skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's ok. Just tell them that you have an awesome "ability to execute" dime-a-dozen ideas. According to their theories, that, the capital they would subsequently invest and their "value-added" should help you all become multi-billionaires. Surely they believe their own talk, so in theory they should gladly put aside their pittance of $500 an hour to share ideas you can execute for them.

Don't forget little people like me when you guys hit the big time.
Even if it only solves the problem with heads of state, that would make it valuable.

Also, if something like this becomes well known, then I would predict many more unknowns would attempt to contact famous people -- way more than famous people would be able to handle in terms of email.
Also, it would be fun if karma were actually good for something.
Shouldn't "Male and called Steve" be an option? As in: among all programmer populations the number of women is roughly equal to the number of men called Steve.
Really well written
In the primaries? That doesn't seem useful...

But with multiple selections in the general election we wouldn't need primaries and would get more centrist presidents.
But have you measured out your life with coffee spoons?
Ask YC: what are those fields in the profile page?
(talking-about '(showdead noprocrast maxvisit minaway))
Actually I taught myself how to program to a limited extent as an undergrad when I needed help from a professor to complete an independent study course and he agreed to help me if I learned enough MatLab and Mathematica to manipulate data as he suggested.

Our computer lab had nothing other than this mammoth book of "examples of code of stuff some people have figured out to do" ... but with no actual explanation of what code did what - just result, and accompanying code.

I learned enough to get what I wanted done.

From that experience I learned that:

(1) I barely have the temperment to review my own code, let alone rework other people's work, so as a career choice it was not for me to be a programmer and

(2) coupled with my economic background I learned that, intellectual stimulation aside, as a practical matter there was no way I could ever teach myself everything I needed to know in a timely manner to do everything myself, so it would be more useful if I could learn to put my ego aside and seek different people with different skills sets and work together to solve problems.

So, from an intellectual point, yes. From a practical point, that would be a waste of time.
That's where the kidding part came in.
http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=p3ZpyEuzg1jyMSQxC-NBM...
Before reading if I've already read the article, if it's from a trusted source, if it's a start-up asking for feedback, if it's news that might lead to an interesting discussion or if it's a AskYC discussion that interests me.
Programming Language Graph
Java tops all...
Frankly I thought most were terrible. Very sterile.
I don't know if I was vague but I was specifically saying that you should immerse yourself in an industry you are interested in and then use technology to solve their problems.
Figure this out and you may have a business.
Just got done with this pretty good book on marketing called "Selling the Invisible" by Beckwith.

Most important thing I got out of it was the points you need to cover to have a complete value proposition to any potential customer; you usually need to cover all points to get people to take their wallets out:

We are (who are you?), and we do (what do you do?) for (who cares what you do? who do you serve?) who need (what special needs do those you serve have that they can't take care of without you?). Unlike our competitors (who are they?), we're different in this way (how so?) and that's important and people care about that because (what's the unique benefit to your difference?).

Pretty simple, but how many startups you think can fill in all those blanks? I'd be willing to bet next week's beer money most people never think it through, from a marketing perspective, past the "who are we" part ... maybe the "what we do" part.
Sure hope you're not too old, because I'm 37! I just decided to leave my academic career in astrophysics and get a "real" job instead, mostly because of the sacrifices academic life demands in terms of relocation (the bad pay doesn't help either...) I've done a lot of coding as part of my research and I hope I have enough skills to land a job. It's a good reality check reading YC news and hearing about all these technologies I have no idea about...
From the beginning I've thought of the Silverlight logo as a radioactive jockstrap.
You're saying about TN status (sometimes referred as TN visa). I was saying about EBGC and H1. Only Canadians and Mexicans can use TN.
Pretty amazing that the gov't programs meant to "support" farmers really is hurting many of them. It must suck to be that farmer, who just wants to grow more vegetables and just gets screwed.
It's interesting there was so much antipathy towards the Vote-Up-If posts. I found them annoying, but I could live with them. Personally, what ruined reddit for me was Ron Paul, politics, and all the 911wasAnInsideJob folks. I could even live with the over-abundance of LOL cats and flicker links. But the overall nuttiness of the site simply turned me off.

