skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Wow, I'm glad to see this question be asked here. I don't think you should stop posting as long a the 'fake INSERT FAMOUSNAME' do not begin muddying up threads. You have a lot of readers that could benefit from this community and vice versa although you might create more work for pg and the algorithm :)
Two issues:
1. Browsing the internet deep within a mesh network is painfully slow. In other words, no streaming video in remote Pakistani villages anytime soon.

2. XO represents a trivially small % of worldwide laptop production. This will only take off if a manufacturer can sell mesh software OEM to Dell, HP, etc...
But we are not talking about domain squatting, we talk about how to name a startup.

Maybe I'm wrong, but I assume that when someone picks a name and domain for a startup is because they plan to use it. When would you register a domain then?
ok that made me laugh - kreative :)
Ajax patent to be auctioned
Best $20/month I've ever spent on hosting.

Pros: Root, many distros, great support (was able to change slice size within hours, that may vary but it was fast). The web console, in case of ssh irregularity, is nice.

Cons: none yet, maybe there exist some but I've had no problems so far for about a year or so.
Add the Solid State disk though, and from what I hear, compiling code is extremely fast.

Of course, I could never justify the cost of the SSD today.
I think the best solution to maintaining the quality of a rapidly growing community/vote driven site is restricting the flow of new users by providing disincentives. Metafilter (for example) has a $5 sign up fee.

Requiring a small karma minimum before allowing users to vote on posts & comments, or submit new posts could work well. This way new users can only influence the community by engaging with it, which would filter out votes from casual users and trolls, while also giving new users a chance to grasp the community norms though participation.

Other approaches like vote-weighting and down-voting ignore the root of the problem, which is dilution of the community and its norms.
Largest WiMax network in the world !!
I think domains like these were important in web1.0 era. But who has ever gone to business.com. Who cares about it? It sounds old and boring. I'd be surprised if the number of people going to domains like perfume.com is increasing...
If you look at alexa rank over 5 years it seems to have hit it's peak a while ago. Same with business.com.

I think techcrunch was simply meaning the domain business is likely a shrinking market, and not a new and exciting growing market.

Having said that, there's plenty of money to be made.
Congrats on the sale :)
I suppose this means the Auctomatics aren't aiming for eBay anymore? Acquisition is nice, but repositioning for domain trade isn't that slick of a score for the hackers.
A lot of the biz types would be surprised at how truly unoriginal their "ideas" are. It takes deep technical insight to come up with something truly groundbreaking.

I would rather talk about the opposite case: i.e. A hacker has a brilliant technology idea and needs to find a business person with the connections, sales skills, finance skills, channel knowledge (and at least some technical understanding) to make it commercially viable. That seems like a harder problem... your fresh out of college MBA guy might not be the right fit.
What an interesting reference! Thank you, Jeff. I'm surprised I never heard of it. It seems so full of common sense that I think it's definitely worth a read.

I especially liked these two:

25. Missing requirements are the hardest requirements errors to correct.

42. Enhancements represent roughly 60 percent of maintenance costs.

If an "enhancement" is the result of "missing requirements", then is it really an enhancement at all? My experience is that 90% of "maintenance" was the direct result of poor or incomplete analysis. Let's not forget that "software engineering" includes all phases, not just development.
Ask YC: Dealing with post startup depression
Hi, I recently shut down my first startup ever. I am having a really tough time getting over it and starting all over again. A feeling of extreme weakness and failure has taken all over me , clouding my judgement. Any tips on getting back to normalcy would be highly appreciated.
they pop out thinking, talking, and building companies in a way that is remarkably similar to the way that PG would

Hmm. I'm all in favor of what YC is doing, but this makes me decidedly uneasy.

Groups with a charismatic leader have a tendency to devolve into personality cults. In my experience, to avoid this requires conscious, ongoing effort on the part of the leader (and enough of the followers) to stay aware of such tendencies and counteract them. First and foremost that means staying aware of these tendencies in oneself.

