skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks, I actually had a demo video, but the quality wasn't that great and it was with the old design. I was going to go through and remake the video if there was any interest at all. If there isn't, then I wasn't going to waste my time.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G75KhTQWyDA

In the meantime, here is the demo video I had... do you think I should put it back on the homepage? Would it serve to help sell the app or drive people away because of the quality?
Technically, they may be inadmissible in the future now that they "did business" (talking to investors, etc.) on a tourist visa.
It'd be easier and less annoying if there were fewer of them at a time on the front page, though. What if YC required a postmortem written interview/reflection (got in or not) and then stickied the term's index page of them on HN when it came out? Less, but at the same time more.
Music and the economy
One of these is not like the other. If Google's search engine is revolutionary then you have a low bar for "revolutionary". Trusted Coumpting is not the console model the idea of a consle is there is a market place of third party aplications that meet some minimum standerd and revinue from their sale is shared with the consle maker. Network / Trusted Computers don't fit into that catagory.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FingerWorks products where designed to work with a traditional keyboard.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_Touchsmart almost, but it runs Windows Vista or Windows 7 as standard not an OS built around the mutli touch concept. They where designed to work best with a keyboard with the option to provide limited touch based interfaces.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Surface not portable.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wacom is focused on a pen based interface.
Is it so difficult for you to just ignore the posts that you personally don't want to see? I'd rather see every single one of those posts than this post that you have just made.
According to PG sometimes you dont get in, not because there is anything wrong with your application, but because there were so many others who were a better fit. In this case applying again isnt productive. And you shouldnt change your idea just to get into YC. Right?
JavaScript and jQuery Techniques and Tools
Good point. I just disabled snap previews.
When presented with two interface options, we should resist the urge to implement both and let the user decide.
As a Canadian citizen, part of me wants the "founders visa" to fail because it passing would remove a small advantage we have in a sea of disadvantages. RIM, for example, was not founded by someone born in Canada. I'm not exactly sure what makes it easier to immigrate here, it just seems easier if you have certain education.

In a similar thread, Microsoft opened a development office in Vancouver (well, outside of it) more/less because it was easier to bring offshore talent here than to Redmond. Given that it's only a 2 hour drive away, it seemed like a good example of more liberal immigration laws helping out. Although, the net effect of this seems to be that the Canadian office is really just a holding pattern for top talent who can't get an H1-B yet.
If you go back in time and have sex with yourself, does that count as homosexuality, or just masturbation?
Yeah, it can go wrong and it does sound pretty awful. It's good practice to check the final mix out in mono for just that reason but stereo is ubiquitous now and people often don't bother any more.
Come on people, let's see some cited examples of engines overpowering brakes!

Car and Driver actually did a test (http://www.caranddriver.com/features/09q4/how_to_deal_with_u...), and even a hot (540HP) Roush stage 3 Mustang didn't overpower the brakes at 70MPH.
Vimperator: Use Firefox the Vim Way
Wow... if only the window manager was a separate program or something... then you could just run the one that you like instead of the default one.

Oh, you mean that's true? Oh...
Dunnit todo app integrates Openfeint
The same people that still use mouses.

It is a little quaint, but old habits die hard, I guess.
Bradbury isn't my favourite author. I like the pulp-style of Dick much more. Who cares that SF is not deemed `serious' classic literature?
What do you suggest?

KDE wanted to change the whole game up with KDE 4. They solicited the community for ideas for months. They still ended up at roughly the same interface and concepts that have always existed for the overall interface metaphor.

I think this is just how people expect computers to work now. Of all the proposals out there, I haven't heard many feasible replacements for the desktop idea.
Fed up with articles whining about Mahalo on HN? Report it here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/r?fnid=ymjIDn84Or
Just so we're clear, lose money on every user, and try to acquire more users as fast as possible?

