skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What does "no predictive power" mean? The Emperor's Nose technique has a certain amount of predictive power: it's very unlikely that it will be off by more than an inch, for example.

Similarly, in the hands of a conscious reader such as myself, my tarot deck has lots and lots of predictive power. Right now it tells me that Mike Gravel does not have a 50% chance to become President this year, that Barack Obama will not live to be 200 years old, and that Bill Clinton, with 99.999% certainty, has not invented a perpetual motion machine.

I'm not saying these markets are wrong. I'm suggesting that, at best, they're as correct as an off-the-cuff guess by the average reader of the New York Times. That's not all that impressive, but it's just good enough that I can't consistently outguess them without doing some research -- and, given that the total size of most of these penny-ante markets is less than a postdoc's annual salary, I'm never going to make any money doing that.
My trading in November (assuming a close race) is more predicated on knowledge of what happens to those betting markets throughout the day of the election than any political knowledge.

As you pointed out though, I can't make retirement money on that small of volume. I might be able to make vacation money though.

Also I should check to see if there's a difference in odds between betfair and intrade. Might be able to run some sort of cross-site arbitrage if possible.
What a Startup Company Founder's Priority List Looks Like
I'd hope that there will always be at least some 'open' devices.
Fifth cable to middle east cut
This is a fun way to approach the paradox of perpetual motion: if we had a machine to generate energy from nothing, (or to magically teleport unlimited amounts of energy from Alpha Centauri, or whatever) we'd soon fill up our Earth with lots of extra matter (matter=energy, don'tcha know), and eventually the planet would collapse into a black hole!

Or, much more likely, we'd heat the Earth up enough that we could successfully radiate the excess energy out into space. Al Gore would not like that plan one bit.

Of course, while you're violating the second law of thermodynamics, I suppose you could always build a second machine that takes the exhaust heat from your perpetual-motion-powered cars and planes and sends it back to wherever it came from.
When I tell people at work or at school about it, most of them get pretty excited...

It's not clear what precisely you mean by "about it" here. Are these tech-savvy people getting excited when you tell them what your chat application can do for them -- or are they getting excited when you tell them how your chat application will work?

One of the common faults of hackers is that we tend to get excited about new technologies, and we'll often decide that a piece of software is "cool" because it uses "cool" technology (I'm reminded of recent discussions concerning Amazon's SimpleDB service and Erlang -- for many hackers, whether SimpleDB used Erlang was far more important than whether it was actually useful).

When presenting ideas to potential users, you should never mention how your idea will work; instead, present what it will do for them. When presenting to people who won't understand the technical details, this is easy; it requires far more willpower when dealing with a technically minded audience.
Do you have a workable demo for us to check out? If we saw what your application did or could do, we might be able to give you more advice or suggestions on how you could prepare and present your elevator pitch.
Help With MSDN Help - That's the name of the post
Another thing to note regarding potential users who aren't as thrilled about what you're creating as more tech savvy people are: consider cell phones and pagers. When these devices came out, they were not exactly the coolest things. Only Doctors and lawyers could afford them, and only they had any real use for the devices. I mean really? Who needs some bulky cell phone or pager with them when pay phones are everywhere? Of course we know how this story ends today. Cell phones are everywhere, and used by everyone. Your job is to convince the average Joe that your application is as necessary as a cell phone.
Be careful not to choose sets of names which are too common though. Trying to integrate two separate systems, each of which was named after the Greek pantheon, can be very painful.
Ask YC: Is anyone using Fluid, Air, or Prism to wrap their sites?
There
Though he doesn't mention which Java version he's using, nowadays some core bundled facilities can make such diagnoses a lot quicker. 'jmap -histo' give you instance counts by class in a running JVM -- so over a period of unexpected memory retention, or the period just before an OOME, you can identify supspiciously overrepresented types. A binary heap dump and then browse with the 'jhat' tool can backtrace the exact reference chains causing objects to be retained. -- especially if you have the luxury of debugging a 16MB heap, rather than (say) a 2+GB heap.

