skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
YouTube.

'But the executive team made up for nonmastery of details with unwavering vision, which inspired the troops. At his San Bruno, Calif., office, YouTube CEO Hurley remembers his PayPal days as an education in business. When he arrived in California with a degree in art from Indiana University of Pennsylvania, building a successful company seemed like something other people did.

"You never think it could happen to you," says Hurley. "But seeing Peter and Max and the guys come up with ideas and seeing how to make things work gave me a lot of insight. You may not have a business degree, but you see how to put the process into effect. The experience helped me realize the payoff of being involved in a startup."'

The PayPal mafia
http://tinyurl.com/2gsxte
i'm a web dev with lots of time on my hands... problem is, no ideas to apply to it!
Results of these polls are already skewed because the respondents are self-selected.
This subthread is an example of the ratio getting higher.
e) The article is deserving of an upvote AND I'd like it committed to my list saved articles.
I think you mean lower.
You're right - but that's a problem that can't really be solved, unless we start hijacking unsuspecting random people to answer.

:-)
Inspirational article, and it hits home on many levels. I remember loving math at 12, kicking major ass in geometry. But as I grew older, I didn't seem to pick it up. I wasted time in high school, and failed Pre-Calculus at Uni, but I now realize 2 things:

1 - Math is rarely taught well. The "ax2+bx+c=0" approach to teaching quadratic equations is rubbish. I never understood what it was they were trying to solve until a few months ago I was at the library and read a book on the history of mathematics. It became crystal clear. IIRC, the Indians used quadratics to make sure that they could increase the size of their altars without losing the proportions.

2 - Many people who get good grades in Math don't get it at a fundamental level. Sure, they can regurgitate the rules of logarithms, and solve worksheet questions that follow a specific pattern, but outside of that, they're sitting ducks. I've asked several people why ax2+bx+c=0. Why doesn't it equal 37? Or 3.456? None of them have a clue. I realize that this logic can be applied to me if someone asked me about branch prediction or out-of-order execution, but I think the logic holds.

I've also realized that I use ratio to solve many problems. I remember in my year at Uni, we were given a problem to solve in electronics class. I realized the answer immediately, knowing that 1 amp is = to 1 volt applied across a resistance of one ohm by definition. The 'math genius' in the class struggled.

I've always believed that those who have a natural talent for programming also have a natural talent for math. It's just not taught well. Me, I've convinced myself that I have the latent ability, it'll just require me to learn it on my own terms, instead of a formula-based approach. In the same history of math book, they showed the history of place value, and it made so much sense. The same approach we take to crafting algorithms can be used to find the solution to math problems. Again, great article. Gotta love YC.

PS. I just noticed that when you enclose text in *s, it gets displayed in italics. Nice one, PG

PPS. Actually, I can speculate about branch prediction and OOE. But that's for another time.
I've never liked online polls. They're intensely unscientific, suffering from all the biases that trained sociologists battle every single day, with no attempt to correct for them. And they're easily manipulated, both by the questioner and by the respondents and their claques.

Humanity already has enough noise, nonsense, and astroturf masquerading as data; the last thing we need is more of it.
Poker People (Matt Maroon)
I think you'd have to weight the number of votes cast to ensure polls are fairly upvoted. Promoting based solely on the vote count may skew the main page.
That comment doesn't pick up on how much of an impact the low quality of the data has on the outcomes. For instance the commentator points out that there should be a larger difference between the average IQ's of Hong Kong and mainland China, given China's massive peasant population. However, the wikipedia page points out that the Chinese rural population was never tested, and that the differences in scores was artificially added by the authors:

"For People's Republic of China, the authors used a figure of 109.4 for Shanghai and adjusted it down by an arbitrary 6 points because they believed the average across China's rural areas was probably less than that in Shanghai. Another figure from a study done in Beijing was not adjusted downwards. Those two studies formed the resultant score for China (PRC).
Question: Resources for online advertising.
Hey all,

I'm trying to learn all about the world of online advertising. I've read the wikipedia articles and all other blog, etc. articles I can find on the subject, but no resource I've found provides a comprehensive in depth look into everything about web ads.

Have you come across any valuable resource, be it web page, book, etc.?

Thanks.
"uh-oh" should be "Oh, no!"
In the very limited field of dinky web calendars and todo lists, maybe, but not in the startup world in general.
It might hinder you in terms of funding in the startup world. A lot of people say "dont fund anyone over 30" and mean it. I'm not sure if there's any merit to that philosophy at all (probably a little) but it definitely exists.

