skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was standing on the edge of my toilet hanging a clock, the porcelin was wet, I slipped, hit my head on the edge of the sink, and when I came to I had a relvalation, a vision, a picture in my head.

Seriously though... I think best in the bath or while asleep or while driving.
If you are creating a site that has a lot streaming audio or video the embedded player must be flash, just as youtube does! There is no other way in this instance! 99% of net users use flash to enjoy audio and video through their browser.

A entire site in flash... well that does suck!
Any thoughts on that?
If we were to rebuild the Internet today, we should remake it using a fully decentralized model instead of a distributed one. By turning it into a mesh network, it would make it a lot more robust.
I second its greatness but the name is all wrong!

It's not only not hands-free, you also now have to use your arms, legs, jump in place, lean, twist...

I didn't watch the whole thing because I don't want to know how they handle sex... shudder

http://www.secondlifeherald.com/slh/2007/09/afternoon-delig....
Most VCs you can safely tell you're not currently looking for money, and they'll still help you. If you're good, they'll want to start a relationship in case you need money later.
A nice bit of PR for Monster:

"I assume that Monster Cable International, Ltd., in Bermuda, listed on these patents, is an IP holding company and that Monster Cable's principal US entity pays licensing fees to the Bermuda corporation in order to shift income out of the United States and thereby avoid paying United States federal income tax on those portions of its income;"

I don't think this is going the way Monster expected it to go.
Wasn't it Eugene Kleiner who said, "Take the money when it's available." :P
Jesus that was painfully slow. I think it maxed out my 8Mb connection as well...

It did look slick though.
I'm still trying to figure out what problem Webtops solve.
+1 for inventing the flux capacitor
No, because he preceded his statement with "If all your site does is provide information." It is fair to assume if you provide information, you can choose the format for providing that information. That is, you don't have to provide PDF's, you can put it straight into the HTML. In fact, that's his entire point. Whether it's a PDF or a Flash file, that's not necessary. It's just text, so it should be rawly embedded into the page.
5 Ways to Become a High-Class Networker Without Awkward Phone Calls
Just curious - did you guys put a reserve on that auction?
it doesnt even have a web browser
There is no need for flash just to view a document. Just convert it to an image on the server. I hacked together a script that did this in an afternoon once, so it is doable.

Using flash has some benefits, but it's not impossible without it.
Got Virgin ISP? Cancel it.
Maker of Electric Sports Car (Tesla) Sues a Competitor
This should not have been posted before it was fixed. We all make mistakes, even stupid ones, and I'm sure none of us would like this happening to them.
A bit of professional courtesy would have been in order.
hey silverlight is actually pretty cool. at least, i don't need a $600 program to develop for it
You don't need a $600 program to develop flash either. osflash.org has one alternative ide and there are a few others.
Don't Be Evil or don't lose value?
I agree with Parker on the pain point and I agree with mixmax on the constant flow of ideas. Keep track of them. Keep lists. Revisit the lists. Prune the lists. I usually hit instantdomainsearch.com to see if anyone's registered an obvious name for the concept, reg it if it hasn't been, explore the competition if it has.

Two thoughts:

1) Go to Amazon. It's obviously a huge center of commerce. Find an active forum. Make it easier for someone (or a group) to do something they're talking about doing there, complaining about, etc. Advertise it there in the forums. That's how I launched RefreshThing.

2) Observe existing behavior in others you can relate to. Improve upon it, make it simpler, show them how it should be done online. Double points if that behavior is something they're accustomed to doing offline and are crawling online where you can show them how to run.

Or try picking an idea you have right now, developing it (a little or a lot) and then solving the problem you don't know it has until you're at a stage where you can see that about it.
haha, yeah; didn't even know the term "phreak" until, say, 3 months after when I stumbled across the old cDc text files.
Built to Last vs. Built to Flip
ah, cool. i was under the impression flash has always been closed
scathing?
For me, it's simply something that's learned and cultivated. As far as I can tell, my creativity comes from a sense of curiosity in the world around me, a mental flexibility to entertain odd possibilities, and a broad scope of knowledge.

