skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There is a hellacious amount of luck in startups. The best startup guys generally admit that it was luck/market that was responsible for a huge part of their success. Tremendous brains and a ton of effort is a big part of it, too.

The founder of Del.icio.us was at a YC dinner last night and talked about all of the miserable failures he had before Del.icio.us. Ev Williams had Pyra Labs' product before Blogger and Odeo before Twitter.

Failure abounds. Drink it in, learn from it and dive into your next one.

Or, if it makes you miserable, get a real job and some fun hobbies-- no shame in that!
Checkout Feedity - http://feedity.com for creating custom RSS feeds from any webpage

(Shameless self promo)
that is funny kkkk Matt Marron first advice was:
"Apply early. I’m guessing something like 75% of their applications are submitted in the last few days. That’s usually how those sorts of things work. Doing it earlier can only help get you a little more consideration time."
I think everyone has considered very lose table schemers before, built entirely out of foreign key relationships, mostly its not done because of performance. I do wonder if you built a database engine specifically around this paradigm if it would be fast enough.
Ask YC: have you ever hired hacker freelancer from elance.com or rentacoder.com?
I've couple of ideas and i may not be able to concentrate on all, so i was looking for hacker co-founder but then one of my friend suggested to find a freelancer from elance.com / rentacoder.com and get my stuff done quickly and cheaply... just wondering whether this is the most efficient way to get the work done than finding a GOOD hacker co-founder?
There are tons of still good domains out there. Problem is, those filthy domain squatters (networksolutions, etc) have already registered them and demand $500+ for them! It is ridiculous that such practices are legal.
Are you even Micheal Arrington? This is your first post... You don't have any info on your profile... The writing style seems different... hmmm... Still an nteresting topic though.
that's turbo pascal! not long after that one, borland produced a similar ide for the C language, and later, C++. and that's how and when i started programming.
Patent holders: "We don't care if you use LZW/gif..."
(Internet becomes popular)
Patent holders: "Oh wait people are actually using this stuff? We changed our minds! You can't use it!"
If you do it, make sure to write very, very thorough design spec with mockups. Don't leave any room for decision to the freelance coder, unless you're paying them to make decisions.
I'm with these guys since I live in Vancouver, and I don't want my data subject to the PATRIOT act. Given the exchange rate, it may not be the best deal in town anymore, but their service is good and uptime is fantastic.

http://canadianwebhosting.com/
I wouldn't like that one bit. I know a fair bit about technology, but when it comes to most here I probably know diddly squat when it comes to programming. I'm a reddit refugee who finds quite a bit of the articles here interesting and is excited to actually see good discussion. Besides, I'm willing to bet there are a fair number of people who could pass any kind of test you set up and still prove to be quite destructive.
Webfaction: SSH, Python/Ruby o whatever language you want. No limitations for "long running process" (Django, web.py, RoR... ) and Unlimited PostgresSQL and MySQL databases. Arround $10 a month.

However, if all of you want is a standard Linux + Apache + MySQL + PHP hosting you can find cheaper alternatives.
Gradual engagement is absolutely critical. A good rule of thumb when developing a user experience is asking -- what would be appropriate if the website were a person? When I first meet someone, I expect a hello, and an introduction... not a 10 page questionnaire.

Incidentally this concept has been discussed at length by Prof. Cliff Nass at Stanford (the infamous originator of the MS Office Clippy), that people treat computers like people. Well, then if your app is a person, then make sure your app is a good, polite person who makes life easier.
thanks - that's good suggestion - have u ever hired one or do u know someone who had used these services?
The "Grids are Good" presentation by Khoi Vinh is absolutely must-read for any designer. http://www.subtraction.com/archives/2007/0318_oh_yeeaahh.php
An MBA with the SSD drive also seems like it would perform well for him. But then, the MBP should be cheaper.
Was I voted down, simply because someone doesn't like IE or Microsoft? I was pointing out a feature of IE 8 that directly competes with his website.
"Rascals" will try to pass the Turing Test this fall
If you stop promoting the site on techcrunch, then the folks here at Hacker News will have one less thing to complain about.
"The stereotypical nerd no longer matches the stereotype. "

A quick flickr search for "ycombinator" suggests the opposite...
Brawn meets brains: Supercomputing for the masses
Crackpot tech ideas that could transform the enterprise
The first paragraph nails it -- Google did less than Yahoo, and wins because of it. Twitter, likewise. Also: See Flip video camera.

