skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What's even cooler is his house. It's on an island off New Hampshire, which he claims is it's own nation, separated from the United States (he made a peace treaty with Bush Sr!) It is a huge mansion in the shape of a hexagon, with loads of secret passages and stuff. The first thing you see when you enter is a huge stirling engine (working). It has its own army (the local police force uses his baseball fields), and currency, which is measured in increments of pi. His company (DEKA) builds him intricate presents each year, two years ago they made him a chess player (mechanical)... (added this stuff the the wiki [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dean_Kamen#Personal_life] a while ago).

He also founded FIRST, a robotics competition for high schoolers. I recommend anyone with mechanical experience (includes C programming) to find a local team and join in. They are always looking for adult mentors; www.firstwiki.net
Actually, Spaghetti can be pretty quick if you have enough people to eat it all.

Put some noodles in water over the stove. Grab a can of sauce and put it in another pot on medium.

It really depends on the size, but it could be ready in about 10-15 minutes for a small amount.

If you're entertaining on short notice or limited prep. time it works too. Give yourself about 20 minutes and then you're set for serving yourself and guests!

(Note: Spaghetti done right will take significantly longer. This does not include preparing meat or adding any spices)
Eh, I don't know. You have the guy who thought it up (which seems like the easy job, as someone else surely would have thought of it soon after), the guy who wrote about it in a book, and the guy(s) who made it happen.

Only the third truly impresses me.
In user space? None, but if the processors aren't doing any other work and your threads are the only available runnable threads then they're likely to get run. As cores become more numerous, the problem will be keeping them occupied. That's why Intel and AMD want you to start writing multi-threaded code. NOW! You're making them look bad with all those cores doing nothing. :)
I usually take PG with a grain of salt but he hit the nail on the head with this one. Another phenomenon I've seen when working in larger groups/organizations is the predatory ways developers will pursue the core/api/library work so as to expand their freedom and limit their dependence on others. The essay's comments about the programmer at Google reminded me of this as I've seen it time and time again in my career. Whereas in the smaller groups/companies I've worked, all the developers were responsible for the entire stack. It felt more communal and I think the groups were healthier and more productive.
- An AI that could play GO
- A documentary on trying to create a startup in a highly regulated industry ( like healthcare)
- Educational games to teach math skills ( and not drill style, a game that would teach actual concepts)
- A WikiBook on relationships
- A free university (in person, not online)
there's David Cope's Experiments in Musical Intelligence --- http://arts.ucsc.edu/faculty/cope/mp3page.htm --- where he's playing compositions that some AI wrote which was trained on Bach/Beethoven/et al. last june, i was toying around with the idea of learning a grammar of music on seeqpod, and generating pop songs, or something.
Relevant patent:
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sec...
That, by definition, is distillation. It is remarkably difficult to do properly.
Concurrent Programming in Java by Doug Lea.

(Though do your actual programming in a more powerful language such as MzScheme if you have any choice).
Don't forget to flip the steak to the other side halfway through.
Wubi, is somewhat more flexible than Vmware. The ability to install from image is ridiculously cool.
Ev's Improv: Heat olive oil, throw in a can of white beans, a small can of green chiles, half a can of chopped tomatoes (minus the liquid), a vegetable bouillon cube, curry powder, and black pepper.

(So named because I had to whip this up for Evan Williams when he spoke at YC and we discovered at the last minute he was a vegan. It was better than the official vegetarian dish I'd spent all afternoon cooking. http://www.paulmckellar.com/things/1684-?context=album_42)
Book Review: Gusher of Lies by Robert Bryce
in no particular order:

Myers-Brigs Model for Personality

"Four Steps to the Epiphany" by Steve Blank

John Boyd's OODA Loop as a model for competitive decision making

Decision Analysis techniques: in particular decision trees, expected value of perfect information, and good decision bad outcome

BATNA (best alternative to a negotiated agreement) concept for negotiation planning