The really annoying OOMEs in my experience are those that aren't really object heap exhaustion -- but other depletions that still get reported as OOME. Sometimes, increasing your object heap makes these worse (eg by allowing less space for non-heap JVM structures). At least starting in Java 6, these "other OOMEs" tend to have different messages.
There are a lot of options to wrap your site, and make it available as a standalone application.. Adobe has Air, Mozilla has Prism, and Fluid uses WebKit/Safari.

Does anyone have any experience in releasing their sites as downloads? Have your users enjoyed the experience? What sort of download numbers have you seen?

Chron X is currently a downloadable game, but we're porting it to a web-based game, running in Flash.. Since people are used to downloading it, I've been considering releasing a wrapped version, but I'd love to see any anecdotes that people might have in working with any of the engines.
Misdirection is a powerful psychological force. It just feels right that energy can come from nowhere, because that's how our world works! There is stored energy all over the place, but we weren't there to see it get stored, so it's like it came from thin air.

Energy just comes up out of the ground, as trees or coal or oil or uranium, and we use it, and when we need more we just do more digging or chopping!

Geologic time is an alien concept for humans, far more alien than anything ever shown on Star Trek. Even those of us with lots of science education have trouble grasping it. It's really quite hard to look at an oil field and think of it as the accumulation of millions of years' worth of solar energy. It's like trying to remember that you are one of seven billion people in the world: that number is so much larger than the number of your friends that you can't really understand it.
For once, even as a linux fanboy, I must say the Air isn't a BAD value. Its priced at $1799 without SSD and I mean that isn't outrageous or anything considering its a decent laptop with Mac's flagship OS (which I would never call bad, only overpriced) and a solidly beautiful design. Perhaps its not worth every penny, but its definitely an ok value.

Now as for the SSD version...I'd have to rethink that a bit.

And of course, normal people buy solid computers that fit their need without that extra oomph to the form factor, probably for a cool $1000 or less. And they install linux to save money if they're smart ;)
Firebug is the best thing since sliced bread. (and cake, if you know what I'm talking about)
I remember from my Thermodynamics class that modern gasoline engines are only about 37% theoretically efficient (most of the energy is lost as heat). Even if his invention doesn't violate scientific paradigms and is merely a more efficient induction motor, it might build a market.
Yeah learning by doing is good and prolly I'm guessing the most common way people begin with programming.

Teachers can present angles you don't think of yourself though, so sometimes its important to get other opinions whether it be from other programmers or whatever. I know that even after programming a ton I learned a lot from a simple intro to compsci class.
Do you have a reference for this? Because if this were the case, the point of such classification of shares would be somewhat moot.
One Computer to Rule Them All
Nice! I especially like the first one about getting it working and THEN making it great. Brings to mind in a round-about way Knuth's comments on premature optimization being the root of all evil. And it's very, very true.

Marginally OT: has anyone read the book these are from, "Dreaming in Code"? If so, is it good?
Microsoft Adversary Rises Instinctively at Yahoo Bid
I agree with Paul about that because a lot of "Ask YC" threads have tons of comments but aren't really what I'm looking for...but what is useful is the SEARCH. THANK YOU SO MUCH for that.

I've always been afraid to contribute for fear that others have posted an article I encountered. Fear no more! Hello, new homepage.
I'd triple bury this story if I could. He's like a "patriot" saying you shouldn't criticize the government.
Firebug is better than cake.

because the cake is a lie.
What To Do After You Launch Your Startup
Looks like you have one of these either-or products.

Either nobody will know what the heck you are talking about, even after you have a demo.

Or people will see its merits, think "how could we ever live without this?"

Unfortunately (based on empirical evidence) the chance of it being the first one is extremely small.

