skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
PG says he likes going after big, bad corporations and monopolies ...

A YC company to revolutionize the food industry?? :)
Potato Salad Recipe
Classic potato salad recipe
The reason its super secret is that it works with my bank account only with my banks online banking. It would only work there, so no need to try to make it available to others.
One thing to keep an eye on, though, is the spread of ug99 and the potential effect on wheat production: http://www.ars.usda.gov/Main/docs.htm?docid=14649
If Social Networks Were Like Cars...
About this subject, checkout the latest cryptogram:

http://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram-0805.html#3

As usual, Bruce Schneier has solid advice.
well, for starters, I'd suppose YC thinks favorably on the startups they've invested in. I mean, they're putting some of their money and I suspect a bunch of their time into them. Maybe I'm dense, but this seems obvious to me.

YC has posted the launched startups here:
http://ycombinator.com/faq.html

So, if you were so motivated, you could contact these startups and do scoops on them, if they are so willing.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=193123

That recommends several books and blogs. The blogs seem good, but I haven't read the books yet.

Although, I do generally have pretty good luck with slate.
It wasn't because we funded Rescuetime that I wrote about this problem, but because I already thought this problem was so important that we funded Rescuetime.
Easy target, eh? Slow news day?
Which PHP template engine do you use?
I use PHPTAL, but I am not satisfied with it. I am wondering if I should switch to Smarty.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Negroponte gives Big Brother a whole new meaning...
Pen and paper first is my approach. I like to do workflows and ideas on pen & paper with lots of bullet points and rewrites. I go off to a secluded, quiet area and turn off the cell phone/computer and then I just start writing in long hand what my idea(s) is. After that, I start thinking about what features to add in - I'm not really being discriminate yet; any idea will do - and write those down.

Once I've done the initial brain dump, it's time to tighten it up (and more coffee, please). I re-write it all trying to make it shorter and more explainable to someone else. This inevitably leads me to other ideas and again I just brain dump - no worrying about shortening it or explaining it at this stage.

Okay - take three is tightening it up further and segregating into bucket "A" (must implement in beta), "B" (must be present in version 1.0), and then I put the rest for later. I write up the summary in 3-4 sentences max.

Done with that part of the planning stage - now it's time for workflows. I figure out the major consumers - who's going to use the product? I then create a page for each of them that describes, in minor detail, their usage of the product.

Once I have that done, I then re-write it all and tighten it up which inevitably leads to more ideas... And then I tighten it up once more.

Once I'm done with the paper part (usually several days), now it's time to prepare a mockup of the product's main features using a graphics editor. Once I have designed these, then it's time to start building.

When I build, I like to build the prototype first in terms of look/feel and then add the guts later. I'm very concerned with code maintenance here (assuming you are programming) as I know that I will rewrite this 10x in the next month and 3x in the next year. Take your time - you can make mistakes here that will be felt for years.

Good luck!
I'd highly recommend "The New Rules of PR and Marketing" by David Meerman Scott.

http://www.amazon.com/New-Rules-Marketing-PR-Podcasting/dp/0...

Good read and very practical.
Many of the ones that have been summarized here are pretty good:

http://www.squeezedbooks.com (currently undergoing a server upgrade, sorry for random bits of downtime).

Some favorites include "20 years of high tech marketing disasters", "crossing the chasm", "innovator's dilemma".
Eh. MS is still immensely profitable, as is IBM. I don't see that changing in the short term & they'll probably see it coming in the long term & adapt. As did IBM. Who knows, they might even be happier off if they lose the ability to fuck with other people but get to keep the money.
I just used the title of the original blog post.

What other metric could be used for evaluating teachers?
Feeling Naked? How to handle losing your sk*rt.
I have to wonder why you are doing this - are you really planning on having so many authors that you need a technical solution for this right now? Massive book publishers need that sort of thing but for a startup it seems unnecessary and a luxury. email the contracts in .pdf form, have them sign and return two copies, then mail one copy back to them.