Brilliant.
I thought he seemed familiar.
Anyone up for a web application framework rumble?
We're throwing an open source conference at University of Illinois at Chicago called Flourish (http://www.flourishconf.com). As one of the attractions at the event, we're going to have a Web Application Framework Rumble. I was thinking that maybe some of the Chicago hackers here might want to take part in this.

We'll be building an application for a non-profit in a period of about 3 hours, using different web application frameworks. During the course of this, we'll be showing everyone's progress with various frameworks and sort of encouraging some friendly competition between the different camps. And everything will be released under the GPL.

So far, we've got interest from 37signals for RoR and the CakePHP and web2py core developers. Also, there will be free food. Any interested parties?
In game, sure.

But post game the coaches and players go back to the tapes and see what they can learn from the game. Then they hit the practice courts.

As an aside, my personal experience is that success can also be cause for depression, feelings of failure and weakness. Growing is hard. Surrendering control, and the (inevitable?) cultural dilution post acquisition is hard. It was my baby. Now it's not.

For this too you mourn.
Filter4: you may be surprised with the recommendations
You said it. Weight training is especially good for this.
I still find it is a double-edged sword. It totally depends on the company you hire. Plus, the time-zone differences with, say, working with folks in India vs. working with folks in Canada is important. It all boils down to competency, execution, and communication. In some cases, it has worked very well for me. In others, it has been horribly bad. It's still a gamble today, as far as I'm concerned.
Cool! I like it, we need even more sites like this!

Digg, reddit, mixx, stumbleupon, and hacker news is not enough in this crazy world of abundance of choices.

How about adding some real-time tuning options?
real-time tune jaanix like?

none of that sites recommendation system have worked well for me...
How to value your startup
Why did Apple try to push its browser onto Windows PCs?
Free keyword submissions
Really? I thought the folks in WFP07 were almost universally pretty good looking, healthy, skinny folks. Some were better looking and skinnier than others (Heysan, for example). And the software dev shop I worked for in Austin, Texas was chock full of good looking dudes with good looking wives/girlfriends (and it had double nerd power--they developed scientific computing applications and had geologists and mathematicians who were also software developers).

Perhaps you haven't looked at the average American lately...
His theses in the older article are that A) More complex relationships between more disparate data are becoming more useful; B) It's hard to establish new entity relationships or new entities in a relational database.

B) Not really true. Learn relational theory. It's definitely easier than updating data structures, file formats, and all affected routines, which seems to be what he's suggesting.

A) True. But absolutely nothing about this is easier to deal with by not using a database than by using a database. Loads of new flatfiles, query APIs, graphs, and datamining algorithms don't mean it's time to throw out the DB. It just means things are harder.
This is an evolved response, made for the paleolithic era. Your brain thinks your tribe was just conquered by the neighboring tribe, and that your women and livestock have been taken. Evolution thinks you're lucky to be alive, and the best way to preserve that is to lay low for a while and be submissive as possible. The mechanism by which is does this is by temporarily cutting your testoterone level. Your T is low, so you feel low and hopeless and the world seems a bit grey.

That was the smart move 50,000 years ago. Not now. You need to do things that bring the testosteroone back: hard exercise, especially weightlifting. Try to arrange for plenty of small, guaranteed wins in anything you're good at: video games, basketball, trivial pursuit, whatever. Get lots of sunlight! That's an easy one that boosts testosterone. There are probably other things that boost T. Google.

Bravo for asking this question. Great job in doing a startup in the first place. Consider this a hearty slap on the back.
One word: Fujitsu.

Just bought one of their S6410s. 13-inch screen ultralight with good performance and great battery life. Don't know if the machines are available in the US yet, but the laptop rocks. Small enough you can use it on a plane with the screen fully open, or throw it in a knapsack. Large enough to be my main computer, although I like to browse the web with F11.