I work in the trading business, and in the trading business there's a running joke -- we'll lose money on every trade but make it up on volume! I didn't know people actually practiced such a strategy.
The cult of busy
I totally agree, and that is one of the first details I'll fix if the app proves viable for anyone other than myself and friends ;-)
I think the point is that the iPad manages this for you. You just have to remember that you made a document in Pages and the name of it. You don't need to worry about folders or where it was saved to. ... That doesn't mean a single, flat directory. Just that users don't have to manage files.

I have had the following conversation multiple times in my career:

"I can not find the file I worked on yesterday. It
was right here before."
"What did you name it?"
"I don't know."
"You don't know what you named the file? Okay, then
where did you put it?"
"I didn't put it anywhere, I saved it where all my
files are saved."
"Okay, then what program did you use to create it?"
"I don't remember."

Based on my experience, just needing to remember which application the file is for and the name of a file isn't enough.

And then this "feature" would negate the majority of the reason to use computers: the ability to share files, both between users and between programs. If you need to use Excel to even find the spreadsheet you want to insert into your Word document, with the divergent interfaces that multiple programs would have for this ability, it would get even more confusing. Rather than a single "attach a file" functionality in an email program, you need to provide email functionality to each program. Now admittedly, Android does offer something like that, many applications have a "share" function that lets you select how you want to share something with users, but you can still browse for files when attaching, but the base is still files that can be individually manipulated without the original program.
FTA: http://www.ivankamajic.com/?p=281
"Many of you have been asking for some correspondence regarding the button position in the window manager.

Here it is..."
Dick said something like his works could be called "paranoid fiction". (With some parallels to Lovecraft's works.)
I build my product in 2006. I didn't get into YC in 2007. My company became ramen profitable a year ago. Then I found a co-founder.

I broke just about every rule of thumb that typically applies to startups, and my company took a while to get off the ground as a result, but we are cash flow positive, 100% founder owned and growing like gangbusters.

YC is not the only way to go, and most of the "rules for startups" can be broken. If you want to start a business and have a decent shot at building a substantial amount of wealth, there are plenty of other less-glamorous, less-publicized, less-competitive ways to do it.
I wrote about us applying multiple times (and eventually being accepted) here:

http://blog.directededge.com/2009/09/30/on-applying-to-y-com...
Good defaults are crucial to the success of a platform. Ubuntu is going for mainstream adoption. The mainstream wants their computers to "just work". They don't want to have to change themes or window managers, they just want the buttons to live where they're expected.

Even if the users were willing to change the WM for the button position, almost no user knows how to change the WM, and it probably necessitates editing .desktop files or .xinitrc or something (unless you use something like fusion-icon to control it, which might be reasonable but is still extra configuration).

Furthermore, this is custom to that theme. Any other Metacity theme has the buttons on the right, so they'd just have to change the theme, not the WM, to get the buttons where desired.
You could probably say the same thing about Microsoft, couldn't you?
The vast majority of people using computers.
Another case of lawsuits stifling innovation.

And I agree with one of the comments on that post - why doesn't Netflix have people opt-in to have their data anonymized and used for this purpose?

Edit: replaced bureaucracy with lawsuits
I don't think Vancouver is worse than Seattle in terms of "druggies and street crime", it's just more concentrated and visible. Given the warm climate and concentration of social services, it's a bit of a magnet for transients from all over Canada.

Aside from that, I think you can attribute a lot of the differences to the simple fact that Vancouver doesn't have any highways going through it or anywhere near the downtown core.

I prefer it to San Fran, but given the 4 degree(C) weather with rain today, I can appreciate someone taking the opposing view.
I'd like to read a longer post about that.
It's almost always surprising just how much private data can be exposed after data has been "anonymized."