Don't get me wrong, I like politics and I personally think Ron Paul has a lot going for him. But I didn't start reading the site for its political bent; I started reading it for the interesting links and the tech stuff. I'd simply like to get my political news elsewhere. With the bastardized reddit, I couldn't get away from politics, even with the introduction of sub-reddits.
A girl on the Internet?

http://xkcd.com/322/
http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html
If you think that's amazing, read about the U.S. farm bill and how it affects farmers around the world. More disquieting is how it affects the U.S. food supply (and as a consequence, our health). There's a reason a Twinkie (or a cheeseburger) is cheaper than an orange (or a salad). Uncle Sam subsidizes the former (sugar and beef respectively) much more. People (like me) are starting to wake up though with the help of popular books, like from Michael Pollan (all excellent). For the first time in a long time this year the farm bill saw some Congressional debate and for good reason. Why pay out millions to treat obesity and diabetes when cheaper food choices are a primary culprit?
Oh man, if I could give out 10 points for a T.S. Eliot reference, I would. Much love to you. The Four Quartets rivals Hamlet in its intricacy and attention to the human condition. And, it's about 1/10 the size! What a bargain!
That's a lot of fancy words for trying to say their products don't look like Google Docs. But I think that's just you overestimating the simplicity of Google Docs and underestimating how dominating Microsoft Office is in the American business landscape.

In the US go apply for an job, an actual job, in a small office and they'll ask you three things: can you type? in Word? when can you start?

They've printed hundreds of books to teach you how to use Office. The main interface of office has stayed relatively the same from 1994, 1998, 2000, 2004, XP and it is by far the standard in small to medium businesses and enterprise. This isn't about style, it's about utility and functionality that people recognize.

And this SaaS strategy is even more fundamentally important because they can now finally achieve their BackOffice dreams started in the 90's. Complete service backend (SQL, Exchange, systems management, ISA, IIS) to power Excel, Acess, and Outlook and charge you globs of money each month for it.
I measure out my life in elevator rides to the 9th floor of the crappy office I work in. That's why I started taking the stairs. Nevertheless, +1 for an T.S. Eliot reference.
Excellent! Unless there's something atypical about the sample of YC.news users late on a Saturday night (e.g., maybe we're a tad older?), I don't think the distribution will change much.
Unfortunately, so far I've seen just the opposite. Other than this one, the comments on most of the polls I've seen (both here and elsewhere, now that I think about it) have just been the poster stating what choice he chose with little else. Even the poll on "When do you upvote an article," which I expected to be very promising discussion-wise, has little going for it after 8 hours.

I think this is a result of the fact that names are no longer associated with votes with the explicit polling system. In more frank terms, people no longer get their burst of vanity from "voting," and thus many replace it by shouting their vote out loud. In previous polls, many would post a more complex response to the prompt in their own words, along with a few thoughts. While we'd get plenty of the '"a," "b," "me too"' comments (glad I'm not the only one to detest those), they'd at least be at the bottom of an interesting thread rather than the top of a shoutfest.
I think he's saying it's like an organically-derived algorithm that meets halfway between "I don't know you so I'm skeptical of your value" and "I may be skeptical but if this many people think it's worthwile, perhaps I'll take a look."

I don't know what famous people you're talking about ... I'm assuming we're leaving out "celebrities" and concentrating on "useful" famous people in business/academia? If so, you'd be surprised at how much correspondence they can have.

Not to mention I'm not sure if you realize how many of the "emails" on things like VC pages are bogus on purpose. Like when they say, "mail your business plans attention "Business Plan Manager" ... that's usually code for "just toss this in the paper shredder.

Here: test this out. Think of 5 famous people and email them something you think surely would catch their attention. See if you can find their real emails and if they bother reading it. Use one of those "verification of opened email" services.

