skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It is a bad practice in general. Most of those issues that are 'bad for SEO' fall under bad practices in general.

There are few tricks, and just common sense concepts of having proper return codes, redirection and site structure.
I really doubt most people hate McCain.
Swedish car giant Volvo sets a target to eliminate death and injury in its vehicles by 2020.
My proposed solution: automated driving. A $1T opportunity.
Do You Consider People Under 18?
Is YCombinator willing to accept entrepreneurs under 18?
I am suspect of the data (but thought it interesting). I would like to see more analysis of this type for comparison, for example, the impact of partisan versus bipartisan legislation on the economy. I think an approach using methods like this is required to implement objective government policy.
The article references three different posts about how startups need to aim higher and try to change the world, then conflates it with "trying to do something really useful like making things that people actually want to pay for," before falling back to the comment on "or if it's free."

My point is that making something people will pay for is vastly different from what any of those articles he was referencing is talking about.

Honestly, the whole post kind of struck me as a retread dressed up to be linkbait. Which, ironically, is what he's complaining about in startups.
HP Discovers Potential "God Particle" of Electronics
In a lot of cases, rapid growth is incompatible with NEAR-TERM profit (but not necessarily revenue). It's hard to concentrate on both. A company can generally grow faster if it takes on investors and plows any revenue back into growth...

I think most investors (YC included) are most interested in meteoric growth (or whatever path is going to lead most swiftly and reliably to a BIG liquidity event of some kind).

Going for a lifestyle business and eschewing investment rarely gets you there quickly (if at all).

I love Wufoo (and I'd certainly put them on the relatively short list of YC companies that I truly envy), but I think they are leaving some growth "on the table". I think 37s is, too. Not that there's anything wrong with that-- it's just not necessarily "investor-friendly".
It's common in places like banks where they need to present at least the illusion that they're doing whatever they can to prevent the flow of confidential information out of the company.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y_Combinator

obviously doesn't inlcude all 80.

c.f. http://www.crunchbase.com/company/y-combinator
I guess that depends on everyone's perception of "done whatever they could to make it work." As the article implies, they might have forgotten as simple a thing as actually listening to what other people suggest.
Gemstone builds Ruby runtime based on Smalltalk VM
Damn, I read the whole thing hoping to learn what an IOU is, but he didn't say. What could it be? Initiation of Underlings? Investment in Ultra-High-Returns? Intent of Usurpation?
This worked pretty well. It showed me a few people who I know in real life but had forgotten to follow.
Anki is awesome. I heard about it a week or so ago here, and have gotten though the JLPT 2 words (1300 of 'em) with 90% retention in about a week. I really wish I used flashcards when I was living in Japan, instead of my lazy-ass "i'll learn it from hearing other people" technique. (That worked, but not nearly as well as Anki.)

Now I just need to find a JLPT 1 word list :)
Traffic: How Do You Measure Success?
Larry Page on how to change the world
theres nothing like checking in code between shows (on tour w/ my band) from a car flying down the highways of rural nebraska :)
I agree.

At the very least, "variables" should be implemented with multistage processing like MetaLua or Template Haskell. Really, I just want to say something like this:

foo = { background-color: #coffee; margin: 42; }

bar.span { ,foo; something-else }
baz.span { ,foo; something-else }

I know I can do this with HTML (apply more classes), but I can envision cases where this is less hackish (or more natural, anyway).

Edit: the MetaOCaml people have some good reading about multistage programming: http://www.cs.rice.edu/~taha/MSP/
I really shouldn't comment because I haven't read through this mountain of comments. So I won't. But thanks all the same.
Simply: no.

KDE, you just got it like Qt:

- too huge

- too MS-like

- too 'take-over-the-dev-world' like
The Conditional Price. Twitter: $10B
> At least faulting the customer makes more sense than blaming the startups that are just doing what makes the most money.

The whole idea that you should blame anyone for a startup doing something that makes money is thoroughly pointless. There's nothing to blame anyone for.