This sort of question is asked of cartoonists a lot, and usually, they'll make up some sort of fanciful answer, like "I like to drink coffee with cocoa butter". In reality the very best ones have cultivated a sense of curiosity about edge case situations. They make it a habit to notice odd things, and things that don't quite make sense when you think about it. If you read Bill Watterson's (Calvin and Hobbes) Tenth Anniversary Edition, he talks about this topic, and his answer is that he mainly just sit there and lets his mind wander in front of a blank piece of paper--which to others might look remarkably like goofing off. Hackers in general are the same way, but they get curious about systems and how things work instead.

A mental flexibility to entertain possibility helps as well. Often times we're boxed in by our experience, and what we know, as hard as we try to break out of it. When radio was invented, it was asked why you'd want to say stuff to no one in particular. And when the TV came out, the inventor of the radio dismissed it. Here, I think it helps to know how to daydream and let your mind wander. Or when you approach a problem outside your field think of how to solve it using something outside of your expertise. The only person I've ever read about to overcome it was Richard Feynman. Apparently, he had the ability to start from basics from any problem and work his way from the bottom up, aware of his assumptions.

Lastly, what's called creative is often just taking two old things that don't usually go together, and getting them to play well with each other. When you know about lots of things and have a broad scope, you start to see how things are interconnected. In school, I liked math, but other kids complained about how they'll never use it. It wasn't until after college that I started to see that the segmentations of subjects is done so that students don't get confused and have discrete chucks of info to learn. In reality, every academic subject is interconnected somehow, and when you have the broadness of scope with deepness in some of them, you'll be able to make connections between things that are related, but not usually thought of as being so. If you can make those connections, people will usually dub you as being creative, when you don't think it's as big of a deal yourself.

Being creative is a habit you get into.
The extremely embarrassing truth is that I've gotten many of my AI ideas while trying to write science fiction and fantasy stories.

- Eliezer Yudkowsky
I emailed him and didn't get a response yet... I vaguely remember emailing him last time I went to SF and also didn't get a response.

Are there any other molecular gastronomy places in town?
They released the details of Flash with the condition you couldn't create clients. So the Flash clients are all Adobe, but you can write software to create Flash stuff.
Startup School Schedule Posted
Programmers, DIY Types Embrace Soft, Hackable Chumby
It'll be interesting to see if readers like the system, because I imagine there's a number of problems with the metrics and then establishing a good personal weighting function. What about books that have mixed perspectives, 1st and 3rd person? Most of the writing style metrics would be far less significant than interesting plot and good characterization. Let's say someone liked Jurassic Park. Chances are they liked it despite the slow start, yet the structure analysis apparently recommends other books partly on a criterion ("slow start followed by fast pace") that should be negatively weighted.

Pandora's music DNA matching might be more successful because listening to music seems more visceral and less cognitive than reading books. The dimension space of book recommendation feature vectors could dwarf that of music and even movies. I wonder how the system would do in the Netflix challenge by turning the analysis on the production screenplays for the films.
In all honesty, if you have ever wondered what to do about the cycles and storage that went unused or underused in your datacenters (and the effect of said on operating profit and loss), I have to wonder who wouldn't have come up with it eventually.

Amazon came up with a way to rent supercomputing facilities to people outside of academia, and continue to refine the offerings. I'm a little surprised it took this long, but that could just be a reflection of Amazon being the first to get it mostly-right for a maturing market.

I'd be more interested in their thought process in terms of "OK, we can offer this, but it's too risky to offer that, and a waste of time to implement that..." That could be enlightening.
Which is that? I'm always interested to hear what's going on around here (I didn't realize there'd even be this many people from Dallas here).
The best submission today by far, IMO. I suspect it won't get crazy popular around here, unfortunately.