"Secrets of Consulting" by Gerald M. Weinberg

"Bionomics" by Michael Rothschild

SimCity computer game

Analysis of Competing Hypotheses methodology

wiki (social process) model for small team collaborative document development

community of practice model for knowledge management

"The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" by Robert Heinlein (in particular TANSTAAFL)

activation energy, catalyst, and phase change concepts from physics/chemistry

Amplify Positive Deviance model from Jerry Sternin (Save the Children)

"The Empowered Manager" by Peter Block, in particular his trust vs. agreement matrix

"Crossing the Chasm" & "Inside the Tornado" by Geoffrey Moore

"Maneuver Warfare Handbook" by William Lind

"Change Your Brain, Change Your Life" by Daniel Amen

"Micromotives and Macrobehavior" by Thomas Schelling

Appreciative Inquiry Techniques
Is anyone here applying to TechStars?
Angels? Sure. VCs? Sure. But Not Both.
Chop up some raw chicken....this one is a winner.
Ideas/books/concepts of George Lakoff and his colleagues. In the same way, Jeff Hawkins. Their approach to cognition as a problem that is comprehensible is incredibly far-reaching.

In a similar vein, the writing and blog of Scott Adams:

http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/

The vast majority of it is humor, and the inspiring pieces are subtle, but they're like a honey bunch of oats in your cereal (except more rare (and with better metaphors than this)).
Refried beans, cheese, sour cream, 'salsa,' tortilla, and a minute in the microwave.
Does apt-get have a Web 2.0 interface? I'm not aware of one.
"Do it right" means as opposed to doing something the way a big corporation would do it (generally design by committee or by apathetic drones). MS is certainly guilty of that, but I wasn't picking on them.
For those interested, A Mathematician's Apology is available online here:

http://www.math.ualberta.ca/~mss/misc/A%20Mathematician's%20...

YouTube links to the first episode of the series "Connections 1" (from 1978):

1/5 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pTbCNycm0nQ

2/5 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tlKykc6ipY4

3/5 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kIVnaq0spdE

4/5 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNPL92tvqhY

5/5 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SnRZ18GpOhg

The rest are on YouTube also, as well as bittorent:

http://thepiratebay.org/tor/4039213/BBC_-_Connections_-__Com...

Depending on whether or not you think paying ~$500 for them would serve "to promote the progress of science and useful arts", you might be legally obliged to buy them on Amazon.
Linux MPX Multi-touch Table May Become Alternative Microsoft Surface
Ah. Is being a condescending prick your primary tenet? Maybe I should be taking notes...
Another solution is to have them share an s3 key and have 'client' nodes write a file like <s3>/private_dir/client.192.168.1.1 a controller node recognises them and issues work.
Inspectd on TechCrunch after only a few days
having anything to do with Calacanis and his gang of slave-labor lackeys is enough to make me want to stay the hell away from you.
Nature's fast food (aka fruit)
i like the no-wash needed like banana, oranges - easy clean up too
considered as vegan food too :D

for cooking:
rice, water, meat, garlic put together in a small rice cooker
use the rice cooker's bowl - no need to transfer food to plates
clean everything in one swoop

oh yeah, you can put raw egg+shell too and peel later ;)
Lisp, SICP, PAIP
I could probably write several pages on this, so I'll try and keep it succinct: much depends on what category you file under. Employment-based Green Cards are filed typically under EB1/2 or 3. Make sure you don't let your employer and the lawyer make all your choices. Do some research.

An EB1 filing is the fastest - but you typically need a PhD or equivalent to qualify. Most other filings are in EB2/EB3 which approximate a MS/BS educational equivalent. EB1s could go as 'fast' as 1-2 years wheras EB2/EB3 could take 3-5 years.

These are typical numbers - counting from the day you file.
I know folks that got it in just over a year in EB2 and folks that are still waiting 6 years after filing. All the best!
Casablanca Software Inc.

http://www.mobygames.com/game/apple2/computer-edition-of-ris...
In the sense that the YC folks explicitly state their hypotheses and have publicly revised some of their guidelines in light of experience (e.g. stressing need for teams, adjusting minimum age range upward) it's more scientific than most of what other VC's disclose.
$55/mo? Here in NY, you'd be lucky to get a Band-Aid for that. The cheapest plan I've seen here is the state-subsidized Healthy NY, which is ~$200/mo for crap coverage.