I don't mean to be harsh on the author of the post. I don't think he was being cultish, just enthusiastic, and that's good. But the risk is a very real one. It would be wise to alloy that enthusiasm with something else.
Sure, the big moments of serendipity for me are the ones tied to geographic proximity. When a friend says they're hitting the Shake Shack ( http://shakeshack.com ) in 15 minutes, I can show up and join them, or vice versa. I don't want to email or IM all my friends everytime I'm going somewhere, but if I Twitter the message, I know I'm spreading the word without spamming people.
It was probably left in for better performance. Glad I could help.
When you put it like that, PG sounds like John Galt.
Adding a link to your list of favorites should be functionally separated from the public voting system.

There should also be some way to eliminate the votes of individuals whom you have personally black-listed .

Thus, you could toggle between the public view of the main news page with all votes counted versus the personalized view which takes your preferences into account.

Or you could allow votes from only those you have personally white-listed.
During some crunch times, I've told our business analysts that it's not a bug if they have to write a requirement for it (the bug) :)

And, in an ideal world, requirements would be stable before coding starts. We make the best of what we can work with. Cost, quality, functionality - the classic triangle - you can't impact/maximize one of those three without affecting the others
The MacBook Air is wonderful for some people.

If you travel a lot, you care about size and weight more than normal people. If you're like me and 95% of your time is spent in vim and Firefox, you probably don't care about speed all that much.

Every product does not have to be all things to all people and the MacBook Air is a niche product.
I was thinking my site, testomatix.com, was going to escape unscathed until you got to the ix's, only to find out ix is "the new rama." Argh. Nice post, though. :-)
For things as simple as simple Bayesian filters, I'd agree. But I wouldn't be surprised if a sufficiently advanced filter is indistinguishable from intelligence. Otherwise, you could make the argument: "It is an easy mistake to believe that things as simple as neurons can emulate intelligence. It requires intelligence to determine whether someone else is intelligent or not, not a bunch of firing thresholds."
I don't agree with Paul's argument as to why others won't feel the pinch:
"The restrictiveness of big company jobs is particularly hard on programmers, because the essence of programming is to build new things. Sales people make much the same pitches every day; support people answer much the same questions; but once you've written a piece of code you don't need to write it again. So a programmer working as programmers are meant to is always making new things. And when you're part of an organization whose structure gives each person freedom in inverse proportion to the size of the tree, you're going to face resistance when you do something new."
I don't agree with this characterization of programmers as more creative than others. It is true that you never <span style="font-style:italic;">have</span> to write the same code again (though how many times have you written authentication or a wrapper around an authentication class) but that doesn't mean that everything you write flows out of a brand new non-linear creative endeavour any more than a sales person's pitch is entirely new. Sales people sell services that have never existed (and then they get engineers to code this selling process into an online flow and move on to selling new stuff). Support folks get entirely new questions all the time (and then get engineers to code a system for responding to the easy stuff in an automated way). These folks that Paul singles out as being less restricted (or less "meant" to create) do all sorts of breathtaking new things too. I've seen support folks handle a very angry person with an issue with a brand new type of product by creating solution to the user's problem and explaining it in a way that is brilliant. I've seen sales folk come up with entirely new types of business arrangements or finding an elegant "in" to a relationship. It is certainly true that both of these groups do a bunch of work that is less creative, but so do engineers, even at startups (gasp!). These are the things that follow the creative move, things like debugging, unit testing, perfecting UI, etc. A good startup as well as a good big company, will value creation (and the stuff after the creation) in all of its people, not just the ones that are from Paul's chosen tribe.
More at: http://www.bricoleur.org/2008/03/graham-dont-work-for-compan...
IBM Invests In MySQL/Oracle Competitor
City-Provided Wi-Fi Rejected Over "Health Concerns"
I found these two rather odd:

7. Software developers talk a lot about tools, but seldom use them.

30. COBOL is a very bad language, but all the others are so much worse.

Number 7 just doesn't match my experience. But I am an N of 1. I don't know what to make of 30 at all.

