skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask YC: How long to stay secret?
How long should you keep what your startup is doing secret? Until public beta? Launch? Do most startups do that intentionally or is it just that they don't bother putting any energy into a public face until there's something to show?
at least in my experience @ mit, google has become the safe post-college default, like microsoft was before it. hell, facebook has even started to take that crown.

the cycle will continue -- google may have perks and comfort, but not much upside anymore (that stock ain't goin to 1000 anytime soon). even facebook has hundreds of employees, and a strike price and recent track record that doesn't quite have the luster it did before.

the best hackers i know are either starting or joining startups (including a bunch that left google to do so.)
Integrating XCache Into PHP5 (Debian Etch & Apache2)
The application for Seth's summer internship was due today.

The application was to write a four page (max) PDF on anything you want and email it by April 2. That's where this post came from:

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/03/why-bother-h...
YC:  Startup School Meetup
A group of us are getting together the evening before Startup School. I set up a Meetup page, to organize things a bit. Sorry about the login, it was just seemed the easiest way to organize the event.

We're hoping to split things up into groups of 20 or so, to not overwhelm the cafe we're going to be at and make it easier to get to know people. So, if you're interested, please feel free to RSVP.

http://entrepreneur.meetup.com/1737/
I recently got a "splatter-gram" email from a friend of my father, also slamming Advanta. Sorry, but I'm smelling a pattern here, and it makes me skeptical that something is going on targeting Advanta. It's likely what they're doing is legal and quite common, even it doesn't make people happy.

Further, using any type of "rewards" card hammers the retailers. The "reward" comes out of the transaction, as do transaction fees. The end result is higher prices to cover the rewards. Your reward isn't the result of generosity, it comes out of your own wallet ultimately.
There are many hypotheses out there that Lisp lacks popularity for this or that flaw in the language or in the community. The problem with these hypotheses is that you can point to similar or bigger flaws in languages that have grown popular. If a language has good qualities, people will figure out ways around the problems.

My hypothesis is that Lisp is unpopular for the exact same reason some of us love it: concise code. Everybody praises concise code, but humans love looking at things that have repeated patterns. The more you compress information, the fewer repeated patterns there are to look at.

I wish PG well with Arc, but I don't think popularity will come from fixing anything that's wrong with Lisp. By my hypothesis, Lisp only becomes popular by fixing what's right with it.
Here's a better one: http://browsegoods.com/ , built by "ows" at Reddit and friends http://reddit.com/info/69dia/comments/c038ey8 . Someone should reimplement it in Flash, I have too many interesting things to do right now =) Seriously - anybody wanna learn to build draggable maps? It's dead easy, I can teach you by email.
More here:

http://thenextweb.org/2008/04/03/keynote-adeo-ressi/
First round of start-up presentations at Next Web
"It depends", most likely.
First its bad for you, then its good - I wish they would make up their mind!

I actually don't like the taste of coffee, which makes me a bit of a weirdo apparently, but I believe you can get your caffeine hit from tea instead (or red bull if your really brave!) - but I tend to avoid those too. I would hate to think that I need a hit of caffeine through the day just to keep me awake.

Feel sleepy in the mornings? Goto the gym before work.

Feel sleepy in the afternoon - go for a walk or get away from your desk for a while. I always find those two things wake me up better than anything else.
A very shallow argument. The author doesn't take into account realities of most companies out in the marketplace. I'm exaggerating of course, but not every company is like Google which can afford to hire Ph.Ds to write high performance code for distributed systems. In a typical mid-market business (500-5k employees), if the company can afford it, the IT dept. is staffed with "Bob"s from accounting who started programming using scripts in Excel and then moved on to basic Java. These aren't the people who know about lambda calculus, Petri nets or even nuances of ORM. So for them, a workflow product that works well in a distributed environment, e.g. supports a range of databases, web service integration, long running processes, asynchronous invocation is a huge time saver and productivity boost.
Yea, I had a J1 visa once and spent a summer working in a beach club on Cape Code - good times!

They expect evidence that you have at least one more year of university left to get it (they don't want people not going back home and staying in the US illegally).

I believe it only lets you work for 4 months however, with 30 days 'travel' allowed at the end, so it may be no good for a startup.
My thought as well. YC would be huge for me; the resources they can offer and the sense of community and advice most importantly. But I'm certainly doing this either way. Not getting selected will not deter me. If not getting selected does deter you, you may want to reconsider why you applied in the first place :).
I think there are various reasons why Lisp has the level of popularity that it does (I won't say it is categorically unpopular). Unfamiliar syntax, real or perceived attitudes of the community, number of primitives, the divergent nature of the language, industrial history, industrial support, editor support, academic support, perceived performance, programming trends and other things have all affected the adoption of Lisp.