My girlfriend is going back to school in the fall, and she's facing the decision of what to do about insurance. Seemingly, no reasonable option exists.
" job in sociology,"

lol
No one cares about the idea. In fact we applied with a different idea to snaptalent but it was the team that mattered.

We could change our idea again and be confident of smashing it out the park because our team is super solid, motivated and hell bent on success.
I'm sure it's a good recipe, but I couldn't stop laughing after "soak a cedar plank."
This is a really outstanding quote. I had read William Whyte's "The Organization Man" which deconstructs the same situation from a sociological perspective, but I had overlooked this novel: sometimes there is more truth in fiction.
Someone should take this game global using google maps API.
Maybe I'm confused, but I think the "folders" in Google Docs behave the way you'd like. I can put a doc in one or more folders, and then I can look at the contents of only one folder. And I can have sub-folders. And really the folders are just tags.
The story about the drug-dealing gang in Freakonomics comes to mind.
We look at the founders, if that counts as real world data. We don't look at much else.
aneesh - thanks. i emailed you.
No specific book or article, but for me it's been what I've read about Memetics and Evolutionary Psychology. It's not only enabled me to understand human behavior, including my own, but has influence the way I think about everything from career to diet.
My grandpa giving me "How to win friends and Influence people" in 7th grade.

My Mom teaching me to code in 6th grade.
Isn't that risky? After all, it matters to you whether you are pursuing your own idea. If not, then it's like working for someone else.

So if you can change your idea at any time (or are encouraged to do so), how do you know it would change to something that you have contributed to? Isn't an idea change likely to break up the group?
maybe "Let Our Options Go!" or "The American Semiconductor Industry: Winner or Whiners?" or "An Entrepreneur's View of American Competitiveness"
People who are sleep deprived have no sense of their limitations
You might be able to find it by searching for "tobacco" because one point I remember was that the US government spent money on both subsidies for tobacco growers and anti-smoking campaigns.
Robots. Intelligent, self-sufficient, house-keeping robots. I know, that would be pretty easy to monetize... but it would take me decades to build. (and it'll be done by Trevor Blackwell long before).

so... 2nd option.

A better web.py web site.
I'm not sure this would actually affect my rails app, because we have a seperate and distinct authentication process on accounts (which helps!).

Users register and the information is written into a temporary table. Then user data is copied from that table (and the temporary table doesn't store anything like 'is_admin') into the active user table upon authentication.

Users are automatically not administrators of course, and the setting of an admin flag must be done manually.

Works well for us :)
Save your money and cut your personal burn rate. This takes maximum advantage of your "great salary" in the best way possible. If you are working on a good team in a "pocket of excellence" in a decaying organization either your team will help to revitalize and reverse the situation or you will be overwhelmed by the slow failure of the larger organization. Have a plan now for how you are going to exploit your success (whether in follow on projects with the same team at the firm or in doing something new) and a risk mitigation plan for how you will judge that the project is not going to succeed (or be overwhelmed by the decline of the company). If smart colleagues are leaving your team for better opportunities then it's unlikely the team will succeed. There is a lot of value in seeing a project through to launch (and volume) but you have to be careful to avoid the "monkey trap" of a good salary and the natural inertia of continuing to work on what you've been doing.
1) Write code.

2) Forget to eat.

3) Drink lots of water.

4) take an hour to eat someplace and think about what you're going to do next.

Repeat every 24 hours....
All SlySoft claims to be able to do is break a single BD+ program. There are an infinite number of BD+ programs; BD+ is itself a VM. SlySoft's own press release acknowledges disks they can't "yet" crack, and concedes that future titles will likely set them back to the drawing board.

That dynamic, if sustainable, is a major "victory" for DRM.
Wait, so an old test designed to measure the abilities of young kids not relative to each other, but to see if they pass a certain score in order to know if they should be getting special assistance in school, means nothing when trying to "measure" skills, goals, ambitions, and future chance of success of adults, to each other, as well as individually?
Ok, this is the best one right here!! Take those biscuits that come in the roll,, pop em in a toaster oven with pasta sauce and mozzarella cheese on em: instant mini pizzas!
assuming you aren't taking advantage of corrupt government employees

Bribery happens here less often than you probably think.

