skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Surprised no one has mentioned this yet. We use HelpSpot by UserScape (www.userscape.com) and it's been really, really great. Almost support ticket 2.0 (don't shoot me!). It costs money but it's pretty affordable -- the founder also frequents news.yc, I think.

Also, you will eventually outgrow using Gmail or Excel/Google Apps -- there's just a ton more features you're going to eventually need. Switch now, or switch later, eventually.

Things that hugely complex systems like RT completely miss: You really, really want to optimize on the bare-minimum path, IE what it takes to respond to a support request. Helpspot does this very well -- you can select pre-made answers that automatically file the request into a category and set any number of flags on the ticket (such as change who it's assigned to, etc) and that is really nice -- 1 click and you've answered a request.
In Favor of Password Managers
The idea was that PG&E would pay to even be able to see the comments. The comments would be hidden
not that great idea after all. Comments shoul be open
RT and FogBugz both suck. You have to click 3-5 times to get a request filed. That gets annoying real fast. Check out my comment below about Helpspot (and no I don't work for them either :)
My apologies for drawing Norvig into this - actually I also hold him in high esteem and I don't really think he had any ulterior motives for that remark. And I do like to learn new languages.

HN sometimes makes me think what I wrote, though - a good way for the competition to keep you busy, for example by posting math riddles and stuff.
Can't wait for a decent open source phone to hit the market...
He doesn't fully realize that he is the only one (with the other writing code for this project) that is really giving back something, not "Google". This corporate thinking is sad.
Coding without typos... not so much.
Heidi, Geek Girl Detective - a webcomic
'Filthy Rich Clients' in Java
Especially a future filled with robots caring for old people. As I understand it, Japan's declining birth rate has been part of the zeitgeist for a while now. I recall there was an feature-length anime film in the early 90s -- "Roujin Z" -- about an experimental robotic hospital bed that is developed because there aren't enough nurses.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roujin_Z
Looks useful. Nice.

Small suggestion:
You should reduce the leading for multiline headers, they look too far apart so it hurts scanability.
The hard part (unsolved as far as I know) is for a non-hacker to find good hackers. But assuming you can, the key to hiring and keeping them would be to give them freedom to work the way they want to, including letting them have their way if they feel strongly about design decisions. Since we've assumed you've got good hackers, their design choices will tend to be right, so this is a safe move.
Bugzilla.

- clean interface

- allows you to customize the look and feel

- super sweet email interface

- documented database structure <http://www.ravenbrook.com/project/p4dti/tool/cgi/bugzilla-sc...;

- can interface with subversion/cvs

- free (as in speech) software
I owe a lot to pg for making news.arc open, and to the people who run Anarki as well. Some things I am thinking about:

- it is harder to open-source something than to deploy the site, because w/ open-sourcing, both the site and the code have to be in good shape, whereas with just deploying a site, it is not as big a deal if the code has some quirks. In other words, there are some deviations from Arc best practices that I want to take care of.

- I am thinking about whether there is an opportunity to have an open-source digg-killer based on Arc, and if so, what that would look like.

Anyway, if you want to work something out then shoot an email to: pageonetimes@idoh.com
It does make sense for Microsoft to deprecate continued development of C, when one considers their push toward .NET and getting various languages implemented on it.
Some services have huge network effects that make the product better through higher distribution.

Imagine if there were no "digg this" buttons. There would be worse content and fewer Digg users - making all of Digg worse.
Google on spectrum bid: We bluffed!
Sure, but since technological innovation tends to decrease prices, calling a price "artificially low" is the same thing as calling it a future price.

When GMail launched, it offered artificially large amounts of free storage, in the sense that they couldn't support many users at that size. That's why they had to start with invites. But they knew that disk would keep getting cheaper, so they just gave people a number that would make sense in the future.
Bam Azizi
I've been there, and have had great experiences with hackers. I'm a non-hacker myself. What I found to be succesful was:

1) Be intellectually curious. If you are interested in what a hacker does he'll like you. If you understand and learn what he does he will respect you.