Other than that, neither compilers nor users know or care how old you are. Make something people want and you'll be fine.
Find a good way to have an asynchronous feed back from a web server to a web client, a true general purpose "push" protocol as an extension of HTTP. Hey you can even call it HTTP2W or HTTP2HTTP. Of course you'll have to come up with not only the protocol definition but also a reference implementation for both the client and the server. Sounds like fun, eh?
here's one: user generated content is hot. games are fun. turn a game into content creation or content creation into a game.
That's absurd. If they have to be that strongly discouraged, they shouldn't exist at all.
f) The article is something that belongs on hn & i like it
The China Syndrome followed closely by the TMI incident, the wastes problem was never satisfactorily solved either.
i often wonder why there isn't a "articles i've clicked on" section on the front page of so i can vote when i return
Sounds like it will be impossible to make money.
A good way to come up with new ideas is live outside the tech world. Get a non-tech job in a totally different field. Haven't tried that myself, but I'd bet you'd come up with some good ideas that way.
"Nobody knows how to build really complicated hardware systems, so designing hardware tends to be simpler. Software is much more complicated."

For those of you who, like me, have wondered how processors and other complex hardware are so reliable, while software is disgraceful, he's probably got the answer.

"Sometimes I think that the goals people are trying to reach are just too much to ask for. Programmers often lose sight of the fact that the problems in building software systems arise because what they are trying to do is just too hard. They believe the computer is a universal engine that can do anything. It’s very easy to be seduced into the proposition that a group of one or five or ten or fifty or a thousand programmers can make the computer do anything. That’s clearly not right."

Interesting...
Where do you live?
You may be right. But even if the results were worthless they could still set off interesting conversations. And the fact is, people already were doing polls, via various awkward hacks. When your users keep walking through a hole in the wall you should probably make a door there.
What do you wish someone else would build for you?
BTW ... let's say you get the help you want. Do you offer anything in return?
Already exists:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_%28programming%29
... be with the 'in' kids
i have to swim over an ocean to do that, but i do think that for a long time after the transformation from hunter/gatherering to farming a lifespan of 65 was quite rare.and a leap from hunter/gathering to industrialization is a lot to ask(:
if their chances of being 65 had been that great here in europe do you really think they would have taken their chances in those ships(to reach america)?
IN GENERAL this is a great frame of mind to come up with ideas for a non-programming mind; I think, however, that as a developer such a perspective would lead to technically interesting stuff that few people would use / pay for. As time remains constant and life becomes more complicated, I suspect people will become more selective and use more of the kinds of services they would actually bother paying for and limiting their interactions with things that are interesting, but not enough if they actually cost something. That said, most non-programmers usually start the "what would I want built for me" process from the perspective of "that would be so useful that I might even consider paying for it" whereas, from my experience with programmers (trying to recruit for my own startup efforts), most programmers start the "what would I wish someone built" process from the perspective of "that I would respect this guy's technical ability a lot."

Case in point: there are tons of ideas that can become good, useful, practical valuable services based on standard, already existing technology reconfigured in different ways. But most programmers, if they're anything like the ones I've come across, would consider that "below them" and instead favor a startup working on some obscure problem that 6 people on the planet could understand and appreciate.

Google aside, that rarely translates into "great business".
Bundled startup companies. Offer a Limited company with matching domain name and web-2.0-ey logo/trademark on the holding page. Your customers will get an instant web presence they can start coding into. Perhaps having an operational online payment system in that companies name would be good value for money.
Could we have a permanent thread dedicated to this question?
"they shouldn't exist at all."

I think this version works much better.
Feature request: Allow author to make choices exclusive or multi-response. By that I mean, some polls

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=126903

are designed to allow voters to vote on multiple choices. While others:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=126923

should only allow for a singular response.
is there an interactive-computer-help system going already? Punters pay per minute of help. They are matched with a nerd somewhere who can view their screen, offer advice (voip) or help using a remote desktop.
Come on, there must be at least one female in here.

Edit: Looks like we found one.
My Forbidden Fruits (and Vegetables)
It sounds like you're in a mental rut at the moment. To get out of it, you will need to put aside the problem of 'finding your next startup' and focus your attention on other things for a while. Teaching yourself a new technology or working for someone else's startup for a while might give you enough of a different perspective to make more progress on finding a startup idea.
It would be empty. The second somebody with technical ability came up with an idea, they'd think, "Hey, why don't I just build that myself?"

If someone without the ability to develop the idea had a good idea, they'd wonder why they should do the idea-thinking for programmers who'll then dismiss the idea-generation with some VC-inspired platitude about how "it's all about the execution" or something.

So there you go. Progress halted by the best of the human condition: arrogance, greed and suspicion of the "other."

On the other hand I've always thought that if you get people who normally would never talk to each other in everyday society together and got them drunk, tons of good exchanges would occur resulting in who knows how many great new companies.

