skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
what interests HN users if not their own startup? answer: YC funded startups.
Maturity is the best thing you can convey. To that end, it will benefit you to appear to have (and to have) your own things going on: ask questions that will tell you how to accomplish your future goals. For instance, if you're a programmer and you're interested in startups, ask about entrepreneurship on campus, on-campus attitudes around that, etc. Similarly, do not ask how you can best prepare for college -- college isn't/shouldn't be a destination.
SXSW Buzz: Bitstrips Comic Builder
On Man and the Universe - Aristotle.

(Relevance other than stamping "Ask YC" to the front of it? Just curious)
It's yet another gtd web app. It's web based because almost all of the apps I use are web based now. Plus, the entire application is a single Ajax page with optional Google Gears integration (everything works offline). There's also an API that I used to make a command line client and to hook with TextMate.

One of the best strengths of self-hosted web apps are plugin systems (ie. Mint's peppers) which is something I'm working on.

So I guess it's not that unique because there are tons of GTD applications. But the users who do use GTD apps tend to be more tech savvy.
Ah yes, blogging by press release is alive and well.

Try this search: http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=%22Eye+Research+Institute+h...

Especially in science blogging, what's the point of copy/pasting press releases? Where is the critical eye? Where is the independent thinking - the peer review?

Pierre
Is anyone here using Scala in a production environment? We've had to start using Java (ick) on some projects and I would love to be able to target the JVM and use Java libraries without actually having to code in Java. Just like a few hundred thousand other developers ;-)

I really like the looks of both Clojure and Scala, but I haven't had the chance to experiment with either yet. Scala is obviously further along in development...but I'm not sure if we could risk either on our project. The Schemes on the JVM aren't production ready yet IMO, unfortunately, and Jython/ JRuby/ Groovy will also not work for us for various reasons (execution speed, bugs, etc.)

Any words of wisdom from Scala trailblazers?
Sequoia’s Gospel of Startups More True Than Ever
I think a great name is very valuable and should be protected with a trademark if you can do so and you have the funds. (If your company name sounds like a Teletubbie's name, don't bother. Instead work on coming up with a better name.) Trademarks can be very valuable IP and can give you a decent amount of leverage if used correctly. I've secured startup funding on two occasions just based on the strength of the company names and the fact that I had trademarked them. Trademarks are also something you can usually do yourself, whereas patents almost always require professional help. It's a cheap investment.

We used to always get a few international domains (.uk, .au, etc.), but we don't do it anymore unless we are actually establishing a physical presence in those countries. It is otherwise a waste of time and money. The .COM version is highly prized and will work for international customers just as well as a country-specific suffix.
Are there many science bloggers that cover scientific research with a critical eye? Biology News does press release copy/paste, sure, but he also does original summaries of some papers.

If you know of any good science bloggers, I'd love some to add to my list...
Blue LEDs reset your internal clock
The author admits he lives in his own reality distortion field where everyone uses Safari or Firefox and a Mac. The reality is that 80% of the world still uses IE, and anyone trying to make a living on the web should think long and hard before ignoring that fact.

Joel isn't arguing that IE8 should be or deserves to be the standard, he's simply arguing that like many things Microsoft puts out, there are too many people using it to ignore.
So... if you need some help staying up, http://wakeup.appjet.net/
I wish them luck. In my humble opinion, they're making many mistakes. Their core principles aren't abstract enough. "Golden Box" is a technology not a principle -- and it isn't necessary to get where they want to go. As long as they focus on "small and self-describing", they won't go anywhere. Lisp is beautiful in this way, but that's irrelevant. I heard they even pinned-up some code that Ian wrote. Bad move -- no Golden Calves. You have to be able to throw it all out every few months. There are some other things I could say but won't. I respect Alan Kay more than anyone in this industry. So, again, good luck.
very cool - i've been waiting for something like this for ages. can i please echo the request for a webpage plug-in? it'd be nice to drag and drop this into something else rather than have the visitor leave my space.
This is similar to cheap/good/fast. Two out of three is usually as good as you can do.
High Tech Henpecking (with a simple but important lesson for startups)
A single Ajax page with Google gears? that's about as easy an installation as you'll get. Why don't you drop the server part altogether?
> it must have some interesting physics code inside.