When you're using private data in any public way, or even with "partners or affiliates," you need to be very careful, watchful and responsive.
The bright bunny was quite awesome... I want one!
After reading all of that, I still don't know what he/you actually did.
I have already read a lot of people (who were accepted) sharing their experienced, but never those who weren't. I think mistakes are a more valuable thing (obviously carefully explained).
Cartoon: Agile developers belly up to the barre
Thanks for the encouragement! I've been meaning to write more about it, just been too busy. I'll try to get it done next week, now that I know there is an audience :)
Interesting thanks for the link. However, seems like you need to be able to cross-correlate with another database in order to de-anonymize. If netflix made a good faith effort to protect privacy, how are they liable?
In that link they really don't actually go into the 'why' they just say they thought about it and show us a snapshot of a white board that says nothing as far as rationale.

The most telling part of the article parent linked to is: "Is it better or worse? It is quite hard to tell." If that's what they think, then why change it?

Additionally, the author says: " I have had it running on my machine with the buttons in this order since before the Portland sprint (first week of February?) and I am quite used to it". That sounds like it conferred no benefit whatsoever.
It's not that no themes work, if I understand correctly, it's that any other theme would still have the buttons on the right. Someone please correct me if this is wrong.
going from $0 to $1M is a hell of a lot harder than going from $1M to $2M. even though you're profit negative, if you got that far, you're 95% of the way there.
Agreed, as would I... even just a cliff notes version would do.
Do not want. http://www.innowhere.com/ is cited as an example of this kind of interface, and is a total disaster - I'm browsing on a 3G modem on a train (tunnels etc mean my connection is a bit spotty) and clicking the links on that site offers me no feedback at all on whether or not a page is about to load - it either fails silently or eventually throws an alert() box with a weird type error. Call me old fashioned, but I like links that work. I can just about forgive Gmail for being a single page interface (though I'm frequently frustrated there as well), but for a content oriented site it remains a terrible idea.
Presumably it's: start several blogs, and make money via advertisements, referrals, and e-books.

The two sites linked in the article prominently advertise self-made books:

http://www.reactivehypoglycemia.info/

http://www.statisticshowto.com/
There is a big difference between saying that our current model is "deeply wrong" and saying that our current model might be superseded by a later model which encompasses the current observations. Therefore the major assumptions of the current cosmology are not likely to be "deeply wrong" anymore than Newton's theory of gravity was "deeply wrong" just because it was superseded by general relativity.

I do believe that our current understanding of cosmology has hardly scratched the surface of describing how things really are. However, any future model is not going to invalidate current observations, but rather, better explain them.
8 liters per person per year...is that of actual alcohol content? So if they were all drinking 80 proof whisky, they would average 20 liters of the stuff per year?
That's fine unless you're billing yourself as a user friendly Linux. Personally I think the issue of mis-clicking while going for the file menu would be infuriating.
Plus one to Netflix for making this the first sentence:

"This is Neil Hunt, Chief Product Officer for Netflix."

No vague hiding behind an unidentified team or blog. A person has chosen to identify himself with the decision, and the company chose to present it that way.

The general tone is also positive. This is a good way to communicate.

Contrast with Amazon's anonymous whine on their kindle blog when they gave in to MacMillan. Not signed by a person, not even "the team." And full of blame and "you'll see!"

http://www.amazon.com/tag/kindle/forum/ref=cm_cd_et_md_pl?_e...
Ask HN: Do you think Reddit will sue me for my URL shortener?
I launched a URL shortening service yesterday for reddit geeks like myself:

http://rddd.it

I'm hoping the community embraces it like they did with imgur.com, but observing Reddit's fickle nature, I'm withholding my expectations. My real concern is that Reddit (or Condé Nast) will frown upon the domain similarity and come after me. Not that they'd get much from my asset-less student self, but I'm not looking for trouble.

I tried my best to give rddd.it a different theme, as to not infringe on Reddit's trademark.

So why did I do this?
In a saturated market of URL shorteners, I decided that the best course of action would be to start my own. This sort of logic can only come from somebody who was dropped on his head one too many times as a baby.