I would just worry that you'll spend 40 hours developing a solution that will save you 5 hours a year.
Which window manager are you using? And what chat program is that (running on an emacs shell?)
If fertilizer were made from Oil, I'd be concerned. But other, more abundant hydrocarbons power the green revolution.
"I’ve thought for a while that sending laptops to developing countries is simply the 21st century equivalent of sending bibles to the colonies," adds Python language author Guido van Rossum in the comments.

There may be something to what Guido says.

That said, I don't think the OLPC project was necessarily a bad project. Because the whole thing was open source, folks are now free to part the project out: borrow the bits that seemed to work well, redesign other bits, and throw out the rest. That's the best you can expect from most academic research projects.

I'm not surprised to see that OLPC didn't last that long, and that the endpoint is a big explosion. That's the problem with these semi-academic semi-charitable semi-engineering semi-commercial projects: It's hard to have a child with four parents. There's a tendency for the whole thing to devolve into a tooth-and-nails custody fight.
Launchbox 08 team looking for hacker co-founders
Didn't get into YC but still have a burning itch to get in on the ground level on a seed-funded startup?

A Launchbox (http://www.launchboxdigital.com) duo is looking for passionate co-founding hackers.

We'll be in Wash, DC for the summer, starting ... next week, and we're looking to fill the team with one (or two) awesome hacker(s).

Some tools you'll need proficiency with:
- PHP
- AJAX/JavaScript
- XML/XSLT
- W3C DOM methods and properties
- Experience in database design, SQL and object relational mapping.
- (BONUS: Working knowledge of Internet protocols, networks, HTML, TCP/IP, CSS, Python, Perl and/or Shell preferred.)

Those looking for a challenge can expect heuristic algorithms.

Email launchboxhackers@gmail.com with whatever you think will convince us you're the right fit for the team.
I hadn't actually realized that these two Negropontes were related...

I'm also not convinced that it's relevant. You can choose your friends, and you can choose your philosophies, but you can't choose your relatives.
Any book by Harry Beckwith. The Ultimate Sales Letter - Dan Kennedy.
The 25 Most Popular Pages on Facebook
so can someone explain why Windows on the OLPC is such a crime -- especially, as I said before, when some countries won't accept the OLPC without it?

whether the goal is learning or shipping laptops is immaterial -- if by shipping laptops the students are learning, then the end goal is accomplished. don't see how opening up the XO to Windows to get distributed to more kids who need it is a bad thing.
Purple Cow and Trading Up
and, once you get a bit of legs under your business, move away from it seems to be the strategy.

And as soon as someone buys your startup, the porn comes back (see nsfw reddit and Condé Nast)
"He is the elder brother of Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab and of the One Laptop per Child project. His brother Michel Negroponte is an Emmy Award-winning filmmaker, and his other brother, George Negroponte, is an artist."

Conspiracy theories? Do you have more information on the nefarious connection between Nick and John -- I'd actually be interested if this were a legitimate concern.
And let's not forget that they essentially created the tiny, cheap laptop market. People like ASUS and Intel were scared of them. If the entire project has turned out to be "a con" and jack shit has ended up being done for children, you have to admit that in that case they've at least pulled the most successful bluff in the computer industry, perhaps ever.

And I still think that some of the ideas in the Sugar interface - like the Journal, and the pervasive collaboration - are potentially revolutionary. (They "just" lacked the necessary execution.)
In an essay published in the Salmon of Doubt, Douglas Adams said something about how every new medium starts out as porn, and the other genres move in afterwards.
And I just hope this experiment will remain unique in this industry.

It is far, far too late for that. Pron is often credited as the force that built the home video industry, for example. (Although I admit I've never seen actual data.) And I suspect that pron been a huge driver of broadband, er, penetration.

