skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In the US there is a royalty fee paid for each blank cd that is labeled for "music" use. Also manufacturers for certain recording devices pay royalties whose cost is passed on to the consumer. Every time you buy a VCR/Audio Tape Player/DVR(?) you're probably implicitly paying the RIAA some money.

If you really think about it from their position, it sorta makes sense. If they're already receiving payments for some devices that facilitate recording, then in their minds they should get payments for copying over a network as well. Interestingly enough, I believe "computer peripherals" are excempt from this tax/levy/royalty.
I have access to the designers and illustrators, as well as a few programmers, but they are on different projects right now. i just couldnt seem to focus on it. I wish i could, because games are my passion, and I think this would be popular.
use it to document your poop habit: http://twitter.com/ipooped
Is game maker web based? can you share your games on facebook? how do you monetize your games with game maker?

There are vital differences.

Look at aviary. i have photoshop, why would I use it? Because i can use it from anywhere and share it anywhere.
Code Validation Tool
I am very impressed by a tool called Polyspace from Mathworks. It is a code validation tool for C/C++ that mathematically proves all permutation of your code for runtime correctness by using abstract interpretation. After analyzing your code, it generates a report with mathematical confidence that (for example) 90% of your code is 100% correct for runtime and will never fail. As a developer, you concentrate on the 10% of your code to make it 100% reliable.

If you can afford 30k/year to buy a tool, you should definitely give it a try.
i'm surprise that wedding video business is around $4billion !!! i dont think apple can afford to loose this market - but u never know, if economics of apple tv movie distribution is stronger (which i doubt) than other markets then apple will surely take time to introduce blu-ray.
sprout builder is great imo. i would like to have some features similar to theirs editing wise. Very inspiring, and i have been a fan since i saw their demo.
How to Gain the Trust of Your List
YCombinator is a new kind of animal, in that it offers a lot less money and a lot more help. In the abstract, I have seen another local company in Ottawa (www.taraspan.com) do the similar kinds of things.

People often say that the combination of team, market opportunity, and technology is what it takes. One typical cause for failure of great teams is that they are pointed at the wrong markets. The other usual cause is that the "great team" really isn't. I believe that your model, by encouranging early alphas, and by giving guidance serves to honestly vet the team and the market.

I think you guys are doing great work because you create new deal flows with a fraction of the money. That, in turn will reduce VC's risks, and lower their rewards. I'm going to guess that if you guys feed companies into VC deal flows, VCs will start looking more like banks and less like venture investors.
I am not looking for money. i just want to see it be created. So while Im working on other things I can look at that and say...nice, somebody did it, and it didnt just disappear into the void...
Opening technical tasks to non-technical users can be a good direction (wufoo, for example). The business and idea could go either way, depending on execution, like everyone else will point out, I imagine. It's not clear to me what the revenue model would be.
I second that recommendation, with a preemptive shush to anyone was about to whine that it spends so much time covering parser generators. Those algorithms may be old hat, but they're nonetheless enlightening once you understand why they work.

I do wish they covered optimization in more depth, though.
I'll second the vote for Engineering a Compiler.

I'm not even that interested in actually making one, but the way they work is fascinating, and this book was excellent, and I kept it after the class was over.
The Audiogalaxy Lawsuit, Shutdown, and Aftermath: A Very Silver Lining
I apologize for the misunderstanding --- no offense meant.

And I see above that you did lay out your idea in general. That sounds like a pretty interesting idea. I hope someone can make it work as well.

I've seen a similar idea already in development; check out http://www.metaplace.com/
I think that it has been hardest for me to find a mentor or even people in similar situations as a result of my education being primarily online for the last year - a decision I really regret making now. My wife took an accounting job in a different city and Troy University offers the CS degree online (primarily for the military) and so I have been completing my senior year on the computer. This has made it difficult to meet people who are doing what I am doing and to share our experiences about our journeys - thats why I turn to kind people such as yourself ;)

I have joined some computing and programming groups here, but it seems like most of them work together and the group is just an excuse to eat and catch up on people's families and such. If I mention group coding or similar activities, generally, the response is 'we should' and then no one can or does... I feel like this is what I am missing the most - just being able to lean over to my neighbor and asking 'hey man, how do you think you would do this?' or 'How did you get that to work like that?' The personal touch, you know?