If you start up a business and you make money, then, in general, you have achieved the goal of starting a business. Who cares if it's making vampire widgets on Facebook or a social network for shortstops? If you're making money you can laugh at critics all the way to the bank.
IOU = "I Owe U"
I really like Clojure, but I have to say that the shit smell of Java still leaks through the clean Lisp coating. sigh.
"a) charging a different rate for different keywords you want to hit."

What's wrong with that? Ranking for a very generic keyword such as "widget" would definitely require much more time, effort, and money than ranking for "easy blue widget".

"c) doing 'off site optimization' is not SEO, that's spam."

Where did you come to the conclusion that off-site optimization is spam? Link exchanges, directory submissions, etc, are not "spam".
The blog you link to, http://blogs.king5.com/archives/2008/01/computer_glitch.html, says that the error was due to a corrupted file (assuming this means for the firework control software).
It's a lot easier to make people richer when they have clean water, so they aren't sick from cholera, can safely bathe themselves, and they aren't dehydrated.
Sturgeon's Law, baby.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon's_law
Maybe they thought his blog was AOL? ("Me too! Me too! How dare you say something bad about Python in public!")
Congrats on TC, Michael, Long - and thanks for helping me to get up & running with Insoshi a while back.

As far as I'm concerned, a business like this (mysql/wordpress for social networks) was bound to happen. I'm just glad it's written in Ruby, running on Rails, version controlled via Git, and founded by the guys who taught me Rails (via RailsSpace).

There's loads of enterprise social networking consultancies popping-up, and they all want their own custom made platform , written in the latest web development framework, to sell straight in to the SMEs. Insoshi should fit the bill quite nicely. The only major question is how hosting services fit in to this (WordPress.com?), but I'm sure the guys already have this planned out.

As for the WordPress plugin comparison; Rails already has a convenient plugin architecture, so there's no reason why Insoshi can't piggyback this, at least for the time being.
First, when questioned by the TV crews, the pyro guys refused to say what OS they were running. They did say that they had to reboot the computer. Then later (may be after suits with duffel bags arrived) they said that it was just due to a corrupted file. It was a screw up big enough to be worthy of a cover up (since it touched the common man).

It sounds like a nut-job conspiracy theory but I have difficulty giving MS the benefit of the doubt.
That's really been the sticking point for me. As time goes on though, it becomes a little less irritating. Rich Hickey has done a really great job of managing where the language is going so far.

Initially, I didn't even want to look at Clojure due to it living on the JVM. However, this article shows that leveraging the JVM isn't entirely terrible - sure the setup of the structures is kind of ugly, but the actual usage doesn't look bad at all.

If you reframe it as a Java FFI instead of a language living on the JVM, it's a little less... smelly.
Open betas and short software release schedules lead to "a race to the bottom"
25 Signs That You Might Be An Apple Fanboy
Or earn for 7 years in the first world and retire in the third world. You can retire by 28.
OK, "God Particle" was a silly enough name when it was applied to the Higgs Boson.

But when you're two layers of analogies deep, looking at an electronic device which is (very) tenuously analogous to a particle which is (very) tenuously analogous to a God, you're beyond the range of regular silly and into a range of silliness so silly that I can't think of words to describe it.

Apart from that bit though, seems like very interesting technology.
hows that for disclosure - thanks for the update keep rockin!
Mysterious Akoha Game Funded
Akoha receives funding for a game . . . little is known about it except that the investors believe it is something worthwhile to pour money into...
good times! cheers to you Mr. Hofmann
New height of "God Silliness" achieved.
I don't really care about the JVM. It's just that the code ends up looking like Java translated to Lisp.

Lisp:

(some-method instance)

Clojure:

(. instance (SomeMethod))

Yuck. But not as yucky as the real Java :)
Is it too late for you to reframe this item that way? Your title suggests it's implementing a web server in 100 lines, when really it's creating a 100-line API for driving Java classes that implement a web server.
Ask YC: Good Introduction to Economics / Markets?
I figure a lot of people here have a background in CS / Engineering and have the same question. Any suggestions?
I believe I read it in an interview.
Anyone developing for the iPhone?  Any suggestions on learning?
I just got accepted to the developer program.

