skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Wow. I feel this is the most important problem anyone could be working on right now. I love the fact that you turned toward the startup culture to get advice, so here's mine:

Show people in the planets terms possible, what their impact is... as a nation, as states, consumers of certain products, etc.

Defining the problems isn't enough. You need to provide solutions as well. You can invoke change if you provide solutions.

Your map went viral quickly and it's a great tool. Do it again, with more minute detail and also provide solutions.

1. The growing deadspots. Define them, then map them all. Show what they'll be like in 10 years at current growth rates. Then try to display what would happen in 5 years if all farms went organic and stopped using chemical fertilizers.

2. Overfishing. Map severity of fish stock depletion. Show percentage of fish consumption of diet for each country. Map what could happen to fish stocks if people swapped 5% of the fish they eat for organic vegitables.

Build some snazzy interface to allow users to affect the change on the maps themselves. A slider that changes peoples diets or something.
"Take a look around the net and make certain that you don’t have another huge player operating in the space that you want to move into."
BS, That is how you end up selling hats for iguanas, dont be afraid of competition just make sure to do something better.
OK, everyone who complains about crap articles and xkcd comics, here's your chance to put your money where your mouth is and give some upvotes and comments to an awesome article, to get it on the front page. pg's algorithms reward activity, so give activity to the kind of stuff you want more of!
Watch the video.

It's good.

I have significant issues with the core argument, but mostly due to it's naïveté.

It does not address the issue that there are numerous, hmm, micro-languages. Say one invented spontaneously between twins that only the twins and say a couple grad students (maybe) will ever be fluent. The twins language may be incredible but it is useless to order a big mac.

Can two autistic folk each with their own totally valid non-verbal language ever communicate?

The world is getting so specialized, perhaps with tools some very smart folks cut off due to neurological, er differences, will become dynamic members of the greater society.

I really liked the view down the slinky, good thing that it was not a full 9 minutes of just that. just that. just that. just that. just that. just that. just that. just that. just that. just that. just that. just that. just that. just that. just that. just that. just that. just that. just that. just that. just that. just that. just that. just that. just that. just that. (wow, doesn't it feel good typing just that ;-)
iPhone "is not married to the single, exclusive-carrier model"
Picanswers - Ask questions with photos
Why is SCTP needed given TCP and UDP are widely available?
So true. It's like they got their ethos and values from Disney movies.
Example: You're looking for a house.

There may be several databases of houses for sale in the area you're looking. You want one that's within walking distance of a good school; the regional government has a database of schools and data about them.

If those databases are published in RDF (or some machine-readable format that can be transformed into RDF), then it's trivial to smoosh them together and query them as one.
Also is a computer science or business degree recommended?

Computer science. Hands down.

am wondering which college would be the best for an aspiring start up entrepreneur.

I think that Stanford is obviously the best choice, they push entrepreneurship pretty hard. But at the same time, I don't really think that it's the school, it's the student. And, Stanford is really expensive. If you get in to Stanford and can get funded, great. If you can't get funded, I'd really try and balance the really high costs, how much work it's going to require to get in to Stanford and how much competition you'll have while you're there, with the benefits that Stanford will give you.

You might be better off going to your local University of Foo state school, and working hard on your own to learn the types of technologies that you're going to use in your startup. Nothing can stop you from learning what you need to learn to start a business. The school I'm finishing up at-- University of Maryland--isn't a tech powerhouse. And, most of the CS education tends to have a slant towards Defense contracting, which means Java and Oracle (Ada for the advanced stuff. :) ). But, I've managed to squeeze out a decent education in web development since I've been there, I think.

Another key factor in school selection is to keep expenses low. You're going to have a hard time starting a business after college if you're $125k in debt to school, and $25k in debt to credit cards because you went to a school that you couldn't afford.

Your risk of failure is a lot lower if you have minimal expenses when you're done with college. If you can finish college with zero debt, your can take all the time you want to start a business as long as you have money for rent, ramen and bandwidth. I really think that people underestimate this aspect of being an entrepreneur. As an entrepreneur, it's in your best interest to run financially lean and mean: low cost, low debt.
He mentions that he is inspired by Daniel Kahnemann, who has done work in behavioral economics. He won a nobel prize in 2002 that can be seen here: http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/2002/...

The lecture explains quite well what he does, and also gives a hint at what is being done in the netflix prize contest.
When you

a.) Need to take money from someone else.

b.) Have done something you might get sued for.

The "might get sued for" doesn't mean when you've done something wrong (at which point it's undoubtedly too late - don't be evil ;-). It means when you're performing a service for money, or when you've got a fairly well-trafficked site that's attracted a lot of attention, or when you're doing something where there may be disputes involved.