Thanks for the tips wallflower!

-Matt
Is game maker web based?

No, but that was from 1985. There's at least one company that publishes user-submitted games:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kongregate

Whatever the economics behind that, someone is getting paid. I don't know much about the game business, but it seems like there are a lot of great people working for next-to-nothing on the fringes. I can't imagine how popular a connect-the-dots approach to design would be.

You basically were asking for criticism, so I'm giving it. Obviously, there are far, far...far...stupider things on facebook, so it may well be a big hit.
Coda: however, the professor whose class I missed the first 20 minutes of was a lisper, so he got a good laugh out of my excuse.
This is one of the best books I have come across. Precise and to the point. Lots of examples, and bibliographic references.

http://www.wiley.co.uk/wileychi/grune/

There is also a great book by the same author on parsing.

http://www.cs.vu.nl/~dick/PTAPG.html
Jungle Disk didn't exist when I started working on this; but it doesn't satisfy my security requirements anyway.
I might have read the whole thing if the text had more than 25% of the horizontal space.
whenever company grows the chances of becoming arrogant also grows and this is what is happening with all big companies which includes apple and sony ... apple made a big mistake in trying to control the iphone market by locking the phone and having only one service provider --- on the top of that they pushed another program to make unlocked iphone useless - this has created a very bad taste in consumer's mind. This is the world of free market - the sooner u understand the better... apple could have instead sold the unlock iphone to begin with ... and with the help of unique marketing and distribution channel it could have profited big time - this would have also stopped the smuggling of millions of iphones to other countries.
"That's my two cents"

And I thank you greatly for them as I, myself, only have about 1/2 a cent right now :) I am seeing a lot of reoccuring themes there - notably version control, egos, teams and testing, and from this I know where I need to go next.

So, again, thank you for your cents!

-Matt
Want a real idea that would be easy to implement and would appeal to the masses? Write a del.icio.us clone and do recipe bookmarking so people like my mom can keep track of all the recipes she sees all over the web and people looking for good recipes could just browse the popular feed.
I should note that if anyone is interested in doing a startup around this, let me know: office at unchartedventures dot com
Y Combinator Demo Day Roundup
It doesn't even seem that optimized. The fact that the replace function sticks undefined back into the string means it has to coerce undefined into the string 'undefined' then manipulate the string needlessly (he even admits you end up with a string of 'undefined&undefined&undefined' that you throw away).

The version eventually created in the comments seemed much better:

function compress(data){
var match = [], q = {}, ret = "", re = /([^=&]+)=([^&]*)/g;
while (match = re.exec(data)){
q[match[1]] = (q[match[1]] ? q[match[1]] + "," : "") + match[2];
}
for ( var key in q )
ret = (ret ? ret + "&" : "") + key + "=" + q[key];
return ret;
}

The underlying string manipulation of the browser can be horribly bad. I think it was IE6 that had a quadratic time concatenation issue. Granted, query strings aren't really going to be long enough to matter for this, but if you are for some reason parsing a lot of these at once, speed could matter.
Productivity Magic Eye
Poor title, but great descriptions and examples.

Bonus for harmonic mean.
Wait wait wait, here in Europe, we are not strong in internet technology or tax spending, but we can do quite good raw milk cheese, and that's what IS important.

