skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's a pretty good description Alex. We've tried to minimise the feature set and whilst we've made sure that people can use their own OpenID if they want to we figure most users won't. If it turns out that they do we'll switch to making it an automatic feature.
TC has always been very kind to YC and its startups. They seem to take the view that startups are going to have a hard enough time without their first media appearance ripping them apart over the usual early startup pains and problems. TC readers that comment, on the other hand, are like a more vicious and less literate TMZ that somehow views startups profiled at TC as "the other half" who don't have to work for a living. Not entirely relevant to this thread, but I've been pleasantly surprised by how nice the TC folks are in print and in person, and they're enthusiastic about the whole YC concept.
Exactly! And we have to test network scalability issues, too, so I should get some PS3s for my friends and have a LAN party, er, . . . intensive network stress-testing day at the office. :-D
Actually one of the guys I went to school with (https://publications.dev.java.net/seanfitzgerald/) mentioned something like that to me when details of the PS3 first started getting announced. He was doing Beowulf clustering stuff and mentioned that he wouldn't mind getting his hands on a few PS3s.
You know what's funny? What you said is true for pretty much everything else in life, too. Not just sex.

Here's something I've learned that rocked my world: most things are not nearly as complicated as I make them in my head. Apparently this comes from some kind of childhood issue with pleasing parents. But if you're smart, chances are you can do a lot more than you give yourself credit for.

I just wish I'd learned that earlier.
Buffett didn't say $516 trillion. The headline is completely wrong.

BIS estimates that amount, but its really misleading...its a measure of the nominal size of the derivative and not the actual financial exposure.
Freenode is still one of the primary hubs for a lot of open source action, so for those of us that are linked up to open source communities, an IRC channel is similarly convenient.
When I saw the Coverflow idea, I didn't think, "Aha! Time to take on Google!" But then again, I didn't imagine it used on a touchscreen iPod, either. So who knows.
...and for those who have never seen a programming language ever. Do they really need arrows that point to comments that say, "This is a comment"?
The intention isn't replace a server database but instead manage more efficiently the information you'll store in Javascript variables anyway.

Many Javascript-intense webapps could use it.
maybe better as in different as tyohn points out
All due respect, but thinking that a system's security relies on people not knowing what ciphers and hash functions the system uses is on the top 3 list of signs that you're clueless about security. It'd be difficult to have made a more ironic post than slamming someone for "not understanding security" with a "security through obscurity" argument. ;)

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerckhoffs%27_principle for why.
Why make me enter my full name? I hate, hate, hate giving out my name on Web sites that don't need it. My internet identity is my username.
I hope its not the beginning of the enditt.
More Please!
My antisocial version of social bookmarking, feedback welcome
Study sponsored by monitor company says to buy new monitors? No way!
Women 2.0 Business Plan Competition - Deadline to Submit April 1, 2008
Women 2.0 Business Plan Competition deadline to submit is April 1.

More info: http://pitch.women2.org/

The Women 2.0 Business Plan Competition gives passionate entrepreneurs with interesting ideas a chance to follow their dreams and build something to change the world! Teams with at least 50% female ownership are invited to submit their business ideas on a 7x7 inch paper napkin along with a business plan. Finalists will be invited to attend and present at the 2008 Women 2.0 Conference and Pitch Night on May 10.

Judging Panel:
» Alka Gupta (Managing Director, The Ojas Group)
» Alyssa Rapp (Founder and CEO, Bottlenotes)
» Angela Strange (Senior Associate Partner, Bay Partners)
» Anu Nigam (Sand Hill Angel, and CEO, 411Sync)
» Chris Shipley (Co-Founder and Chairman, Guidewire Group)
» Christine Herron (Venture Advisor, First Round Capital)
» David Hornik (Partner, August Capital)
» Katherine Barr (Partner, Mohr Davidow Ventures)
» Kevin Braithwaite (Director, Tech Impact)
» Mark P. Jacobsen (Managing Director, O'Reilly Alphatech Ventures)
» Navam Welihinda (Associate, Sierra Ventures)
» Patricia Roller (The Angels' Forum; Co-Founder of Frog Design)
» Rob Hayes (Partner, First Round Capital)
» Saad Khan (Partner, CMEA Ventures)
» Stewart Bonn (Angel Investor - New Media, Gaming, Entertainment)
» Venky Ganesan (Managing Director, Globespan Capital Partners)

(Complete bios at http://www.women2.org/?page_id=44#judges_bios)

All submissions will receive written feedback from judges. The winning team receives the grand prize of a one-on-one meeting with iconic angel investor Esther Dyson, a PR package from MWW (1/2 day strategic marketing session, free media analysis of the market, and 3 months of PR services), a legal package from Orrick, an 1/8 page announcement promoting your company in the San Jose Business Journal, and the valuable experience and opportunity to have met lots of cool and like-minded individuals.

