skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
SEARCH..PLEASE..
(not searchyc.com)
note to the developers: this initial prototype has some pretty severe client side glitches in Opera 9.26
http://biographicon.com/view/l966v

There's somebody named Hairy Beaver linked to from a home-page featured profile listing.
This is a fantastic idea.
The NTIS sells this data (SSA death master record) as well... to folks inside and outside the US... 80 million plus records: http://www.ntis.gov/products/pages/ssa-death-master.asp
How do you build a public library in the age of Google?
Ask YC: What would you do?
Background: I'm 25, I am about 4 months from eliminating all my personal debt. I have operating experience in the real estate industry, and I studied biology and engineering in school, focusing on designing, programming, developing three different medical devices from concepts to working prototypes. BTW, I hate programming, but I know how tech can be applied, love crunching numbers, playing with different business models and cashflows, marketing/selling products that solve meaningful problems, and think consumer web apps and most web 2.0 "start ups/businesses" can go to hell. Yes, I am a fan of uncov.

It appears to me that healthcare and real estate are both industries that are ripe for change and have many problems that could really benefit from technology solutions.

I have several ideas for real estate that have generated interest from people willing to pay. Best case, this could end up in a start up or highly profitable company, netting several million in profits in several years time. I have a good team in place, with great software experience, distribution experience, sales experience, and extensive experience in the particular market and problems I am trying to address. In healthcare, I do not have as strong a network, and would probably need to join a start up and get ops experience before I gained sufficient credibility and insights to start a start up of my own. Problem is, I am not particularly fond of the real estate industry, and it is not as sexy as solving anything in healthcare.

Question: Should I take advantage of the immediate opportunities in real estate, or develop myself for a potentially larger set of opportunities (in both personal satisfaction and financial incentive) in healthcare? What other factors would you consider? Having not worked much in healthcare, could it be that I'm suffering from "grass is greener" syndrome?
You're right that startups should be focused on building things that people will want instead of just trying to use cool technology, but you're mistaken in believing that Google wasn't doing that. Google had a strong following of enthusiastic users from very early on. "Make something people want" also happens to be the YC slogan, though I think it should be "Make something people will want", since people don't always know what they want.
NodeBox, OS X app that lets you create 2D visuals (static, animated or interactive) using Python
That's actually not quite true. Over some limit (maybe around 20), upvotes stop counting directly to karma.
A down arrow is a way to punish people who don't do group-think. The best way to bury a lousy story is to up-vote good ones.
Do what you love.

Money is only means to an end, the end being happiness.

If you spend 8 (or 12) hours a day doing something you don't like you won't be happy.
Is this web 3.0?
World's first computer
Almost... Turing never got to complete it in its complete functionality...
Heh, nice.
Good for him.

I'm sure he, like all VCs everywhere, says exactly what he means and would never tell an audience of prospective entrepreneurs what they want to hear just so he doesn't narrow his own investment options in the future.

Not sure what a speach on venture capital funding has to do with creating a successful business based on convincing customers to hand you their money, but I digress ...

Let's say a "business" is defined as "getting a venture capitalist to write you a check."

Try to get him to follow through with cold, hard cash for for, say, a problem you face that nobody else cares about, let alone cares enough to pay for.

For example, go call him up and tell him, "I have this problem: there's this annoying poster on Hacker News called "NSX2" and rather than manually respond to posts he puts up that I disagree with, or, for that matter, rather than respond to any such posters, in a flash of inspiration I created this superb program that summarizes all the key points of my essays into a set of 79, prioritizes their uses as responses, and anticipates what annoying posters are most likely to say based on empirical data I've collected since starting Hacker News and matches their anticipated annoying posts with a point in one of my essays that has the most statistical probability to express what I disagree with and how. Fund me."

Please let me know how that works out for you.
Thanks. Found that very interesting!
Real estate looks to be in a bad spot right now. Health care is only going to grow, with aging baby boomers. Health care seems a lot more like doing something that will leave the world a better place.
I'd like to see a graph of the number of times someone has commented on techcrunch that is the equivalent of "how did this get funding?! no value". I wonder if there are spikes for YC company launches.

Who do these people think they are? Nobody, clearly, as they are usually anonymous.

Remind me to stop reading the comments there.
Thanks, my curiosity about the poker world is now satiated.
Wasn't it this kind of reaction to FooCamp what lead to BarCamp being created? Don't complain about it, fix it. Sure the celebrity component of TED can't be replicated but there are still lots of smart people who can help figure out how to make the world better.
Finding names for your startup
I'm trying to figure out a name for my startup. In two cases, the same has been swiped from me by third party. A name helps provide focus and reason least of which identity. How are people choosing their names and where, what process? I'm at the gallows.
but you can learn OO and functional programming in 4 hours?

