skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Body Doubles for Rappers is the clear winner here! It's not quite as scaleable, but it would be a great boutique service. BDFRAAS
He said fructose is poison. Sucrose is just as hazardous; it's just that HFCS happens to be pumped into everything.
I mostly want to get back into gaming and spend some time with my teenage son online. At first he will kick my ass, but I have to believe that I'll eventually get up to speed. And if I don't it'll be something he can laugh at me about. I mean, he needs a 1up on me too, right?
here are two things that might help.

It's much easier to build something that makes thousands of dollars a month than something that makes hundreds of dollars (and it keeps scaling up).

It's much easier to succeed when you give yourself a few years than a few months.
Heck, I can do one of those.
Here are sample points with the following characteristics:

Min: 21
Avg: 28.3
Median: 34

21 21 21 22 22 23 34 34 34 34 34 34 34

When you consider that there are about 26 people selected (ten teams times three people each, or about 30), we can simply double the above:

21 21 21 21 21 21 22 22 22 22 23 23 34 34 34 34 34 34 34 34 34 34 34 34 34 34

And to account for the maximum, which is 51, or 17 additional years on the right side, we must really drop the left-hand total by 17 to maintain the same mean... and we cannot... The best we can do is to give everybody younger than 34 the minimum age, which still leaves 9 years unaccounted for, making the average 28.7...

21 21 21 21 21 21 21 21 21 21 21 21 34 34 34 34 34 34 34 34 34 34 34 34 34 51.

One cannot make the numbers below the stated median (34) any lower (because the minimum age was 21), and any change to the numbers above the median will only increase the mean, since the numbers on the right are as low as can be. Another alternative is to increase or decrease the number of successful applicants from 26 to something greater, like 30 or 35. However, that would still leave a lot of 21 and 22 year olds, and almost no 23-33 year olds, which does not appear to be likely. Therefore, the numbers don't make sense. In other words, the only way these statistics make sense is if TechStars consisted entirely of students that are right out of college and thirty-four and thirty-five year olds.
First it was in Python, now in C++. The change was for speed reasons, not because they didn't like functional languages. It is simply that functional languages don't quite meet the speed requirement that Google needs. And yes, I know that Haskell can compile some extremely fast code, but it still has not insignificant issues with memory bloat.
What was their big idea in 1998? Search .. Not a billion dollar winner. They only really won after seeing Overture and saying "Damn, we could do way better than those ideala! clowns"
At this point, we're at 52% Xbox. Here's an HTML page with all results so far: http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=tQ_S9H40SLxVJ0wwCcSRG...
Warning - easy to lose track of time watching these. He is always terrific to listen to, or read.
This is an excellent idea, and it's exactly what I'm going to do in a few days.

But rejection is rejection. I wouldn't try to sugar it up too much. Reality is a good teacher.

I used to be a freelance writer. You pitch people, they reject you. When asking girls out, you ask them, they reject you. If you're a salesman, you make friends and offer people help, they reject you.

Nothing wrong with being rejected. In fact, it should be a point of pride. Life is a numbers game. You have X rejections to get through to get where you are going. You got rejected. Now you have X-1. The faster you can crank the decrement loop the faster you'll reach your destination (assuming you are learning each time through the loop, of course!)
We do have free gyms. It's called parks.
Blogger has introduced Template Designer
Ask HN: Meetup in SF for YC rejects
Let's face it. You still think your idea is great and has legs but you didn't get your seed funding.

How about we all meetup? It would be beneficial to meet people in the community to share ideas, find partnerships and be a support group. If there's critical mass, it can be a sort of weekly happy hour/coffee thing that's a good excuse to get out of the house and interacting with people again.

Anybody interested?

(Edit: I created the event. RSVP if interested. Date and place are TBD.)

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=401254911062
The problem with video blogging is that it doesn't have the same mass appeal as text blogging. As uncomfortable as people are with their grammatical abilities, they still blog, constantly, no matter how much we hope they wouldn't. As for video blogging, the barrier to entry is a lot higher, and self-consciousness about "public" speaking and appearance severely stifle the potential "market".
>>The top scientists from BARC, ISRO are very well known are literally treated like national heroes. And so are the 11 cricketers from the Indian National Team.

You must be kidding.

This is obviously just an opinion (since I can't point to data), but I'd say that the number of people in India who know the name of a scientist at BARC or ISRO is a tiny fraction of the number of people who know Sachin Tendulkar (cricket) or Shahrukh Khan (movies)

Cricketers and movie stars have millions of fans in India. I'd think that the average Indian wouldn't be able to name a single scientist currently working at ISRO or BARC
1TB SSD
Truth. Anyone capable of maintaining a homebrew setup has Sufficient skills to spend five minutes scanning the macports guide and tweaking the port files. OTOH, building clojure is te leas of the parents problems; he is in for anworld of painful surprise when he sees how screwed up packaging is. Have a clojure app? Include your own copy of clojure and clojure-contrib. Have a clojure editing mode? Do the same. Have a blog entry that mentions clojure? I think you need to download and squirrel away the jar files in those cases as well...