I have lived in the US for 47 years and never has anyone confided in me that they bribed an employee of the US government although of course I have read about bribery in the newspapers.

The Feds pay their employees enough to live comfortably, and an employee never knows whether someone offering a bribe is working with the FBI on a sting operation.
Seems like a neat idea excepting that BitTorrent doesn't support changing content that well afaik.
What's with the broken "more" link every few minutes?
Hi guys,

Just wondering... what's the reasoning behind the "more" link breaking down every few minutes?
Missed a 'not'

I've talked with a couple parole officers and they say the same thing. The people they deal with really have to decide for themselves to change, it isn't a matter of changing their environment.
Q: "Other" Startups
So, most of the time here people talk about software startups — no real surprise there — but I'm curious...

Who has some stories about non-software startups they're working on/with/around? Biotech, printing, design, restaurants: it's all fair so long as it's not the regular fare.
This is from talks I've had with parole officers. Often, the prisons can merely act as Criminal U. Coming out it is hard to get a legitimate job, and they've learned more criminal skills while in prison. It's much easier to just go right back into the criminal lifestyle, a vicious cycle.

However, a concern I have with this program is that gang members can bring their criminal connections with them into business. In times of tough competition they may be tempted to use these connections.
I am in the process of writing my book summarizing my own experience in startups. The following chapter talks about success and failures of one of them. Hope it helps.

http://www.lovemytool.com/blog/2007/09/why-startups-fa.html
You just made this thread my all-time HN favorite. Here here!
Taking a look at that link (and then going to the YC main page again) made me realize how cool that lecture hall you guys have is.

Any chance there are some photos around of the "YC Offices" just for the curious?
Tao te ching, Shakespeare, and the pharse "Your will only have 2 friends: your dad and a dollar in your pocket"
I believe YC uses the same criteria that Walmart uses to select its suppliers and vendors.
Or maybe CostCo!!!
One does not need only a mentor; it helps a lot if the person has initiative and can notice patterns themselves that a mentor might never have thought of telling them about. But it does seem true that with a great mentor and lots of practice, many people will achieve greatness regardless of what their "IQ" score might be measured that week.
M0 theory intro http://www.buildfreedom.com/content/reciprocality/r1/intro.h...
http://www.datamodel.co.uk/Reciprocality/www.reciprocality.o...

The idea that folks become addicted to boredom or ritual via
producing dopamine. People have suggested that startups are run
by "mappers" (associative thinkers) then are taken over by packers
(people who like ritual, rote-work).

Many techies are "natural immunes".
Entity-Attribute-Value model
Star Trek, Plays by George Bernard Shaw, Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged, Firefly
It's definitely more stark, but O(N) would have gotten a chuckle from the intended audience and a nod to Randall for getting his complexity right.

But I'm just advocating for the devil...
That was a great article - highlighting everything that was wrong with Segway. I'm totally ordering the book, kind of hidden away at the bottom - http://harvardbusinessonline.hbsp.harvard.edu/b01/en/common/...
No, but in web 3.0 everything will be in visual text-mode, so aptitude is your best bet. ;)
I second robots; but more like "waldoes", generic amplification of
my human capacities, on a bigger-than-me (backhoe), stronger-than-me
(force amplifier to assist my neuromuscular degeneration), or tinyier-than-me (microfabrication) bases. Make them available and plentiful.

A language translation system like Reasoning, Inc's "Refine", but intended to swallow code from ANY language,
including it's
libraries, factor and globally optimize, and emit code in
any other language.
With some tool that points out "routine A" is a not quite complete (errors or
omissions) implementation of "routine B".
Eventually, using the accumulated library of code, produce a goal (constraint) based
language that asks interactive questions, to produce new programs.
Any bio-mass can be converted to oil.
you could use this to successfully and anonymously route packets through a ring of trusted and untrusted peers .
Carl Sagan's Cosmos. I saw it when I was a kid, and didn't realize how big an effect it had had on me until I watched it again a couple of years ago.
revolutionize the fishing industry in Africa
Eggs, chicken breakfast sausage in 2" pieces, some salt, some cheese, frozen stir fry vegetables (everything organic). Pre-heat a pan, mix everything (break the yolks), pour it in the pan and start mixing with a plastic spatula. Takes about 5 minutes, comes down to $2 for a hearty portion and has all basic food types, sans dairy.
XUL is actually not that much harder than HTML. You should learn it, if that's all that's keeping you from doing it.
I understand what they're talking about, but I don't get it - what makes it look so horribly geeky and dorky?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Segway_Polizei_4.jpg