My gripe with the Mac is that it's too expensive for what you get. I've never been inclined to put a laptop in a manilla envelope though, so I'd guess I'm not their market. Only problem with Fujitsu is that the company seems actively disinterested in selling their products (took ages to find a local reseller) and the company has literally nothing in the way of Linux support, not even "unofficial" drivers. They also do that awful "backup as a partition" that screws up when you repartition the hard drive to do things like install useful software.

Ubuntu is up and running now though, and it's great.
Is PC gaming dying? Or thriving?
Ah, thanks. The widget is working for me now on blogs that use it, so it's less of an issue now anyway.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entity-Attribute-Value_model
Safari is easy.
Just Thinking About Apple Boosts Creativity
MySpace and Friends Need to Make Money. And Fast.
While I agree the signal to noise ratio has increased significantly since I first started frequenting YC News, I'm not sure I agree if its specifically the TechCrunch exposure that is the cause of this. My reason? I was actually reading this at school and I've had friends sign up who could really care less about anything about programming...and end up treating this site like its Slashdot. Perhaps similar episodes have occurred elsewhere?
Not sure that's the best example. Try interfacing with a computer thus:

http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/701/701_141505.ht...
It's funny you should put it that way, because just the other day I was describing YC to someone as a "reverse boot camp".
Hi Hank. I find it refreshing that authors of popular articles here have thick enough skin to be willing to engage the crowd. Welcome!

You said, "The problem is that relational databases (at least the ones that are available to us) are not at all fluid and flexible." Since I disagree with this and find you so eloquent in your arguments, I wonder if this debate is over "semantics". I don't know what you think is "available to us", but I have worked for ages with RDBMS that are so stunningly fluid and flexible, they have never failed to deliver what I needed for any app. Perhaps you haven't had the same opportunity (and joy). Remember, just because it's relational doesn't mean it has to be Microsoft, Oracle, or open source.

http://www-306.ibm.com/software/data/u2/

http://www.jbase.com/

http://www.rainingdata.com/products/dbms/index.html

http://www.revelation.com/
Rent a Nanotechnology Lab
I wanted to have my own domain instead of myname.f2o.org
A "reset" button would be a good idea, for when you click the "<<" link too many times.
Don't forget, sometimes hackers can be users, too. This site is the one thing that we users have in common. So indulge us if you can as we discuss our common user experience. What you call noise we call QA.
From Oxford to Silicon Valley, part six
the pre-edited version lives here http://blog.auctomatic.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/bbc6.html
Mr. Google's Guidebook
the semi-inside story on our sale. the pre-edited version lives here http://blog.auctomatic.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/bbc6.h.... Usually they get it right, but this one seems sensationalist.
Great design: The airplane bathroom lock and light switch
That turbo pascal IDE is how I started programming as well. I had dabbled in basic on c-64 before that but the limitations were too confining. Back then, it felt like pascal could do anything!

I actually had a serious nostalgic moment watching him page up and down and wait for the refreshes. I miss the feeling of endless possibility that blue cga screen imparted...
I was the opposite. I had written quite a bit of BASIC and a tiny bit of assembly on my C-64 and then a C-128, but when I got Turbo Pascal on my dads PC I was utterly thwarted in my attempts at building something. A few years later I was able to breeze through the AP computer programming course in high school, which used Pascal on Apple IIe systems, but I was never able to do anything useful with Pascal. I started making progress again on my Amiga with ARexx, C (using Matt Dillon's DICE environment, which was very UNIX-y), and Amiga E. I think OOP concepts just threw me.
Is this why your handle is jcl? Getting ready for fame and fortune? ;)
Can't see the flash preview thingy on the lower right. Can see the other ones. I've seen this before with flash in Firefox. Might be an interaction with the AdBlock extension, which can be uninstalled over my dead body. ;-)

When this happens on other sites, I just scroll down until the top of the flash item reaches the top of the browser, and then it displays. Can't use this workaround on your site, because there isn't any more content to scroll down to after that.