Questions? Email women2.0@gmail.com or check us out at http://www.women2.org

Help Promote Women 2.0 on your Website or Blog
--------------------------------------------
If you have a blog or website, please help us promote the Women 2.0 Conference and Pitch Night by posting this banner on your site.

See http://www.women2.org/?page_id=44#tell_people
You actually read the Tractatus? Wow.
It's a little bit like http://l8tr.org/
Forget BFF. Try Rivals4Ever.
Perhaps not having a deadline of April 1 is a good idea... wouldn't want people to think it's a joke.
I think I like this service.

I prefer IRC more, simply because of how I can make IRC look. (I like my chat clients plain and simple).

But I will definately use it.
Hard Lessons For Entrepreneurs - Why We Fail
I don't have any friends :-( Actually, the few friends who email me get stocked in Misc.
I like to call our judging panel of VCs "top shelf" -- they are no joking matter!
From the FAQ (http://getdropbox.com/faq):

15. How public are Public links? How Private are my other files?

* Any file in your Public folder is accessible to anyone who can guess your public file link and the path to the file. No one can browse the directory, though.
* Any file in your Dropbox outside of the Public folder is by default only accessible via computers linked to your account or to you via the web interface.
* If you give out a shareable link to a portion of your Photo Gallery (from here), people who know the link will be able to browse any photos in the album you linked from and any sub-album.
France gives US$92 M in funding to create design-by-committee Google competitor
Don't know why, but I really liked network calculus in university:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_calculus
And their name is hard to spell (qaero? quero? yo quiero Taco Bell? aw fuggit, I'll just go back to Yahoo/Google/MSN/whatever I already used before).
This is a very nice article; I was surprised.

Too many people out there are depending on some crazy stuff to happen.
I like it.

How do you build your web iPhone interfaces? A custom "framework" or leveraging an open source project?

Do you plan on building a Buxfer native app?
Thanks a lot for your reply; I'm starting studies on maths and I was very interested on this.
Notes on “Predictably Irrational” by Dan Ariely
I found this particularly interesting because while the central theme appears to be about market economies, there are a lot of parallels to startup theory and practice that permeates financing and money. I actually learned a few things about how to develop my startup and steer potential customers in the right direction by understanding how they see what's readily available.

In the blog entry, much less the book which after looking at the first chapter, I think I need to read.
"Google Drive killer coming from MIT Startup"... awesome. Top in all topics on digg at the moment.

Update: Top of digg, top of news.yc... SECOND on reddit... can they complete the trifecta?
Maybe what sigstoat wanted to say is that telling so much detail about that could be a sign that he doesn't know much about it. You don't talk about loops all the day when talking about programming, as they are the fundamentals any decent programmer understands and can imagine by himself (and when there is ambiguity, any programmer can check some extra documentation or even the code later to know about the details). I don't know much about security so I could be wrong, but that's what I think he could have meant.
IS-A IS-A HAS-A
I found this to be a very interesting read (the blog entry that is); have not yet read the book but so far I'm seeing good notes in the author's explication that have decent parallels to startup theory, not just market economies
It's kind of a horrible business. Billing is a nightmare (I wrote my own software so that it integrates into everything else that I bill for), clients can be demanding and not really all that technically-savvy, and you have to be constantly on guard for security problems. I'm running tail -f of Apache logs non-stop, and I've caught enough problems with client sites (including sites of some prestigious institutions that you've probably heard of, and wouldn't think had issues) that it's actually worth doing, crazy as it sounds.

Reselling a server that you don't have physical access to is also risky because if anything happens, you're at the mercy of the technician on the phone. Sometimes they're great. Sometimes you have to find a new ISP the same day and transfer 8GB of data across the country because you have no other way to recover a dead server.

It's a perfectly competitive market--theoretically, anyone can put a hard drive on the internet, just like theoretically, anyone can grow corn. That means it's a buyer's market. Be forewarned.
Economics. After years of studying earth science and natural processes, economics taught me that economic drivers dominate everything, including everything about the natural world. It also taught me that economics is completely amoral. It doesn't look for good or bad, it just achieves results that society wants - versus what society says it wants.
We've been covered on TC twice (without any other significant coverage on the same day):

We saw an additional ~2200 UVs for the site on the first post; ~12000 UVs for the widget (incl in post) and ~1000 UVs for the site on the second post.

To this day, we still have people e-mailing us (as a result of TC coverage) -- usually they want you use their service.
Ask YC: The value of internships?
I'm a sophomore in college who has a small non-startup product business that's started taking off. I develop Mac software. It's been paying off well for the small amount of time I've been able to sink into it, and there's a lot I could do to serve my customers better and attract more business. Kind of exciting.

