skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Right now" doesn't and will never matter. "Right now" is incompetence, lazyness, lack of awareness, comfort, and politics all rolled into one. That's the definition of "right now." It is a horrible, horrible measure of what can or should be achieved.

I don't think Paul intended this to be a ground-breaking article. I doubht he's saying that those specific examples lead him to a certain process with a certain guaranteed successful result. In other words, he's not saying because a=b, and b=c, a=c. In that case, if you can disprove the examples, Paul's theories don't stand.

What I interpreted PG to say is that he has done things a certain way for a while, and has noticed correlation where people reject change time and time again, but that this is normal, and in fact, one of the steps in the process of innovation.

You need to 1) come up with a simple concept that benefits someone, especially yourself or someone you know who might care to look at it when it's ready (that you know you can do in a weekend even if it actually takes you a while) 2) promise to that person or anyone else besides you that you will release the software you promised 3) release the crappiest version you can that has the least features and is so unimpressive that it's stunning (esp. if you release before your deadline which gets you feedback sooner) 4) take criticism and make adjustments 5) come up with a system to make promises to do x by a certan date and a parallel system to make and measure forward progress towards any of the objectives 6) stick with it because people really love it when you've been so dedicated to a project 7) you're now an expert and have a lot of design and coding experience under your belt, as well as happy users who like that you're improving the app and listening to them.

Most people never get past step 1 or 2, even though at those steps you really don't have to do anything.

Oh, and step 8) you will learn what makes your body tick and become very efficient and feel like you're "improving exponentially" and 9) you will come up with ideas and insights that may make you sound insane, especially since you'll be so confident and focused you'll be blurting them out, but that 10) a year or two later will have been proven 100% true.
Gasoline is still way higher energy density than any electric car, and fuel cells are not currently based on a technology that would scale in production.

If they can make gasoline cheaply it's carbon neutral by definition. It's actually quite a promising avenue; one of many.
He's looking at statistics over large numbers, not a a single data point. Besides, it's his funding strategy, and if it isn't a good predictor of success, he'll pay for it.
The govt or anybody being able to read your scrapbook is not the same as them telling you to stop based on it.

I've put the book on my list.
Yup. We're selling high and we'll just make more stuff to create new value. Betting against America isn't a good long term proposition.
Unless you are doing hardcore systems programming, there is almost never a reason to write your own sort.
I voted you up because I agree ;)
I think people like to be correct in predicting the failure of crazy-sounding ideas because they don't want to feel like they are missing out on something big. I know I predicted that Google was all hype when it was selling at $200/share and unloaded the few shares I had. I kick myself for it now obviously, and even though it made no financial difference to me whether it sunk to $25 or went up to $600 (since I no longer owned shares), I still couldn't help hoping it would tank so I would feel like I made the correct decision.

I think this is really why you don't have to worry about competitors. If your idea is good enough, everyone will think you are crazy/naive. If your idea is simply decent, you'll never pick it anyway (because it's not exciting enough to you) and it will end up getting done by some existing company. Either way whatever you actually choose to work on will be unique until it's proven, by which point no competitor is catching you anyway.
Where's the C library function for "sort the N-byte records in the file named 'foo' which is too large to fit into RAM"?
"Where is it, then? Where is the final, perfect Lisp that's so easy to write?"

Maybe there isn't a final, perfect Lisp. Maybe there are lots of individual Lisps that are each perfect for some class of problems. That's one of the great strengths of Lisp: if an existing implementation is almost-but-not-quite what you need, you can throw a few macros on it and adapt it into a new language that is what you need.

It's one of the greatest weaknesses too: you don't see the same willingness to say "This is good enough; let's move on to more interesting problems" that you get with, say, Python/PIL or Ruby on Rails.

If you're going to create a new Lisp (and expect people to use it; creation for the sake of creation is another thing, and doesn't need justification), you've gotta answer why it's superior to throwing a few macros on top of an existing Scheme or CL implementation. After all, wouldn't an individual programmer know his specific problem better than you do? They don't have to worry about harmonizing a variety of concerns, because they don't have to worry about other people's concerns. They could just build the language that's best for their specific problem and keep it in their own private toolbox.
> Go Meatless.

No.

> reduce the amount of meat in your diet.

No.

Other than that it's a decent list.
For more details, read the Innovator's Dilemma and Innovator's Solution.
Reddit's discussion of karma for comments
BitTorrent Developers Introduce Comcast Busting Encryption
What you're doing is arguing semantics. Whoever feels like replying to a reply of a reply long enough that all meaning has been lost and the other person stops posting, is the "winner." Whover is smarter and can come up with great examples can easily make another person defensive and tired of arguing. This person can then "win" arguments simply because the person who just wrote about actually developing something is busy developing.