You can check it out for yourself: http://box2d.org. You can also download several of the Game Developers Conference presentations given by the original author here: http://www.gphysics.com/downloads

An enterprising chap has also ported the original C++ code to Flash: http://box2dflash.sourceforge.net
I just noticed the "inspiring sci-fi", "insipid sci-fi" and "fantasy book" threads recently added here.
Sir Richard Branson once said a sentence that stuck with me for years, "The best way to become a billionaire is to create as many millionaires as you can"

You forgot what is probably one of the most important factors for people here when they decide to go work for someone else... Is there equity involved and is it substantial...
The server part is used for persistent storage, so a user might have multiple computers open each with a Gears database but they all sync up to the same server DB.

Hopefully, once Gears is available for Mobile Safari, you'll be able to access your list on your phone both online and offline and sync back and forth.

Plus it's also for people who aren't using Gears, like Safari/opera users.
In case anyone is interested, here some screenshots:

http://flickr.com/photos/t0fuu/sets/72157604174774537/show/
In recent news, Microsoft claims their blue screen of death actually increases user productivity.
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Umberto Eco - The Name of the Rose
One very good solution is to make it a virtual appliance, that way it is relatively easy to install on all platforms, and you get a lot less support issues as all users use the same OS/distribution/framework version etc.
CruiseControl.rb with Charts
OK reading a single paper on a large project is likely to lead to one arriving at false conclusions. So with that Caveat:

I think this team has like so many before them got the idea that solving Brook's accidental complexity in selected domains leads towards solving the problem of essential complexity.

Anyone who did not live through the era of "fourth level languages" will not have been inoculated against this error. It seems to me that you can always simplify the programming task in specific domains (often with a DSL) but I have yet to have even got a hint of a solution to the problems of applying such approaches to a wider business process.
I'm not particularly concerned with equity unless I'm a founder or very early employee.
Thus Spoke Zarathustra - Nietzsche
There are many, many housing ads on Craigslist right now that say "female only". In general, they are perceived as being cleaner and more responsible. For those same reasons someone might not want a female roommate.
On my great big idea whiteboard, I have "Hacker Classifieds" listed for just this reason. Why not build it in your spare time? I'll be trying to launch my site at the end of May.
I agree very much on the filtering aspect of the stream. For instance, I have a problem with my RSS feeds: there's just too many of them and it takes a long time to check them all. Of course, you could go all Zenhabits here, but in the end, people are lazy. If you can somehow rank/filter the incoming info, you're on to something. Unfortunately, that's also the hard part, because just filtering by keywords (like feedrinser) is a quite crude solution, and you could easily miss out on interesting stuff.
Karma whoring galore
I remember reading about Virgin Charter on the news. Pretty cool idea, filling up empty seats on charter planes by advertising them over the internet (if I remember correctly). That way you never have an empty jet flying back to its home base.

Of course, what everybody wants to know is if they work for Virgin Charter, will they get free rides from Virgin Galactic?
are you looking for Helma? (http://dev.helma.org/) It's basically what you asked for (Javascript backend and front end) but without the Python.
They screen sites that want to show their widget, so they know ads are going to be on good sites. They let advertisers choose institutions (eg Stanford) or companies (Google) to target and then targets ads based on IP addresses. And the ads work very nicely - instead of leaving the page, you get a lightbox so you can go right back to your page.
Plus the Slate article explained it well.
That's a very interesting idea! This sounds like something that could be brokered more efficiently by YC or something similar - create an option pool for all the companies in a season (maybe 1% or 0.5% of each). 1% split 6 (8? how many companies per season?) ways isn't a ton, even in a big liquidity event, but's a nice hedge that would reduce risk for all the founders and make YC even more attractive.

