skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not start coding before you fleshed out the design? Not design until you've identified a market? Sounds like a recipe for never getting anything done. That might be the proper way to tackle things when you have a big upfront costs, but generally for software you can just start coding on things you find useful and interesting. If others are interested, great, you've got a company. If not you just have a useful product and then you can move onto something else.
Ruby book: 30$ - Rails book: 30$ - Never have to work with arrogant hackers again: priceless!
URLs Are Totally Out In Japan
Wow! Great site. I agree with Hates_ in that you get a lot more bang for the buck if your demo had better sound.

Having said that, awesome website. Great logo and a very nice layout. I tried it my library's home page and it worked very well.

I certainly will be using this. Great work! Thanks, and good luck...
Really nice idea. I've hacked countless snippets of perl to do this for me in the past, so would love an app that would relieve me of this task.

One suggestion -

I used http://www.junction.co.uk/HTMLTemplates/whats_on/music/dates...

but it kind of got the wrong idea about which bit of text was important.

How about extending the post-process ("Events I want / Events I don't want") page so that I can give some hints to the app about which bit of text represents the event name / date / time etc.

keep it up, guys.
What are you talking about? Apple overcharges for everything. Their monitors and laptops alone are probably 20% more expensive than the PC equivalents. Early iPods had terrible battery life and sound quality. As far as the OS, Windows sets the bar pretty low, but the recent versions of OSX have not been the most stable.

I've wanted to play around with their laptops, iPods, and iPhone, but everytime I start looking into it the price scares me off. I've been more than happy staying away from both MS and Apple products, but at least the Apple ones pique my interest slightly.
"(or stealing their trucking jobs)"

This was covered in a Simpsons episode. Turns out that all the trucks already drive themselves, but the truckers' union has prevented that information getting out to the general public.

(Couldn't find it on youtube.)
People that understand and appreciate all sides of the equation are worth their weight in gold - unfortunately they are also very hard to find.
the immediate downmods of my original comment of "stubborn" seems to be further testament to the overall quality in capacity for this site lately.

the authors comments are emotionally loaded opinions that are quite frankly, a result of immaturity and frustration.

so my original comment stands:

stubborn.
for sure. so much potential with wufoo. seriously, i laughed at first "a startup for forms?". Then I used it,ate my words, and still recommend the service to EVERY startup I know. The customer service kicks ass there too. ++ to the wufoo team.
Too young?!?! Hah.

I ran my own, of course. Customized version of Color 64 on my Commodore 64, in Greenville, SC. A couple of my friends ran part-time boards (usually 8PM to 8AM), but I paid for a second phone line so I could run 24/7, and I had a second system for my personal use. A stack of 1571 disk drives, 1200 baud modem, and memory expansion. I lusted after a 10GB hard disk, but never had a hard disk until the Amiga days a few years later. I dabbled with a PC board, as well, running...I think it was Wildcat. But it wasn't as much fun to play with. So it was only up for a few weeks.

By the time I moved from South Carolina to Houston, I was an Amiga user, and so spent a lot of time writing and trading MODs with other Amiga nuts in the area. A year later ('93) I started spending time on the Internet, and never started another BBS--redirected the effort into my first website.
Will Yahoo Negotiate?
"1-900" email huh? Interesting.

A better idea for him would be:

He should make an inbox out of (nsv) in Arc. Then people can vote on his emails and he can just read what is on his hot page.
When Rails and Django compete... we win!
He should keep all $100.
This would be better if the half that consists of mere insults was replaced with some ideas. There's a lot more you could say about this phenomenon, like why it happens, and what the solution might be.

Once again the top story is an embarrassment to News.YC. And unfortunately it is mostly the recently arrived users who voted it up. Maybe it's inevitable that I'll have to turn on some form of vote weighting.
ha, make the emails you dont read public, ie- pitches, and then rate them up. cool concept, but wouldnt work for the mass market.
Well: a webpage is created with whatever you typed, and an unique URL assigned.