It just doesn't happen that often. If anything it gets sent to an assistant who sends it to another assistant who sends it to the intern who gives it to his little sister who gives it to the cat.

I think this would be a good "idea" if not necessarily one that translates into a business.
For fuck's sake. Shouldn't I have received this as a forward of a forward of a forward of a forward (do I need to go on?) with the subject line CARPE DIEM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Come on guys, aren't we better than this? Can't we transcend cliché?
The statistician in me cringes at the information lost in categorizing a continuous variable.
The silverlight logo is technically rendered differently whenever you install it.

Also, I don't like how they defame Lisa Simpson with raunchy sex acts.
I won't pick out five new ones, but in the past few months I've corresponded with PG, ESR, Bruce Schneier, Randall Munroe, and JD Frazer.
I agree. Python code is generally much easier to read than Ruby, and it's just as succinct.
Um ... I'm not 100% sure, but I suspect what the poster had in mind was a little bit different. I'm thinking perhaps he meant like if you wanted to get in touch with Bill Gates or Larry Page or Steve Jobs or something like that. That's a tad bit different.
Sure is nice to have a rich Ivy League lawyer tell me how unimportant success is and just to be happy with my life.
Yes but how do you know it's worth your time to open and read in the first place? He's suggesting like a "digg" or "reddit" on behalf of those people, ie, "the public" reads your suggested email and vote up those they think is worth it for you as the "famous" person to read.
Single vote polls would be useful here.
PG: how many people voted for more than one?
Thats from a paper called "Potential of Cell processor for scientific computing" .. they quote a figure of 200 gigaflops for single precision GEMM (generalized matrix multiply) for large square matrices (using a simulator?). Assuming their model is very accurate, its actual 200 gflops.
Well, Bill Gates is just about equal to a head-of-state. The other two I'm pretty sure I could pull some strings and get in touch with (off the top of my head, they're each a friend of a friend of a friend), but I'm not about to waste their time for the sake of a social experiment.
You're not spending 50 karma, you're investing it. If your poll gets 51 upvotes, it was worth it.
The current 50 votes were cast by 38 voters, so there
were 12 dishonest votes:

> (let voters (flat (map [_ 2]
(map [(item _) 'votes]
((item 126923) 'parts))))
(list (len voters) (len (dedup voters))))
(50 38)

In particular, many if not all of the votes by people claiming to be 12 and under were fake.
Did you check out Venture Hacks by Naval Ravikant and Nivi - http://www.venturehacks.com
Many very smart people built amazing products in Java (Google, Amazon, Ebay). Calling them drones makes you sound like an amateur.
Many commenters on N.YC were saying that those Zed's posts were 'career suicides' and I guess they were wrong. He did pretty well by spewing hate, I must admit.

Biggest irony is that he's using Rails on his new project even though he said he didn't want anything to do with RoR and 'left' it for Factor.
Why benchmark apples against oranges? Any app that will run well on a PS3 will suck on Azul and vice versa.
I can understand that viewpoint, but porting the whole Linux universe to a new architecture is a much larger job than porting a Java VM.
Colliding galaxies (JPG)
A month ago Obie good-naturedly called Zed out for this here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=98361

To be fair, Zed also said in subsequent interviews that he'd still use Ruby to make money, but he wouldn't use for hobby coding or new, envelope pushing projects.
Right. Case in point. Even though you can get to them through personal connections, you're reluctant to "waste their time." So what about people who can't get to them through 2 degrees of contact. What if they wanted to contact them with an affirmation of the value of their proposals? As in, "I don't know you and I don't want to waste your time, but 83,000 people in this industry think what I have to tell you is important enough for you to drop everything and read."

That in itself is something. Now compare that to the next guy who may be able to say, "That guy's idea is good. But my idea is sooooo good, 210,000 people in the industry think you should read and consider what I have to say."

As someone with limited time, which one, all other things equal, would you open first and which second?