We met with a lawyer for incorporation when we first launched, but he kinda dragged his feet and we're still not officially incorporated. In retrospect, he's doing us a favor, because we really don't need to be incorporated at this stage and the additional overhead of a corporation would just slow us down. (In particular, corporations need to file taxes as a corporation.) If we were successful enough that people were actually submitting much user-generated content or (gasp) had a revenue stream other than Google AdSense, we'd want to move the incorporation along, but while we're still developing/finding traction, it's not that important.
Well, we'll never know what they lost, will they? It's not like we can turn back the clock and launch it a second time. When upside potential dies, it dies with a whimper, not a bang.

I agree that this product seems very nice, and that it might be cool enough that it will do just fine. On the other hand, as you point out, they have competition already. More will be coming. They could easily get lost in a sea of competitors within the next six months. Every geek on this site probably imagines that they could build a site like gitweb in their spare time. I know I do. And it's not like the cost of moving a project from gitweb to a competitor is going to be that high: you do one "git pull" and ask your clients to update their URLs. Maybe you clone a couple of wiki pages.

The biggest problem with free private beta is that, when they finally announce some prices, they probably will get another round of P.R... in the form of unreasonable people complaining that the prices are too high and talking up the alternatives. Even if their prices turn out to be incredibly reasonable, they will be higher than they are now... and folks don't like having things that were free taken away from them, no matter how polite and logical the sales pitch is. It sets off the inner bait-and-switch detector, which is a very highly developed mental organ in a consumer-oriented society like ours, and it just makes you unhappy. Unhappy customers are never a good thing. And this problem defies logic: Just look at all the people who complain about paying $20 a month for a Slicehost VPS because it's so much more expensive than the $6.95 oversold shared hosting plan at VapidHoster.com.

It's a particularly hard sell to convince people that a wrapper around a free-software tool is worth money... and it gets even harder when you consider that 100% of the customers are the kind of hard-core Unix programmers for whom the gitosis docs are light bedtime reading. Launching without a price tag and then trying to paste one on later just makes that whole argument more difficult.
probably doesn't hurt if you try integrating this with facebook/open social

maybe some icons that quickly classify (like right next to the title) dreams would be good too (nightmares, happy, sexual, weird, mundane, ....) (in addition to tags)
Besides decentralization, it's about making connections between two datasets without either dataset having to know about the other.

There's a certain minimum effort required to make it worthwhile to write a web application with a public API; combining and querying two distinct datasets that already exist is below that bar.
The "printer friendly" version has no breaks between paragraphs for me (Firefox 2 on Ubuntu 7.10)... that happen to anyone else?

So it may be friendly to the printer, but I definitely can't read it.
Recently my son and I sat through a combo-presentation given by Stanford, Penn, Harvard, Columbia, and Duke. The presentations were all good of course, with the presenters from Harvard, Penn, and Duke being the best.

One point glaringly stuck out in the Duke presentation though. Even in your freshman year at Duke, you as a student can pitch the school with an idea, and they'll consider providing project funding and resources. None of the other schools suggested they would do this.

Duke is obviously taking the entrepeneurial pulse right now, and consider promoting and cultivating entrepeneurship as a selling point for their school.
> Could you build in Semantic Web structure at development time, or DB insert time, etc.

Sure; just use a triple store rather than an SQL database. Take a look at ActiveRDF.
elance, odesk, craigslist, and the boards of frequented blogs.
Rocking the Stocks of Your Favorite Bands
Handbook of Mathematical Functions by Abramowitz and Stegun (great reference book now free)
Google Goes After Another Microsoft Cash Cow
Why is the link to the last comment, not to the beginning of the article? Took me a while to read the linked comment, and to figure out why it was so important. It wasn't. :)
Bill Gates and Other Happenings at LinkedIn
One Google ad.

In all seriousness, even those of us who are veteran native speakers of English (which our Shanghai-based contributor may not be) sometimes have trouble with the distinction between a "startup company" and "a fun new website". Entire issues of Fast Company and Wired have been known to miss this distinction.

This is a charmingly simple idea and the tool is correspondingly charming and simple. And, for the moment, blissfully free from ads. Well done.
True, and yet if you literally don't know about the huge player there's a good chance that you will forget to do something better. Or, if you accidentally do have some distinctive features, you will neglect to market them properly.

Another way to phrase your point is: "look around the market and make sure there's a huge player whose customers you can siphon off".
Google Sites released
Yeah, there were dozens of companies like you describe in the wake of Napster. The lawyers laid waste to the field.
How about this ?
http://bigadda.com/system/wordverification/verify.php?T=1234...