Again, I still think, a good writing essay can teach memory management and pointer, and it shouldn't take you more than a couple of hours to finish it, don't underestimate the powers of good writing and expression skills

some authors are really talented and if they know the topic well, can be concise enough, and clear enough to teach you Programming A to Z in few hours!
I can't wait for the web x.0 moniker to die.
Processing has been the Canvas of Choice for Artistic Programming: Introducing Ruby-Processing.
Piffle.

http://www.maxlyons.net/locreadingroom.htm
Another vote for Tcl...
healthcare is definitely ripe for change. but it is one of the hardest industries to solve problems in. the payment system is so complex, the customers aren't the decision makers, and they're not the payers either. so you have to keep lots of people happy.

so don't just go into healthcare because you don't like real estate.
https://www.tdnam.com/trphome.aspx look under closeouts and do a search on expiring auctions.

I have found some really excellent domains in there such as AskShare.com, RealtyGoLive.com, SharedList.com, and ShareCircle.com.
Tcl
Like what was said before, real estate is not doing too well, and if your application would require a high market then it might not work too well. On the other hand, it is entirely possible for someone to make money a few years from now by taking advantage of the low market right now, so it depends what type of market your application would thrive in.

If it were me, and I were only 4 months away from eliminating my personal debt, I would go for the short term gain. I don't know what your financial situation is like in terms of steady income or savings, but if you're still in debt, I wouldn't recommend something that will take longer to pay off it it does at all.
Agreed. Web x.y will offer so many more subtle variations.
Can't anyone who pays the $6000/year membership fee get in?
if i recall the ze frank speech was pretty good, no link sorry.
i remember being part of that 10 CD for a penny thing and i got KLF cd and it was awesome, well worth the month of crappy metal cd's i received afterwards.
Do both. Start a business you understand and start now on educating yourself more deeply on the issues in health care. To me the single largest opportunity in real estate is to move away from the broker model to a fixed fee model with guaranteed service levels. This would allow a focus on productivity and value added service, but my experience is much more limited than yours.

The only place that a market current functions in health care is cosmetic and other elective surgeries. Because the patient pays a number of incentives are aligned that are disjoint in the third party payer (e.g. employer / insurance) model. If you could find another medical practice that patients could pay for, a lot of startup opportunities would flow.

Entrepreneurs work from available means to ends, start with what you know well and work (assuming you have passion for it) and learn more about the aspects of healthcare that energize you.
Works on Mac, Windows and Linux. Using interactive Ruby (via-jirb), you can do Live Coding, redefining your methods and classes as you go.
In two cases, the same has been swiped from me by third party

Are you saying that you had a great idea for a name (domain name I assume) only to find that it's registered moments before you would have registered it, or that it was already registered?

What really bugged me when I was looking for a name was the fact that 90%+ of the domains I thought would be any good were being squatted on by a generic page. Nobody seems to have told these people that you can't expect to get $1,000,000 for a catchy name anymore.
Japanese robots enter daily life
Black Fungus Found in Chernobyl Eats Harmful Radiation
I Need a Virtual Break. No, Really
How do you know what it is you love? (Maybe by asking that question, I don't really know?) How do you go about finding what it is you love to do? On the same token, as long as I'm doing and learning a bunch of new information constantly, I can usually find interesting problems to solve.

Money buys freedom, opportunities, and most importantly time. I don't want to be a slave to my debts and habits, which is why I'll be debt free by age 25. Money certainly is not everything, but it's definitely a factor.
How many blogging platforms are there?
"Not sure what a speach on venture capital funding has to do with creating a successful business based on convincing customers to hand you their money, but I digress ..."

VC's are an integral part of the setup for many startups that go on to become successful businesses. The list includes Google, Cisco, Ebay, and almost all other big tech companies.
Good point.

There's a quote from an eccentric Danish Millionaire that says "Money can buy almost everything, and the things that it can't buy are free anyway"
Perhaps you're aware that these days VCs are exponentially more likely to invest in you if you have paying customers than if you have a solution you think is interesting but nobody else agrees with you enough to pay you for it.

And I think Ebay was actually making money and showing a clear proof of concept before it got funding. Google began during a period of collective insanity; I doubt they'd be able to raise a penny with a similar starting proposition today.

Cisco I have no idea about.

But as for "all others", not sure what you mean but Microsoft, for example, was making money as a private company before getting VC to help with the IPO process, and the terms they got investment on a clear indication of their cash-based negotiating leverage at the time.

Oracle if memory of my reading serves correctly was making money first.

SAP had paying customers ...

When you say, "almost all other big tech companies" started off with VC as a prerequisite, can you specify what you had in mind?
That's cool. Thanks. I realize the name won't make the startup, but it's enough for me to give me direction without deviation from my idea. Network solutions has stolen two of my domains and are now squatting. I'm thinking about raising the issue further if i can.