And since I'm secretly having an affair with HN, I thought I'd take this opportunity to share it with you guys first. I even gave HN it's own URL for easy access. I hope you like it:

http://rddd.it/hn

The site isn't complete yet, some minor tweaking/polishing still needs to be done. Do wish me luck!
I don't know when it began, but I stopped using the address bar quite some time ago. I found it easier to type in the url into Google. If I make a typo, it offers a correction, and I don't accidentally end up whitehouse.com, if you know what I mean.

That said, I don't think people are searching for "search engines" on Google. I think people are like me in that they use Google as an address bar.
How To Make Numbers Say Anything You Want
good idea...opt-in and we can improve our recommendations to you.

People worried that some geek will find out they watched Who's the Boss reruns will miss out.
> They do better on stats than we do, at much lower cost.

Irrelevant because that doesn't imply that the US govt can do that. (Also irrelevant because the German and Japanese populations are very different.)

That's why I proposed the experiment - let's see what the US govt can do.

Many of us prefer Google to other search engines. Google's existence proves that better is possible, but it doesn't prove that Yahoo or Bing can do better than they do.
the niche disease site and ebook made 40k in its 12th month??
I think bureaucracy had little to do with it. As I recall, the first Netflix contest did indeed expose private, and sometimes embarrassing, information.

This was a privacy issue, and something legitimate to address.
I think the lesson he's shooting at is the basic "don't be afraid to chase your dream because when I did everything turned out roses". I'm not opposed to that message but it seems self evident. Everyone has a dream, everyone knows some people chase their dream and succeed. What holds people back (as he says in the post) is fear that they won't succeed and I don't see how one anecdotal story is going to alleviate that.
How lucky for him that his wife had a strange disease! We can't all be this lucky though.
Some people from the first dataset were deanonymized. Given age, gender, & zip code is enough to identify 87% of the US.

See http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/09/netflix-priz... and its links.
Amen.

I use both OS X and Ubuntu and I don't mind remapping my behaviours depending on the context. But if you make things similar but not quite the same... Irritating!

I'm not sure that Ubuntu should be copying OSX but if they are going to do so, then bite the bullet and do it.
This is a project I did to learn Ruby on Rails. Im sure I could've done it faster with the stack exchange framework. I started it about 4 months ago and i worked on it on and off, did a redesign, learned how to run a VPS (which is awesome btw, any non-.NET dev who programs for fun (not work) should pick up a cheap VPS!) under linux ... In terms of hours its hard to say. It certainly wasnt the most efficient process since I did everything on my own and much of it was a learning experience.
The Ubuntu folks need to get a good UI designer to deal with this stuff. I'm not sure a design-by-committe approach works for producing a good UI with sensible defaults, good UI organization, good colors, consistency, etc. It seems to me Ubuntu 10 is taking a huge step backwards in all these areas.
Good point. It works the same with Firefox. In fact, it is an advertised feature that you don't have to add the .com.
Wisdom of the crowds isn't infallible, and YC acceptance/rejection is certainly a likely place where it might fail.

Erlang day getting taken too far is a great example of this type of failure happening in the past.

EDIT: That being said, I definitely think it's possible to do feedback on YC rejections in a positive way. I'd just like to be careful about a mob getting triggered regarding rejections.
Dear Lawyers,

Lame

Regards

The Tech Community
privacy issues dont necessarily need to be dealt with by lawsuits. Most lawsuits are about money.
You do know that the IPv6 address space contains one or two million IPv4 address spaces for every star in the visible universe?
I read that is Pb-mining. I thought it was a new World of Warcraft-like game.

Incidentally, cold lead fits in the microwave.
I'm glad I can appreciate the recursiveness of reading a minimally informative blog about getting rich, all the while knowing that the punchline is going to be "write lean content that strings people along".
The site has elements of IMDB and RottenTomatoes and is currently focused on hindi (one of the indian languages) movies.