Then at top left there is a "claim this site" to declare your ownership on it -but you don't have to.

Jottit: a great paste bin. Among other things.
Yeah I was there in BBS world. I would just hate getting that busy signal and re-dailing again and again... Thank god for the internets.
As a non-coder who is cursed with a brain that comes up with a constant flow of creative ideas that my fingers can't execute, you've just shattered my world. Screw you. Oh, and do you mind if I borrow some of your old reference manuals, I just decided to learn how to program. ;-)
Thanks again to dbreunig we'll try going to the Delacy Street Restaurant (http://tinyurl.com/2pwa7f). It's bigger and we can setup a good after work schedule, something around 5:30pm-7:30pm and we can even have dinner there if we want to stay longer.

As usual, comments are welcomed. I don't mind the time but I'm sure some people do so please leave a comment suggesting a time.

I want to repeat that this venue is for the April 16th meeting at San Francisco. For the one on the 19th see comments above.
I think Firefox 3.0 has added a feature to go in this direction. When you start typing in the address bar, it searches the titles and urls to match what you are typing instead of just the url. It's a lot easier to find pages that you visited this way.
The problem was in the solicitation of people to participate in a share issuing entity that wasn't registered with the government after they paid money to participate. (basically selling shares).

The law is setup to prevent people from buying/selling shares of hypothetical inc. without talking to the government first.

Also with the raw number of people who had shares(120+) that more quickly draws the governments ire than two people trying to found a company together and it fails. Advertising for a company co-founder doesn't fall into this problem space.
Picking up on an earlier article, I really like the way you (don't) do user accounts. Well worth a look by others who want to see how this _should_ work.

I wouldn't have bothered looking at it if I had to log in, but this was just easy. And now I have seen how well it works, I might just use it :)

Or watch a web cast. It's amazing how many people don't have Flash, or hate Flash, or are on limited bandwidth/transfer, or just don't like video. And if you try and use some other format it just multiplies all the above by a factor of ten.
This is a non-story. It might be a slightly interesting point that the top Google executives don't take out salary, but stories like these are never anything but PR stunts. Anyone with half a chimpanzee's brain understands that these numbers don't mean anything. All 3 of them could take a salary of 500 million dollars, and the shareholders would hardly notice. I suppose the goal with stunts like these is to show solidarity with the workers who earn much less, but this rings hollow when each of them has enough stock to buy the family of every employee. I'm not saying it's a problem that these guys have great fortunes, but it seems a bit cowardly for them to pretend that they are actually quite frugal. They are not, by a long shot.

The only thing worth noting is that they only use their own shares for large expenses. But the practical implications of this are miniscule. And in the case of the CEO, these shares were after all issued at a time.
this presents a rather binary view of things - either you're a hacker or you're an arrogant MBA.

there are plenty of people who aren't hackers but they certainly understand tech and aren't beef-headed MBA's. mitch kapor and joe kraus never wrote a line of code.
Why are academic salaries lower than commonly assumed?
Average number of words per Google query now closer to human conversations
Semantic Web Patterns: A Guide to Semantic Technologies
You may be breaking the same law, but you're probably breaking half a dozen other laws at the same time (zoning, etc) and this one seems no more likely to affect you.

I suspect that corporate lawyers are mistakenly worried about irrelevant laws being broken, but I don't know if that's the case here: 100-person startups formed over a weekend face unique legal challenges.
I'm confused by your comment. Are you saying I'm silly for not spending time and money trying to accommodate people who run cracked software?
Looks pretty cool, although I couldn't get it to work with the first site I tried. It's one I use for local events: www.thecornernews.com. It worked if I selected a date and used that URI, but I couldn't find a way to get all of the events on every day from the front page to load up.

On the plus side, I dig your design and that's a pretty nice domain name, too.
Current US hiring practices don't help. Job descriptions are well specified and exactly followed. That can be good, but it means you get what you ask for instead of something great but unknown.