I'm confident, given time, that all these concerns will be addressed and the rate of adoption will continue to increase. That's why I think now is a good time to get involved if you aren't already: be ahead of the curve.
For Some Advertisers, 'Google Slap' Means Plummeting Revenues
I went to a startup conference in Boston yesterday (waste of time). There were quite a few people with nametags that said "Stealth Mode" instead of a company name. I found it hilarious and with the investor/entrepreneur ratio as bad as it was, nobody spoke to them.

Get your idea out as soon as you can because people will give you great advice on how to improve it even before you launch it.
VCs counting options in flagging economy
Very different, but you can turn artists into programmers via visual programming:
http://www.cycling74.com/products/maxmsp
http://www.apple.com/shake/
This seems to work well, but this maybe due to the constrained nature of the problems.
>Do we really need the top sliver of our graduates working on destructively taking market share from PayPal?

Do we really need PayPal in the first place? We had credit card companies already, and eBay had its own offering before PayPal. Hell, do we really need Google? Alta Vista was already here, why did we need another search engine? All that competition is just "destructive" "duplication".

Or maybe the reason why we have duplication is that some people like one service better. Other people call duplication "competition", and on net it has done a lot of good for this world. Each company tries to get better than the other, and we all win (except for the companies competing, sometimes). This process is what Schumpeter called "creative destruction".

But maybe you're right, and competition is destructive. Maybe we should just appoint ONE company to have a monopoly on each product in the marketplace. Should we abolish Apple, which is just "destructively" copying Microsoft? Should we draw-and-quarter anyone caught running Linux? Does that sound like a better world?

>Or fighting black-hat SEO fueled and exacerbated by the search-monopoly problem they created?

So, is the problem competition or monopoly?

You have very strong opinions on where other people choose to work and who should be able to hire them. It sounds like you just want a really bright person or group of people to assign all the tech grads to jobs. Similar things have been tried before, and the outcome wasn't too good.
Another item in the BOM is the last thing mobile manufacturers need. Why not use the camera instead? With some image recognition magic, you can come up with a working prototype.
What do you guys think about VCs sharing your information with others?

Necessary? Unethical?

I lean to the latter.
New Mobile Service Fights Speed Traps
For me CherryPy hits the spot between "too much magic" and "too low level".
I've used many templating systems with it, found Make and Cheetah to fit my mind the best.
A lot of credit card issuers are now including arbitration clauses in their contracts with the borrowers, so that any claim made against the issuer can't be turned into a class-action suit.
That's "mako"
Rails Admin Plugins Reviewed
5th-grader finds mistake at Smithsonian
You're looking at a picture of a single circuit the size of a large office building, built to a precision of 100 microns.

I agree that this is impressive, but remember that you get to cheat: You build the thing, measure how far off you are, and stick delay lines in the short branches until everything lines up. Admittedly, if you're off by a hundred meters the required delays would be embarrassingly large, and the architect would get teased a lot, but even then I don't think it would pose an insurmountable problem.

Meanwhile, if the essence of your argument is that Lisp was used by mainframe guys and wasn't pushed hard enough in the microcomputer world, I can't help but agree. God, if only I could travel back in time and replace all those useless Pascal books I read as a teenager with Lisp books...
This is fantastic. RTS game design is antiquated and severely bloated (partially from developer laziness and publishers not wanting to invest money into the genre since it's relatively niche and not a big seller on consoles).
Even if it is possible given the properties of Pi, information theory tells you that the size of the offset will be comparable to the size of the actual data. And it will be slow as molasses.
What's the advantage of keeping your startup a secret?

The only one I can think of is being afraid of people "stealing" your concept. If that's the case, either the business is built around a weak concept or you don't work hard enough.
OT: According to wikipedia, the PAVE PAWS phased array operates in the 420-450 MHz UHF range, with a corresponding wavelength of 66cm; if the error margin is really 0.1*lambda, the system is built to a precision of 6cm, significantly easier to meet than 0.1mm.

Also, it would be easy to compensate any error by controlling the phase of the fed signals.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballistic_Missile_Early_Warning...
A long-running web 2.0 startup for business process management: Thingamy http://www.thingamy.com/ by Sig Rinde http://thingamy.typepad.com/ . I'm not yet sure if this approach makes sense, the blog sounds intriguing but vaporware-y.
We experimented with a workflow engine at my last job (jBPM), and it was a colossal waste of time. I have a colleague who uses it very effectively at another job.