Sigh ... dreams ...
Thanks, I'm aware of Comet. Not exactly what I meant, in Comet the connection stays open after being initiated by the client. I'm looking for something where the interaction is first client-to-server, then client registers a "callback" address and port that it will listen to. This would be followed by a server-to-client call where the server will send updates/events to client as they happen, the client then decides what to do with those events. I want to avoid a persistent connection, and either the "heartbeat" client requests or other forms of polling by the client. The interaction that I'm looking for is more akin to a P2P sort of model.
The Python community has the advantage of being older. The fanboys (if there were any) have moved on or calmed down. The libraries and documentation have had more time to be beefed up. A few years can make a lot of difference.
I fully agree with you. Polling would only be interesting if in addition to answering the poll the users would post comments. I like the overview of the different votes at the top of the thread that the polling feature provides but I think there should only be 2 ways of voting:

1. vote only when you add a comment by specifying your vote in addition to the comment

2. upmodding someone's vote/comment automatically adds a vote from you for the same choice

We need to keep in mind that a benefit of polls is that the folks answering can answer without worrying about loosing karma if they vote for the least popular choice. But we need to balance this with the fact that readers of the site don't gain much from just reading the numbers of a poll.
Google aside, that rarely translates into "great business".

I think you mean Google, Apple, Microsoft, Yahoo aside.
Join another startup for a while? I think its almost a huge strength to want to work on startups but to not currently have an idea. There are tons of guys out there with good ideas needing co-founders. A few people in the current batch of YC included.
vote in stupid polls
Am I the only one who thinks of fallopian tubes and vaginas when I see the Silverlight logo?

The Xerox and Compaq logos suck but the Olympics logo is the worst of all; the British public is not happy with it. See, e.g., http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/london/6729611.st...
Throw in Intel, AT&T, and all the early transistor companies for good measure.
Seconded -- there are plenty of godawful Java jobs out there, none of which you likely want. (Unless it's just another tool used for certain libraries in certain applications)

PHP isn't nearly as bad as it's made out to be, especially PHP5. It has a horrible reputation due to some very bad design 'decisions' made early on, but it has got a lot better.

I was talking with some of the core devs on #drupal last night and plenty of them are well aware of RoR and its utility -- web applications are very easy to write and deploy in Rails, but a big modular CMS like Drupal takes a lot of work to do it right. It's iterative, it benefits from a network effect in terms of modules, and frankly it kicks the shit out of Radiant, Bricolage, and any other solution I've used (including hand-rolled jobbies) for that particular problem. So, right tool for the job... it's surprising to me that 'Drupal developers can write their own ticket' because it's actually very easy to use and code to.

Ruby and Rails are beginning to (unjustly IMHO) get the same sort of scrutiny simply because bad programmers can use them to quickly create dogshit. It's not the fault of the language, not unless you're using it for the wrong purpose.

Python never seems to have got popular enough to attract morons, and thus continues to chug merrily along at Google and elsewhere. The last day I wrote something interesting in Perl was the first day I ported something interesting to Python. I never really looked at Perl the same way again. It has some truly horrific design decisions that can make it easier to write horrible ugly code than to write good code.

But, again -- tis a poor craftsman who blames his tools. Having at least a passing familiarity with the strengths and weaknesses of various popular tools never hurt anyone.
No, I mean just Google.

Apple in my mind = present an OS GUI according to the needs of the human brain. A lot more than 6 people were/are/will be interested in that.

Microsoft = make big business computer functions possible on the home computer (at least originally). Apparently more than 6 people were interested in that.

Yahoo's proposition originally = the world wibe web is taking off exponentially and you need some sort of list or something to keep track of all the interesting stuff that keeps popping up.

Again, more than 6 people were/are interested in that.

So, only Google. And truth be said, even Google doesn't count that much since from my understanding Google was just living off of angel/VC funding for a few years until a biz-dev V.P. came up with the idea to tie search results to paid advertising as text on the side.

Without what became adwords, Google would have just stayed an interesting technical solution.

Had that V.P. kept his mouth shut and left, secured VC backing based on his cred as an exec in a KP/Seq-backed venture and started his own search engine based on his adwords idea, I suspect he'd be the billionaire and "google" would have turned out to be a startup his subesquent company bought and absorbed.
AT&T is too broad and I don't know what you mean specifically, but from a common-sense business perpective, the problem Intel works on is "how to keep making smaller faster better processors" and I think again that's another idea that, technical though it may be, captures the interest of way more than 6 people.
> ... A useful voice interface requires an entirely new UI paradigm.