That's a great link you posted btw. I'm using a perl script now solely to search domain names now through cpan module.
Is it feasible for you to start on the server and wait until it presents a noticeable performance problem(if ever) before going client side? This would be my initial inclination.
I would downvote this but there is no downvote button.
It would be an interesting feature to add to allow other users to see what you upvoted. This way if you upvote something silly they can attack you like wild animals or more hopefully you can see what they like and like it too.
I read this awhile back and it made me wonder why if that fungus could exist here why it doesn't already exist on other planets. The fact that all sorts of crazy life forms are here and nowhere else is interesting.
I'm in healthcare and it's hard. At least here in the UK the NHS is big annd slow. They prefer large vendors like Microsoft and Philips over smaller agile startups. Our users (Doctors, Nurses, Pharmacists) are not our customers (Bean Counters, Management) and that makes getting good products that can help hard to get into the users hands.

But the possibilities for improvement are huge and you will make a real difference to the lives of people which makes getting your product adopted so much of a sweeter victory.

My advice is do what makes you happy, and if possible improves the world in some way.
...the comment section.
Can't you just remove some vowels from a descriptive name? Or is that passé by now? :)
My Introduction to Scrum and Agile
riefly, Scrum is an Agile software development methodology designed to produce higher-quality output that is more responsive to market needs. it is focused on constantly delivering value rather than on meeting a specific date with a pre-determined set of features.
So what if they're smug? We're smug - wasn't it only a little while ago that reddit was excoriating us for being a bunch of smug, elitist bastards? And we replied, "Yeah! That's the point!"
Git post-commit for profit
It was a joke.
Couldn't agree more on the value of yoga. If you have any back problems at all from sitting all day long, spend the money and go to a yoga class once a week. Beyond getting stronger and more flexible, it will make you much more aware of your posture.
Hmmm.. that might be overkill, but I find that just unplugging the ethernet cable when I really need to write something can be helpful.
What I mean is that not all products can be developd using only your own money, and even less can be grown to successful business without taking in money from investors. This is a normal procedure in many startups, where the goal is to grow fast. This requires money, and this money comes from investors.

And if the best search engine we had today was Altavista I don't think it would be a problem for Google to raise money today.
For some reason, content like this makes a periodic appearance every few months.

Because its kinda cool, kinda geeky and with broad appeal: a common denominator. Its been on Reddit many, many times also, for the same reason. There is nothing wrong with that, its an unavoidable characteristic of systems like this (unless you particularly wanted to make an effort to avoid dupes).

Though I agree it could be waaay better executed by someone with enough time and data on their hands. The first time I saw it I really wanted to abstract the idea to a general system into which you simply feed structured historical data, and people can generate custom interactive map-reports. Wonder if there is much of a market for such a thing, it'd be really cool for educational purposes.
Ask YC:  How do you build a community in a single player puzzle/game site?
Do you think it is important to build a community in a single player puzzle/game site to maximize traffic?

If so, how would you do it?
http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=delft+library
Sorry about the brash comment above, it doesn't add value to the discussion.

I just got a bit disillusioned.
"We"? I don't recall saying anything.

People who comment on a site aren't members of some gang. Although it seems that all social news sites are eventually overwhelmed by people who think so.
Self-hosted, custom app built with Django. The admin interface was provided by Django, I just had to make the front-end.

I ended up going the custom route because I really wanted to just hack on my own website.
Zero Hour for India's Tech Companies
Self-hosted: Wordpress on a Rimuhosting VPS that runs betterexplained.com (blog) and instacalc.com (fun little app).

If you're new it may take longer to figure out, but it's a learning experience: basic sysadmin skills are very useful, and setting up a blog is a great way to learn.

Given the amount of customizations I want/need, I need to self host. For a "get my ideas out there" dumping ground, a hosted service works (I have a few anonymous blogs for this purpose).
Mine's self-hosted. I like the full control that I have over templates, plugins, etc. I've made quite a few little tweaks and I'm not sure I'd be able to do that on a site like wordpress.com.
I couldn't agree more. I find I have the highest energy levels when I exercise the most. Before I write an exam, I like to go cycling for 30-40 minutes. It does wonders. My biggest regret right now is that I'm not doing Judo or Brazillian Jiu-Jutsu regularly anymore. Do either of those 2-3 times a week for 2 hours or so each, and you'll feel great.
Check out forumwarz... one way they do it is by having the community build more levels to play. It's an RPG, not a puzzle game, though.
Seems like a legitimate time to use the new polling feature.
No, it's invite-only, and they only invite 1000 people.
Another thing to consider: in the US (assuming you plan to market in the US), 2/3 presidential candidates have proposed variants of socialized health care. The "conservative" candidate is a "maverick", who is not averse to doing similar things.