2) Treat hackers on an equal footing with the guys that wear ties. Hackers should decide technical stuff - not people with ties.

3) Talk straight - hackers seem to hate politics and hidden agendas, and often aren't very good at them.

4) Keep hackers informed of all aspects of the business. This partly relates to 4) but a sidepoint is that they like to learn. I know at least one hacker that now knows a decent amount of marketing ;-)

5) be fair and play nice. Keep the dirty side of the business out of the way of the hackers. This relates to 2), 3), and 4)

6) give credit where credit is due.
The search terms are highlighted in blue for me. Could this be a Flash version issue?
Direct to consumer genetic testing raises concerns
What requires more thought, farming or computer programming? coal mining or accounting? I would argue that today we engage our minds more than any other society before us.
Goodbye, Organize Tab
and lots of opportunity for startups to grow and profit, is what i like to tell myself.
Sure, this is the television event of the last year, at least. And I'm kind of annoyed that they didn't promote the online premiere at all.
This story is ripped off an article from the SF Gate, March 11, 2007: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2007/03/...

Original article:

"I'm looking around and there's gotta be 50 people with laptops," said Brett Levine, 31, a co-founder and the company's lead programmer. "I got on a chair and yelled, 'Hey, are there any ActionScript programmers in the room?' People at the counter looked at me glaringly, but a couple of people looked around and raised their hand."

New article:

So Mr. Levine stood on a chair, and shouted out, “Is anyone here an ActionScript programmer? We’d like to hire you!”

“I got some nasty looks from the baristas,” Mr. Levine recalled, “but that didn’t stop three or four people from coming up to our table and inquiring.”
Thanks for the reply, that makes total sense. I suppose CDN services should be compatible with AWS anyway, so they wouldn't be mutually exclusive. Each for its purpose :)
Sadly it never works as my spam seems to have all additions filtered out. All the .'s and I assume that by removing the + I don't get the spam anyway. :/
IMO, if you are talking with lawyers, investors or vendors for any significant period of time during the first 3 months of a startup, you're doing something very wrong. Though, as you say-- all businesses are different.

I do agree that design is important (I'm a designer myself-- tho if I couldn't code a bit, too, I wouldn't have enough work to do).
Buxfer iPhone News.YC interface issue. 
When I load more submissions and click on a submission to discuss, the site doesn't do anything. I really enjoy the interface but I just can't view more than what I load initially.

Is anyone else having this issue?
http://www.buxfer.com/yc/
Justin.tv is hiring Python Hackers
Google paid him for doing this.
I have high hopes, but then again I had high hopes for Longhorn and Xbox 360 too...

Given MS's history of not giving high priority to reliability and quality, it's typically a good predictor of the future
I've never understood how people can concentrate and get real work done in a coffee shop. Sure, it's fun to take your laptop to a cafe and get some hacking done occasionally or catch up on mail, but as a substitute for an office or an apartment? No thanks.
Fewer Digg users might result in a higher quality digg, because the community is more tightly-knit.
Sarahintampa Writes Up 'The Photo Stream'
Shocking!

btw, you should really check out submissions and comments by raghus here on news.yc - he's really insightful.

http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=raghus
Getting around for startup school. 
Hey, for those that have been to startup school, do you generally stay around campus when going out with groups or is a mode of transportation other than my two feet more convenient? It'll be my first time in the area and will have no car.

Thanks and hope to see some of you there.
It also says "Flickr, the popular photo sharing site, held weekly meetings there before it was bought by Yahoo."

I am pretty sure Flickr was based in Vancouver before they were bought by Yahoo, so this does not smell right.