And if the third next idea only had 300 votes and you were pressed for time, you'd skip it most likely, right?
What??? What's this doing here? I was just at Reddit, thank you very much.
The difference between RAID and clustered redundant storage seems arbitrary.

RAID is dead, long live RAID!
So what do you want to address to these famous people? Anything of a personal nature between yourself and a famous person I don't think would get voted up. Like - You, "I have a great idea and want to show it to you Sergey." The crowd does not care about what you want, unless you are the crowd or you and your friends are!
But, if you asked, "How big are your #()! Pamela Anderson," or "Do you feel guilty at night OJ?" then the crowd would be more likely to get involved.
Not a bad idea if you take the sensationalism route, but if are interested in trying to contact a famous person for your own good, then I think the site would be challenged in reaching it's goal.
I am so old.
Well put. While people say dont worry about the business plan, just get your product launched, they really need to look at the overall idea of how the big the market is. Know exactly who you are targeting and how big that target is. Personally, i find the best way to do this is to write a detailed plan out for your teams own benefit. Its worth the time to write your plan out now and make changes before you spend hours on end coding the product, only to change course. But thats the business students perspective for you...
A pithy homily does sell business books. I can't disagree.

But often the answers to these questions are found (or changed) by experimentation. The point of a scrappy startup tends to be that experimentation, not a sophisticated execution of a great idea.

I've read your comments, and while I appreciate your economics perspective, and I do agree that's immature to pretend to be a sophisticated business when really what's being built is a sloppy experiment, it's not going to be well received to attack the focus of this community: experimentation.
My point is that there are very few people on this planet whom I couldn't get in touch with if I had something useful to say to them. The five people I initially listed are people who travel many of the same circles that I do, so it's common that I have comments that are worth their attention (Schneier less so than the others; that was basically just a fan letter that got answered). Somebody like Larry Page is further outside my circle, and correspondingly it would be both harder to get hold of him and less likely that I would have any good reason to. In the most extreme case, it's both seriously doubtful that I'd be able to get in touch with George Bush, and seriously doubtful that I could say anything to him that he wouldn't consider a waste of his time upon hearing it. These are all examples of how the filters that form through organic social interaction are already very efficient. Trying to create some kind of voting mechanism to supersede them is like trying to beat a market economy with a planned one.
Poll: What languages are you using to build your startup?
If you are actively working on a web startup, what technologies/languages are you currently developing with?

This is data I've been interested in capturing for a while now, and figured the new polls are a great chance to do so. Please only vote if you are actually using a particular tech for web development, not simply if you think it is cool or others do. This is mostly off the top of my head, if I missed anything significant just let me know.
Lisp (any other dialect besides Arc)
JavaScript (native, independent of other languages. Can be any framework)
JSP (Struts, Seam, or any other framework utilizing JSP)
"Their most successful records will kick into
the chorus with a line which encapsulates the entire emotional meaning
of the song. This will obviously be used as the title. As soon as
Rick Astley hit the first line of the chorus on his debut single it
was all over - the Number One position was guaranteed:

"I'm never going to give you up"

It says it all. It's what every girl in the land whatever her age
wants to hear her dream man tell her. Then to follow that line with:

"I'm never gonna let you down
I'm never going to fool around or upset you"

GENIUS."

And from Rick Astley, we get Rick-rolled.

Sometimes, I think the stuff in the business of music are mimicked very closely in the startup world. It sometimes mirrors more closely than I'd like to admit.
I've always loved this story. I come back to it every few years (I've been on the Internet since '93, and I've stumbled upon it, or sought it ought, at least a half dozen times). I don't write songs much anymore, but it applies to taste-making in any industry.
Flex / Flash
I vote for an article not because of the article, but for the discussion
to save article for future reading
I've been wondering, since lately, I see about half of the articles on the front page I don't read or if I read, didn't upvote--which leads to me wondering how it made it on the front page. I wondered if it was a difference in taste, or people just upvote based on title.