Over here in the UK I see a little more flexibility in hiring good people and (finding somewhere to put them|letting them work out what to do).

Like everything it has good and bad points, not the least of which is that you really only need so many people who can do everything.
All of the above also apply to running-joke threads, which I'm quite fond of as long as they don't take over a site completely.
It is outrageos!!! It is just another way to skip paying taxes.
If you have a salary, you have to pay 12% on payroll taxes (for the first 102k), plus 9.25% CA taxes, and probably 32% personal income taxes.

What they are getting, is security, housing, travel expenses to private islands, parties, etc.... all of those end up as "businness expenses", which obviously reduce taxes.
Ran a six line BBS off Renegade in Minneapolis back in 89-92.
Introduction to Information Retrieval -- free online book
Safety of OpenID / Clickpass
I'm considering adding OpenID support for my web app and I like clickpass's interface, but I have a concern. If their service is down, can my users still access my site?

Worse yet, are all of my users (and my site) completely hosed if my OpenID provider closes up shop?
agreed, http://Skribit.com is in the clear, which is great news.

http://twitter.com/lance/statuses/776956955
I would say you don't need brilliant marketing before you can make a product. Brilliant marketing can maximize the money you make off an idea, but you can make a great product with a small market. 37signals is a great example. They build products for them, since they know what they want.

Of course, this doesn't work in a lot of situations. People who don't know how to write software need software too. To start a startup though, all you need is an idea that some people might think is ok. If it really is good, marketing and business will come later, after you've developed the product.
Well, that's not exactly how I would put it :-)

What I'm saying is that if 30% of the users who go to your site (the number is grabbed out of thin air btw.) use IE6 then your site should deal with it. Everything else is like stopping 30% of your customers at the door telling them that they can't spend their money here and will have to go over to you competitor.
Yeah. It also wasn't possible to knock out all of the power in Las Vegas with an EMP bomb, to lift a mansion covertly with a 12-man team in one night, or to "hack" into a casino's "security system" by clipping little tiny things to a few network cables.

That's because those were movies.
Why?

If a product is good and investors are convinced it has a market, they'll invest. Otherwise I'll need to move on to something more compelling. That's no reason not to try. Insisting on an identified market before starting on something would eradicate a whole lot of University research.
Microsoft on iPhone - Is this a good idea?
Random note: my hacking career really began writing/selling scripts to automate TradeWars turns.
I think the author has a point, but I think hackers are guilty of similar behavior regarding legal and finance expertise, both of which are critically important in keeping and profiting (respectively) from your hacking. I think it's really just pretty self-evident that people will overvalue their own field of knowledge, and consider other fields to be less important/valuable than they actually are.
It was not a great comment, but I'd also like to say that we've had, if not quite a tradition... many of us have encouraged people not to downvote beyond -1 or 0 for comments that are not "really bad" (racist, outright insults, spam, that kind of thing).
This sounds as hysterical as if someone told me, "If you don't know Mandarin, don't do any business with/in China!"

Delegation of responsibility is a concept of pivotal importance for any entrepreneur to grasp if they want to go very big. Isn't Richard Branson dyslexic?
Mobile, Alabama had a lively BBS scene in the early to mid nineties. I spent my teenage years on various boards and even ran one for about a year.

User acquisition with BBSes is much harder than websites; it taught me a lot.

BBSes, specifically the "Mobile Area Freenet", were also my introduction to the internet. Gopher was awesome at the time, and I flipped when I saw the first graphical browser and figured out how to establish SLIP connections with WinSock.

Kids these days have it too easy... ;)
I also take the 80/20 approach but slightly different. If my site works on 80% of browsers then that's good enough... Which is why I don't bother supporting safari... even though I started using it on windows a few days ago and DAMN it is fast... but i am way invested in firfox to switch.