This doesn't bode well for long term planning. In 4-5 years time, who will the buyers be? Doctors, hospitals, or some American version of NHS? What regulations will you need to satisfy?

If the healthcare system is taken over (in any sense) by the government, expect major rent seeking from various special interest groups. M$ may purchase a "M$ software only" law, or hospital administrators may purchase a "don't let software steal our jobs" law. (Such laws will, of course, go by such names as "Helping Children not Die of Cancer Act").

In short, I'm saying that unless you are a lobbyist, stay away from this market for a few years. Do your real estate thing, come back to healthcare once the market settles down.
I am sorry it kicks its ass because it lets you post a picture?

Do you use twitter?

Posting a picture to twitter goes against what twitter is. Granted it looks good but pownce is designed to share this sort of stuff and twitter is not.
Based just on this info I'd take the real estate route. Healthcare has bureaucratic constraints that make it a tough world for startups-- at least startups that aren't founded by older people with tons of money and connections.
Wasn't the Bombe at Bletchley Park the first?
search at http://www.internic.net/whois you can be sure it wont be stolen if you search there.
Keeping up with the Zenters
http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pxT7jIffmj3lGdXFcn9hK...

The data is highly weighted on certain languages, which is probably to be expected. I'm a bit surprised there are not more Arc, GWT, AIR, or Silverlight based projects going on yet though.
Yet more NIH syndrome, both twitter and pownce.
The speakers don't pay for their ticket, so it's similar to a $6k paycheck, assuming you actually wanted to go to TED.
The bar lengths don't seem to match the numbers.
Many of those (the good and obvious ones) are registered/squatted by now.
What Makes an Expert?
I had assumed the Zenters had written their code in Java when I read that.
Come to think of it, I believe the guys who wrote the most code this past summer were the Anywhere.FMs, who also got bought in the first 6 months. So while I would not want to encourage people to equate LOC with quality, it does seem to be a good sign when founders write a lot of code.
Ask YC: Should I work for a startup?
Here's my dilemma: there's a relatively young startup in the Valley that I think would be a great place to work. I really like the people, the technology, the product and the market. I'm sure I'd have a great time working there and that I would make lasting bonds with my colleagues.

Here's the problem: equity. The offer is just too low: a fraction of a percent. For me to make decent money from this startup (by decent I don't even mean enough to retire, certainly not in the Valley, which would require a few millions) it would have to have an exit of hundreds of millions if not over a billion dollars. These days, very few companies achieve this. I doubt this startup will.

It seems like although the attitudes towards funding and operating startups have changed significantly since the .com bust, the attitude towards equity distribution to employees is still rooted in the delusional .com days. It's just not worth it for a good hacker to join someone else's startup for such little ownership stake. As much as I would like to join them, it just makes much more sense for me to start my own company so I'll have a better chance at cashing out with a reasonable amount of money.

This brings me to the startup risk paradox: working at a startup is riskier for employees than for founders. A founder will do well for himself even if the startup has a modest exit. An employee will only do well at the much less likely event of a fantastic (hunderds of millions) exit. If you're a talented hacker, it's less risky to found a startup than to join one. Sure, you may fail, but if that happens you can always get a job and then try again.

Your thoughts are appreciated.
Well fatigue and exhaustion are different, which I think you was hinting at. You get fatigued from running, but after 5 minutes rest you're able to run again. If you're exhausted from running a marathon, 5 minutes after you've finished running you're lucky if you can stand up again.

I experience this fatigued problem regularly, I go from doing heavy hands on work as an electrician and when there's an ebb in the work I used to do little exercise as I'm used to getting more than enough whilst working. I go from 6 hours sleep to feel completely rested to sleeping 10 hours, on a good day. I also end up being unable to do any writing or any other work.

I recently found an old set of light weights and simply keep them next to me, I do about 100 reps per arm and afterwards I feel completely energised. After a few days I was even back to sleeping 6 hours. It seems odd that doing 20 minutes infrequent exercise through the day, like when I'm stuck on an idea, gave me about 4 hours extra time without feeling fatigued.

So I'd say dig up some old weights or buy a cheap pair of 5lbs and you're sorted. You'll end up with even more time in the day and you'll be more productive. Ironic that the more time you spend exercising, the more time you get back.
TechCrunch Unique Visitors in January
At Xobni I singlehandedly wrote 30,000 lines in three months.

That fucking hurt.

But that sunk cost was my #1 motivator during the first year. I remember telling myself that I had to make this work, because if I didn't then I'd have to start all over again.

There was a point a long time ago where Xobni was very close to dying. PG said to me "Well if xyz happens then Xobni will be dead."

I was hesitant to argue against PG in those days, but I remember saying without hesitation "No, if xyz happens then I'm moving to Texas to live with my parents and eat Ramen noodles for as long as it takes to come back. I will not let this thing die." I couldn't bear the thought of starting over.