This is actually what causes that disparity between what people think of new technology when it first comes out and two years later, as long as it still exists: one party was busy developing, the other party was busy coming up with reasons it can't be done, getting pats on the back for being so smart, then riding that dopamine rush to nowhere fast for two years until they meet the product again and just say "oh, I was wrong." Then this cycle continues. That's what PG's essay is about.

But being unable or unwilling to argue semantics does not make the original poster's ideas wrong. The only way to prove a determined person wrong is to engage in direct competition, and from the rear, of course, as the other party is already ahead of you. For obvious reasons, it's easier and "smarter" to come up with "logical" reasons than to "do the full experiment" to show it's wrong. We're not talking about math equations here, so a productive person's potential is more than his writing but also his skills, experience, credibility, and dedication, which can't all be ignored.
I like a lot of what this essay says, but I still don't think it applies to Arc. Because the criticisms of Arc would have happened no matter what the design had been.

For the most part, Lisp people will never like any modification to the language that changes their pure abstract computation engine into something that more people would want to use.

Behold, a Usenet post from 2000 on the notion of a "lispscript" that could compete with perl or awk:

http://perl.plover.com/yak/12views/samples/brief/why-lisp-wi...

That said, I personally have no idea if Arc is all that good or not. I get it, but it doesn't inspire me the way Haskell or Erlang do right now. But Arc seems to be successful by the designer's own standards.
By what metric is Yahoo Messenger now number 1? That seems silly to me. I'm guessing they just count everyone who has a Yahoo Mail account as a customer. I have to think that by actual usage it's still 3rd.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=85461
San Francisco Muni - Standing up with one hand holding an upper bar. Very easy to hold iphone in 1 hand and turn pages with the thumb of the same hand.
Newspaper Ad Network Shuns Google, Yahoo, MS
My objection is just installing the client software. Public key is definitely superior for all the reasons you gave.
Congrats guys -- what a week!

If only you could have had Bonforte demoing your product and Bill Gates as your CEO ;-)
21st Century's Grand Engineering Challenges Unveiled
That gives me an idea: an APP for mobile phones that lets you take a picture of handwritten text, and then REPLs it.
Open Thread: How Would You Fix Yahoo?
No matter how much money it makes, Facebook is a roach motel where your data goes to die.
Yuk. How horribly unimaginative!
Perhaps not in libc but on my freebsd box /usr/src/gnu/usr.bin/sort/sort.c delivers the goods if foo has newlines.
(g) Profit!

Hence the gnomes' predicament is solved.
"Right now" is incompetence, lazyness, lack of awareness, comfort, and politics all rolled into one.

And yet that's what the market generally pays for.

Your list reminds me of Levchin's advice from http://venturebeat.com/2007/03/26/start-up-advice-for-entrep...

As a final word of product development advice, Levchin encouraged founders to think about the Bible’s seven deadly sins - especially greed, sloth, envy, pride and gluttony. These characteristics, he said, describe many of the primal motivations for users.
;) I think you won.
Startup feedback request: Fractal Press - We publish anthologies of blog posts
I'm the co-founder. Would love to get feedback. Looking forward to hearing about what you think is the good/bad/ugly.

Thanks.
I think there's very interesting thing happening around Arc. It appears that people there are less afraid of making mistakes or repeating past attempts. Maybe because pg broke some Lisp traditions so that others feel more free to step out of them as well. Maybe because people with other language background are gathering so there are more divergence of minds.

I have my own Scheme implementation (Gauche) and I live on writing software in it, and I keep trying new ideas with it. For that regards, I don't need Arc. But that kind of atmosphere at arclanguage.org, that's not something I can get without Arc.

Maybe most of the ideas tried there will turn out not to work, but new ideas need a place like there to come out. In a sense, Arc isn't a new programming language, but a medium that sheds a new light to the language design process.

And I'm watching it closely to steal whatever good ideas that come out :-)
Paul Allen's new mobile startup
I'm surprised linux usage is that high. Granted, it's been my main OS for ~six months now, but it still surprises me.
I will probably take agreements and copy them until I can afford to hire a lawyer to draft them for my startup, but it is technically copyright infringement. It's also not the best option for various reasons as others have already pointed out.
There is not enough there to comment on.
Perhaps a sample of the final result would help.
I generally ignore most personal finance material I come across on the web so I suspect you would have to do a very good job to get my attention.