(BigAdda is a major Indian social network)
Have you seen the homeless people in San Francisco? Do you really think that a lack of voicemail is what's holding them back from getting a job?

You can give 'em a phone, a shower, a shave, a set of clean clothes, and even some lessons on interview skills, but you can't convince them that working for a living is better than begging passersby for money.

edit: Of course most of 'em aren't lazy, they're mentally ill. Voicemail doesn't help much there either.
Looks like Apple hired a private eye and discovered that the "single, exclusive-carrier model" is cheating on them, in China, several hundred thousand times a day.

They have pictures.
Funny, but would seriously have needed links to the actual items. For example the math problem -- wtf?
ActionScript 3.0 is basically Java. We're using it at work, and, compared to JavaScript (with a good library), it's pretty uncomfortable. They've made it (optionally) classical and static. Prototypes, dynamism, and FP are pushed into the corner. It's really gross. The modularity seems kind of nice at first, but then you realize they wrote a bunch of mediocre libraries instead of building a good lang. At least it has E4X, which is very nice, but then, I've found JSON to often be the better approach anyway.
That's cool, but the YC app question about "What do you know that your competitors just don't get" applies here. The core functionality seems twitter-like (and with a twitter API, you could get everyone's twitter dreams displayed on this site too).

You need something that is unique and distinct about this dream journal compared to the world of microblogging. I do, however, like being able to read about other's dreams in Chinese though.
Code Search - O'Reilly Labs
Doesn't this also compete with Backpack? I would think 37signals would be much more worried than Microsoft, just because they are smaller.

Of course, I haven't used either service, so I might be talking out of my ass.
"Using Erlang continually makes me both smile and cry at the same time. "
Stanford is stepping up financial aid:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/02/20/...
No tuition if your folks make < $100k. Full ride if they make < $60k. No more student loans so debt can be removed if you live within your means.

Aside from the great CS education and networking, the location is really key. How many places in the world can a student attend entrepreneurial and hacking-type events every week (for free)? The local events may be too distracting (need to work!), but if I were a student again, I'd rather have the opportunities to pick & choose. Example: YC Startup School.

I fully realize that other schools can be great and also have students just as good or better than Stanford. [I loved my time at Univ of Virginia.] But if the question is "best" environment for an aspiring tech entrepreneur, I think it's got to be here.
Game Graphics During the 8-bit Computer Era
+10, University of Foo.

Pay as little as possible. State universities, full-tuition scholarships, whatever. The debt is what will imprison you, and colleges aren't worth anything near what they cost.

If you focus on doing well in school, and you later find that you need better credentials than the U of X can provide, there's always the master's degree... the thrifty person's path to Ultimate Credential Power. The top engineering schools are easier to get into (because it's easier to distinguish yourself in college than in high school, where grades and SATs are all hyperinflated and everyone's admissions essays are ghostwritten) and much more affordable (sometimes even marginally profitable!) at the graduate level.
I actually think it would make a viable business if there was some integrated astrology/fortune telling aside of the dream. Horoscopes are huge businesses in Asia. (Of course, you'd have to know how to produce horoscopes)
Steve Yegge |  Ancient Languages -- Perl
Yeah, it happens with Leah Culver and a number of other women in technology as well.
You can learn (or incidentally, not learn) CS at most decent colleges. What I think is a lot more interesting about college is everything else that you'll learn there along the way and learning to get along and have fun with other smart people.

When I was college shopping, I was choosing between a liberal arts school and a top-tier engineering school. I visited the engineering school and realized that while they had an amazing computer science program, the social outlook was rather drab. Only 20% girls, in the middle of nowhere, the people that I talked to didn't really seem to like it, but all assured me "that it was really a great college."

Then I visited the liberal arts school. That was definitely the right choice. As it were, I had some great professors that really took an interest in my research and my life. I learned a lot about literature and philosophy and psychology and history and hung out with folks that weren't just gear heads. My world grew wider, not just deeper.

Now, many years later I realize that after the first two years or so of CS I knew enough to be able to understand and find hard problems. But if I'd not been forced to take that massive block of core classes, I might have never realized that psychology is really interesting, that there are a lot of parallels between the way that architechts and programmers think or that you can meet a lot of cute girls if you hang out in the music department.

So, why is that important?

Well, when I was submitting my proposal for my senior research, I was stressed out because it didn't fit neatly into a specific department. It was on the line between CS, physics and biology. My advisor said something that's stuck with me to this day:

"The interesting problems of the coming decades of computer science lie at the intersection between computer science and other fields."

