/2290592/6-05-HowToBeCreative
It's definitely worth reading, but not worth paying for since you can read it for free on their site.
I'm European and I think I can answer the question:

1) It's in Texas, which is basically halfway around the world for Europeans. I don't think many Americans would attend a conference in St. Petersburg.

2) This may be big in America, but I've never heard of it, and I'm fairly tech-minded and informed.
Panda3D - Free Python-based 3D Engine from CMU
Lately I have found myself reading the comments on a article prior to reading the article itself. I don't know why, but maybe its because the discussion on YC is invariably better than the article itself. Also, if I see too many negative comments, I skip the article altogether. I read a lot during the day, and using the comments as a filter prevents me from adding to that list, if it be so.

I hope that made sense...
Apple are overwhelmed by the positive response to the SDK. Wasn't it 100k downloads in the first 24 hours? All this talk saying third-party devs will be locked out is nonsense. Steve Jobs wants to sell all the apps you can code through the iTunes App Store. He takes 30%, remember.
Ahh it's the other way around. Sorry, math isn't my speciality, I'm just the guy doing the powerpoints and wawing my arms around convincing people wearing ties that whatever I happen to do at the moment is the best thing since sliced bread...

But thanks for clearing it up. Modded you up to make up for it :-)
I like these simple one-question-one-answer sites, though I never remember about them when I actually need a specific one. This one is the first Google hit for "down for everyone" though, so that should take care of the long domain name.

I wonder if it only pings from one location? (it probably doesn't account for "down for some people" dns problems).
I saw this the other day and thought it was pretty neat.

I'm a little unclear how it works. Does it actually attempt to load a page from the requested site or does it simply log the number of people asking about it and assume that something is down by the volume of requests?

If the 2nd one, I can see how it could be pretty flawed, easily gamed, and only usable with some serious critical mass. (It could also explain the YouTube thing if lots of people are using that to check it out).
Look at the empirical evidence. If you can point to just one example of someone making a million dollars of an idea without any execution I'll buy you a beer. On the other hans I can give you countless examples of people that made millions on execution without an original idea.
JMeter. I have an ant task that does it automatically.
Michael Arrington falls for Y Combinator
Why Only Emacs Uses Lisp
Ask YC: What heuristics do you use to judge ideas?
When you come up with a vision or an idea for a startup, how do you judge its merits? What questions do you ask?

Here are some of the filters I apply:

How does it make the world better? What does it make easier or more productive?

Who pays? Why do they pay?

Edsger W. Dijkstra said, "Only do what only you can do." I ask, "Why me?" followed by "Why now?"

If this startup executes perfectly, what is the maximum it could earn?

The Innovator's Dilemma (by Clayton Christensen) outlines the characteristics of a "disruptive innovation." Is this product disruptive?

Who are the competitors? If none, why not? Else how is this different? How easily could companies skilled in execution crush it? (Poor Kiko...)

How long will it take to complete? How will it be funded until then?

Are there any better, related ideas?

What's missing?
the latest meme is to call them "single serving websites"

They're awesome
http://www.kottke.org/08/02/single-serving-sites
I use google reader as well. When I slack off and end up with 1000+ posts to read, I just ctrl+F for subjects I want to read about.
I'd love to hear some reasoning behind: "not trivial, i.e. not easy to copy"

Who cares if it's easy to copy? Paul Buccheit says he built the first version of Gmail in an afternoon. Digg was famously built in fairly short order. Twitter, Flickr, Facebook-- all would be fairly trivial to clone. Less trivial to scale, obviously but... Feature-wise their V1 releases weren't that complex.

If you want something that you can do in your off hours AND something that isn't easy to copy, I'd say you might have an unreasonably low opinion of hackers around the world. Surely there's nothing you could build in your off hours that a few persistent hackers couldn't clone in a few months of full-time work, is there?