I ended up creating my own branch of the port tree for clojure bits just because of all the patching needed to avoid this "let me grab a copy of clojure for you" behavior.
It says "C API" in their own manual:

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/c.html

Or did you mean rethinkdb's mysql API?
Nov. 2009. These have been for sale for a while now.

The more interesting variety is the PCI-Express version, but it's a bit pricey still.
Lots of comments, so I'm going to remark on one thing in particular: functional programming really makes static typing shine: the types make putting functions together like legos; really obvious when you're very clearly doing it wrong, whereas imperative style is all about saying "do this" and then "do that", which is not something that the type system can help you with.
People didn't suddenly get more stupid over the last 30 years. They did suddenly get more obese.
If they're paying, they're deriving value from your service. If they're deriving value, they'll probably come to rely on that value. And thus, if it stops working, they won't want to piss you off so badly that you take that value away. Game theory, really.
He's just using the dictionary definition of "conservative". A physicist who assumes new developments have little to no merit unless shown otherwise. Contrast with a "progressive" physicist who comes up with a new radical physics theory every month.

By analogy: a conservative programmer is somebody who would generally look at tools like C++ and Java and .NET to solve his problems, because the tools are proven and have well known pros and cons. A progressive programmer would be more tempted to consider the language du jour.
I could have knowingly paid good money for hardware I'm not allowed to tinker with, but that would be hard to reconcile with who I want to be. So I dropped a better video card into my PC.
That's the right attitude.

I'm going to do an ask HN on the biggest success that YC missed out on by rejecting them, it's interesting to see who made it in spite of being rejected.

Edit: Ok, it's up: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1191566
Ask HN: Who got rejected in earlier cycles of YC application and made it anyway?
Daniel just wrote he got rejected and someone else chimed in they had been too, but were definitely not going to let it make a difference.

So, my question is what is the biggest success that YC missed out on, some group that pitched during one of the cycles and that was rejected, manned up and made it without the YC funding and the access to the network?
What does your son want? He may want to play with his friends online.
Well.. to be honest, I don't understand why you would apply as an individual (for a second time)!

Getting a team together is no easy task, it requires discipline amongst other things. YC has been pretty vocal about favoring teams than individuals. Put a solid team together and people will notice, not just YC.

Sorry if my comment came out as harsh. there's no sugar coating it.
Congratulations to all those who made it to the interview.
Not sure of the price/density coefficient multiplier for flash versus hard drives, but if it's near unity then these should be set to disrupt the magnetic drive market in 4-5 years.
Async Batching with Twisted: A Walkthrough
As far as I have read in the past they don't have a set quota and will assess each team being interviewed on it's own merits when deciding whether to fund it.
> maps, filters and reduces

Don't forget unfold! http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.42.1...
The Manhattan Fun Index
Thanks, those are great points. Spam hasn't been an issue so far, which is good. I'm working on a couple of those things already. I'm not sure if it's busy enough yet to generate an active IRC channel for each class, but people are always free to set one up on their own and post the info
That has always been my understanding as well.
Government and computer man. caught installing hard-wired keystroke loggers
Yes. I'm a big note jotter and have experimented with different apps; Wave is the best so far. Whenever I have a thought I need to record I just open a new wave, write it, and move it from my inbox to an appropriate folder within the Wave client. All wave contents are searchable, so finding stuff is easy. Plus, when the note/wave is business related, I just add a contact to the wave to get feedback on what I wrote or to start a fully treaded discussion. If you don't already have Wave apply for an account or ask for an invite--it's worth a try. Plus it's free.
Not harsh at all -- I upvoted you -- but your comment was easily made and not very insightful.

I already know I don't have a team. I already know the YC deadline. I already know that time stands still for nobody.

Is it better not to apply at all? Did YC say they wouldn't fund any single-founder teams at all?

Do you make do with what you have and move forward, or keep trying to find a founder instead of trying to find a business model? At some point you have to make a decision and run with it, and I'm happy with applying solo.
I was denied ("rejected" sounds so harsh :)). But I'm still moving forward with my idea.

I'd love to meet up with other YC rejects who are looking for a support group-- I mean people to share ideas with. :)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1191553

I'm located in SF. I'm sure there are lots of bright people also looking to partner with others to form a great team.
My understanding is there was no word in English for the word orange before the fruit was widely introduced in Europe. In other words the fruit gave the name to the color, not vice versa. (Other orange colored things were usually called 'ginger' or 'red-yellow'.)
As probably one of very few HN readers to have made my own ketchup (all you need is time, a kettle, and a farmstand, preferably selling seconds), I can say that dark red is your basic ketchup color if you start with red tomatoes. Purple sounds like heirloom, and at farmers market prices you'd be approaching the price per volume of very good wine.
Summer 2009 was 26 funded start-ups.