I'm pretty fluent with C, but I've never worked with Cocoa/Obj C, and was wondering if anyone here had suggestions on good ways to come up to speed.
Potentially off-topic, but I find that I often upmod submissions that I don't necessarily agree with.

In this case, I don't have enough background in writing OO Python code to have an intelligent opinion. Yet, I still find the issue interesting to read about.
Jeff Bezos puts $3 million into Kongregate, a social gaming website
"Even when we started Google, we thought, "Oh, we might fail," and we almost didn't do it. The reason we started is that Stanford said, "You guys can come back and finish your Ph.D.s if you don't succeed.""

So true. Society has formed a horrible notion of stressing the importance of earning your degree(s) right after high school and in consecutive order.
Psystar's Open Computer arrives at CNET
McCarthy is clearly a legend and a genius in the domain of computer science. Unfortunately he also has the political imagination of a developmentally disabled love child of G. W. Bush and Ayn Rand. For additional political commentary by JMC, see: http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/commentary.html
jcl: I'm not sure why you deleted your comment, as it was right on track. A better point to be made, perhaps was that most of the comments added no other value than to "second" or "third" the notion of posting to python-dev/python-3000
This extracellular matrix stuff is quite exciting. They've actually managed to reconstitute entire organs (but are of course still a long way from doing it reliably for humans):

http://www1.umn.edu/umnnews/Feature_Stories/Researchers_crea...
Thin Servers
How does it determine location? It doesn't seem to be terribly good at it... I'm in Portland, Maine; when I put the slider all the way to the right (presumably to find people close to me), it gave me a bunch of results in California.

Not that I blame the app for having a tough time... there's not a lot for it to go on for figuring out the geographic location of a user. And I can see why it might get confused between the real Portland and those impostors in Oregon who stole our name!
What determines the meaning of that phrase is not how you measure time; it's how the employer measures time. And what ultimately matters to them is days. Hours only matter (and that, to some employers) inasmuch they affect your present or future productivity, measured in functionality/day.
American Airlines loses $3.3 million a day
1) http://www.amazon.com/Investments-Zvi-Bodie/dp/0071263101/re...

2) Wikipedia all the terms you may be unfamiliar with.

3) Read pmarca's blog :)
Your website is down.
Art of Testing Web Applications (PDF Slides)
I always enjoy a good read during sex.
pg,.. a nice graphical time line would be fun to see. i think a series of wired like info porn on the subject would be great.

[a histogram of growth rates]
[a histogram of round based success]
[a histogram of general margins] - burn vs. profit
[an aggregate timeline of all companies] - maybe something like this http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/02/23/movies/2008022...
There was noise about trials of regrowing fingers on amputees using extracellular. I have yet to hear anything, which makes me think it may not have gone well.
Medical Advances—Through Your iPhone?
Ask YC: a YC mutual fund?
the curiosity struck, weather a mutual fund of all YC companies would be a good investment? Maybe it would be a way to raise funds for YC teams?

I think YC has demonstrated acceptance by this point, but I am curious if a fund could be created that would generate > 12% return for secondary investors.
Ask YC: Good mySQL tutorial on linking tables
I'm trying to develop a scalable table structure for my current project and I think the best way to do things will involve linking tables. I'm looking for some good tutorials on how table linking works as well as what are the best ways to create scalable database structures.

Does anyone have any good links on these subjects?

Any help is appreciated as I'm a total newbie on this subject.
The sidebar on 'The Best Advice I Ever Got' makes for good reading too.

Here's the link:

http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2008/fortune/0804/gallery.bes...
Joel gets away with longish posts by illustrating with stories or being funny all he way through. There's nothing wrong with a bit of comic relief if it's relevant or if at least it doesn't distract you. The following joke bought Petzold another screenful's worth of my attention.