I think it's important to use workflow engines only in situations where it makes a lot of sense. In our case, we were using it to control the order in which network components were provisioned, and it was a lot more difficult than just implementing it in code. In his case, they're modeling complex sign-off business processes at financial institutions.

So I think it's most useful in modeling business processes in software in the rare cases where you'd want to do such a thing, especially if those processes can be dynamic (EDIT: and need to be validated by non-programmer types). But it's not a suitable replacement for "if statements" when good old code will do. We threw out flowcharts years ago for a reason.
Then my brain is a Sherman Tank.
Django contains almost no magic...they intentionally removed anything like this after I think 0.95?

What is an example of this magic?
How to make Lisp popular (or as popular as Lisp will ever get):

1) SBCL working very well on the big three PC platforms.
2) Bindings + easy installation for popular libraries.
3) Education (pg's articles, everything on planet.lisp.org)
4) Solid debugging, perhaps with things like breakpoints.

There is much activity on all 4 problem items that I identified above, so Lisp IS getting more popular. I don't know if programming.reddit.com can be a scientific gauge of how popular Lisp is, but it seems to be mentioned increasingly often.

Of all the problems Lisp has, parens are much less than the problem that it takes a gigantic effort to use Lisp with any popular libraries, once you step outside of the way that the larger community is using it.
Yep. I see Flash games as the only chance for the industry. There's no chance a fantastic game like N http://www.thewayoftheninja.org/n.html could go through today's major publishing channels. Big games of today are just more artists, more polygons, more levels. Nobody's going to make the next LOOM http://members.chello.at/theodor.lauppert/games/loom.htm except Flash devs.
My Startup: app turns music discovery into an online game - feedback?
www.thesixtyone.com

what?
thesixtyone, a web game that makes listening to new music a fun, adventurous experience. It's like a music scout role-playing game.

how?
Listeners are allocated virtual currency that they can spend promoting songs and are rewarded when their picks perform well. Top songs reach the homepage and are sorted into a radio playlist where listeners are a click away from discovering new sounds.

status
We're 3 months into our public beta, and, aside from balancing several "gameplay" mechanics, we've since introduced a couple of new features, including a more sophisticated genre system, show listings, artist photo reels, play history, and embeddable listener badges that syndicate your personal radio station across the web.

about
thesixtyone is myself and Sam Hsiung. I used to be a game developer (EA/Atari/Activision), but declined an offer to work on Xbox Live (my dream job when I was in school) and dropped out of college so I could make thesixtyone happen. Sam is a YC alum, having previously created the venerable YouOS (YC Fall '05, I believe). We made thesixtyone because music on the web to date has felt either super-gimmicky or like a ridiculous, restriction-driven police state. Music is entertainment, and entertainment is all about fun...and "fun" just happens to be what makes us tick.

For those curious, thesixtyone was written in Python (Django), although our very first prototype was thrown together with Rails. We're named after Highway 61, a US interstate that starts in a little town in Minnesota and ends at the heart of American music culture, New Orleans. A significant portion of music culture emanates from this particular place: it's where Bob Dylan came of age, B.B. King first toured, and Elvis was born.

One more thing: we're interested in recruiting a talented developer as teammate #3; we'll be at Startup School, so feel free to say hello!
Data centre used to heat pool
I also wonder if there is any causality between the decline in the number of smokers and the rise in the amount of caffeine we consume.

That wouldn't surprise me at all. The idea that people with addictions often substitute one addictive behavior for another is conventional wisdom in counseling circles, I believe.

But I'm a former cancer researcher, I know people who have drunk themselves to death, and I have friends who counsel heroin addicts. So trust me when I say this: Caffeine is an excellent alternative.

At least you were able to stop drinking caffeine, and we're pretty sure that your liver or lungs aren't going to explode in ten years from the espresso abuse.
Offshore Software Development Company India
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The biggest barrier in my opinion is what most people think is "weird" syntax or the more precisely the absence of it. People are just not used to it. Add to the that the lack of popular libraries for some modern niceties and it really adds to it being unpopular.
I'm not particularly afraid of people stealing, you know, Our Revolutionary Idea.

I suppose my question is, "Is that why everyone else keeps things secret so long, or is there some better reason?"