Can someone elucidate?
Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki
Awesome. Love your blog. Can't wait for the book!
That's what I said to myself about HP, Dell, Lenovo until I bought a MBP (Macbook Pro).

It's tough to imagine 'what it could be' unless you actually see it.
You can also get the Desktop Effects (Compiz) to work fine using Wubi. In VMWare, you can't.

I think these types of improvements by Canonical are what make them the popular leader in Linux desktop.
http://www.cypress.com/portal/server.pt?space=CommunityPage&...
I roll my eyes whenever I see something like this ascribed to human nature and evolution. Passing by the post hoc ergo propter hoc nature of the argument, it doesn't allow for human diversity. Humans are very diverse, some of thrive in small bands, and some of us thrive in huge hierarchical organizations. There is no "one" human nature. Look at reproductive strategies: harems, polygamy, polyandry, monogamy, serial monogamy, celibacy, all touted as by one group or another as the one true, natural, reproductive strategy for humans. You could argue that the evolution has best fit us to live in tropical savannas, but the Inuit, Lapps, and Siberians would take it very much amiss if you told them they should abandon the arctic because humans had not evolved to live there. Evolutionary biology does not consist of telling "just so" stories to explain the virtues of your tribe.
everything that was wrong

I don't think that's true. The real problems were:

1) It looked like a medical device--something for cripples.

2) It pretended to be a replacement for cars, but was in fact a replacement for walking and bicycling--both of which are superior and cheaper to scooting around. That miscalculation was why they thought it was "revolutionary".
Nice, I'm assuming you're not one of the founders. But if they're reading this, good stuff!
Another solution to this idea is FreeNet, but it doesn't seem to be catching on as well as the creators had wished:

http://freenetproject.org/
Coding Horror: Paul Graham's Participatory Narcissism
There's more than one way to be corrupt.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/21/nyregion/21immigrant.html?...
I miss the old news.YC :(
Nice. Some of your games use a Go board -- are you planning to implement Go itself at some point?

I develop a Go web app myself in my spare time: http://eidogo.com/. It's more for studying and bot-playing than multi-player, though.

I decided that since I'd probably never make more than a pittance off it, I'll just give it all away for free and open the source. At least it makes for a good resume item to show off my JavaScript chops.
show me a software that can turn "go into my facebook account and pull the pictures that are tagged fun" into a working application. Think what natural language does for search. i want the same thing for programing.
This article actually gave me the best non-programming related startup idea I've ever had. I wrote a blog entry to answer this question, then realized the idea was so good that I might want to hold on to it. Now I'm unsure whether or not to post.
I want to work on two things.

1. Technological improvements for human vision. I have a very special friend who lost vision in one eye because of a detached retina and the failure of ophthalmology to repair it and rewire it to the optic nerve. I want to help her, and other people in the same predicament.

2. Energy. Clean, renewable, highly efficient energy is the most important problem humans have to solve today (IMO). The usual suspects of solar, wind, waves, and "clean" biofuels only make economic sense because of government subsidies, and that situation stinks. We need radically new ideas.
Ask: What interfaces inspire you?
Particular applications, websites, the controls of a jet aircraft, the interface of your tricked out car, musical instruments, complex weapons, simple weapons, control through spoken language -- there are a ton of interfaces out there, which inspire you?

I want to gain a broader knowledge of interfaces that are awesome, innovative, or exceptionally usable. Mostly awesome.
Nope, not a founder, but you can say that I helped them out.
Here Come the Warm Jets; Brian Eno

Godel, Escher, Back, book; Douglas R. Hofstadter