And this one made me think the book was rather old (which doesn't mean out of date necessarily):

53. High-order language code can be about 90 percent as efficient as comparable assembler code.

I just wonder what he means by higher-order? In this context, probably C.
Incrementalism and The New New Thing
Best comment:

One minor addition to that: Cloak (the JVM in CL) also runs ABCL, for maximum silly recursiveness: http://paste.lisp.org/display/2096
Aside from the more obvious prior art like FTP, for example, the sale of a patent seems counter to the spirit of the a healthy patent system. It's hard to take the current system seriously at all.
Here's a rather poor writeup of communicate.com's stock: http://blog.valueinvestingcongress.com/2008/01/04/a-diamond-...
The best way to get over your fear is to practice. Start form smaller groups and work your way up. Eventually the fear goes away and you can turn that fear into positive energy when you are on stage.

I am the president of MIT speech club where members give speeches and participate in impromptu speaking. We meet Tuesdays at 6 pm in room 2-105. Feel free to email me at mpresh@gmail.com or just show up.

Looking forward to you joining us.

Best,
-Mike
In all seriousness, take a break. It doesn't have to be for a long time, just enough to refresh your mental outlook. Travel a bit, even just to visit a friend in a fun city or somewhere to enjoy the outdoors. Get away from your computer. Be patient. Allow yourself to be human.
charging $1-$2 would help by cutting out the noise he receives, much like the listing fees on eBay stop spammers.
the best scorers in basketball have whats called shooters amnesia. They don't think about the shot they just missed. It isnt part of their reality. Focus on the next thing. don't tie your self esteem to your last shot
makes sense to me, and it seems right by set-theory too. Take this all with a grain of salt, though, because it's been a while since I was taught set-theory, but here's my stab at it:

there is an intersection between '(a a) and '(a b); the element 'a. Thus, the union would be the set of things inside the intersection --- 'a --- and the parts outside it --- 'b.

With the second union, there is no intersection, so the union is merely the set of things not in the intersection, which is the original sets, resulting in '(a a b). There is no relation defined in the union operation between those things not in the intersection, so they remain in the union set.
It’s official: Microsoft’s concerned about GNU/Linux
FotoFlexer Tries To Take On Picnik With a New Look
Why do you want to become better at speaking?

The better public speakers I have known have always had a desire to communicate their message/their story. Even when their public speaking skills were poor. The passion/intention always came before.

Toastmasters changed my life because it made me realize that you can become good at something if you have a simmering desire to become better. I stumbled upon toastmasters in a period of workaholism, and diving into TM allowed me to work towards something non-work-specific-related but broader. And saved me from burning out in my job.

I believe you can only improve by doing and by getting feedback on how to improve. Toastmasters is all about giving you honest feedback on how to improve. After you give a speech, you get honest, handwritten feedback (a Toastmasters standard) from a formal evaluator and from some of the audience members. The value of that is immense. A team of people who want you to get better but at the same time don't want to cut you down to the root (while you are still developing).

Toastmasters is an excellent environment for learning public speaking. Because you have to eventually face your fear and do speech #1 (The Icebreaker). You can only learn by doing. You're going to fall down, stumble umm/ahh but we're there to catch that and support you. The fact that most of your fellow Toastmaster attendees have no tie other than you're all there for public speaking experience - there is no office politics (unless of course, you're in your company club - which I do not recommend - go somewhere else).

If you're not ready for Toastmasters, try asking a question in a public forum. Like at a Q&A after a lecture. Then, if you feel you're still not ready for Toastmasters, just go to a meeting. You don't have to participate. Just observe and watch.
Woot! Congrats, guys.