It seems like people are judicious with their votes.
No, I mean just Google. Apple in my mind...

I'm talking about the actual historical Apple, not the one in your mind. It happened because Steve Wozniak made himself a computer.

http://www.foundersatwork.com/steve-wozniak.html

Microsoft, likewise, began not with "business computer functions" but with a Basic interpreter for the Altair.

Yahoo literally grew out of the list of web sites Jerry and Filo compiled for their own use.

I recommend you read Jessica Livingston's Founders at Work, which is specifically about this subject: what actually happened when famous startups were started? It's a common mistake to underestimate the difference between how a startup began and what it later became.
Biographicon (YC Startup) Wants To Be Wikipedia For The Non-Notable Masses
How a Bubble Stayed Under the Radar ("Information Cascades" vs. "Efficient Markets")
This is news.yc... have you read any of PG's thoughts on the value of ideas?

Here's an idea for bored_dev:
Apparently, some people have a bizarre habit of highlighting the text as they read. Write a script that checks whether a user reads the entire text of, say, an EULA, or maybe an essay...
I'm 24 and I'm here on a Saturday night... I may be at my Ballmer Peak, but I'm here!
I want a way to use Paypal to pay for Google Adwords and/or other sites that don't accept it.
The Art of Verbal Intimidation
Green Building at Stanford Just As Smart As People It Houses
If you like the Wasteland, you'll like this site:
http://world.std.com/~raparker/exploring/thewasteland/explor...
Berkshire Hathaway 2007 Annual Report (PDF)
Matt, by upper percentile in math, where did that place you, i.e. SAT scores, etc? I'm curious whether I have the math chops. Also, is it entirely math and logic, or do you also need a good cold reading ability?
Split the main screen so external links are on the left and internal links (polls, posts) are on the right.
well, the YC app asks at least 2 of these. so anyone who applies to YC thinks about them!

What do you understand about your business that other companies in it just don't get? (how so?)

Who are your competitors, and who might become competitors? Who do you fear most? (who are they?)
Your understanding of Google is not at all accurate.
You want a different and more complicated solution to an already solved problem?
Redditors trying to force ideas down my throat was a turn off for me too.
but only a small percent of startups succeed.

whereas most people with a law degree can be "successful" lawyers.
I upvote (and post) items I think are worthy of the attention of the "Hacker News" users. If something has already made it to the front page then it does no need an upvote (even if it was posted by Joel Spolsky ;)
Randomly select three words, then think about what they mean together and how to turn that into a business. Repeat.
who lied and said he was 12 and under
A big shout out to our feminine and androgynous members! Glad you're with us!
That's an idea - could the vote be summarized in the title?
i can see this becoming very popular, particularly for students in school/college who could very quickly populate it with their circle of friends

one thing: what will happen with people who have the same names?
I'm nowhere near MM's level in poker, but I'll chime in since he hasn't yet. The value of ability to read tells is vastly inflated in the public consciousness. Some bad players have very obvious ones, but at higher levels it just doesn't happen much that anybody picks up anybody else's tells. You read other players by how they bet, not by which way they twitch. Good poker players are good at picking out patterns by induction.
Depending on what you put in the toilet, you select the power of the flushing action. What will people think of next?

Toilets in Europe have had this feature for years.
On a book entitled "Mr Turings Computing Machine"
that feeback button is everywhere!
As you seem to have studied Japanese, how does this compare to Japanese culture? I see many East Asian cultural elements among several points in this thread. Also, how unique is this to Finland? I've heard the Swiss also share this "introvert" quality. And the Germans?
Good question. I don't know - people tend to throw the "racism" term around when really its culture. India is made up of a bazillian races anyway, so clearly it can't technically be racism unless someone intends to slightly a significant percentage of the global gene pool in one hit (which is more comical, then anything).
Microsoft Office Online and Attacking The Innovator’s Dilemma
Hecl, which is built with Java (not JSF or JSP) and Ruby.