For instance, 1% of a $10 mil acquisition would be $100K. If there are 8 companies that round, each would get $12.5K, which for 2-3 founders is like another infusion of YC cash and a few more months of runway.

Hardly enough to cause a moral hazard but still a significant benefit.
Our rosy future, according to Freeman Dyson
It's still a shock to me to see otherwise egalitarian and meritocracy-minded hackers engage in such blatant and naive sexism.

That's in response to your first paragraph. I can agree with the second.
A rigorous dynamical model for collective attention: how news grows and fades in popularity at Digg
A [Law] to Limit the Tracking of Web Surfers’ Clicks?
Big Name Companies Using Ruby on Rails
"... so it's relatively low-risk as startups go ..."

Low risk, low potential reward.
Ask N.YC: Is there a public, high SNR robotics list?
I'm looking for a high signal-to-noise robotics list to lurk on. Sometimes these things are not widely publicized, to keep the quality high.

I'm thinking of something of a similar quality to the arocket list: http://www.arocketry.net/forum.html

Of course, I'm presenting any potential responders with a dilemma: to publicize or not? I'd just say that the current n.yc audience can probably be trusted not to decrease the SNR of such a group.
Comscore Feb-08 US search engine rankings
Google February search share down globally
My girlfriends pops was telling me he wants a myspace for dead people.

Like a repository of videos left to certain people in the family, pictures, a comment section, and then have other little features like getting a text or email every year when its their birthday or the day they died.

Of course this would be all done by the person, while they are still living, in preparation or anticipation of their death.
This Is Your Brain on God
"Nearly 30% of all fatal accidents involving large trucks in the US happen during the hours of darkness"

Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't we spend less than 30% of the day in darkness?

(Yes, I know that the time spent on the road trucking is probably less than 30% in darkness. This just felt like a sampling bias. Like: http://www.insurance.com/quotes/article.aspx/Car_Accidents_H...)
I know that wasn't intended to sound salacious, but it does!
Thanks alot for the ?currentPage=all.
Yahoo's rules for web performance
Sequoia Capital: Elements of sustainable companies
Paulo Coelho - The Alchemist
Ajax on Embedded Devices such as the BarracudaDrive
The Perfect Desktop - PC-BSD 1.5
John Gruber disagrees apparently: http://daringfireball.net/2008/03/kahney_jackass
How Leander Kahney Got Everything Wrong by Being a F'ing Jackass
Your Ignorance Does Not Make a Programming Language Suck
Three Index Cards To Easily Remember The Essence Of Test-Driven Development
Time to Profit from Customer Affection
A Web Framework for Every Language
Django’s tipping point
Top 10 upcoming US tech cities (as measured by increase in important patents)
I used PC-BSD under VM-ware when I was forced to use a Windows computer, and when I wanted to use some very old hardware. It is very lite-weight and easy to use. But now I am on Ubuntu because it is touch to beat being able to apt-get almost anything on a debian system. I will have to take another look when they upgrade to FreeBSD 7.0
Also in recent news, accidents go up because drivers are blinded by blue light which is the color that reduces night vision the fastest.
Third Party Gadgets Arrive for Google Docs, and a New API
'learn to write' should include 'learn to write simple prose that can be read by non-Native English speakers'.

Personally, I find this much harder than writing elegant prose for people who speak English fluently.
It is? That hasn't been my experience. In my job hunt, and I'll admit that I'm well away from the center of things, my last position (co-founder of digg) is a distinct negative.

Most hiring managers haven't heard of it, question why I'm not mentioned more prominently, etc, worry that I will leave for some other pie-in-the-sky startup. The only interest I get is from early stage startups.