I had a hunch you'd do well. It's a field ripe for the picking. Ebay has a lot of customers, and their interface leaves a little to be desired, and their API really looks pretty decent. Good job.
http://www.rubinghscience.org/memetics/dawkinsmemes.html
I know one guy who got an offer from Google but chose to stay in CERN, so obviously he must like it. On the other hand, some of the stories he tells are not very reassuring. For example, someone recently decided that CERN would be a Microsoft-only shop, to the extent that the NNTP server news.cern.ch has been shut down because MS doesn't sell NNTP servers. However--this is sweet--the department where my friend works writes software that actually operates the detectors in the colliders, so it has to work so their department is exempt and they're still using Unix (Linux and LynxOS.) Another guy I know had to implement web applications using Oracle cartridges. Also, some say there's a lot of nasty politics going on there, my friend's wife quit CERN because of that. My guess is this also depends on the department.
I agree. Go somewhere different for a bit, and try to just wipe your brain.
No. It's not a bad community to pick up readers/users from. And, people are pretty quick to down-mod ugly comments here. Thanks for asking, though. It means a lot.
Go PostgreSQL!

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=109120
Ignore this. The best thing you can do to attract VCs and raise capital is launch a service and begin engaging your users in the marketplace. There is no substitute for real traction.
depends on what you consider "normalcy".

i'd consider trying to get a corporate job. being bossed around, having structure and timelines, and not innovating much will fill your brain with ideas and have you itching for a startup in no time.

edited to add:
i'd also consider trying to find a job in another field if you have the skill set or the means to potentially take a lower-paying job. taking a break from the tech sector could definitely re-energize you.
Who is John Galt? ;)
I was one of the first people to buy a MBA and I love it for what I use it for. If I was doing video editing or intensive photoshop work it would definitely not be my choice, but its absolutely perfect for what I need - a truly portable machine that is powerful enough to let me do my job. Indeed, I have been pleasantly surprised with how I've not missed the multiple ports and have only needed to use the DVD drive twice (I purchased the external). After using this machine I've gone back to my MacBook Pro (15") a couple of times and I know that I made the right choice now for a PORTABLE machine.
I didn't go for the SSD and the performance is fine for me.
Congrats--you got one under your belt. Take a break. Then analyze it, learn from it, and iterate. Figure out why it failed, and avoid that trap the next time. Deliberate Practice makes perfect:

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2006/...
A healthier and more legal approach is to auction the resulting IP to an individual or a small group out of the participating people and divide the proceeds among the rest of the participants.

You can't afford to maintain 100 employees in a startup, and it is foolish to have 100 equal stock holders in a startup, every decision will take months. But if you auction the IP, the person or group with the most faith and ability to further the startup will buy it from the rest of the participants and the rest will have had fun and gotten some financial restitution for their work.
http://www.centraldesktop.com uses PostgreSQL
Rick Astley on Rickrolling
I'm not surprised to see MSFT include an entry about open source in their 10-K form. They're required to include a listing of risks to the business. Businesses tend to enumerate any and all conceivable risks in the document so as to not be accused of hiding information if something not listed hurts the company.

I do find it amusing that the risk they list is that the popularization of open-source software may force them to lower their prices (and therefore margins) in order to compete.

Funny, I thought that was the point of capitalism and free markets?
The Sage
I don't know, but YouTube probably can't hire moderators for the comments, because then they would implicitly acknowledge that they CAN moderate stuff, and thereby open themselves up for lawsuits about posting copyrighted material.
So if you're an engineer with an MBA, it's a wash? Little known fact is that originally the MBA program was specifically designed for engineers. It was supposed to address the needs of engineers who were rising the management ranks. I know when I did mine, I generally looked down on the people who did their undergrads in business (why exactly are you taking the same courses again?).
China's new intelligentsia
What are the most popular web apps according to Friend Feed usage?
Actually, I take back my statement that this is not set-theoretic union.