However I am curious about the kind of tools and organizational system you plan to use in the production of your product. E.g. things like http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=104348
This ties in a lot with what PG says about creating wealth (http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html). It's not about how much money you make, it's about how much "stuff" you can get with it. It's about what your efforts (work) will gain you.
Just wondering if you've ever used an iPhone? I'm not an Apple fan-boy, but what I am is someone that likes things that work well. I had an n95, but it sucks in comparison to the iPhone. What these numbers show is that the iPhone is EASY to browse the web in comparison to every other phone out there - the proof is in the stats. I personally use my iPhone considerably whilst out for googling or for the maps. Try it, you'll not be so negative afterwards
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.

I'm still trying to get a handle on which of these apply to Arc. Perhaps I'm looking at it the wrong way, but Arc feels a little light in areas (a-c).
A distributed DAG to make dependencies explicit
"copying the Y Combinator site without making silly mistakes."

Using the word 'silly' in the first paragraph of their site is one of the silliest mistakes they could make...
Thanks. We just happen to be starting with Personal Finance, in general, would you buy a real book that happens to be an anthology of the top blog posts from your favorite topic?

And if you're a blogger, would you be willing to participate if we were putting out an anthology in your niche?

Lumifi looks interesting, looking into it now.
It's a succinct summary of a method for developing new ideas/products. The closest I have seen for brevity is Bob Bemer (the inventor of ASCII) with

"Do Something Small But Useful Now"

which he also wrote as ((((DO SOMETHING!) SMALL) USEFUL) NOW!)

so that it became this sequence:

Do Something

Do Something Small

Do Something Small But Useful

Do Something Small But Useful Now

see http://www.trailing-edge.com/~bobbemer/ for more info
Great.. thanks for the tips. Any recommendations/ suggestions for 4)?
Searching online/google etc. We're bootstrapping so hiring a laywer is not ideal, but we will propbably follow the advice of some others and write it ourselves and then get it reviewed by a lawyer. I cant tell if you were sarcastic about the rest, but we do our design and pr ourselves. Those add value so we do it ourselves, but legal jargon doesnt really add value at this stage, hence my original questions to the YC community. Thanks!
I wouldn't clone S3, only implement the interface.
No question its a good thing, I am just amused at the "look ma, its a monad" craze going on. But if people are getting excited over FP concepts, thats nothing but a Good Thing (as long as it doesn't turn into a fashion, which will then go away).
Kathrin of the The Amazon Web Services Team has posted some more specific details on the failure here. In summary it seems their Authentication service was overloaded.

http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/message.jspa?...
The only blog I like that touches on finance is http://www.winterspeak.com and unfortunately it has been inactive for the past few months (Zimran where did you go?).

My taste in anthologies tends towards collections of academic papers selected by an expert in the field - things like "Readings in Database Systems"[1]. I would certainly be interested in stuff of similar quality.

I'm not a blogger - I just stay in the peanut gallery. One of these days I may try to self-publish some stuff from our internal wiki at work using something like http://www.lulu.com/ which is why I'm curious about what you're doing.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Readings-Database-Systems-Kaufmann-Man...
It's definitely becoming crowded in the toolbars area. Now that I think about it, I don't know why 8aweek needs a toolbar at all, as it is not really interactive. An item on the menu would be sufficient.
I want my karma to be zero (null, nil, 0). Please help me guys using this comment's down arrow. We have just 24 hours.
How much is $4.60 a gallon in $ per liter?

And when are you going to convert to the metric system like any other sane country?
Agree- very small market for Arc. I know hundreds of people who can benefit from Viaweb, tens of people who can benefit from YC, no single person who will use Arc.
Merchant account for 3rd party processing apps?
I'm currently trying to get a merchant account for my business that's essentially a 3rd party processing app for a large niche market here in the UK, however when I explain the nature of the business, the banks simply turn us down flat.

Even Paypal turned us down for our WPP application, though they were more vague with their reasoning.

Obviously things are stalled until we can get this issue sorted :)
google for "laptop laidback" for a commercial version if you're too busy coding to do hardware. i have not bought yet, so don't know how good it is.
There is this already:

littles3 - Server implementation of Amazon S3 API

http://code.google.com/p/littles3
Google says about 1.21519144 U.S. dollars per litre

http://www.google.com/search?q=4.60+USD+per+gallon+in+USD+pe...
perhaps the founders don't have the skills needed to grow the company further so hired the talent in. Also maybe the investors behind it wanted someone with experience at the helm.

This is common stuff that happens all the time in funded startups.
Actually, RescueTime IS available for Linux (not directly from the RescueTime folks). Check out: https://launchpad.net/rescuetime-linux-uploader

I'm running it and it works well.
Thanks, exactly the kind of thing I was thinking about.
To be honest, I would probably just read another blog post with the title "top ten finance blog posts" or something like that.