Creating a sustainable business has been my lifetime dream, and hearing day after day after day about quick "exit strategies" on news.yc has been very depressing: if you're so eager to "exit", why are you in it to begin with? Pure greed would be an honest answer, I suppose.

This is why admire Jobs so much: while he certainly cares about the "money problem" he has remained so obsessed with Apple, with his baby, throughout his entire life. There is no "next big thing" for him.
I have had people come to me with seemingly complex problems requiring what they thought would be complex solutions. Oddly, the elegant solution was often a gross simplification of the complex problem. Often because I just didn't understand the complexity.

Example 1. A shipper can only fit 1200 boxes in a 40 foot trailer. The material is so light, they can never make weight. The boxes must be delivered to depots throughout the United States with no more than a 3 day window either way. What box should go on which truck? The customer thought they needed sophisticated algorithms to provide an optimal solution. The simple solution: a screen where an educated user can drag boxes (or groups of boxes) to trailers and can drag trailers to destinations. The computer did very little, but the difficult business problem turned into a "game" that employees fought each other to "play".

Example 2: A cloth manufacturer wanted a linear algebra solution to determine what products to mount on their mills and where to set the knives. The simple solution: A screen with all customer orders and key data about each order (size, weight, width). Everything on the screen was sortable and switchable. Again, an intelligent user could "play a game" to schedule the mills almost as well as any automated algorithm.

Example 3: A distributor wanted to know what to buy, when to buy it, and what to put on sale to move slow inventory. He wanted an expensive ERP program. The simple solution: A screen with all supplies and demands that can be mixed, matched, sorted, and selected in many different ways. Again, an intelligent user can "play" with his data and then confidently make decisions.

The "real" bonus of all these "simple" solutions? The person drove the decision and felt in control of the situation. No more blaming the computer for the results.

My suggestion: Slow down. Even stop. Ask, "How are we making this too complicated? What simple little thing could I do to get just part of the way there?" You may surprise yourself and find that the simple little idea IS the solution.
His first three points: "Spread risk through multiple projects and multiple partners", "Do as much as possible myself" and "Question everything all the time" sound like a perfect recipe for pissed-off cofounders.

I don't think I'd want to be this guy's partner if I knew that (a) he'd only be working part-time, and when he felt like it (b) he'd insist on doing everything himself while he was around and (c) he'd probably spend most of the time that he was around questioning all my decisions.
does anyone else find it ironic that in apologizing for their SNAFU they list the full name of the one person effected most by the incident?

"We’d also like to make a special apology to Julia Allison, whose account was temporarily affected by our mistake."
I think people are assuming that he is working on a startup exactly like they are (the same equity structure, type of business, roles, etc.) The author really isn't very clear about what he contributes or how anything is structured. I'll give him the benefit of the doubt, although his second bullet point does make me nervous. He may have a performance-based equity arrangement...who knows? Some programmers are 10X as effective as others supposedly, right?

"You think you're that much more effective than other founders that you can pull it off part-time?"

Well, I do. I'm not the author, but I have a similar approach in regard to his first bullet point. I may have a different structure (I hire employees with equity more often than I work with 'cofounders', and I have a somewhat formal VC-ish corporate structure with outside investors for each project, but 95% of the software/internet related ideas we execute are mine, and I'm actively involved in every aspect of the companies.) I think the difference between our approach and that of most startups is related to this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Myth The need for 'monomaniacal' focus from every cofounder is largely a result of having limited resources...if you can't afford an attorney, you have to learn to do it yourself. If you can't afford a designer, you have to learn to do it well yourself. And so on. You have to be a Jack-of-All-Trades out of necessity.