So, given that the 80 was indicated to be a 'bumper crop' the actual number becomes constrained by how many start-ups YC can handle per cycle, I figure they get more good ones than they can fund already, so now it comes down to distinguishing between 'good' and 'best'. Figure a few more than 26, but not many.

One more reason not to take a YC rejection too heavy.
Good question. I'm not an expert in functional programming but it's changed my mindset.

Imperative / functional languages are equally powerful, but are they equally expressive? There's a reason I wrote the above in a shell script vs. an OO-language (or C): shell scripting captures my intent with minimal overhead, with the right primitives built-in.

OO-languages force you to define classes, methods, type input parameters, etc. up front. So if you know you just want that exact workflow then you can model it.

What if I want to customize the sort routine? Well, I guess I can define a sorting interface and take that as an argument.

And what if I want a more flexible data structure? (With unix it's all text, but why not a hashmap being passed around?). Well, I can define a generic "list" class with an infinite number of members, and all the operations change this list.

But now we've gotten away from OO programming (saying data is of type "List" is not saying much at all).

We're basically trying to recreate functional programming ideas:

* Simple, flexible, built-in data structures (list of lists)

* Pass around functions at runtime, as you please (no interface to define, instantiate an object of that interface, and pass in)

* Composable functions (at runtime, decide that function Z is really F(G(x)))

It's not that the operations aren't possible, but OO languages seem to lead you down a specification-first path, usually customized to a problem domain.

You can "get around" this by using design patterns like Strategy, but again, you're recreating functional ideas in another language. Not that it's impossible, but it's not quite suited for the problem domain (like doing text processing in C vs. using perl... yes, you can find a regex lib, and a better string class, but why not use a language with it built in?).

Hope this helps -- different languages help you think differently. I've used C# a lot and really love the mix of functional and imperative styles in the latest versions (3.5). Joel had a good post (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/08/01.html) on this regarding map/reduce: it's not that it's "impossible" in OO languages, but you don't instinctively think about ideas like "passing around a function and apply it to data".
That page messed up my eyes, what a horrible color choice
I thought this was going to be about a different lesson.

For an idea to be worth a million, it's got to be worth the customers paying a total of a million, i.e. to them it's worth losing a million.
keep trying to find a founder instead of trying to find a business model

I don't think the two are mutually exclusive. YET, if you want to go through the YC route, I think finding a cofounder would be more important than finding a business model.
How does that negate my statement? Normal people don't look for things like, "Is the close button on the outside of the window?" Are you really going to tell me that the only reason that people tolerate a switch from Windows to MacOS X is because the close-window button is still towards the outside of the window even though the buttons are on the opposite side?
Ask HN:Any HN folks developing products in SAP area?
Hi All,

I am currently thinking of startup based on SAP, IPhone and Web 2.0 etc. It would be interesting to know if other HN startups out there working in SAP space.
It has been quite a while since I've flown regularly, but I remember airline magazines as pretty awful.
With all of the emerging media outlets that you mentioned above, I am more interested in the question: People still advertise in airline magazines?
Lumping JPL/Caltech in with LockMart and Boeing does not make sense. The first is a research lab mainly concerned with conceiving and building robotic (unmanned) missions. The second two are mainly involved with operating manned flight systems. No comparison.
Anybody else interested in a meetup before or after the interviews?
Exactly. Functional programming may or may not be "worth it" to use for one particular problem or another.

However, if we ask ourselves whether functional programming is worth learning (as I suspect the poster is really asking), then the answer is clearly yes, if for no other reason than that's the only way you can make an informed decision as to whether it's worth applying FP to that particular problem of yours.
Water Bobble
Activitystrea.ms the next evolution of ATOM RSS?
the actual site - http://activitystrea.ms/
One word: Rope

It gives you all sort of semantic and refactoring awesomeness for python in emacs.
You are correct. And yet you have completely missed the point.

They are not mutually exclusive. And yes, the cofounder is more important.

Today's the deadline and you have a beta product and no cofounder. Do you apply or not? More seriously than this YC stuff, do you stop working on a business idea and execution because you don't have a cofounder? Or do you continue forward, constantly looking for a chance to find one?

EDIT: I see you've edited your comment to include a YET. At this point, seems like you are the one imposing a false choice here: the YC route and all other ways. There are many options and paths and most of them don't require you to pick one or the other.
CouchDB is a pretty well-known "didn't get accepted, but kept going anyway" project. Not really a business success story, but it is a project that has had an impact on web technology, and on a scale that many YC companies have not. It's an Apache Foundation project now, but I don't know what that means for its business case.