More on the "why should you care" front-- can you name any successful product/company that succeeded cloning someone else's idea? Maybe you can, but it's the exception, not the the rule. Now there ARE examples of companies jumping into the existing marketing and cleaning up by doing BETTER (iPhone, Flickr, etc) - but that's not cloning... That's innovating.
i think Smalltalk was more of a mindfuck than Lisp.
This is neat. I'd like to see it extended to things other than websites, like MSN messenger. Not sure how that would work though.
A look at Yahoo Buzz after 2 weeks
This seems pretty reasonable, but in general beware of "manifestos". See http://www.textism.com/maunifesto/
it could be interesting proposition if founders know how much to value, if they have an experience mentor then they can calculate all kinds of permutation combination. Sometime it is better to keep the control and give away stake and vice-versa.

But following is what i learned from one of the venture blog, its very interesting and educating:

Entrepreneurs focus on valuation when they should be focusing on controlling the company through board control and limited protective provisions.

Valuation is temporary, control is forever. For example, the valuation of your company is irrelevant if the board terminates you and you lose your unvested stock.

The easiest way to maintain control of a startup is to create good alternatives while you’re raising money. If you’re not willing to walk away from a deal, you won’t get a good deal. Great alternatives make it easy to walk away.

Create alternatives by focusing on fund-raising: pitch and negotiate with all of your prospective investors at once. This may seem obvious but entrepreneurs often meet investors one-after-another, instead of all-at-once.

Focusing on fund-raising creates the scarcity and social proof that close deals. Focus also yields a quick yes or no from investors so entrepreneurs can avoid perpetually raising capital.
Open Sourcing The Fundraising Process
It's easily gamed and does not consider the intellect and/or knowledge of the voter/submitter.

Moreover, as suggested by gaika, one can use merit points from useful contributions to society instead of puzzles/games (e.g., contributions to open source projects).
How exactly does it work though ?
Specifically how big is the "everyone" sample ?
Since I can't attach text with it, I figured I'd explain in this article. We created HearThisPitch, in order to share our experiences with other entrepreneurs. By open sourcing, we mean: sharing all the feedback we get from potential investors, placing our presentations online, the source files to those presentations, our personal notes, and opening the comments on the blog. Purpose is two fold:

a) Helps us revise and make the pitch better through a community effort. We're far from being where we need to be and brutal, honest feedback does it best. Every two weeks or so, we'll update the pitch according to people's input on the site. We'll also post feedback from investors. Anything seriously confidential will stay that way.
b) This creates a great learning ground for entrepreneurs. When we started, we knew nothing aobut fundraising (and honestly, still have tons and tons to learn). If we had a resource like this, it would have really helped us. Hoping that this creates the same effect that open source does for software, but for entrepreneurs with fundraising.

-j
Some of the Numbrosia Puzzle players obviously have very high IQs and it would be interesting to see what they think is worth reading.

Moreover, if they have lots of time to play with puzzles, maybe they have lots of time to keep up with the latest news as well.
Fortune interviews Steve Jobs for its Most Admired Companies issue
People have to realize that this was a "Wow, we're just not ready for this yet," and not a "go away and never come back."

It may have been worded a little poorly, but Apple isn't trying to shut developers out. They're just asking for more time.
I think that this is a great presentation, but more than that a great idea. I would have never of thought that a company would render itself to criticism the way Publictivity has... it shows how important their product is to them and how they are doing everything they can to improve their product.

Great job on the presentation and great idea! Keep it up!
"We don't get a chance to do that many things, and every one should be really excellent. Because this is our life. Life is brief, and then you die, you know? So this is what we've chosen to do with our life. We could be sitting in a monastery somewhere in Japan. We could be out sailing. Some of the [executive team] could be playing golf. They could be running other companies. And we've all chosen to do this with our lives. So it better be damn good. It better be worth it. And we think it is."
This notion of 'where are the (mainland) Europeans?' not only occurs at SXSW but also at this website and websites like techcrunch. Where are the European web start ups? UK websites do popup now and then (Clickpass for example). Within 5 minutes of launching I knew Clickpass was alive. This never happens with Dutch websites, German websites, etc. The Netherlands for example is home to some great websites, like booking.com or joost.com (largely build in The Netherlands) and products like TomTom.com. But, there does not seem to be a startup culture over here in The Netherlands. Where do European startups meet each other? Online or offline.