Anyway, we "agree" to this because (a) it's not as if we can stop it by protesting; and (b) it's a hilarious promotional idea -- probably more for the pron company than for IPv6, but maybe for both. It's right up there with Diskette Day at the Carnegie-Mellon/CWRU football game in 1986. [1] I agree, though, that it's not especially likely to improve IPv6 deployment. IPv6 has been the technology of the future for a decade, and it may remain so for a while yet.

[1] http://honesthypocrite.blogspot.com/2005/10/hail-carnegie-an...
Google Analytics - 20 Ways to Fix Analytics. Please Hurry?
From what I've heard, x-rated stuff was never that big a component of Scribd's traffic. Porn is so ubiquitous that it becomes a component of any general purpose Internet service (e.g. the most popular search queries tend to be about porn), but I don't think Scribd got any particular boost from it.
Ask HN: Tell people about your idea, or keep it to yourself?
Hi wonderful HN people.

Quick question, probably aimed at startup people.

Do you like telling people about your groundbreaking new idea, or do you keep your cards close to your chest?

When people ask me what I'm up to, I'm very reluctant to tell them, incase they, or someone they talk to, is a competitor and get a heads up on what exciting ideas I'm going to bring to their market.

I think I subscribe to the old school mantra of keeping quiet about what I'm up to but maybe I should get with the times, it does seem the more you talk about something the more likely your words will end up in the right persons ear, be it investors, new users etc.

What do you think?
AutoGuitarHero: When you just can't get any better
Two things I forgot to say:

1) As a former academic, I suspect that everyone who spends long enough in academia goes through phases of frustration where it all seems like "an enormous con". (In industry, of course, you learn that it's all an enormous con in your first week. ;)

2) they essentially created the tiny, cheap laptop market.

Exactly. And that helps children worldwide as much or more as the actual OLPC does.

It can be ugly to watch the R&D sausage being made. Its indirect approach is not for everyone. Every R&D project has a stated goal of "taking over the world" or "curing this disease" or "ending poverty" or something, and almost none of them ever explicitly reaches such a goal. And yet often those "failed projects" publish stuff that gets picked up by the next generation of projects and refined into something good. Or the students who worked on the "failed" project take their experience into industry where they apply it to a real product that actually succeeds.
I have done quite a bit of work in Erlang over the past 4 or so years. I even wrote an anti-spam engine hat was heavy on parsing.

The best thing Erlang has going in the parsing area is the binary pattern matching, which if you convert a string to a binary works wonders and is much faster. IN fact switching a string to a binary, doing your parsing with binary pattern matching and switching it back to a string CAN be faster in Erlang than using Erlang's string functions.

I won't go into comparisons to other languages, mostly because my personal opinion is that Erlang has so many other great features that not being good at string processing is a minor issue.
I agree completely. I get so bored with the over-the-top standard-issue whine about suburbs which you nowadays hear from just about anyone who doesn't live in one. Blah blah ugly blah blah McMansions blah blah Wal-Mart blah-blah soul-destroying.

To me it always just comes across as snobbery: some fashionable upper-middle-class guy criticising the unfashionable lower middle class for not being as tasteful as he is.

Sometimes it's a bit more sinister -- the criticisms which come from an extreme left-wing position always seem to carry a wish that the lower two thirds of society would stop buying the four-bedroom houses and huge TVs that they can now easily afford, and go back to being those picturesque poor huddled masses so that we can can plot revolution on their behalf.

But usually it's just boring old snobbery, in one of its few remaining socially-acceptable forms.
I'm leaning more towards live+historical analytic tools like Woopra and to some extent clicktale.

These have absolutely changed the way we look at our web visitors. Now hosting feels a bit like being a BBS sysop, especially on our medium-to-small sites.

Google Analytics still makes good quick reports that are useful when discussing traffic with investors/advertisers. Yet we're using their dashboard less and less now that the live tools provide us some decent statistics for our smaller sites.