More seriously, EU sometime mess up things, teh big way, but :
1) if you are about to mess up something, don't fail shy, fail big, make some noise. If you win, you deserve your bragging rights.
2) EU did actually create some quite good technology, mainly with EADS, ESA and high speed trains.

disclaimer : I'm French.

edit

a more serious answer : what did the people around you told you where you started your venture ? I bet exactly what people here say to quaero.
The Golden Rule of Startup Success
The information bottleneck that exists with specialized social networking apps sits directly behind the eyes and in the skulls of users, so tools that let people aggregate, sort and present social porn (Erm, sorry, meant INFORMATION) will be really valuable.

Sure, some of my friends may prefer the nuanced flavor of Twitter over Facebook, some of them may still be clutching their drama-laden Livejournals to their caffeine-laced hearts, but personally, as a consumer of the rich media content that my friends lives have become, I'd prefer not to have to stop at every one of those outlets in order to catch up with my friends.

The continued specialization of
and the expanding options presented by all these different outlets for social network-driven expression will, in the end subvert the very ease-of-use value proposition they tout. Aggregations like this let you have your cake and eat it too.
What Happens If the RIAA Targets You?
The first several comments to the article are definitely worth reading.
I'm in beta now, but I updated my profile.

If you speak french and wants to access the real site, drop me an email at : yc@nraynaud.com
this is one of the few ideas to come out of the riaa that i think might actually be worthwile.

imagine this:
-ISP's charge an extra $10-20 per month.
-Your internet access comes with free access to music/movies/tv/bloggers, etc, whichever media conglomerates opt in
-You have free access to their media
-The extra fee is appropriately distributed to wherever your bandwidth goes.

Yes, it needs to be refined/rethought, but the idea of charging for content at the ISP level solves a lot of problems.
Been lurking for a period of time here. While ideas are being thrown out there, here's a thought.

Allow comments from within feed readers as well as comment tracking (so you don't have to try to remember... or use co.comments, etc).

Could be done one of two ways.

1. Design the 'comment module' for the large blogging platforms (blogger, wordpress, typepad, etc). Bloggers confirm their blog on the platform (to bypass captcha or similar) so a users comment goes directly into the blogs comment system.

2. Create a widget that an author can place on their site that pulls the comments from the server housing the comments. This widget would be placed directly below where "normal" comments go and would tie in as seamlessly as possible.

Could be a standalone service or it could be the next feed reader that takes a chunk out of GoogleReader (unless integration with gReader could be figured out).

Thoughts?
I completely 100% agree! (Still love Flex though)
sorry for sounding like an a-hole. i was just noting the differences. Kongregate is far different as well. I want users to create the game through the site-based tools/ within set parameters. More like kongregate-mixed with game creator-mixed with the facebook widget
This is going to lead to a whole new type of addict.. I can see it now: "Social Porn Addicts Anonymous"
You could just add a line to the profile page that says something like:

Startup School: Applied

if the email in the profile is also in the list of applicant emails. That would save everyone typing and clicking (which is so much work I tell ya).
The presentations were awesome. The total value of the tech in the room was huge.
Movie Weekend
Before going to the movies I always like to check the web to see what other users have to say about the new releases. I find that most of the times they are more accurate then critics
Revenue masks what no amount of money can buy: Motivation in the heart and soul of a human. The kind of motivation that leads people who believe in a dream to give blood, sweat and tears to a project and come back for more with a huge smile on their face.
I made a site where you can learn hundreds of digits of pi really easily using the method of loci. I opened sourced the code:

http://www.jperla.com/blog/2008/03/14/learn-100-digits-of-pi...
What really impresses me about Apple is that they manage to not only do truly good design work, but they manage it on a consistent basis.
nostrademons is working on something along these lines, IIRC.
Docbook.
Because I love building shit.

Because I have crazy ideas that people say "that's the dumbest idea I've ever heard," and I feel compelled to say "fuck you! I'm going to make it anyways..."

Because through every action I take I consider whether it will be a declaration of my independence or an act of conformity.

Because I want to get that paper!

Because it feels good when you build something that people like to use.

Because I want the respect.