Why didn't I went to SXSW? Too expensive, too far away.
English syntax and grammar is efficient at communicating ideas without throwing a bunch of highlighting and fancy colors and lines into the mix.
http://ycombinator.com/arc/arc2.tar
One query per comment is terrible... I'm glad you realize it's inefficient :)
"billions and billions"

-Carl Sagan
Ask YC: What logo do you prefer
Would appreciate comments / suggestions on possible logos,

http://www.myplaylist.biz/index2.php

Red, Green, or neither?
Because its there...
hehe, is this a play off of "istwitterdown.com"
The homepage is scary.
Well then, I did a helluva good job :)
Neither.
The Hydrogen Economy: Savior of Humanity or Economic Black Hole?
To lead people, walk behind them. - Sun Tzu
I check the front page for topics I'm interested in (webdev, Jennifer Connolly, artificial intelligence, amateur hardcore pornography, general programming, etc). If I'm really bored, I'll look to see which entries have 20+ comments and read those. If I'm really, really bored, I'll look at the newest comments. I'm usually really, really bored.
You're kidding right? Neither.
For reasoning see my other reply in this thread. Specifically your "few months" estimate is rather conservative. A team of professionals can clone the app or the service in a matter of weeks. The question here rather is how easy to put this cloning team together, i.e. how mainstream the idea is to begin with.

Additionally, you appear to be mostly considering high-profile web apps, which is not exactly the whole software universe. Head to the tucows.com, pick virtually any category and you will see it full of apps that are very similar. On the other end of spectrum, have a look at companies like NetScreen, which effectively grew their business by building cheaper Cisco devices. And this is not a singular example, it's more of a general MO rather.

All in all, I wrote about what worked for me and what worked exceptionally well. This does not imply that it's the only way.
http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/youtube.com

youtube is down is it? :/

Good idea, but an error like that doesn't fill me with confidence ;)
There's a lively Barcamp Scene in Germany, practically every month one barcamp with up to 300 attendees. You can find a list of german startups here
http://www.deutsche-startups.de/a-z/startups-a-z/
MPTT is generally the fastest way to get relational to tree data. If you are udsing Django code.google.com/p/django-mptt/
A simple no-login listmaker built by the folks at FriendFeed
Built by the folks at http://FriendFeed.com Simpli.st makes and manages lists. It aims for simplicity and requires no login. Each list gets a new link for sharing and linkmarking (social bookmarking). I like it especially with the Del.icio.us Firefox add-on and Del.icio.us live feeds of selected tags into Firefox.
What Makes People Give? (like A/B testing for philanthropy economics)
2/3 of snaptalent's founders are british (Tim & I)
Built by the folks at http://FriendFeed.com Simpli.st makes and manages lists. It aims for simplicity and requires no login. Each list gets a new link for sharing and linkmarking (social bookmarking). I like it combined with the Del.icio.us Firefox add-on and “Live Bookmark” feeds of selected tags back into Firefox. Combining these two simple tools makes an even more flexible and powerful tool for managing lists.
neither ... change the logo, the style and the fonts. changing only color won't help.
AutoCAD also uses Lisp.
Great video about something that's very important today. Thanks for sharing.
Why? It's a genre like any other. It can be done well or poorly.

http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/T4PM/futurist-manifesto...

http://www.screensite.org/courses/Jbutler/T340/SurManifesto/...

(Actually, I wouldn't have said MacLeod's piece was a manifesto; it's more of a personal essay. Regardless of that, you said one thing I think is the kiss of death for this kind of writing: you called it reasonable!)
http://www.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.c...

Seems to be working.

By the way, who exactly upmodded this?
You are right. The web is fluid and always evolving. Changing the version tag with such definiteness is the same as declaring a pile a heap...at what point does the transition take place?