I have to agree adding an API for Google Analytics would be great. Woopra has neat javascript tricks where you can add additional information about the user from your backend to be passed to woopra. So in the GUI interface we can tie traffic to actual usernames (avatar images, too) rather than IP addresses. This is hard to describe how useful it is--- nameless IP addresses and user-agent strings lead you to "guess" when users are the same and it doesn't help across machines. When you can see how a specific customer uses your site over a month or two, it can help a lot in understanding what you've done wrong and right with your site.

Quick advice: If you have a small website (50k-1k page views a day) and you're not using something like woopra and clicktale to understand what your users do when they visit your sites, you're losing a great opportunity to make your site better for customers.

Edit: A quick search turned up a few other live-analytic hybrids out there I hadn't seen before. Like whoson.com seems to have a self-hosted version. Might experiment with those, too.
If the problem is as Michael described - a blocking call to fetch a remote file for every page request with no timeout, then it would seem the "bad judgment" has been going on for a while.
Go outside.
You'd have to sideline a lot of regulation and subsidies.

But it might just be doable.
From the article: In his treatise, Malthus couldn’t envisage any innovations for increasing yield beyond “dressing” the soil with cattle manure. In the decades after he wrote, farmers in England took advantage of new machinery, powerful fertilizers, and higher-yield seeds, and supply rose faster than demand.

I believe that due to mechanised food production and distribution, it takes 10 calories of oil to put one calorie on your plate. If oil becomes more expensive then food becomes more expensive. In a global market, the poorest lose. Governments have ringfenced rice for domestic consumption and supply and demand has cause huge rises in export prices. There's no safeguard to prevent this happening next to potatoes or wheat.
Well, one major component is Natural Gas or Coal:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process

> The Haber process now produces 100 million tons of nitrogen fertilizer per year, mostly in the form of anhydrous ammonia, ammonium nitrate, and urea. 3-5% of world natural gas production is consumed in the Haber process (~1-2% of the world's annual energy supply). That fertilizer is responsible for sustaining one-third of the Earth's population...

This actually doesn't take into account the energy to bring the components to the high temperatures required, either, usually supplied by electricity.

The output:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UAN
Has anyone ever actually had this happen, or is this just plain ol' Guardian-style anti-American paranoia? I've carried computers through US customs as a noncitizen many times, and they've never shown any interest in searching 'em. Of course they have the power to, in theory, just like the customs of just about any other country you might enter. But are they actually exercising this power routinely?
A healthy dose of skepticism works well for me. I'm happy to share certain details with close friends and colleagues but less likely to divulge critical processes to someone who I meet off of craigslist.

I will say that ideas are more sacred when they are still only ideas. Once I've executed on the idea, I'm happy to talk about the current implementation but not likely to divulge thoughts on future growth except to trusted advisors.
the journal suggestion was more of... keep track of what's going on while it's going on and report to us after it's a good time to do so. Writing on say reddit may or may not be as easy because he may not have notes to do so.
But you can choose your employer (unless you are a slave, which doesn't apply here, being [] shipping magnates).

It is so simple; so elementary, that most people don't see it (e.g. think of mass-energy relationship).

MIT's primary goals and funding agencies are well known, and so are the little one's scientific achievements, supposedly securing him a place among "the great". Also look @ at the goals of the OLPC, as the whole concept (not as a cheap notebook with little green ears). It is written publicly in B&W:

"At its core, our journal concept embodies the idea that the file system records a history of the things a child has done, or, more specifically, the activities in which a child has participated. Its function as the store of the objects created while performing those activities is secondary, although also important. The Journal naturally lends itself to a chronological organization (although it can be tagged, SEARCHED, and sorted by a variety of means). As a record of things a child has done—not just the things a child has saved—the Journal will read much like a portfolio or scrapbook history of the child's interactions with the machine and also with peers. The Journal combines entries explicitly created by the children with those that are IMPLICITLY CREATED through participation in activities.
[...]
Each machine is a full-time wireless router. Children in the most remote regions of the globe—as well as their teachers and families—will be connected both to one another AND to the Internet."