But I'm also interning at a company. I've interned at a few before. Since I've just had the first month where I made more off my own business than wages from the internship, it's made me re-evaluate a lot of things. It feels really weird.

While I could quit the internship and lose credit for it, and funnel all my energy (instead of a couple hours a day) into improving my own business...something in that doesn't appeal to me.

In a way, I kind of want to be a corporate slave for a few years. I'm learning a little about business and working with other people. I really need to have some daily interaction with other human beings to stay sane. I also recognize a lot of gaps in my non-technical skills that I'm going to need experience to fill.

But on the other hand, it's also extremely frustrating and demotivating at times. Everything happens really slowly with a lot of BS in the way. And, even though I've taken some initiative in the company and contributed to a lot of projects...you can't entrust any kind of responsibility to an intern, and you definitely can't promote one. Unlike when I'm working for myself, there's no advantage to figuring out more efficient ways of doing things or pressing myself to work harder.

So I find myself being less effective than I would otherwise be just because of the environment. Most of the interesting, technically-challenging work is given to other people, and, if not, attributed to other people upon completion.

And, because of my own business competing for my time, often the slightest little indignity will make me think about quitting and be really grumpy for a couple days.

So what would you do? I don't want to burn any bridges, but I want to be happy.
Perhaps; I couldn't speculate.

To your point, though, a security protocol implementation document that makes use of secure hashes, encryption schemes, and the like isn't typically considered credible unless it states precisely what building blocks it uses. For instance, it's not enough to say you're going to use "random numbers." You need to say how you're going to seed and generate your pseudo-random numbers. The details matter.

Had the document spent time explaining what CBC means or how AES is implemented, that would have been the security equivalent of talking too much about loops or Quicksort.
True, I always choose standard size. I want vertical space much more badly than horizontal, especially for browsing, editing source code and reading PDFs.
How do you feel about forward metablogging? (A question of mareketing and usability)
I'll make the assumption that we know about Metablogging (blogging about blogging). What about forward metablogging?

It's a phrase I've used maybe twice on my own site, but numbers of times have I talked about it, and how it's a destructive practice for the end-user. Forward Metablogging is a type of blogging or in other instances of user interaction where instead of linking them directly to a website being reviewed or discussed, you forward them to another article on the same site, about the same topic.

Example: TechCrunch's article about ClickPass(http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/03/11/clickpass-could-change-the-way-you-surf-the-web/) doesn't directly reference ClickPass until the third paragraph, but however has the site logo affixed next to the first. Software developers should be familiar with what a perceived affordance is. If a user sees a radio button, they expect it to perform like a radio button and perform the task it says it will do.

That said, you click the ClickPass button, and it takes you to another page also operated by the TechCrunch team that holds no value to a user expecting to see this ClickPass site in action.

Other sites like Technorati, CNet, even CNN do this type of "bait and switch" all the time. Even links with the title of a web app or website placed directly between <a> and </a> never take you to the site itself, but to more blogs.

If software performed like this, the exodus to web applications would be monumental. All of that said and keeping relevant to YC themes, from a usability front do you think forward metablogging is a good practice for users to experience who plan on running blogs based on their startups and business ideas for fear they may inadvertently do it themselves and ruin the experience of their applications?
What's your Mac software?

How long is your internship?

I think getting experience in a company is valuable, but if your software is good you might as well run with that and get experience from having to face problems as your company grows. If it's growing you'll be able to get others to impart their wisdom without being a wage slave for many years.
9 principles of innovation from Google
Airway, Breathing, Circulation... Everything else is details

Carl Jung's ideas of Myth and Robert Johnson's "He"

Wealth is what people want. If you have what people want, you have wealth. You can create what people want.

The point of working is to make enough wealth to retire. You can do that all at once, or by selling off hours of your life in exchange for money.

The "money problem" can be solved.

Recursion.

Code == data == code
Venture capital spreads the wealth around the country.
Portable contact lists and the case against XFN
Ok, nice reality check...thanks! We were actually hoping to do setup and afterwards have people run their own servers (much as LT themselves do).

I don't think it's a perfectly competitive market from a higher level point of view:

http://www.welton.it/articles/webhosting_market_lemons.html

but in terms of prices it certainly is.
Six Apart Takes Aim At Wordpress Users
Zeno's paradox (deliberately?) confuses a thing — motion — with its measurement. You can always measure something with higher resolution, but so what?
Drop It Like It’s DropBox
On the issue of wage vs wage:

If you are seeing more benefit from working on your own and producing software you truly believe will succeed use that as motivating platform to become an unsung hero in your niche while at the same time proving to be an asset with the company. This may result in becoming a full-time employee and later on down the road a promotion and bigger paycheck.

On becoming a corporate slave:

Try not to look at it like this. As I mentioned, become an asset early on, but establish a pace in which you can work. Corporate work is very important to have in your tool belt as it shows you have the capacity to work in a very structured environment, and have the ability to interface with multiple levels of personnel. Yes it can be demotivating, but see above on being an unsung hero.