But again, it's all about fit. If you're 22 and messing with startups it looks like youthful experimentation. If you're 45 and messing with startups you get passed over.
I'd actually like to work with female hackers. Never met one, but I'm pretty sure you could learn something. Different approaches to things, yeah.
Only to you, sanj. :-)
Before debunking the "conventional wisdom", it'd be nice if the author would read up on it. The only insight added by this blog post is the dubious notion that the first-to-market wins a sustainable niche; that's been untrue as often as it's been true.

Otherwise, the idea that markets converge to a major winner on cost and a niche winner on product quality is basically marketing 101.
I hope I'm not the only one who tried to work out the top speed.

I make it about 300mph.
Targeting by IP adress with such granularity is interesting indeed... thanks!
Lot of Important Dates Coming Up, Here's a Reminder of Some of Them
Startup School

Where: Kresge Auditorium, Stanford University.

When: 19 April 2008, 9:00 am.

Application Due Date: 23 March 2008 http://apps.ycombinator.com/susapply

Acceptance Notices: 27 March 2008

YCombinator

Summer 2008 Cambridge, MA from June through August 2008
Application: 10 pm EST on April 2, 2008 http://news.ycombinator.com/apply

TechStars

March 31, 2008 - Application deadline

Deadline is 11:59 PM MST (Boulder) on March 31, 2008.

April 10, 2008 - Finalists notified

Approximately 30 finalists for 10 spots will be notified by April 10th, 2008.

May 27, 2008 - Summer 2008 program begins

Selected companies should plan to be in Boulder by May 23, 2008.

August 22, 2008 - Summer 2008 program ends
these press releases really need to start linking to the papers..

full paper here:

http://www.iovs.org/cgi/content/abstract/49/3/1142
visit http://programmermeetdesigner.com/

this is one of the best resourceful website/community , post your profile there - if you are looking for entrepreneur or other techies then u can visit their profile and postings to comment and contact them.

I have posted my profile there under same user name "ideas101" - contact me there for more ideas and details.

Good Luck.
What I'm saying is that just because a particular set of regulations didn't help in a particular case doesn't mean that regulation is worthless. SOX was created primarily intended to prevent the type of gross-mismanagement that brought down Enron.
Ask YC: incorporation or LLC for new startup?
Just wondering what is advisable for new startup, Inc or LLC, and why? if its Inc then where (nevada, NY?) and why?
Albert Camus - The Fall

All-time favourite. Heck, the fact that my all-time fav band is named after the same novel doesn't hurt.
I wish I knew. :-)

I've heard it's fairly good though. Probably 3rd in the country behind the valley and Boston.
Scientist wins prize for 'virtual water'
I don't really care that much about which industry I'm in. I just want to make successful, quality products.

I'm kind of interested in fixing the morass that is web-app technologies. The current technology stack of SQL + server side language + html + javascript + CSS sucks. There are impedance mismatches between each of those, and the scalability is not really convenient.
Discover Semantic - Google CSE for Semweb Topics
The world's worst toaster
Debian & Ubuntu for the win :) Nothin' beats apt-get!
Yeah, my first move on seeing this article was to scan it for mention of the fact that there are other hash algorithms than MD5 which still work perfectly well.

I don't think this article would be bad if it had a second page that went on to provide some perspective. As it stands, it reads as a general indictment of all of computer security. They claim that the methods are secure, but they're really not! Don't trust those computer guys, because the One True Algorithm has a hole!
Ah, I bet that last point is key. I know nothing about how hiring works for senior positions.

One way or another, I hope you find a job you love.
Oh my god, the revolutionary 83-step install process!