Most of the YC startups seem to stay in "stealth mode" for a long while.
Glad you explained the name -- wouldn't have got the whole highway sign favicon otherwise. Now that I think about it, that's a pretty awesome name. Especially when considering the crappy selection available and the usually unimaginative ones being used by most startups.
I find git to be a joy to use. Been using it in all my projects except the ones I do with Rails. Haven't checked the git integration with Rails lately, but with this move, it should be better.
Oh! So it's not a story about businesses being prejudice at all. It's a story about bad consumers! I get it. That makes sense. Why would anyone focus on the businesses, though, when they're making a perfectly rational decision -- perhaps because the media are making the perfectly rational decision to outrage their audience using weak arguments that, as an added bonus, blame the big bad businessman instead of the average consumer.

I also don't understand how you can say that when I cite the obvious example of Greenspan hiring women. How did he survive when everyone was complaining about his bitch of a research assistant? How do companies that hire other minorities do it? Surely someone out there should start opening white-owned laundromats, to capture the valuable racist demographic which has somehow been convinced to patronize the many Korean-owned laundry companies in the US. I would argue the same about a gentiles-only investment bank, but even if banks like that did appeal to prejudice, they didn't do it especially well.

If that's your theory, what's your answer: how is it that racism explains how one ethnic group fails, but fails to explain how other ethnic groups are more successful than the racist whites who are allegedly holding them down?
But... but... it has gradients!
→ http://sp.reddit.com/chart.png
My hypothesis has nothing to do with Lisp itself, per-se:

People simply stopped paying attention because of the failed promises of AI - and in a nod to the parent, some of the talent base probably shifted to other technologies, and Lisp was left without an ecosystem. It's starting to build up again.

Beautiful case-in-point: I went to a developer's conference yesterday put on by one of the big software vendors that my company buys from. I was carrying a copy of PG's excellent On Lisp to read during dead times. Having that book out in the open started several conversations with people I wouldn't have met, incidentally. Each of those conversations went something like this:

He: Lisp! Who uses that anymore? Didn't that die out a long time ago?

Me: Well, it was big during the 80's because of AI, but it's in the middle of a comeback that started sometime around 2000.

He: really!? I thought it was a dead language. Who uses it?

Me: There are a few companies out there that use it. There are even commercial offerings of Lisp tools. There's Franz, Inc. which sells AllegroCL, for example. There are two or three others I can think of off the top of my head. There are some open source projects that are very active, too.

He: but it's just a scripting language, right?

Me: No, it's really a general-purpose programming language that can be used for any number of things. It's currently being used for writing web applications, among other things, but it could be used to write any kind of software, really. Whether or not it is interpreted or compiled is dependent on the implementation and how you want to use it.
Why forcing an entrepreneur into a big company is a mistake
> 2.) "It's not scalable enough." The Washington Post runs on Django; I doubt you're going to get more pageviews than them.

Just FYI, the Washington Post does not use Django for their main page. They only use it for small side projects.

At reddit we tried to use Django, but had to switch to Pylons because, lo and behold, it wasn't scalable. Specifically, it has a problem caching templates under high loads.
I'll throw in my 2 cents...
Up until recently, one "flaw" that Lisp had that other languages didn't was one obvious best implementation. If you want to work in Perl, Python, Java, Ruby, etc. you knew where to get them, and you know they would work similarly across platforms, so programs you wrote on your Mac would work on Windows and Linux, etc. With Lisp, different implementations did the "interesting" stuff (threads, sockets, FFI, etc.) differently, and hackers didn't want to invest time learning one implementation if everyone else decided that a different one was the best. No one wants to bet on the loser (Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD), so they stay away until a clear winner emerges. It looks like SBCL is becoming that best implementation, and once threads work on Windows so the web frameworks will "work", that will help greatly.

Another barrier is having to learn emacs/SLIME to have a decent development environment. That is a big piece of yak shaving for the average developer. Hopefully Cusp in Eclipse or something else will help.
As mrtron points out, most of the magic was removed fairly recently, and modern Django code is fairly intuitive. I also first looked around Jan 2007, and discounted Django because there was too much magic. But I took a second look in Dec 2007 and it was much, much better.
When I meet someone who won't tell me what their idea is, usually I've thought they were a little silly--as if they thought I was a spy who would sell their idea on some sort of idea black market. Generally, ideas are not viral--you'll tell someone, and then, frankly, it's not interesting enough for them to pass it on.

There is a place for secret sauce, it's just that the existence of the startup and it's business model is not likely to be it. Few attacks succeed as brilliantly as a surprise attack. If some part of your idea is novel, but fairly easy replicated, for example the Air's touchpad, I would keep that under wraps to extend your advantage.