Updated: the SFGate article mentions Flickr too, but says they meet there now - or at least "then" (i.e mid 2007), not pre-Yahoo. So the NYT piece is definitely a pretty poor cut & paste job.
An Open Call for Widget Jargon Standards.
Unlike desktop apps, social network widgets have several user POVs. After one too many extended meetings, I'm proposing that the following jargon be adopted. Users can be referred to as:

- Tom: a user with the widget installed.
- Dick: Tom's friend with the widget installed.
- Harry: Tom's friend without the widget installed.

Hopefully that'll add some consistency. Thoughts?
Judging by Joel's articles, he at least claims to hire only the best of the best of the.. you get the idea.

Depending on how challenging your software is to develop, you might want to set the bar a bit lower (than the seriouslyfreakingabsolute best).

A genuinely good developer should be more than enough for most tasks, but maybe your product can't be built by merely good developers.

Hackers seem to be quite idealistic too. They would probably like the idea of doing something "good".

Maybe even something to make the world a better place - and who knows, maybe your medical thingie qualifies!
(Sorry, I'm feeling a bit playful here, and right now I can't see the post where you explained things)

What can you offer that would lure hackers to your venture?

How about offering to get them hot chicks? Moderately hot ones? .. only slightly retina-burning chicks?

At first, I thought of suggesting you respect your "hackers" as fellow human beings, and make sure they find you respectable too. I guess that's my two cents after all.
That's a good point. This looks like it is from nytimes.com, which is annoying because I think that they are one of the best media sites out there.
Bacteria that eats antibiotics
I agree it is not a good idea to make a home computer a server... unless if you can't afford anything more and you are going to host it at home. At which point it would make sense, but for something that goes into a datacenter the author would want a more robust solution.
BigDog - impressive robotics video
Porting a LAMP stack app (FreePBX) to an embedded system
Which means you have to rely on he said/she said, hearsay and other totally non objective accounts.

To find out for myself, I plan on one day doing something large and messy with arc. I pick arc cause I figure in the eons it will be before I get around to it, arc will still be around (s/arc/a lisp/)
VC and Angel activity report from PWC.
Real reason why Seesmic bought Twhirl
I wish I knew someone still running gentoo so I could see their weeping for joy.
Getting into Momofuku Ko
Using Google Docs Offline
see also 'fire and motion' by joel spolsky:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000339.html
Cafe Cubano is one. I was once coding there (for a project for my company), and one girl started to talking to me (she thought I was a web dev). Three girls, would go there and talk about a shoe startup. Selling speciality shoes on the web. I trying to give as much advice as I could, (technically wise).
I am not sure how it has gone thou.
Hilarous talk by Panic's founder on creating the company...
You've been warned, you will laugh...
go try it, a statistically significant number of times, and tell us if you ever got caught.
Is it hindering innovation to that extent to justify the rewrite? Remember, GCC is the one of the most fundamental pieces of software running the entire OSS eco-system. It's internal beauty isn't so much important as it's utility to this system.
Why Small Teams Win: Communication and Ownership
"... You can write operating systems and have low-level control over the hardware in Lisp too ..."

Yes, but the constraints on embedded systems make this path harder. On larger systems it just doesn't happen. It would make a good question to ask Bill Joy. "Bill. Why didn't you program bsd in C instead of lisp?" ... WHACK!
Yes you can. But for a couple of hours at a time. I usually play trance on my headphhones.

If you have been working for few hours on your room, and getting a sense you are lacking human interaction, just get your laptop, go to one of these cofee places with free wi-fi, put your headphoens on, sip your good coffee, and work.

It is very refreshing actually. But I could do it only for a couple of hours a day. More than that, your back probably would suffer (seats and tables in coffee places are not the most optimal, and were not ment for long stays).
When I walk back, all that cafeeine and the always constant San Francisco fresh breeze, makes me want to work more.

Just saying.
April Fools. :)
Digg as a community isn't worth much. Digg is valuable because of the huge set of eyeballs for Ads on Digg itself and Dugg stories. It has nothing to do with community.
The mere fact that you read ycombinator and even think of asking such a question surely puts you light-years ahead of the meat-heads being railed against. I wish I knew something about iPhone development and were looking for a job because you are likely the kind of person I would want to work for. I wish my boss read ycombinator!
Stupidest idea I've heard in a long time.