"Web 2.0" is a great marketing phrase to help bring back the importance of the internet. There were no doubt a number of different ways in which the web was used, but this is not a total rehash of the web into a brand-spanking-new thing.

If anything, we need to add a new protocol to have a different web, much less the semantic web - if this vision is to be a reality. HTTP is great but in order to take advantage of the semantic web we need a protocol to address those issues and not a protocol that is decades old and designed for a fairly constrained exchange of information.
‘The Amazing Race,’ as Played in the Lab
Without a baseline or status quo your 10X promise doesn't have a basis for substantiation. Any new offering you are contemplating has to compete against the status quo that your prospect is currently enjoying/using. You can pick the status quo and say if you doing X (e.g. faxing documents for signature, using Notepad and FTP to manage your website, flying 500 miles for a one hour meeting) then Y may save you time, money, errors, ... But you can't just promise a blanket 10X because what people will hear instead is you telling them that they are really stupid.
A book that never fails to invoke in me the opposite feeling this thread is looking for.
Numbrosia - Merit Based News
if you can respond while working out you're not working hard enough ;)

then again, I read YC on ass, so I commend you for doing something.
"Cash is king. Every week figure out when you will run out of cash. Figure out when the last payroll checks will clear, in best and worst case circumstances. Assume the worst case." -what smart people told me + I found to be true
Way to go amichail! I did not see that coming.

It's interesting as an example of Arrington pulling a story from a news.yc post. The original post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=138243
I would love so much to watch him prepare and run one of those Monday meetings. We've all probably noticed the way a workweek tends to starts slow on Monday and ramp up over the following days. I bet his massive energy injection on Monday gets the big Apple machine fired up much faster than most other companies.
I'm new here, so not familiar with the history, but dude: Google grew from the two founders' PhD work in computer science, and Bill Gates is widely known for his technical brilliance and depth of technical knowledge. So unless there is some confusion on the context of your comment, your examples are just incorrect.
Which Weekend?
Ask YC: Startup idea
The problem:

Whenever you go to Downtown or other destinations, it is difficult to find a parking space for your car. Sometime you go from one parking garage to the next to find a space.

A solution:

When I get close to my destination, I would like to be able to access a website using my mobile phone and see available parking spaces. Most parking garages are computerized with a car counter and already know how many available spaces they have. Create a company that publishes these available spaces on a Google Map. You will have to contact parking garage owners and give them a way to publish their car counts over the Internet.

This might help save time and reduce traffic congestion in the area. You will have very targeted customers that are going to Downtown (or a destination you know about). Stores or businesses around Downtown might be happy to advertise on the website.

What do you think about the idea?
"Do good work!"

- entirety of a speech given by Gus Grissom, 1959
In 60s there was a campaign in Soviet Union with a slongan "If it's being done, let's do it big". It sounded really odd even untranslated.
Do i have to be the first to say smart tags?
psst .. you can edit the post after it's first submitted
:)
http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/q?domain=downforeveryoneo...

They special cased their own domain. I love attention to detail like that.
It's an Arc hangout. = is for assignment.
Adjacency list in the database, build the tree in memory, cache the result in memcached if you need to.
The grinder http://grinder.sourceforge.net/ (write your scripts in jython) for unit and nightly runs and for large scale testing on partners hardware HP (formerly mercury) Load Runner https://h10078.www1.hp.com/cda/hpms/display/main/hpms_conten...
yeah xirium that was it, thanks!
Adwords is till more important than Adsense and on a technological level ( I mean the basic core not the quality score etc etc.... ) it's pretty simple. All Google needed was traffic.
"...though I never remember about them when I actually need a specific one."

Could be a good use case for bookmarks.... ;-)
Tsung (http://tsung.erlang-projects.org/) - an Erlang-based performance testing tool.
Their host must be in China
i read the comments first then the article, if i plan to comment i read the article to make sure comments are on-topic.
8aweek now grades your web browsing health
I would split into two comments, because I always assume there will be value in dedicated discussion threads.