But if it is you change the world. So I would go for it...
The samples are Python, but they come from a product called PHPRunner. I assume that they interact with PHP rather than consist of PHP.
I agree with the first statement and don't understand the second. Cake is not a lie, it is a framework. =]
Google Owns 13% of Me (from RescueTime, YC08 company)
They're planning more.
Web Trend Map 2008
There are a few problems with trying to take on the WebCT/Blackboard gestalt. As others have already mentioned, out-of-the-box integration with ERP systems is a big selling point for the commercial solutions, even though it largely doesn't work. CIOs and other college administrators sometimes don't look beyond the sales pitch, though, so the inflated promises of the sales drones go a long way.

Secondly, many organizations are understandably nervous with hosting core academic resources off-campus. That attitude may shift over the coming years as outsourcing of other systems such as student email becomes more common, but in the meantime, most IT staff in higher education still get squeamish about letting some 3rd party become solely responsible for managing such critical systems. That breaks the usual web startup model of being able to host the app, and forces you to do support for on-site installs.
Your title really caught me. Google does own part of us.
MSFT-YHOO Luvmatch Is Not Bad News for Founders'
Oh no! I hate those 2-D bar codes: it seems my brain cannot refrain from looking at them and trying to make sense of them. They are extremely annoying.
Who knows what's going on, but coincidence is out of the question.
http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=810090

Same sort of idea - makes use of deviations in the picture that are hard to pick out.
At least they provided a link to the primary source. From my reading of the paper, Kittyhawk is more of an EC2 competitor; it's not intended to run "the entire Internet", but pundits can't resist the hyperbole.
Izak30, eugenejen, ricky_clarkson, tomh, thank you for comments.
Great Firewall of China to come down
Yes, at least those LP's and cassette tapes stayed bought.
I wonder how Microsoft + Yahoo compares. Since I'm on mac and don't use Yahoo - it really doesn't register for me.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/11/28/new-group-at-disney-to-...

Ah yes. Now I remember... It will be very interesting to see where they go with this.
Not trying to be a jackass here but how talented is Yahoo! engineers?

I've heard great stuffs about Google, Microsoft, Amazon and other companies' engineers but never heard much bout Yahoo!.

Can someone share their thoughts?
Yahoo, Microsoft and Amazon hackers seem to be roughly equivalent. Google hackers seem better.
The board can decide to put the decision to the general assembly of stock holders and in that, the preferred shares will get more votes and stop the decision.

Shareholders will have no legal recurse to take, as they we're fully informed of this power balance before they bought the shares.
Are you a real programmer?
yup...I'm an emacs guy.
The vast majority of public companies have anti-takeover provisions written into their corporate charters, such as classified boards and poison pills:

http://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/classifiedboard.asp

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poison_pill#Public_companies
RESTful Rails. Part I
Adobe Flex vs Ajax development models
Water, water everywhere, and not a drop to drink.

I wish for every ten supposedly witty disses out there on the web there were even one actual refutation. If my ideas are broken, tell me where. I don't want to stay mistaken. I change my mind about things a lot.
That too. I didn't want to use that example because someone would have retorted that Wolfram wasn't really a false positive.
95% of human beings think Twitter is ridiculous. Don't sweat it.

Build the most basic thing you can, put it in front of your friends (and yourselves) and see if they love using it. If so, you win. Communication apps are inherently viral.

The game isn't "build something EVERYONE wants"... It's "build something some people want A LOT". The breadth of people you appeal to is important, but not nearly as important as how much people love you.

An elevator pitch in a space that doesn't inherently seem broken (chat) is hard. People don't KNOW chat is broken. It's not painful, so it's hard to describe the problem you're going to solve... Just like it's hard to explain why the iPhone is so much better than other phones.
Sorry for being picky. But it is Andy Hertzfeld. The z is missed in title.
I was skeptical of yet another post on Google vs MSFT regarding Yahoo, but I found the post interesting.
derefr,
Unfortunately, you are either jealous and letting that affect your judgment or you completely fail to understand that there are real-world reasons to own a Mac. I bought a Mac because I wanted a system that is designed rather than evolved, comes with software I actually want to use (iMovie, Garageband, iPhoto), is secure, and not a target for viruses/spyware, and can occasionally play my Windows video games and host my Windows development environment.