Extortion, outwresting, or exaction is a criminal offense, which occurs when a person either unlawfully obtains money, property or services from a person, entity, or institution through coercion or intimidation or threatens a person, entity, or institution with physical or reputational harm unless he is paid money or property.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extortion
They, like ticketmaster, need to raise their prices...
How we got from 1 to 162 million websites on the internet
I was thinking of the event the day before, sorry!
Huh, it works great for me. Offices with closed doors are okay, but in a cube I get interrupted all the time such that it's difficult to prioritize more important work, and I get tired of sitting around at home all day.

Even better than a traditional office is a room with a table a bunch of folks can sit around, or couches arranged in a circle, but with no people who aren't actively working together present. Cafes can provide that kind of thing pretty well.
That would only indicate my own skill or lack thereof at it (btw I think I'd be hopelessly clueless at doing it). You couldn't meaningfully generalize to the whole population.
Seesmic is to microblogging what MMS is to SMS.
Unlike desktop apps, social network widgets have several user POVs. After one too many extended meetings, I'm proposing that the following jargon be adopted. Users can be referred to as:

- Tom: a user with the widget installed.
- Dick: Tom's friend with the widget installed.
- Harry: Tom's friend without the widget installed.

Hopefully that'll add some consistency. Thoughts?
Michael Arrington already does a good enough job with this sort of reporting.
CEO who puts profits second
maps.google.com will show you the many different methods of transport you can take (such as train, bus, high-speed rail, subway, trolley, car, and walking.)
Oh man...you hit the nail on the head.

I made the mistake of joining a small company where the founder did the exact opposite of everything you have described: the product was his, the plan was his, and the design meetings inevitably degenerated into lectures on why we (his employees) didn't understand the market we were in, and therefore weren't qualified to do anything but follow his guidance. There were certainly no whiteboard sessions (after all, why would you need a whiteboard, when you can just describe what's going to happen using a powerpoint presentation?)

The result was terrible morale, and a bad product. Where we should have been reacting to the demands of the market that we were in, we were plodding along a pre-determined path to failure, without the ability to change strategy or tactic.

As a result, I now have a well-developed filter for people who have this tendency, and I avoid them like the plague. Comments like "I'll flesh out the design" immediately send me running.
any good ones in the marina? wifi is a pain to come by still
10 Millionth Article Written on Wikipedia
the lack of publicity is likely intentional to prevent too many people accessing the stream. Similar streaming premieres for shows such a skins in the uk have a caped number of viewers who can access the stream at which point no more can see the preview.
I think Andrew's making a good point here -- if you can offer some sort of value-add to your customers, it'll help diversify your business. Virtual goods (have to be scarce and desirable!), extra services, special privileges all qualify.

But you don't need a gigantic avalanche of hits to make an ad-supported site work, if your goal is to make a business that adds some cash to your pocket or might be picked up by a large organization.

The days when every startup dreamed of IPO and sky-high revenues are over. Most of us, I dare say, aren't shooting for that at all.

Yes, plentyoffish (god's favorite example) does make millions per year from ads. Like $9 million. I don't need $9 million. $2 million would be fine. Selling the business for $9 million would be even better.
Tagged: an example of how not to do things
http://www.tagged.com/

I'm on there site for less than 15 minutes and already I have to give them a 'never use' policy.

see if you can find what they've done wrong that I've missed.
Breaking the Techmeme Habit
In a Rush?  MS says new Windows coming next year
Y Combinator - Advice for applicants. (from Mixwit, Winter 08)
This is a great example of how to give a talk.
As common as virtualization is becoming , that could be a good solution as long as they can keep a ceiling on the memory cost -- true virtualization can be really expensive, memory-wise.