80/20 is the reason most software companies don't release a mac version of their software.
You don't understand OpenID. As a site, you don't have an OpenID provider; your users do. So if their provider closes, or their site is down, that user can't log in, just like if that user's email server is down, he can't check his email.
If he blogs about you, you get a few thousand hits. How valuable is a few thousand hits from his audience? How likely is he to blog about your startup? Multiply the two and that’s your answer.
CERT Secure C/C++ Coding Standards
Google Recommends No Vote On Human Rights, Anti-Censorship Proposals
Startup Advice: How To Survive The Coming Drought
I was a SYSOP. Ran several BBS's on Macs.
look at it this way, advertising on tech crunch is about 10k a month. lets say this is worth 10% of that, so an article is worth $1000. Lets say there is a 3% chance youll get an article on you. So, $30.
They're paying plenty of tax whenever they cash out.

For example:
"After cashing in more than 9 million shares valued at $3.7 billion last year, 16 Google insiders will owe the Golden State as much as $380 million in taxes -- enough to cover the salaries of more than 3,000 state workers."
http://www.boston.com/business/taxes/articles/2007/01/06/goo...
That said, you shouldn't bottleneck the login/registration process through OpenID or ClickPass. Make sure they can login to the site, through the site, or through OID or CP just like Hacker News does.
Was running BBS and FidoNet node (mostly on OS/2 and Linux) back in 90th in Ukraine.
Google Video is not a good counter example to Jumpcut. I think Google Video works perfectly. The point of Google Video is to view videos, which it allows you to do without an account. To share a video you need to have an account, same as in Jumpcut. (Typically you have to make users create an account to post content otherwise a never ending stream of spam is likely to follow, degrading the quality of the service for legitimate users)

For Jumpcut, the real value in letting the user upload and edit a video is to get a feel for the video editing functionality without having to sign up, (since the video editing is really their selling point). If the user likes what they've created they can sign up to post it. This is key. Let the user try out the idea of your site without signing up. You can then require them to signup if they like it and want to keep their work.

Recently there was another post where somebody had a startup that had some cool way to learn a foreign language http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=144998

I wanted to check it out but had to sign up to really see how it all worked. So I left.
Requiring users to sign up before they know if the service is valuable is wrong. Prove to them what you did is worth their time first, then require them to sign up if they want to continue using it.

You get a pretty good idea if HN is worth it by reading the posts and comments from others. If you like what you see and would like to contribute then sign up. Nothing wrong with that. It would be great to allow anonymous submissions and comments but unfortunately this is very likely to lead to abuse.
"Why?"

Because a great product is not the same thing as a great company. Investors don't invest in a good product, they invest in great people. Look at any VC or angel webpage and you'll see what I mean. Here is a quote from YC: "The people in your group are what matter most to us"

And btw. University research is for finding out how the world works, business is about making money. There is a big difference between the two.
with the considerable amount of traffic that HN can drive to a link/ blog (and such a specific audience) any thought that the "recently arrived users" may be gaming HN?
I always wondered whether or not it would be possible to write a program of significant length entirely in Haiku form...
OK -- as a wanna-be linguist this is definitely a valuable tool.

What library of languages did you use to create your definitions?
I would rather create a great product & rather have him pay me to write a review for my product ;)
http://twitterjump.com/communities/hacker-news

:-) (it's just a prototype, tossed it together in a couple of hours...)
There has been an increase in spam lately, but there was no sign of that here. I wish...
Wow. That particular user has an exactly 100% troll:total comments ratio. Most trolls occasionally have something real to say.
Basic Statistics: Mean and Standard Deviation
The link itself maybe an embarrassment, but the discussions surrounding it on YC are somewhat less emotional and pretty interesting; and they do touch upon the reasons why it happens (particularly the thread started by mixmax)
Muxtape.com
On Borrowed Time: Urban Decline Moves to the Suburbs
wouldn't it be safe to assume that great people make great products?
There was a discussion about this last year here on news.yc; that approach is not at all new, and "Totally out" is absolutely incorrect.