Here's some advice for successfully reading a book: You need to stay focused, so try to avoid distractions. Avoid multitasking. Avoid task switching. Turn off the TV. Shift positions occasionally so you don't get cramps or backaches. Don't get too comfortable or you might fall asleep. (Interestingly, many of these same rules apply to having sex, except that you can read a book with a cat in your lap.)

Then again, you need to be sure you can pull it off. There are few things as devastating to your writing as trying to be funny and failing (hi Yegge.)
An employer can certainly measure time in days, and sometimes demand/expect people to put in extra hours in order to make a deadline.

But working extra hours doesn't make one more productive than average and no employer should measure productivity that way. If person A works 80 hours per week and gets as much done as person B that works 40 hours per week no employer will claim that A is as productive as B.

On a side note, given that I do contract work currently you can be certain that both me and my employer measure time in hours not days.
You might find this page helpful:
http://www.manythings.org/japanese/jlpt/

It contains a list cross matched with EDICT
Hold on, you're simply name-calling without supplying any beef. Can't you make a point instead of sending us off to (you assume) have a good laugh at JMC's political naivity?
Africa’s internet still very far behind
One of the best books I ever read was "How to Read a Book", written by Mortimer Adler. I think it was written in the 60's or so. I read it in high school and it immediately made me a significantly better reader, and the impact wasn't short lived.
Haha, back then I wasn't really into database applications and built it just to experience it. That's how I know that 2-back is fairly easy and 3-back isn't, but beyond that I can't answer you (yet).

I gave my dad a 3-back test, on which he did surprisingly well, and he said, "oh, that's easy, all you have to do is concentrate." Indeed, a big portion of it is attention.
Subversion’s Future?
Won't be "done" in a while, because it's part of a larger work in progress, but I should be able to show something soon. I just started learning ActionScript, but cogsci programs aren't hard to write... but who knows, I look forward to criticism, which I expect much.
Good point. I also don't think anybody would play brain games for very long at a time. But then, such apps are highly motivation-dependent. There is a thing about learning rate and conscious effort, which is a much more difficult problem.
Great link this one, a couple of red herrings in there.

Ford CEO (#25) saying "Focus on the customer. Deliver value.". Neither of which they are respected for.
Don’t Skimp on Your Metadata!
Design matters even when it "doesn't matter"
This sounds like it's straight out of Snow Crash.
I thought of this question before, and I don't think so.
I think a boosted IQ would precede boosted math problem solving ability, because it deals very much with abstractions and an efficient working memory: "suppose x = a, y = c, z = g, then if xyzabc123, qwerty." Each additional step puts increasing stress on the WM buffer since everything needs to be maintained simultaneously for I/O.

You can, however, improve your speed at solving well-defined math problems by practicing them a lot. I believe this would eventually utilize episodic memory (HD space) rather than WM, which uses a different mechanism. But the speed would probably not generalize to novel problems, which is what I think you're getting at.
Economics? Get a good, mainstream textbook (read the alternative stuff after you have a good grasp of the regular material, if you want). Here's one that's free:

http://www.introecon.com/

Also, following blogs is a good way to learn. I like this one:

http://economistsview.typepad.com/

and this one:

http://www.marginalrevolution.com/

Start with those, and they'll link to others.
The best advice I ever got
DoubleClick Mobile Integrates with Mobile Ad Networks (Google Press Release)
It takes a lot of practice to really get the hang of these systems. Is anybody here a regular user of any systematic memory technique?

I know the Major Method but only used it once or twice. The encoding step is by far the largest bottleneck; I intend to write an application to assist learning the MM, but I'm occupied with another related application atm :-)

Here's a very simple method I use to make sure I leave the house with everything I need: I have a special number (say, 4), and when I go out my belongings need to add up to that. That would be keys, wallet, camera, phone. If I have other things I adjust my number accordingly. Maybe it's overly simple, but I'm pretty sure some people forget their phones once in a while.
A terabyte of cheep RAM. That will be the day.
Good points, but this sounds a lot like charity work. If that's what he wants, ok, great, but come out and say it clearly.