I also do this with E-mail. For example, someone sends a message to a group asking multiple unrelated questions, I reply to each question in a separate E-mail (and maybe even change the subject) so the reply threads aren't confusing.
agreed - I periodically make mistakes like this, specifically like 5 seconds ago

though if the reddit model is frowned upon; why not a one time undo instead?
Cool app. My first try resulted in this

"It's not just you! digg.com looks down from here."

But I don't think its really down. At least not from here :).
Good idea. Can find a different domain name? It is long.
The best part about the logo is the lined L's and I (representing volume/frequency?), why not carry that on through the rest of the letters?

The shadow doesn't help.. Try and keep it simple.
I've always thought that 'Web 2.0' at first just meant that a site had user-generated/submitted content - so by that definition news.yc would be web 2.0 because pg does not post the stories and decide what we see.
The problem with using it for that is it doesn't seem to mark which 'entities' are more important than others. So even though it seems to be able to mark proper nouns and numbers, it doesn't differentiate between an 'entity' being the subject of an article and just being mentioned. There's probably ways to get around this(frequency counts of an entity in an article? number of google results for an entity?), but right now it doesn't seem to do that.
Not much to say about the article itself (yeah, TechCrunch has been covering YCombinator a lot lately), but that blog has a seriously annoying layout.
Mensa has always been the canonical example of a Groucho Marx punchline: A club that I don't want to belong to, because it would accept me as a member.

This looks like more of the same. I'm not interested in pretending that the ability to solve puzzles is some sort of overall mark of quality, instead of just a specialized skill that is irrelevant as often as it's relevant. I've had more than enough of that attitude. I spent years in high school and college being exalted for my skill at constructing complex solutions to toy problems, as if SAT scores were the true measure of wisdom, or competence, or virtue. They aren't.
Persistance pays off! Good luck.
Hugh (http://www.gapingvoid.com) keeps updating the list, here: http://www.gapingvoid.com/Moveable_Type/archives/000932.html

Tons of good stuff.
Messing around mostly. The problem with outsourcing now is that I'm in Canada. I could charge exactly the same in C$ as I charged in 2002, and Americans will pay 50% more. Unless I can target a european audience, and then you get into the language issues.

I've been helping a friend with his site, learning lisp thanks to the bad influences here ;-), and trying to create an interesting website. The last one is difficult.

Thanks for asking!
Suggestion: instead of saying "Check another site?" on the result page, just add an input box to test another page.
Lose the bezel. Reconsider the colors; you've got limp, low-value, low-saturation red and green there. The indicator bar letters are cute, but overused; pick one letter and use it there.
Ooh, bad memories, my boss made the same argument at me last week.

Anyway! The relational model uses tables to model all data. Though you can squeeze a comment tree into a relational data mode any number of ways, it is most clearly expressed by a hierarchical model as in XML, S-exprs or a tree data type in your favorite language.

So I'm not saying it can't be expressed as relational data, what I mean is that that representation is not its most natural or useful form.

At work I use a query like:

select s1.id, s2.id, s3.id, s4.id ...
FROM subject s1
LEFT JOIN subject s2 WHERE s2.id=s1.parent
LEFT JOIN subject s3 WHERE s3.id=s2.parent
LEFT JOIN subject s4 WHERE s4.id=s3.parent
....
WHERE s1.id=?

to get all parents of a given node. It's ugly, inefficient, and fragile. You can use the nested set model to simplify this particular query, but inserting rows becomes extremely complex and painful; you really just trade one problem for another.

So, while you can model a tree as relational data, it's not a good match.
When in doubt use Helvetica.
If entities were ever to become something big in the web, it isn't going to be by generating random links between entities and hoping that something useful comes out of it.

If anything, someone has to see a useful link between 2 entities and build an application around it. I doubt it will ever happen the other way around.
While Yahoo Buzz did steal Digg's concept of social news, I'd say it's a valid competitor just because of the fact that it's hacked by Yahoo.

With that said, I'm frightened by the implications of some newbie blogger sites being hit with the traffic that flocks to Yahoo. Servers will melt around the world. ;-)