Search terms works especially in trains, simply because everybody has an internet-enabled phone that has quick keys to a search function. Saying that it's the reasonable next step from the current state of affairs, and assuming it resulted from the lack of good domain names, is quite a leap in reasoning. It's been a while since I payed any attention, but I never spotted a trend of startups using nonsensical/typo domain names like they did in the US.

Japan's internet culture is quite different from anywhere else, IMO.
Example: http://www.google.com/search?q=microsoft&ie=utf-8&oe...
Wind power urged for computers
Australian Company Calls WiMax a Disaster
I think that 37signals is the wrong example to pick here, they are where they are because of great marketing. There are loads of sites that do ajaxified to-do lists, a good hacker could probably code up their ta-da lists in a weekend. The reason they are popular is because they have attitide and great marketing skill. Just look at the number of submissions to YC news from their blog.

And no ROR has nothing to do with this - you could implement their site in Cobol if you wanted to and the average customer wouldn't know the difference.
I noticed that too. It's like stone soup. Still, chicken soup would be better.
In Firefox 2.0 the behavior that already exists seems to be like Google's "I'm feeling lucky" search. doda.jp is the first result from typing "doda" in to google.jp (but not google.com, interestingly) so probably if you have google.jp set as your default search engine in your browser then typing the brand name in to your browser should just work.

It's a very neat Bayesian DWIM thing.

Getting back to the OP, I think it's a non sequitur to go from "URLs have been downplayed in packaging and advertisements" to "URLs are out", though.
they do recognition by trying to represent the new face as a linear combination of all known faces in the database

What is the difference between doing this and just finding the dot product of the facial feature eigenvectors with the feature eigenvalues and choosing the maximal projection? That's how it's been done since forever, AFAIK.
Well, great product people make great products. But if they don't have great marketing people nobody will know.
[HN Meetup] Anyone around Sunday night in Palo Alto?
My housemates and I are going to put on a meetup for the folks in the southbay/penn. Probably around 7-8.

We have a house with enough parking, a large front projection setup, and a wide array of beer/spirits (although I don't see this as a big drinking event).

I wanted to gauge interest first, however. Just want to make sure there is some critical mass.
I'm guessing this is prevalent in Japan not because "all the good domains are taken" but because (browser) support for unicode domain names (IDN) continues to be patchy, especially on mobile browsers which, as far as I can tell, are especially popular in Japan. I'm guessing they've long solved the problem of entering Japanese characters with a tiny keypad for things like text messaging, and I strongly suspect that entering names in their native script is much nicer than entering transliterated or foreign names.

Besides, punycode isn't especially efficient. I suspect you quickly run into the DNS hostname length limit as well, as the number of punycode characters required increases with the numerical value of the code points to encode. I'm too lazy right now to work out how many Japanese characters you can maximally encode in a domain name. :)

Note: I don't speak Japan, have never been to Japan and am generally out of touch with Japanese culture. My first language (German) only uses a small number of non-ASCII characters, so I'm not exactly an expert on IDNs.
what kind of product is it?

While it makes sense to get coverage on a major tech blog a la TC, what sense does it make to focus energy on getting on one tech blog if 13-year-old girls will use your product, or middle-aged women. (i.e. not typical TC readers)

Yes, the VC-advantage that PG has talked about, but as far as gaining market traction, why not focusing on a blog/ pub that focuses on your target demographic.

Let's take ingolingo that just posted on HN -- is their best audience really TC to get out news of their language/vocal-learning startup?
>If a product is good and investors are convinced it has a market, they'll invest.

The business world is littered with great products with no markets. And, as dot bomb showed us, investors don't have a clue. My advice would be to arm yourself with market knowledge, and not rely on investors.

>Insisting on an identified market before starting on something would eradicate a whole lot of University research.

That's why a whole lot of University research gets grants from taxpayers - nobody is willing to fork over any dough for most of it.

Seriously, are you trolling?
Modbook Tablet Is a Designer's BFF