Because entrepreneurs create the world, and everyone else just lives in it.
Kongregate is a different thing. Kongregate is for game developers, who already do games in Flash for example. I understand what he's proposing is different or is at least targeted to a different group of people (not professional game developers, but just people who'd like to design their own games, and to share them).

And I think it's an interesting idea (I work, or used to, in the game dev industry).
I don't know if this has already been posted, I skimmed the comments and didn't immediately see it though:

Programming Language Pragmatics
http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Language-Pragmatics-Second...

I own this in addition to the Dragon Book. PLP is a lot easier for me (a student) to read and understand. I definitely recommend it!
I wanted a list like this to exist, and I figured I could either do it myself or just procrastinate really hard and someone somewhere would do a better job than me. Looks like I picked the right strategy!
is there any video of the presentations?

on paper some of these seem like hacker projects not startups so I would love to see how they see value in these startups.
i’m delighted with this article … from last couple of years i’m suggesting YC model for India and Canada mainly because i’m an indo-canadain so I have first hand experience regarding huge talent pool in these two countries. It is just the matter of time, but its sad that YC model is not yet available in these countries. If i get little bit of support (mainly from VCs) then I would start on my own to tap these talents.

Any help / any takers?
They should have funded 306 start-up with 1 million instead. I'm european and I'm ashamed.
I was curious where they were hosted so I thought I'd share. The script is based on an old post by cperciva http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=65022.

Slicehost LLC 6
tipjoy.com
baseshield.com
mightyquiz.com
insoshi.com
stanfordturf.com
280slides.com
Amazon.com, Inc. 4
8aweek.com
webmynd.com
deluux.com
wundrbar.com
SoftLayer Technologies Inc. 3
snaptalent.com
chatterous.com
omnisio.com
Peer 1 Network Inc. 2
rescuetime.com
addher.com
HERAKLES LLC 1
mixwit.com
Hollywood Interactive, Inc. 1
yumdots.com
Not a lot of love in the techcrunch comments, but I guess that's to be expected.
Yes :) I can see there's prior art on this whole thing. Maybe I need to go and reconsider...
Many sound like good ideas, but I'm most intrigued by Deluux.
Why do you use docbook?
My cofounder and I have been working on exactly this idea (web-based game maker, can share games on Facebook/MySpace, targetted at non-programming users) for the last 15 months. Six months of that has been full-time work. Other competition - folks with released products - includes http://sploder.com/, http://www.gamebrix.net/ (they've got $500k in angel funding and 8 developers on it), and http://www.mygame.com/. Both Sploder and GameBrix have been working on this for at least 6 months longer than us, so they've got at least 2 years of development behind their current releases. I believe the FuzzWich guys spent some time trying to develop a game-making platform before they started their current idea, and I've heard of at least another half-dozen startups in stealth mode that're doing the same thing, though obviously I don't know the details. So you're not the only one who's had this idea. ;-)

The problem is that "a widget-based game maker" does not let you create fun games for any reasonable definition of fun, and a system that does let you create fun games is probably too hard for ordinary non-programming users to learn. Play around with GameBrix for a few minutes and then decide whether any of the games generated by it are stuff you'd be willing to show your friends. And judging from the GameBrix screencasts, their builder isn't all that easy to use anyway. Sploder's done a bit better - you can at least figure out how to use it in 5 minutes - but it gives you very limited customization. It's more like a map editor for common strategy games than a game creator itself.

Anything more complicated than that requires a lot of both UI and technical discipline. We've run into some really thorny technical issues when trying to develop a UI that's both flexible and simple to learn, and we keep running into them. It makes me wonder whether the problem is even tractable, given the long history of attempts to solve it and the noted lack of success outside of specific domains (eg. GameMaker, Quake mods).