On being effective:

Tell them this. Show them that you want to take on some challenge and responsibility, but remind them you do know your role in the company as an intern and want to maximize the best of that situation. I mention this particularly because I was offered an internship with a radio station with the webmaster. Halfway through the interview it became apparent that the individual was very inexperienced, and only received the job she had because she knew more than the rest of the company about HTML and CSS. It became even more apparent that she was only looking for an intern to perform grunt work and left absolutely no room for growth (not to mention I knew much more about web development than she did). I declined the offer, but was also hired by the IT department at the same radio station as an analyst and I don't regret it one bit.

On being happy:

Do whatever brings about that feeling of joy. If it means leaving the company and following your own path, but receiving a smaller paycheck, by all means go for it. If you're happy doing what you do best, and if it works, no one can tell you otherwise.

These are lessons that I had to learn the very hard way throughout the past 3 years, but I don't regret enduring it one bit.
Is $20K worth of development worth 1% of company?
A friend of mine, who is a mechanical engineer, has secured funding for his startup.

The investor is getting 5% of his company for $100K.

Should I offer $20K worth of development for 1% of his startup? I would come up with an approximate time commitment by converting $20K to hours using a $50/hour contract rate (which is what I can easily get in the market right now).

The product is a medical device that takes certain measurements of users. I would be responsible for coding the number crunching software that takes the data as input and displays useful info to the user via the web. I would also be coding in Ruby on Rails, incidentally.

Can you guys give me any insight? ... Is my reasoning way off base? Thanks!
It depends on your personality. I’ve been working for 9 years, and I hate corporate drudgery like I hate hell. If I were in your shoes and earning enough off my own business, I wouldn’t think twice about jumping ship. As your company grows, bring on people with diverse skills and learn from them. Even if it worked, I would never trade a few years on the plantation for knowledge to run my own farm.

Edit: You have to ask yourself: are you an entrepreneur or not? You might not even know for sure at this point, and it’s okay to change your mind later. However, you have the holy grail of entrepreneurship sitting on your lap right now: a self-made business that pays you enough to live. After you reach that point, your upside is MUCH greater than working for someone else.

Read “Founders at Work” and ask yourself if you want your story added to a future version someday. Then read “Dilbert”, and ask yourself which way you’d rather spend your life.
He's also quite up front about having no successful startup, at least in two interviews I've listened to (he brings it up without being asked directly).
Who do the Y Combinator companies go to for design?
I have been curious about this for a while, many of the ycombinator companies have decent to great design/logos. Maybe all these companies are that talented to do both backend and frontend work but I doubt it. Where do you guys go for design work and what do you look for?
11 Cloud Computing Vendors to Watch (Forrester)
I think once Sea Dragon becomes a viable technology to use on sites, something like AllTop might be of great value if it could directly display the content (each page) in the listings.

Demo:
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/129
Founder salaries after an acquisition: how much? 
Early-stage acquisitions usually involve an employment agreement for the founders.

I think the offer I was presented is below market value, but when coupled with the purchase price it seems like a moot point.

Should I put up a fight? Does the acquiring company have the right to discount my salary because they're already paying for the company?
The World You Created
No, they should be paying you more to make sure you stay... That's if they really want you to stay.

Steve Jobs earns $1 a year though...
Pretty disappointing.
> The concept was cooked up by Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi, MIT dropouts and Y! Combinator alumni who are running their three-person startup out of a studio apartment in San Francisco.

So, does each one count as 1.5 people on average?
I think having an internship at a powerful company is a great way to open doors in the future; you just may not realize it now. I say if you can manage your company AND intern at the same time, it's more than worth it. Being a young entrepreneur is never easy-but you'll find you can endure a hell of a lot more than you initially perceive.

If best comes to best and your software takes off even more, create a particular limit to decide when you will drop the internship and focus 100% on the software. When you're making 5x from the software as your internship; when you are working 2x as much; etc. It's up to your needs and desires.

The bottom line: Internships are meant to either teach you the ropes or to open doors. If you feel yours isn't doing either, then ditch it; you're not getting your effort's worth out of it. If it's at a huge company like mine was (NASA), then it's a sticky situation and you might want to stay the course just for the sake of resume-building.
Not sure about YC, but it seems like a lot of my friend's startups I know of used Electric Pulp (http://electricpulp.com) to design/build their system.

Also hiring freelance designers is very cheap and easy to do.
Because "the experts" told them to.

One wouldn't want to be "miss out" on "greater returns for 'virtually' no risk" because they were "too stupid or cowardly to understand it..." according to your VC.
Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook - From Harvard to the Facebook (Ed Corner)
Arghhh, we need more than 50 please :)