Getting a solid grasp on computer science in my opinion is critically important, but it's also pretty ubiquitous. (Though, sadly, it's pretty universally mediocre. A lot depends on your personal uptake.) What seems a lot more important to me is finding a place where you can cross-pollinate with other disciplines, meet a lot of different and interesting people and, well, enjoy yourself. The skills required for that seem to escape nerds much more often than the ability to sling code, and are essential in business interactions. A lot of people get caught up in getting into the dozen hardest to get into schools, but most colleges will have more people smarter than you than's names you can remember, and it's not that hard to find them.
Well we have Greenspun's Tenth Rule:

"Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp."

And this article gives us Robert Virding's First Rule:

"Any sufficiently complicated concurrent program in another language contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow
implementation of half of Erlang."

So I'm going to go ahead and propose this:

"Any sufficiently memorable technical insight about a programming language contains a slightly adapted, informally-specified, semi-controversial, less-eloquent adaptation of half of Greenspun's Tenth Rule."

Call it Xich's First Rule of Technical Quotes.
Rajesh Jain on Turning 40
McNealy to Telcos: Either you become a destination site, or the destination site will become a telco
Kind of cool. I could see it being a bit hard for the casual browser to find dreams of interest to them. I've seen others suggest tags or categories, either of which could prove useful. But you might also want to include a simple reddit-esque up/down vote for dreams people liked reading. That way people can just view the most interesting dreams.
If you're looking to use the firmware portions (location, contacts list, etc.), you'll need the iPhone app on the SDK.

If not, stick with the web. It allows you to not be wedded to the device.

I'm praying for the unlikely event that the iPhone SDK allows browser apps to tap into the firmware of the iPhone. There isn't anything that can do that right now right?
All recommendation engines suck (I'd be happy if you found an exception) and hence any startup wanting to make one needs to actually make good recommendations. Every single one I have tried just wastes my time, and I don't see anything in this populistic description that indicates that any of these companies will succeed.

It's like promising fusion or general AI in 10-15 years. They keep disappointing me.

I'd like to also note that the Netflix prize to date has been unable to nurture real improvements in how these algorithms perform. The way I see it, some paradigm shift needs to happen before this kind of technology comes of age. Automatic recommendation is right up there alongside automatic forum moderation, general pattern recognition and natural language processing for things that no one ever is able to pull off.
Terminator rising: Military robot arms race under way
The ones who aren't mentally ill are hooked on drugs. Do not toy with heroin. It 0wns you.

A girlfriend of mine once worked as a counselor at a homeless shelter. It was a somewhat stressful experience, since the drug dealers line up outside the shelter to tempt the people coming in and out -- it's a good way to get return customers.

She reported that, actually, one of the big problems with chronically homeless people is that there's an immense amount of red tape associated with signing up for housing assistance, signing up for free healthcare, scheduling interviews with social service agencies, drug rehab, potential employers, etc. She spent the majority of her time helping people fill out forms, send emails, and use the phone. That's kind of what social work amounts to.

And, of course, these people have no permanent address, so it's hard to get agencies and employers to call them back. Hence, voicemail could be a tremendous help.

You can imagine what it's like to try to fill out IRS forms while you're in heroin withdrawal and being tempted by dealers every time you go out. It really puts my caffeine-withdrawal headaches in perspective.

Incidentally, the large majority of homeless people are in and out of homelessness as fast as possible. Nothing inspires you to action like being in a homeless shelter... where, among other things, other homeless people will steal all your stuff. Almost nobody stays homeless by choice.
Most large companies are incorporated in Delaware because they do not tax out-of-state corporations. I also know Nevada allows one-person corporations, which is fairly unique.

Edit: I just realized I misread the headline as where should you incorporate.
Connected Ventures : http://www.vimeo.com/173714

And Cambrian House has some good ones: http://www.cambrianhouse.com/video/
blinkx Survey of TV and Online Video Habits Reveals Surprising User Behavior
Hrm...

Hal Varian says that Google doesn't have strong network effects working for it, and he might know a thing or two about it:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/02/our-secret-sauce.html

eBay certainly does, though.
Choose Stanford (MIT, Harvard). The major benefit which you will get there is alumni and networking. If you are low on funds, you will have to be extremely wise on budget. But don't let debt scare you. When you are done, you can take two-three years working on other startups, get the rid of debt and gain priceless practical experience. And you can always bootstrap your own thing during your off-hours outside day job. Startup is not an easy thing, but if you have passion and willingness to win, nothing can stop you now. Don't be afraid and you'll be thankful to yourself for making this choice.

"Being in your own business is working 80 hours a week so that you can avoid working 40 hours a week for someone else." (c) Ramona Arnett
A Guide to Web Typography