So that's what the view looks like from 15 months in. I definitely still think there's something to this, otherwise I wouldn't still be working on it. But be prepared for some really tricky technical issues - you'll want a top-notch technical cofounder, because otherwise you'll be pretty limited in what you can do.
The probability of success.
nope, no video from the event. i have some pictures i'll post at a point yet to be determined.
You might. But fuck what other people think! Go big!
Zynga is much more in the Kongregate/Newground space, serving as a hosting & distribution service for Flash games made by experienced developers. This guy (and us) are targeting programming novices who want to create their own games without programming experience.
He could probably give the idea to 100 people and get a hundred different products of wildly varying quality and feature sets.

It's kind of arrogant of the OP to assume that his precious idea (which of course no one else has ever conceived of in any capacity) is so valuable, like a beautiful fragile snowflake, that it must be carefully protected and only revealed to a deserving "haxor".
RIAA - epic fail
I'm sorry I wanted to give the blog where I heard it from credit...
http://www.computerworld.com.au/index.php/id;270726757;fp;41...
This falls into the category of being "not even wrong".
280Slides caught my attention - sounds like Zenter - The Sequel?

In fact, RescueTime & 8AWeek also sound awfully similar, don't they? This raises an interesting question. As number of YC companies increases, the chances of "collision" increases too. How is that handled?
Reformatting is not an "easy risk management technique." It's completely inaccessible to most people.

I don't understand the point you're trying to make with that article. Clarkson published his account details and challenged people to exploit it. If you gave the keys to your home to a burglar, what would you expect? The article does not say he was unable to recover his funds.

There must be dozens of ways for someone to steal your financial information. If you truly want to be safe, you should start by burning your trash, always pay in cash, and never hire an accountant to do your taxes. You never know where there's a leak. It's not practical to exercise this level of caution. Just live your life. Credit cards offer 0% liability against fraud and banks have the FDIC and private insurance for these types of situations.
I don't use ActionScript classes. Everything's done with closures and literal objects. Can't even use prototypes; MTASC doesn't allow standalone functions or prototype declarations (instead requiring that everything live inside a class), so that falls outside the common subset. We namespace things the way it's done in JavaScript, with objects serving as namespaces, so there's a notion of libraries that're imported at compile time. My Scheme experience certainly comes in handy.

I haven't ruled out doing a mini-translator; this is very obviously a hack, and if the common codebase grows much larger we'll probably appreciate it. (We've also considered rewriting the whole thing in pure Flash, but there're certain user benefits that the dual-language architecture gives us that we're not quite ready to give up.) This approach is "good enough" for now though, so we're hoping that it'll get us to an initial launch, and then we can decide whether it needs a rewrite based on what users want to do with it.
In minutes, learn 100 digits of pi -- Happy Pi Day!
Learning pi is hard. But, leveraging human psychology, you can make learning pi as making up a story. The hard part is making the story to help you remember the digits, but I wrote a program that does the hard work for you. I also made the code open-source so you can use it however you want.
Hi, I'm looking for the vote-article-down button. Has anyone seen him? I really, REALLY need to talk to him...
I second this. It was (and still is) a book almost all instructors swore by back when I was in the Uni. Even though the version had a green cover and had no dragon on it :)
You could also make it more granular and allow users to 'tip' other users who make in-game widgets, or even part of a widget (think areas of in-game play, travel etc). Tipjoy might be a good partner to go in with this one. Alternatively, do something with the AFP to allow users to 'tip' but you do keep a percentage.
This is natural when you abide by "release early and iterate." Most of the companies 11 weeks old. When you release, you haven't yet implemented your entire vision. That takes much more time to develop internally and become obvious to outsiders. But the founders know that the first release is just the tip of the iceberg.
Facebook To Launch Instant Messaging Service
I think Howard Aitken was the one who said it first, but regardless:

Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats.

Always apropos in such times of uncertainty...
You guys do make the best and most popular trains for export (ie. Siemens and Alstom). Alstom's TGV also consistently holds world record in speed.
HotOrNot case study: Bridging your traffic engine with your revenue engine