I have a critic vs critic feature which might appeal to many in this audience http://www.reviewgang.com/site/critic_vs_critic

Would adding hollywood movies make sense? Would any of you use this site in the current form if it had hollywood movies?
Baye Sean, relative of Jay Sean? :)

This is a great list, I'd also recommend Ross's books on probability as starting points.
What are you talking about? In 1993 even little blond girls knew Unix. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0107290/
For any other Europeans confused by this, I looked into it. It is a libertarian thing:

The libertarian position summarized, in their own words:

"If recycling makes economic sense, we don't need to mandate it. And if it doesn't, we shouldn't." -- http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=6158

The other side of course is that recycling is a widespread and popular example of government intervention to fix a market failure, which is of course anathema for libertarians.
Sorry. I didn't mean to suggest that the article was entirely complete. Only that you might have missed it, and it might go further in explaining things you seemed interested in. =)
Lessons From the Sandpit: How Tweetminer Got its Twitter Back On
I'll be watching for a longer post as well. Nice job. :)
"Wisdom of the crowds isn't infallible"

truth. for instance, so far 26 people have up-voted this ridiculous post of swombat's
I can't see Twitter surviving if their long term strategy is to sell firehouse access to their competitors. Relying on your competitors to keep in business is a bad business plan to say the least.

The way I see it they're pretty much screwed. They're going to have to start looking at different ways to monetize and they don't have many choices. Injecting adds into everyone's Twitter stream will mean a drop in users for sure plus it will contaminate the firehose. Relying on smaller developers to pay for API access probably isn't going to generate enough revenue especially if other options are available from Google et al. Once again, Google will destroy yet another marker with free...

Of course one also has to wonder if Twitter isn't just a "pet rock" that will run out steam on it's own.
Not to quibble, but lawsuits are also not bureaucracy.
I don't trust any individual who insists on observing everything I say or do. It is very likely that such an individual aims to control my life or property by threat of force.

I used the word "steal" for that concept because it was the only word that sprang to mind. I'm happy to reword it if you think of something else.
I think the previous poster is suggesting that Dick is serious. The “pulp” he's talking about would be stuff like endless Star Trek-like novels full of humanoid aliens, grand good-versus-evil plans to destroy the galaxy thwarted by plucky young protagonists, and uninspired plots, characters, and themes. The classically derided “sci-fi” (“skiffy”), as compared to “real” SF like Dick’s work.
Well, I care.

Not for myself, but you have teams of guys out there building legitimate web applications that could have a meaningful impact on the web community and instead, douchebags with scraper sites are getting invested in.

For all we know, we lost the next Youtube (or whatever app you want to talk about) due to Calacanis' antics (I don't personally hate the guy, I just don't approve of his methods)

---

Lastly, apologies for the tardy reply. I've got maxvisit set to 30 and minaway to 240 mins, so replying won't ever be close to instantaneous.
> All those books banned?

Actually, none of those books are banned. Americans are perfectly free to buy them.

There is a difference between "a govt won't buy for you" and "banned".

You wouldn't write "vanilla ice cream is banned" if a govt didn't buy it for you so why do you think that a book is banned just because a govt didn't buy it for someone?
Actually pretty damn close to perfect. I'd wish there was a better overview (multiple comparisons) so that I could begin to get a better understanding for their ratings and charity expense breakdowns, but the information is all there.

Thanks for the plug.
Wikipedia dwm article deletion: No consensus
How lame. I'm 35 and I haven't even started working.
I get the impression that there are quite a few YCers that didn't make it on the first application.

PG has said in the past that the most compelling argument you can make to investors is that you're going to keep forging ahead, with or without them. At the end of the day, YC are investors too.

It would seem like the best approach would be to apply with a better version of your original app, because that illustrates that you are persistent (you weren't just looking for an idea to get in with) and can improve upon the initial concept. Best case scenario, IMO, your idea is the same but with more traction (I'm assuming of course there is/was a prototype involved).