I think this would require natural language processing far better than what we have now and great deal of contextual knowledge as well as a great deal of "common sense" built into the software (agent? interpreter?). Mice and keyboards remain easier to work with.
His performance helping a grade school kid with his population project? I kid, I kid.
Hey, I like to make a buck just like the next guy, but it still sounds like a neat thing to work on. I'm sure you could find a way to charge someone something after developing this.
This is sooo funny. Almost every week there's a "Ask YC" type of post where a business idea is seeking programming talent, and almost all the time the response is, "Why should I partner with you? What will you do for the startup while I code?"

And here we have a "bored software developer" just soliciting free business ideas and the mere suggestion that he should offer something in return seems to be unpopular.

Have you ever considered that the person who you seek ideas from may have developed the idea over months ... or even years of thinking, unpaid research, trial-and-error, awkward conversations with potential users, constant analysis of other things on the market, etc.?

Perhaps you may consider that from their perspective it would be something like, "Why should I share the insights of months/years of thinking about the problem? What were you doing while I was investing the time to investigate the feasibility?"

And yet the very question of what value the idea giver can expect meets scorn.
I really like the idea of polls, I think that they would get a better idea of where people stood with actions then just their votes for a good idea (where do you host is one that immediately comes to mind) (do you have funding) (how many startups have you been involved in that have failed)

..mostly I'd like to get some stats on the community in general, and polls are a good way to do it...

As for the karma idea, I think polls are more valuable to newbies than many others, so a karma threshold may not be the right answer.
I know how you can get an idea for your next startup. Call your favorite VC firm and ask them, "You know how VCs are always lamenting that great business ideas are a dime a dozen? I can't think of any ideas for now - but I have 30 cents! Can you please write down 3 dozen ideas you think are great so I can develop them?"

Problem solved ... for a mere 30 cents.

Keep me updated on any progress.
Online Scrabble Craze Leaves Game Sellers at Loss for Words
Microsoft is actually more B2B than B2C.

And yeah, Yahoo! was just making a list of links - hardly a challenging technical problem, but people wanted it.
this is 'in' ? HA HA HA HA ....
Why would you come up "anonymously for now" ? If you have an already successful start-up experience, why not talking about it and tell us a bit about you ? What are the risks in doing so ?

I'm a bit cautious by nature and I'm just curious about it. If I had an already successful experience and were in your situation I'd rather talk about it and introduce myself a bit. It helps to gain trust from other people and would make your request more appealing.
The death knell for RAID?
A friend of mine and I kept a folder once with ideas that had to be both patentable and useful. When we had around 50 we just got depressed and stopped, knowing that there was no way we would ever be able to implement them all. I would gladly give away ideas. I know there's a long way from idea to product - even if you can program it yourself.
Leap Year Code Glitch Shutters South Carolina DMV
Rock Star-Turned-Physicist Trades Keyboard for Atom Smasher
The best reference I could find is this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marilyn_vos_Savant
Search for "fat tail"
WorldWide Telescope (aka "the software that made Scoble cry") demoed at TED
Careful there! That implies that the best way to come up with solutions to a problem in an industry would be to get outside of it so you can get an external, top-down perspective on emerging trends and unmet needs. Then if you get an idea, you'll get a bug to implement it. But everybody will just laugh at you and scoff, "Pssst - what would you know about that? You don't even work in that field! You're not credible!"
It seems to me rather obvious that if reducing one's physical abilities to a score called "sports" is far too vague, then the reduction of the multidimensional capabilities of the human mind to a scalar is pretty silly.

I think you have 1 up on the literature.
Despite the number of people who cared enough to vote in the poll, this actual news item only has 3 points. Should it automatically vote the item up when you vote in a poll? (On the other hand, polls would pretty much take over the front page.)
The Manual by The KLF
I'm referring to the flight school aptitude test, his success in engineering school, and achieving a BA in physics. That's quite a jump for a guy who couldn't do high school algebra.
Well look at comet, django, rails, scriptalicious, and just about all other frameworks or neat pieces of code that developers can use to do something better.

None of them make any money.
I move into a different vote group tomorrow. Better vote while I can.
Patentable and useful doesn't necessarily mean good business. I'm assuming the "bored developer" wants to start a business around whatever idea he can't think of. There are ideas, some useful, some even patentable, but to make a business you need not so much patents but the ability to present it in such a way that a prospective customer thinks, "That provides me with more value than the price they're asking for, so I should buy it." Think of it this way: are Starbucks lattes patentable? But they are a good value to half-dead zombies on their way to work/on their way back from a grueling day of work. That makes them I think like 10 billion a year, roughly same revenue as Google. BeOS was awesome and technically advanced and I'm sure had many patents. Who paid for it? Nobody. Company's gone. There's a difference.
Adam's Advice and Reading List for High Tech Startup Entrepreneurs
Since the upvote also saves, I use it to save articles for future reading. Does this add too much noise?