On the other hand, if they're simply talking about a conventional compatibility box, this is less of a worry -- Windows has been doing variations of this for years for backwards compatibility -- since long before OS X.

This article skips past all the technical details, but the smartest solution might be to make the new API purely managed (i.e. .Net), and run all unmanaged apps in a compatibility box. This is great for stability, and it ends the days where you have to dig down into C or C++ and mess around with window handles to use certain OS features that aren't available otherwise.
Ask YC: Hiring without pay
Lets say your startup needs talent to work part-time (maybe even just 10 hours a week) in exchange for shares. How do you find people to accept that? Everyone seems to just want money instead or in addition to shares, which is understandable.

Also, assume that no one else on the team gets paid as it's all bootstrapped.
I've seen people who have never heard of "folders" save 50-60,000 items in one folder. NFTS (if they keep it), slows to a crawl every time that folder's accessed because I don't believe its storing the entries in a tree.

The other possibility is all of the memory mapping of hundreds of little libraries into the system plays havoc with code locality and L1, L2 caches in microprocessors. Since Vista is trying to be "more secure", there are probably more monitors and validation between these address spaces than there were before.

Now with Vista on just "what the libraries are doing", maybe they just turned a bunch of interns loose on a bunch of API's embedded in those libraries and they did the "almost simplest thing" that could possibly work without thought to performance. "Get it working and ship! Optimize it later."

I find Vista a nuisance to users who complain that nothing looks the same and the "trivial" modifications of user-interface derail the "learned-by-rote" user.

Microsoft would do the world a gigantic favor if they just conceded and made the world "Microsoft Linux." Apple did the right thing already with adopting a "UNIX" core to base their systems and and put all the money into UI and feature improvements. Microsoft is spending too much time overworking their engineers who work on continual bomb squad responses to exploding deck chairs to focus on usability for users.
Another way to think about this: take the "site x doesn't work with browser y" bugs out of all the different browser bugzillas and give them a more coherent home. This will help mitigate the martian headsets problem (http://joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/03/17.html)

Heh, browserzilla.com is available.
Having recently experienced food poisoning, I hardly think clear expiration dates are an example of intellectual laziness.
It probably helps for them to be interested in what you're making; if they're not, then hiring them is a bad decision.
Genetically engineered animals
I love how his bio opens.

"Possibly the only CEO ever described as anti-establishment, a communist, and a socialistic anarchist..."
http://www.craigslist.org/about/jim.buckmaster.html
Are you working on a really interesting problem? Either that, or you better have traction by the truckload.
Actually, I think it's more a complaint about a digital equivilant to dumping - unsustainable business models put in place solely to build market share by hurting competition. The Ford analogy breaks down because Ford sold cars profitably by innovatively reducing costs (which I assume he would have no problem with).

For the record, I don't agree with him either. Standing around saying "I wish I could do x but I can't because of y" is just another dangerous procrastination tactic, for any value of y.
it is even more impressive if you compare that video to their early beta: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXJZVZFRFJc
Asia's Top Social Networks Are Profitable
It will probably be the product that Vistas was supposed to be.
Yes. He lost me when the author said "in the digital world, advertising, the only real revenue stream, cannot support a small digital business."

Chris Anderson is doing the lecture circuit before his book on Free comes out. His Wired article has a list of business models beyond advertising:

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/16-03/ff_free?curre...

37signals makes their living off the "Freemium" model. I don't think Prince raised a VC round before he gave away his CD. As the cost of providing some services goes to zero, businesses can make some things free, especially if it helps grow other markets.
Nope, far from it, they're using the most commodity hardware infrastructure they can find. Their whole system is built around cheap, widely-available hardware. Even with the volumes they are using, they would not get production high enough to compete with the commodity PC market on price.
They basically have to be close friends, or unusually naive.
It might be SSL that's broken on the new Firefox. I can't visit any https sites using Firefox 3 beta on the Mac.
No, it's supposed to evolve. And what makes sense when you're getting started may not be the best use of your time later on.