BTW I don't mean to complain! Nice looking site. I'm just assuming you were hoping for feedback, so there it is.
I was a regular reddit reader(in fact at the time I was a digg-refugee) and found HN about 6 months ago while reading about YC. Reddit started to disappoint me more and more(e.g. Ron Paul) and I started to frequent HN more often. I am kind of disappointed about reddit and digg, that they weren't able to maintain the quality of their active members. I am not quite sure if PG succeeds in protecting the value of HN without making it to a closed community with an elite group of moderators. Let's hope he'll find a way to do this.

I think the most promising method would be in limiting the weight of new users. Not giving them any weight in the voting would prohibit them from posting stories that don't fit into the topic. If they stick around long enough eventually people will find out what the community likes and will submit similar stories.
Jim Leonard = Trixter... one of the originators of North American demoscene. I met him in 1998/1999... he's a great guy. Glad to see him still plugging away at cataloging old hardware.

In that video he's debugging a simple mod tracker... a program that allows you to compose music by adding various samples/notes/effects to a track. Tracker allowed you to create great sounding music (for that time anyway) in a small space and one that was using a small memory footprint. You could forget about decoding MP3s (they weren't even invented then but) since the CPU was nowhere near fast enough to decode the stream. Once you had a mod file, you could synch it to your graphics and play it back together in a demo.

Ah, those were fun times!
If you want a co-founder -- someone to take half of the equity in a startup and take the plunge with you -- hiring a freelancer is a terrible idea. They're not going to invest themselves in the idea the way you would.

If you just want someone to take some of the coding pressure off of you, sure, but I'd still advise against it. Better to hang out here or on IRC and find someone who actually likes the ideas and would be interested in working on them. Saves you money, and you'll get better output in the end anyway.
I guess this place is not big on sarcasm.
Heh, He's like tech-Ghandi.

First they say its not powerful enough.

Then they say its unnecessary.

Then they say its dangerous.

Then you win.
Congratulations!

"I’ve never had a problem with self-confidence so saying that YC gives me a new feeling of self-confidence wouldn’t be accurate. I think what has done is given me a new sense of belief and that has come from being around people who have been a success. When you’re having dinner every week with people like Joe Kraus, Evan Williams, Paul Buccheit, PG it suddenly dawns on you that there’s actually a chance you can succeed despite stupid odds."

From "What I expected from YC and What I Got" http://blog.harjtaggar.com/?p=37

I think that your BBC articles and your co-founder's blog entries about Y-Combinator capture the feeling of what it is like to become part of the YC family. Thank you for sharing.
CNET firing 120 employees
You can completely replace the registration process as long as the application doesn't need any data from the user. If the app needs data then you can pre-fill it (as we do at Clickpass). Even pre-filled though you still need to confirm with the user that they're happy to send it (you can't allow an app to call any data it wants from a user without asking them first)
thanks - what's IRC?
Finding Clojure, or How I Learned to Stop Locking and Eval the JVM
Awesome, I really enjoyed the article. I'm very happy for your guys
I love the 1-sentence per paragraph. It's like reading the story through twitter - lol
Needs moar stupidfilter.
http://stupidfilter.org/main/
This might not help, but now that you've failed you can take comfort in the fact that most startups do fail.
Euler's hypothesis was disproved in 1987 by a Harvard graduate student named Noam Elkies.

And partially as a result, Noam ended up one of the youngest ever tenured professors at Harvard (at the age of 26).

I met Noam when hanging out with guys from the Harvard Glee Club, which Noam accompanies on piano.
Reading Noam's CV (http://www.math.harvard.edu/~elkies/math_cv.html) was one of the most humbling experiences I've ever had.
yeah, but you can barely find the lock in the fist place because its small, and unlabeled. I dont know if this is great design!
Because personality is largely biological and unchanging.
Don't forget the bright blue light (on Southwest anyway) that turns on by the flight deck door to let everyone else know the front lavatory is occupied. This is to prevent a line forming (in violation of TSA regulations).