And, of course, several teams have been rejected once or twice and then gotten in later. A few have even blogged about it; notably wheels of Directed Edge.
I don't even want to know how much this would cost.
Wow, thanks for the list. That's more features than I have time to add though. For some of the bigger items like the whiteboard, I'm hoping people can use other services in the mean time. Some of those items are being worked on now though.
I still wish they'd give reasons why. even if it was a checkbox thing. 'primary reason of rejection: no-cofounder' or 'bad idea', 'need more demo', 'not our area of interest', 'try again with this team and idea in 6 months' etc.
We've always dealt with abusive users in a polite manner. A lot of times they just love the attention and drama.

But time and time again, once we fed them the attention they craved, they became some of our biggest allies in the community.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRbnn7D3qbI

imho n900 still gets less love than it deserves
"My question is what is the biggest success that YC missed out on"

There is a company that makes iPhone software that was rejected by YC, and they recently turned down a buyout offer of 10M. I can't really give more details than that since obviously it's not public.
Fair enough.

Personally I would want to have the highest probability of being accepted when/if I ever apply to YC. Frankly speaking, I don't have the time to wait around for another term if I got rejected. I would dramatically shift my product/process or pitch.

YC is not a late stage venture fund who brings cash to the table. These guys are making a big bet by validating your idea/business. A rejection from YC should make you rethink your business/people/idea.
This is beautiful. I've heard a lot about Clojure but, alas, I've been too lazy to really check it out.

This tipped my interest, kudos!
This 1 TB SSD is listed on Amazon for $3919.99. 1 TB HDDs are listed on Amazon starting at $84.99.

SSDs are already disrupting the high-performance storage market, but I think it will be more than 5 years before they disrupt the bulk storage market.
Survey for those rejected... might give some insight into how close to the cut teams got.

1. How many questions did YC ask your team?

2. How many views did you get on your video?

3. How many unique visits to your prototype from YC?

4. How many hours before the rejection email did they last visit your site?

Ours:

1. 2 questions

2. 3 or 4 video views

3. 3 prototype visits I think

4. 2.5 hours
Great points. Maybe video "blogging" isn't the right term. There's definitely a lot more video content being produced these days, but little innovation in the platforms supporting it.
http://www.currentlyobsessed.com/2010/03/13/sell-ice-cream-n...
If you'd be willing to accept the YC terms, and it's going to take you less time to fill out the YC application than it would to write 2-3 of your typical HN comments, what's one good reason not to apply? Of course you apply.
I had 0 questions so consider yourself loved. :)
Can someone post the actual text of the rejection letter.
I'm curious what it says.
More interesting than the rejection letter - http://ycombinator.com/whynot.html
Hell if I'd wait until I had everything perfect. It's an imperfect world, I'm an imperfect person and we're going to make this thing work anyway, brother. YC or no YC. People still trade eyeballs and money for value, and single founder guys still come up with successful ways to trade that. A cofounder might be a critical success factor -- and you still might not have one. Guess what? Keep looking and keep moving forward. Waiting for a cofounder and not working on your plan is as stupid as getting a cofounder and waiting for the perfect plan. It's an imperfect world. We get judged on how well we deal with these imperfections and yet still make progress.
Part of being a successful entrepreneur is being tenacious. If you fold at the first sign of opposition, I doubt you'll get far.

I don't know this person's particular case but it's possible that he made significant progress on his idea between submissions.
This is a great idea. Love to meet with fellow entrepreneur. You can use http://www.meetup.com/ for arrangement.
That's funny, I like to buy the brown mustard -- has more kick.
I cannot say if this is generally true for functional languages but a good comparison of the efficiency of erlang as compared to java can be found by comparing the code footprint of ejabberd, an erlang xmpp server, and openfire, a java xmpp server. The servers are functionally similar yet the source code footprint of ejabberd is approximately 300 files at 5MB and openfire is approximatley 4000 files at 100MB. The erlang server has more then an order of magnitude less code.
New relating rules in the social media age
Puppy (or, details on Joel Spolsky's retirement from blogging)
My parents, representative, I believe, of the average computer users, have an 80 Gb hard drive that is at less than 15 % used capacity. The point at which, say, twice that level of storage drops to less than $100 in SSD format makes a strong economic case for widespread consumer adoption. We see the beginning of this in netbooks.
AfterTheDeadline was rejected, and got acquired last year by Automattic (WordPress). http://blog.afterthedeadline.com/2009/09/08/after-the-deadli...

Edit: I should note that Paul Graham mentioned in his interview on Mixergy that picking companies is one area where they are weak. That may be true, but I'd wager the YC batting average would be higher than typical Angels/VCs.
Willful ignorance is not an effective argument against personal genomics