Of course there is value in selection, but BOOKS?
I think the six-principles approach is great, and it really shows why the initial reaction will always be contemptuous and therefore doesn't mean anything.

Of course, not everyone can easily copy the approach, you need to be an original thinker in order to not overlook overlooked problems.

I don't understand the last part of the essay about reddit as a classic example. "Tell people what was new", was that an overlooked problem? News agencies have been around for a long time. "Stay out of the way" was only possible because of the user-submission-and-voting system, which seems to me a clever and non-obvious idea. What I like most about this idea is the voting part, it tells me what's interesting, I don't care about whether it's new.
How to Move WordPress Blog to a New Domain | 10 steps
Get a good legal dictionary, and any time you think to yourself, "I wonder why they used that particular word there?" LOOK IT UP! You'll be surprised. This is not something to do in the evening over a beer.
A textbook wouldn't be a bad idea, either. Or, at least a trusted online reference.
Yahoo gets the younger audience, the poorer audience while Google gets the richer ones
Or just read a summary of it:-)

http://www.squeezedbooks.com/book/show/13/the-innovators-dil...
A scientist - but he provides quotes from religious books as 'evidence'.
Poor People Use Yahoo, Those Better Off Use Google
Bahá'í is a cool religion, though.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bah%C3%A1%27%C3%AD_Faith
If you take a standard setup, say Ubuntu Linux, running Postgres and Ruby on Rails, the ratio of your own lines of code to all the other ones you're utilizing in the system is very small indeed. And you're free to customize all that lower-level stuff if you really need to, under very friendly terms. Unless she means that it's so easy to find and use that it's a silly question?

Software 1, Lawyers 0.

Speaking of which, wasn't YC supposed to open source some of the legal things they have?
i am not against the iphone. I was impressed too when i saw it. But all the fuss seems το come from the web browsing rendering cabapilities which as you know are equal το s60 and they always act like they invented the web or the multitouch tech which they bought actually. Of course hands up for the UI. Even a nokia official said we clone when something is innovative refering to the ui
SQL Server 2005 vs. MySQL for a startup?
We are wondering whether to use SQL Server 2005 or MySQL as our database. The database will store the following information (for stocks & bonds):

1. Market activity information – price, volume, open, high, low, close for various instruments.
2. Fundamental information – balance sheet line items, income statement line items, news stories etc.
3. Technical indicator values – commonly used moving averages, RSIs etc.

Typical use scenario will be that a browser will request the following information:

1. Data for an stock/bond
2. Data for a certain day/time (across a bunch of stocks).

The predominant concern here is : SPEED. The application should very quickly be able to handle requests and spit out the necessary data to a .NET client.

Do you have any idea what might be the fastest solution in this situation? Can you ask your coders for any suggestions?

I am tempted to go with MySQL since it is free vs. high licensing costs for SQL Server.

The main reason I am considering SQL Server is because of a notion in my head that if it's a .NET/Windows application, SQL Server may be faster.

Thanks!
Find your TechCrunch Chick or Valleywag Queen
Time for a Flickr-Yahoo Divorce
MySQL Server is cheaper and faster. However, MySQL Server is technically only free if you use it with GPL2 applications or never distribute your app.
1) Get bought by Microsoft.

2) Let Microsoft run the Yahoo businesses like they do all of their others, as a P&L that could actually take significant losses in the first few years just to gain market share.

3) Profit (half a decade from now)
How to raise money from VCs
Tips from Shpigler on how to negotiate - to Yahoo with love.
This is a good step, but probably only a temporary fix. They basically encrypt client-tracker communications to prevent filter software sniffing peer addresses, which are then immediately disconnected. Unfortunately, BitTorrent traffic has a fairly obvious signature (compared to most internet traffic) which is vulnerable to traffic analysis. Even with encryption it could probably easily be detected and throttled.

Disguising BitTorrent traffic to look like other normal traffic might work, though I'm not sure how.

I have no sympathy for Comcast or other large US telecoms. Supposedly these guys were given huge tax breaks ($200 BILLION) in return for developing the infrastructure for high speed (~45Mbps) internet to homes... but that infrastructure was never built. There's a book called "The $200 Billion Broadband Scandal" (though I haven't read it.)

Just because Comcast oversells their capacity it doesn't give them the right to arbitrarily filter some of my traffic. I'm supposed to give them money and they're supposed to give me a connection to the internet at the speed they advertise.

Part of me hopes they take it this far and either get a class action lawsuit brought against their asses, or piss people off enough to get some net neutrality legislation passed.

Whew, sorry for that rant...
The Evolution of Motor Control: from Waves to Bits