The reason I switched my mom, inlaws, brother and sister to Macs is because I got damned sick and tired of being their IT Helpdesk every other weekend -- diagnosing problems, rebuilding machines infected with spyware & viruses, installing patches and fixes, etc. I've got better things to do with my life such as making original content (music & video) with the computer. However, some people just enjoy farting around with settings. That's not me.

Those commercials appeal to me: a 40-year-old guy wearing $17 Wrangler jeans and a t-shirt from Target. You know why? Because they bring out the defensive XP fanboys such as yourself. We laugh at the commercials, then we laugh at you. Now run along.
Don't you have some patches to install or something to update?

--Jack
I wonder who upmods these things. Do these people feel guilty about admiring PG, and think they'll fix their "bias" by promoting "the other side of the story"? Do they want to feel themselves better than everyone else, because they "don't drink the Kool-Aid"?

I understand why stuff like this gets on Reddit, but why here?
I really enjoyed reading it. I recommended it to a fee friends and thry liked it as well. I would highly recommend it.
the only prob I have with the article is that it doesn't mention the open source projects that yahoo provides with either developers, money, or both.

these projects are either important to starups now or will be in the near future
GNU Emacs or XEmacs?

Or ?...
Right, it's the Structure of scientific revolutions.

How is the book mistaken? Did you read it? Can you condense what you think is wrong?

I don't think he denies scientific progress. He addressed that point in the post-scriptum, if I remember correctly.
Microsoft tinkers with scary smart ads
Yahoo has been doing a lot of interesting, innovative open source stuff lately like Hadoop and the Javascript lib. They also have Rasmus, of PHP fame, and while I'm not wild about the language, Rasmus is a first rate hacker.
The article contains other hints that the scientific community is a bit like the Church a few hundred years ago -- rigidly attached to the status quo. That's an odd thing to claim

Really? The tone of certainty in several comments on this page lends credence to it. It's difficult to recognize one's own dogmatism.
8 Years after disastrous merger, Time Warner to split AOL
If your application is a Flash RIA i think the best approach is just to use Air. You can still display HTML content within Air.
Circumcision Video
Take a look at the actual surgery.
I honestly must have missed the point of this. I saw the title on reddit "You see, I once worked in a Bakery, code and bread are very similar in fact" and assumed it was a Joel Spolsky takedown.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Wrong.html

...but here, it's apparently a Paul Graham takedown. Reading it, it doesn't appear to do anything but bumble around for a few sentences.
Home network:

Airports - Tonto, Robin, and Pokey.

Computers - Lone Ranger, Batman, and Gumbi.
Page 160 (start of chapter 13):

"The preceding pages have carried my schematic description of scientific development as far as it can go in this essay. Nevertheless, they cannot quite provide a conclusion. If this description has at all caught the essential structure of a science's continuing evolution, it will simultaneously have posed a special problem: Why should the enterprise sketched above move steadily ahead in ways that, say, art, political theory, or philosophy does not? Why is progress a perquisite reserved almost exclusively for activities we call science? The most usual answers to that question have been denied in the body of this essay. We must conclude it by asking what substitutes can be found."

Page 162:

"Viewed from within any single community, however, whether of scientists or of non-scientists, the result of successful creative work is progress."

163:

"These doubts about progress arise, however, in the sciences too. Throughout the pre-paradigm period when there is a multiplicity of competing schools, evidence of progress, except within schools, is very hard to find."

"part of the answer to the problem of progress lies simply in the eye of the beholder."

-------

He also manages to compare scientists to characters form 1984, and claim that we choose which fields to call science based on which ones appear to make progress, so science seems to achieve progress in part through a selection effect.

So, he takes it for granted that we don't make progress in a variety of fields. He attacks scientific progress as subjective -- a matter of biased points of view. He has doubts about progress in general which extend to science. Part of the answer, he says, is that science doesn't actually make progress. And, he says, the last 12 chapters denied the common sense views on why and how science makes progress, and he hopes to come up with a substitute, but he isn't even trying very hard (because he doesn't really believe in progress very much, in general).