But, once you've had a financial success or can line up backers based on your past experience, you can focus on marketing, innovation, and strategy. You work ON your business instead of IN your business, as the saying goes. I don't worry about cross-browser compatibility anymore. I have an expert for that. I don't worry about A/R, I have people for that. I don't worry about log analysis, and so on. I'm capable of doing those things and I know what to look for to monitor that things are running smoothly, but it is not a good use of my resources to actually do those things. There are people that are better than me at all of those things. I DO monitor the systems and deliverables of my coworkers, but I don't get lost in the nitty gritty details. I work on the things that I think matter the most for success. I occasionally do things I shouldn't (such as write production code) because I enjoy them, but I really wouldn't if I were optimizing everything. You'd be amazed at what you can accomplish when you aren't bogged down in minutiae. Once you have systems in place, you can really scale your expertise across a number of companies.

I think my employees, cofounders, and investors are happier with this structure than they would be otherwise...but I KNOW they are wealthier because of it.
Out of the dozens of IDE's listed here, what's your recommendation?
PG; Did you modify my title for me......? its better anyways..
>> hearing day after day after day about quick "exit strategies" on news.yc has been very depressing

I'm not a huge fan of hyperbole. Care to back this up? I don't think news.yc is obsessed with ripping people off... what part of 'make something people want' contradicts creating value?
I can't give an honest recommendation since I use Adobes software. But I've heard flashdevelop.org is pretty nice.
I find it important to just take some time off for yourself every once in a while and let your mind wander.

Based on what your experiences, what you've read, and what you've done something should pop into your head!
Pandora's matching doesn't have a very good hit rate recommending music to me. But it's okay for automatically generating a radio station, so that I don't have to be involved in selecting every song.

With books, I can't listen passively while doing something else. I'm involved in each and every book selection I make. When I'm involved, I'm already better at narrowing down my selection to things I might like than Pandora is.
I'm not the grammar-nazi type, but I have this problem where when people use the word "literally" I assume they are not being metaphorical.

"it's literally a scrollbar orgy"

Thanks for that image.
Um, because the most important quality in audio equipment is whether or not it comes from a pretty website?

You do realize that putting cheap crap into fancy boxes is how Monster Cable makes enough money to afford their team of shyster lawyers...
Where Did All the Software Seed Money Go?
Cory Doctorow, seriously? C'mon ...
If it's for digital devices, your next set of cables ought to be the cheapest ones you can find that meet the spec that you'd like them to support. It is pointless to buy fancy cables--in digital, it either meets the spec and works, or it doesn't meet the spec and fails to work. More than 10 bucks for pretty much any short-run cable would be nuts. HDMI 1.3 spec (the kind that'll carry 1080p and even higher) cables can easily be found for under 10 bucks.

Even in analog signals, a quality pure copper cable of sufficient gauge with quality connectors put together correctly, is all that matters. All of the BS from Monster Cables (and other "boutique" cable vendors) has clouded the market with ridiculous nonsense. Blue Jeans Cables appears to eschew that nonsense, and build quality "normal" cables. They are a little pricey, but not terrible, I guess...maybe two to six times the price I'd pay, vs. the 10 to 100 times Monster charges. What amuses me is that if you were to buy one of the "low end" Monster cables (which are relatively small gauge), it would perform measurably worse than bulk 10 or 12 gauge copper cabling from an electronic parts outlet and cost significantly more.
Why don’t computer scientists track sub-fields other than their own?
And a non-existant QA department apparently?
while i don't disagree, i would like to point this out:

a lot of hackers are on the bottom floor. they enjoy what they do, but they have to do SOMEthing for money to pay the bills.

i, personally, would enjoy flipping a company if i had the opportunity, because this would allow me a huge latitude with what i would be able to pursue in the future. it would give me the ability to build a sustainable company with future ventures without having to make concessions/sacrifices in the name of being able to buy food next month.

i don't think most hackers are on the verge of running out of ideas, either.
Disrespectful to their users? Tumblr is free. I don't think they owe their users absolute iron clad security.
Bridge Building in Venture Capital-Backed Acquisitions
"Last fall, I quoted on a website contract for our city college"

You don't have to read past that first sentence to realize that this is heavily biased opinion from a person who earns his living doing web design. Many of the issues are completely independent of whether or not flash is used -- like improperly configured domains, accessibility, background music, rest interfaces. With a little creativity you can solve most of the issues on that site.
"Perspective is worth 80 points of IQ" - Alan Kay

Almost everybody here is focussed on a single, simple consumer niche: rich white people who shop online.