http://laptop.org/en/laptop/interface/principles.shtml

"It's data that's practically a printout of what's going on in your brain: What you are thinking of buying, who you talk to, what you talk about." --Kevin Bankston, staff attorney, Electronic Frontier Foundation

go and figure the rest. Guido's colonisation parallel with conversion to Christianity / XP / Whatever is also very apparent: practically all "orders" are from "client states". The ones likely to vote in favour of the MS Office format to be an ISO standard. Advancing (computer?) literacy in MIT's backyard would be a more ambitious goal ;)

Or as they say, in soviet Russia, the employer chooses you ;)
I think it's fine to get inspiration as long as you aren't stealing. I modeled mine after amazon. I'm not a guru designer and I took what I liked from about five sites total to create my mashup. Take the ideas/elements you like and make them your own somehow. People will appreciate the originality also.
If you are by yourself, I firmly believe you need someone you trust to talk to. Everyone really needs a sounding board. I suggest that you try to find a partner or two. I'm kind of in the same boat and am contacting key people who I trust in my network for feedback and interest.
I don't even know what this question means. I wouldn't be surprised to see pg ignore it due to lack of substance.
Writing a framework [3]: The Model View Controller paradigm and object orientation
"(In industry, of course, you learn that it's all an enormous con in your first week. ;)"

I sure hope that was partially tongue in cheek, because if it wasn't, I kinda feel sorry for you.

Many places I have worked have been total jokes and many people I have had the misfortune to work with, let's just say, "misbehaved".

But for each of those places, I found many good businesses where people got out of bed eager to do good things every day. They have produced value for others and have much to be proud of. (These are also the ones who I seek as customers.)
With a 4KB minimum block size? That should do nicely for all of my 100 byte postal addresses; NOT.
Great feedback. Ill try them out. Anyone tried hitwise?
it would be interesting to see how startups progress as they go on. And not just from what the startups themselves want to say. I'd like to know what PG/YC (actual people involved) think.
There's just too much lower hanging fruit.

Not much demand among the masses to revolutionize the food industry (unless you find a way to deliver junk food via broadband).
#$%^ you, economist, for thinking we here at YC are stupid enough to fall for such obvious bait.
And this is on YC why?

Stop upvoting/commenting/clicking on these and maybe they'll go away.
you aren't dense. You are just oversimplifying the answer.

I could contact them, but it is not their perspective I am asking for. There is more than one perspective on the story.
Mat is innocent!
In addition, we would be offering market-rate base salary, which is a bit easier to find benchmarks for. The first link was very helpful, however, it didn't seem to include a discussion around ranges of equity for such roles at such a stage, i.e., pre-investment. I've seen some other blog postings on the subject but for post-investment, Series A-stage.

If there are others that have suggestions or data points, they're most welcome! Thanks!
Except if you make it your job
I'm a lucky guy. I've chosen for myself the job of e-entrepreneur, and so when I'm navigating I'm actually working! Be it e-mails, my feedreader, digg, paulgraham.com or whatever else, I'm actually always trying to improve my business and offer my customers a better service!
Or am I fooling myself? Time will tell.
I mostly did 1) the other way around, and it also holds true.
Concerning 2), few people realise, that hw in the last years was artificially expensive due to lack of concurrence: basically x86 won the CPU arena, a few misses aside (e.g. ARM, which Intel quickly made into StrongARM etc.). This is also true on the sw side: few people realise, that the eeePC uses Xandros, which is basically subject to MS Imaginary Property[1][2], converted to hard $-s. The OLPC is "simply" being accomplished[3].

[1] http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.html
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xandros#Collaboration_with_Micr...
[3] http://www.thecorporation.com/
"(They got funded b/c they solved a problem, had a plan that we felt they could execute, and were smart enough to see that we create value for them) is just repetitive."

I'm asking for more than just why the got funded. I believe that I also suggested, flaws, and how they grew during their time at YC.
Get the Pragmatic book: "Manage it!" It includes some good sections on planning.

http://www.amazon.com/Manage-Modern-Pragmatic-Project-Manage...

Daniel