Now that's what I call extensible.
nearlyfreespeech.net.

Highly recommended, professional, and cheap. But a little on the BOFH side -- will refer to you to a FAQ instead of actually answering your dumb question. Since I'm a BOFH myself, we get along great.
guess Im young at 24, my first programming was with quick basic
yeah like wtf. Have emailed Tim to fix.
I do too... I thought I was arguing against one. But I see your point.
I love history and I love computers, but combining them? Ewww. Glad those days are gone.

</removes floppy 5.25 disk from Kaypro II>
FriendFeed = the sociable guy/girl who mingles among all the groups at a party, bridging* people together

Facebook = the alpha/host of the largest and/or more popular groups at the party

* - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_capital
Fancy computers: $2 billion problem for 2010 census
Microsoft's Latest Jab at Google Docs: Albany?
Better Feed Reading
Mark E. Zuckerberg, and the early team of facebook
The link I put up is an aggregation of the various speeches, starting with the first big one. The page doesn't do a very good job of clearly dividing between them, just with super subtle references to page numbers in the margins.
A 3D chocolate printer, made from LEGO
Oracle 3Q profit meets Wall Street's expectations, shares plunge
Safari for Windows illegal for use on Windows PCs
Sun Ruby Developer Center
Why to look for a religious co-founder
I've poked around the Arc code (Arc1) and the HN release therein, but couldn't find the answer. But thanks for the idea. I'm betting this is an 'optimization' feature....
mail sent :)
Some people like Lisp machines. Others like the original Nintendo.

This guy is just a masochist.
Do you like it this way? :-) http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger2/1715/1669/1600/larson-oc...
Ask HN: S2008 applicant weed out question?
Are any of the following true? (a) You are the only founder. (b) You are a student who may return to school in the fall. (c) Half or more of your group can't move to Boston for the summer. (d) One or more founders will keep their current jobs during the summer. (e) None of the founders are programmers.

Is this the first line of defense again single founders and others who are not fully committed and/or just not hackers?
funny it doesn't show up on the iPhone.
MIT spin-out aims to make silicon-based solar competitive with coal by 2012
Google Founder's $1 salaries, $13B in stock
Realtime NYC traffic simulator
Good read. Demystifies the Facebook mythology a little. Pre-Brandee Barker vintage Zuckerberg quotes in last two paragraphs.
Waiting for a "GOOD" hacker co-founder may have you waiting forever. If your ideas are good, somebody else is already working on it. So every day you wait, you're losing time.

As long as your idea isn't very complicated to implement, and you know what you want; by all means, use an elance or a rentacoder or a craigslist.
We applied at the last minute...the same day they were due, and with only a half an hour or so of work on the app (I applied on a whim...didn't even tell my co-founder until after). I don't know how it effects the odds, but we did get the interview (and I think that's also the point at which I informed my co-founder that I'd applied). I'm guessing it probably doesn't matter. At the end of WFP07, I seem to recall that they waited until the apps were all in before printing them out and looking them over.

I do suggest writing well, however, and taking as long as you need to achieve that goal.
Competitor Attempts to Steal Product Descriptions.. Gets RickRoll'd
So today I noticed an interesting referer while tailing my ecommerce website's production.log file

http://www.mturk.com/mturk/preview?groupId=ZXN2S645SXNTG6SRHV5Z
(Notice the link at the top of the page links to revzilla.com (my site), sometimes it swaps to an amazon.com product so just refresh that page if it does)

Apparently someone had created a mechanical turk which is paying people to reword / paraphrase our product descriptions (I assume) for use on their competing website. We can't be having that so I added a simple rule to redirect any Mechanical Turk referrers to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBGIQ7ZuuiU :D
http://chronicle.com/stats/aaup/

Only by institution though..
Haskell:  Restricted Monads
Ha! Served.
Haskell:  HVAC web framework
Friend feed and other aggregators are all gonna have that potential by their very nature.
Why be an entrepreneur?
Humor: Best way to get on base?
(= caching* 0 perpage* 30 maxend* 200)
Interesting. Loads slower than hell, but it is interesting.