However:; I think that it's easier to contribute in a big, serious way to charity if you've already made your pile of cash elsewhere.
I'm not sure how he can honestly call Subversion a "best of breed" centralized VCS while it still doesn't support merge tracking in a stable release.

And is it just me, or are the use cases for SVN proposed in the developer's mail he links to fairly limited? Making SVN "the best tool for organizations whose users need to
interact with repositories in complex ways" is fine and useful, but they're essentially conceding that the DVCS approach is a better fit for most open source projects.

http://svn.haxx.se/dev/archive-2008-04/1020.shtml
Not bombing, gaining links (there are good ways to do this; linkbait)

- charging different for different keywords is called capitalism; some keywords are BMW's and others are Kia's now go tell bmw they can't charge more

I don't pretend to know all coding, don't pretend to know all SEO; don't fear other's skill sets.
Internet to hit full capacity by 2010
No, you don't understand. It prompts for a CAPTCHA after the user has submitted his text. So if I just wrote out a paragraph of a comment, and submit, I wouldn't want to have that paragraph NOT show up just because I'm too lazy to enter the CAPTCHA. I think the people who won't enter the CAPTCHA will be far smaller with this method.
I believe we (Virtualmin) qualify for that definition, though it'll be another few months before it's on the same order of magnitude as 37signals (we currently make thousands, they make millions...but once we've worked as long as they have we'll be doing fine). Though our end goal is a bit more ambitious than the 37signals guys (by some definition of "ambitious").
Learning Viral: Is your product a natural or add-on?
An idea I learned from a leading venture capitalist about building viral as the core of your product...Thoughts?
airlines are in a real struggle. curious how they are going to get out of it.
this site has nice stuff http://trailsinthesand.com/ or the apple sample code
Ask YC: what do you use for Rails web stats?
Google Analytics is great, but it has an overhead, and it's not practical for tracking AJAX requests.

AWStats is also nice, but it doesn't make use of much of the context available to a Rails app. It also doesn't have quite as much information as Analytics.

There seem to be any number of plugins available, but none of them seem to stand out above the others.

What do you guys use, if anything?
A) You're absolutely right.

B) The title I used is the title from the blog. Aside from that, it's too late for me to make the edit.
He's talked about this before (mostly here at News.YC and in his the "How not to die" essay, which you've alluded to).

But, I've noticed that most go back to what they were doing before because the raising of additional funds proved difficult or boring. I think the rejection process can also be really hard on folks, and very few startups get funded on their first try, so there's a lot of rejection. I believe that's the case with three of the companies that "died" from WFP07 (which are the only ones I know well enough to say anything about). One went back to contracting and building cool websites for indie rock bands and related companies, and another company sort of split off into different things...2/3 of them ended up working for other YC companies (one of which has since exited), while the third went back to writing (I think). The third company that "died" went back to school to do research, and presumably the grants needed to continue the work are easier to obtain for PhD students than investment for research-stage ideas that don't quite have a market and won't for another few years.
By "he," you mean "you." Grandparent poster is the author.
@mosburger Location is found from a user's "location" field on twitter (and geocoded with google) . Only ~50% have geocode-able location fields. And the location is only part of the scoring, so there may not be that many similar people in Portland, ME.

@ivankirgin Agreed that including stats on how often someone tweets and other stats would be useful, like "twitter quotient":
http://web.forret.com/tools/twitter-tq.asp?name=Scobleizer
> 6 got bought (reddit, infogami ...

Didn't reddit "buy" infogami? Seems a little funny to count that as a sale ;-)
pg doesn't actually really have that data. He doesn't sit on the board of any YC companies, and all he knows is what he's told. So, you asking YC companies directly for the data would probably be as effective as asking pg to build such a chart for you. pg has a general idea of the relative successes of YC companies because he chats with them every few weeks or months...but he's not the accountant for any of them.

And, of course, disclosing that data for private companies is probably unwise. All YC companies have competitors (if it's a good idea, somebody is already working on it or will be by the time you launch), and having the laundry aired in public is probably a bad idea. The ones who want to talk about aspects of their business, generally talk on their blogs.