If I'm willing to accept '(a a) as representing the set '(a) when I use it as an input to union, I should be just as willing to accept '(a a b) as representing the set '(a b) when I receive it back from union.
A RDBMS that tries to take being relational seriously, instead of trying to be a fast filesystem with an SQL-like command syntax? Really? Gosh.
What would YC be like if only YC founders (and "famous people") can comment/vote, or their votes count as 10x of everyone else?
Learn and grow from the experience. Having to close up shop is like breaking up with your girlfriend. Get over her, but also learn from the things you did wrong. Give it some time, take a sabbatical.

Don't go burying your head in a carton of Breyer's though.
Don't run away! I am in your shoes right now. Yes, I had to shut down too. But, it has been the greatest growth I have ever made. Why? because you have to " 'real'ize" that no matter where you go or who you talk to, the depression is in yourself, not out there. If I were you, I'd focus on what to do right now with your feelings, not the next big thing quite yet. You have to live with what depression means to find normalcy, otherwise it will be a background process throughout whatever you may do, thereby hurting you more.

I'd like you to ask yourself one question, what is your definition of success? Remember, if you had a blast doing what you did, then there is no point in regret. Hey, if you had a miserable time doing whatever it is you did, it's great now that you are out of it.

Bottom line: learn to live with yourself, everything else will fall in place.
Interesting to contrast with this (top of Hacker News at this moment):

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/03/26/communicate-acquires-y-...

In Japan, URLs are on the way out, while a U.S. company who's main asset is a bunch of domain names are buying a YCombinator start-up to further monetize them.

EDIT: I can't believe I just used "monetize" un-ironically in a sentence.
Get some exercise and take care of yourself (probably in ways you neglected while doing the startup). When you can internalize the fact that failure is not a bad thing (as long as you learn from it), it will become easier to deal with.

Finally, be proud of the fact that you ventured out and took some risks. Life isn't meant to be spent hiding from potential failures.
Good idea. Exercise is another thing to do now that you have some extra time.
Take time to reflect, Figure out what gaps you need to fill and then launch another startup. Remember, you only have to get it right once!
Closer to the truth than you realize. The writings of both Paul Graham and Ayn Rand are successful because they clearly articulate what a large preexisting minority is already vaguely thinking, so the writing ends up becoming a rallying point for kindred minds to find each other. You can see what a powerful force this is in Rand's case, as it made her successful despite her atrocious fiction.

I was reading a thread in an Objectivist forum once where someone had posted a link to an online Myers-Briggs personality test. Out of 16 types, 90% of the members were the same one: INTJ. Personality is the major determinate of philosophy. I know I enjoy reading PG's essays because it's like reading an older, more experienced version of myself.
Sorry to hear that things didn't work out.

The thoughts from others on taking some time off, getting into a different head-space are very good. Getting some exercise, seeing some shows, travel, eating some decent food, all good ideas if you have the cash for them.

If I spend too many days in front of the computer, I start to go stir crazy. I've had to force myself to stop and pick up some genre fiction and history books that I used to enjoy reading recently.
Best Places to Launch a Business
It's funny -- I've been here for about a year, maybe more. How did I discover it? Digg, or maybe reddit. One of Paul's essays got dugg. Ironic in a way, I think.
Mathematicians find new solutions to an ancient puzzle
(FuseCal Developer) Bookmarklet on the way. We have had a ton of folks ask us for email integration so it's definitely on our horizon.
It's good to see Postgres get some financial loving. It's my preferred open-source DB. I like the features, performance, and cleanliness when compared to MySQL.

I think the name change from "EnterpriseDB Postgres" to "Postgres Plus" and "Postgres Plus Advanced Server" is a great idea. It gets the name "Postgres" in a more prominent position and conveys the idea of their commercial product as a step up from the freely available one.
I agree that forums and sites like this have a lifespan. They don't die outright, but they become less and less useful/interesting as they grow and age. Techcrunch almost certainly reduced the useful life of news.yc, so I would have prefered it not happened. But how much did it reduce the lifespan by? Probably not that much, I suppose.