Because, you say, that's where the money is. Well... no.

That's where 2% of the money is. Maybe 5%. Out there, in the big wide world, there are tens of thousands of other lifestyle niches, other places to see. Take a look at that Nokia guy's blog,

http://www.janchipchase.com/

Nokia pays him to wander around the world learning about people and how they use things including but not limited to cell phones.

The whole B2B boom, just before the .com bust was a moment of insight... "wow, people outside of the home shopping by internet niche can use the internet to buy things."

So. Ideas.

First thing, get the hell out of San Francisco. Stay away from TechCrunch. Go to Iowa or Brazil. Spend two weeks walking or bicycling around. Call it a vacation. If you take a computer, don't look at your usual sites, turn off your RSS feeds, don't take work email. Put yourself in a new state of mind and then, if money is the goal, ask yourself "what would these people like their computers to do?"

But the space of "software for technohip 20somethings" is heavily swamped right now. It's a saturated, clogged, grossly overfilled demographic.

You want a freebie? An integrated software/hardware/services combo for old people's homes. Does email to help residents talk to their families, prints out pictures when they are sent automatically so people can take them back to their rooms, reminds people of calendar obligations like their grandchildren's birthdays. Maybe even supports some kind of mediated e-commerce which has a credit card account which can only be spent at a known-good list of a couple of hundred stores, so that they can't get phished.

Yes, it would take some selling, but the improvement in quality of life for the residents, and for their families is not insignificant, and business is booming for old people's homes.

Get out of your demographic. That's where the money is.
Hey! Someone changed the title of this submission. It is supposed to read "Where's Paul Graham?"
Or try out the usernames and passwords on say BofA?
Yeah, totally. Why use a picture when a thousand words will do?
Say "maybe", or "not right now", or "my partners aren't sure" and they should feel at home. :-)

http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/06/the_pmarca_guid_2.html
Gone? That presupposes they used to be there, but left.

No, it's always been like this, modulo the foolhardy dot-com bubble.

The thing is, there are two types of potentially successful start-ups. The first kind is start-ups that have the talent and capability but who, if they don't get a helping hand, will quietly fizzle out.

My impression is a lot of YC groups are like this; getting into YC determines whether they go for it or just stay in school, for example. If Reddit didn't get in, would they be millionaires now? The risk here isn't YC missing the boat, but the boat never departing in the first place.

The second type is the start-up where they are going and you had better get on board or get out of the way. Steve Jobs personifies this approach. Jobs would beguile, needle, browbeat, or otherwise force the issue or pressure anyone he needed to get things done.

Ironically some VC successes aren't based on their BOLD choices so much as being strong-armed into getting over their risk aversion by someone like Jobs.
You need an exit strategy during sex too or there's going to be a merger and then an acquisition of your paycheck.

You don't wanna be left holding the (diaper) bag.

That's some life advice, boys, since some of y'all are going to be millionaires and that makes you a target for all sorts of golddiggers.

Naturally, PG had this one sussed like everything else. "Wait a minute, friend," you might be saying to me, "didn't RTM get an equal share? That's like 50% in a divorce!" Naw, you see, before they got together, they wasn't worth two bits between 'em. PG rode that horsey into the sunset and 59 million pesos!
We had an idea like this too. Almost applied to yc with it.
quick exit strategy != ripping people off

That being said, I agree that there are plenty of motives for hoping for an early exit other than "pure greed."