It'll make every newbie's life much easier.
An article which explains that a lock is broken, but doesn't tell you what the lock is protecting, how to get it changed, and what alternative locks are available, is not explaining the situation well.
Is it just me or did this article just kinda die midway? I was reading with the impression that the Arc Challenge reference was just some example he was going to use to talk about how we keep oscillating back and forth between thin and thick clients... but then it just ended. I guess showing a bunch of Arc Challenge solutions was the point?
Gitnub — GitHub: OSX gui for git
It pays to play nice, Harvard study says
... it still seems funny to me that the greatest (er, most overtly visible) example of a language's superiority is how well it works as... an angle-bracket generator.

Calling web development "angle-bracket generation" is like calling Shakespeare "a guy who drew letters on paper".

Walt Whitman and Tolkien and Neal Stephenson and Abe Lincoln and Plato didn't even have to generate angle brackets. They got away with plain text! And yet their job was no easier.

Of course, Hanselman was joking, and the joke was even funny. I think that ABG would be a nice name for a web framework.
Yeah, it was really more of a trip to the zoo than an afternoon with Richard Dawkins.
Do an S Corp. If you take investment money or get acquired, you can easily convert to C Corp. C corp is required when you receive investments, among other things. LLC will be much more difficult to convert to C Corp.

Incorporate in Deleware (that is standard practice for tech startups btw).
Railslike PHP Framework: Code Igniter
hey, friend, how about a warning that your linking to a PDF!

I didn't buy my laptop this year. Or the year before. Or the year before.

It works perfectly fine, until I click on a PDF link.

And because Adobe has to justify their existence, there are a seemingly infinite number of api's that it tells me it's loading. About 1 every couple seconds. It's all I have to look at while it takes over my machine and ticks by.

My old computer will thank you. And all the other owners of small companies with no budgets for zippy new computers will too.
"You want an alert? I'll give you alert!"

+1, ROTFL.
One of the very few complaints I've heard from my friends at Google is about secrecy: they are under strict orders not to talk about what they work on.

Kinda undermines the entire argument.
Hacker Foundation && Hacker Spaces
So the secret to alertness is to mash the reset button on your biological clock three or four times a day?

I'm imagining a future headline: "Dateline: 2027 -- scientists discover that overuse of blue light causes depression, hallucinations, amnesia, homicidal tendencies."
I particularly agree with (a) creating simple solutions but even more so with (c) solving problems that actually need to be solved.

It’s amazing how often a complex solution can create more problems than it solves and / or completely miss the underlying problem.
I found this from 4braham in Madison, WI. the framework videos make it look exactly like rails, but in PHP. i think its pretty neat, but if i was going to use it i would still have to abstract a custom MODEL for it, because we are using S3 as our data store. I might code my datastore towards their model if this becomes a popular framework.

what do other YC'ers think about Code Igniter?
Widget Graphics Platform Benchmarks (Flash, js, silverlight, java, JavaFX)
thanks a lot ... one more thing to know do i really require an attorney for this? or is there any resource where i can do it by myself and save some bucks.
What kind of app are you developing? I'm not asking for proprietary specifics, just wondering what it generally is, and what makes you think Silverlight is a good fit for its UI (in addition to development time).
PulpCore FTW in webgraphics performance
Chart Me Up: Web 2.0 Venture Deals
Founding: A Neverending Freight Train
If you don't think Myspace and Facebook could be profitable, then I don't know why you are in this business.

They are not profitable now because they are investing in growth (which, like any investment, is a gamble). They could scale down their staff and achieve a very good return on capital.
Geolocation Mashup To Visualize Visitors (Python)
Wine 1.0 is finally coming out, 15 years after project started
Rate the YC startups (trying out slinkset)
Given typical Microsoft attitudes, Hanselman deserves credit for recognizing that languages other than C# and VB.NET exist, and that people actually use them. That's much more than you can ask for from typical Microsoft bloggers who act like the only database anyone uses is SQL Server and the only language people use for web apps is C#.
Snaptalent now lets you buy job postings on the News.YC jobs page
You'll notice in the jobs widget on the news.yc jobs page, we've added a 'your job here'link. Email sumon [at] snaptalent [dot] com for questions.