OK, I read some Kuhn for you. shudder. Someone go read Fabric of Reality now :) It is full of good explanations.
Text + Image + CSS3 = Crazy Delicious
The Attention Crash: A New Kind of Dot-Com Bust
Google's definitely doing something right. Not only does it own a lot of people, but people are often quite happy about that fact.

It says something about Google's image in the marketplace when my mother refers to Larry Page and Sergey Brin as "those nice Google boys." Similarly, whenever she figures out something she wants her computer to do, the first thing she does is to find out if Google makes software that will do it for her.

So, in short, Google owns us, and most of us are thrilled by that fact.
Fine, it's false. If scientists acted like the Church, we'd have made about as much progress in science as religion.

The reason science is able to find truer explanations is that scientists in fact look for them, rather than musing on how to enforce strictly conservative attitudes. If you deny this, you've unexplained something. Kuhn, and you, have not offered a replacement.
2008 Startup School April 19. Confirmed so far: Andreessen, Bezos, DHH
Remote pair programming
last year's was great
Ruby on Rails SEO Tips
Unfortunately, the demo is only about 80% done at the moment (we're trying finish it up a few weeks before the YC application deadline), but I appreciate the offer for advice and will pitch it to the community when it's ready.
And here's Kuhn denying there is such thing as progress short of finding an ultimate, final, perfect truth:

There is another step, or kind of step, which many philosophers of science wish to take and which I refuse. They wish, that is, to compare theories as representations of nature, as statements about 'what is really out there'. Granting that neither theory of a historical pair is true, they nonetheless seek a sense in which the latter is a better approximation to the truth. I believe nothing of that sort can be found. On the other hand, I no longer feel that anything is lost, least of all the ability to explain scientific progress, by taking this position.

Source: http://ejap.louisiana.edu/EJAP/1994.may/mcgrew.html
they've sold more than 50,000 copies apparently. most of the employees he's had at delicious monster have been poached by apple over the years. most recently that of mike matas.
That is an important distinction. I hadn't really considered that. I think the reality is somewhere in between the two scenarios you outline here. I think my peers' technological knowledge helps them understand how this service will be useful; whereas laypeople aren't quite getting it because they don't have any current services to compare it to. Maybe I should frame it as "its the x of chat" where x is some service or product they're familiar with?
GNU Emacs on Windows, but not for any special reason. Help convince me, is XEmacs better?
G-p0wnzor3D
Make Your Ruby/Rails App Fast: Memory Profiling Using ruby-prof and KCachegrind
Adding event to my google calendar... :)
(Note to self: bring lunch as buying lunch last year was really hard because of the huge lines)
It took me forever to figure out that xemacs isn't emacs for X
Marriage turns genius off like a tap.
Air's a great package- We've done a few tests with it, and I like the way it works, with a few caveats.. I'm more interested in the entire process, however.

A lot of YC-like apps would do well as downloads, and I'm curious if anyone has tried.
MacBook SSD may actually be one of the fastest MacBooks
If you want open platforms then don't buy closed platforms.
woah. Nice work Jessica!
Small suggestion: Add geographic location on the name tags so those traveling from afar can network with local hackers. I was really wishing for that last year...
I just scream tones down my phoneline.
Why I Don't Mind Using RSpec - In Fact I've Come to Love It.
I'm fine with that. I just wanted to make sure you had an informed decision :)
If people have other suggestions, tell us here. One thing we'd thought of doing was having different colored dots people could put on their nametags if they were looking for a startup or looking for more people for one...
Damn, California.

And here's me, on the east coast.
Sweet! Jessica pulls through with another great lineup.

Though I admit I'm most looking forward to pg's always entertaining talk.
That's a cool idea.
I'm almost done reading it. It is rather depressing to see all that talent and time go to waste.
http://xkcd.com/378/

The alt-text makes most xkcd cartoons; they're not complete without it.
Awesomeness. Looking forward to it...