skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask YC:  Do you know of any good attempts at using a social network as a brain to solve problems?
One can consider each user as a neuron in such a brain. People would connect and disconnect from others as they see fit to help them solve a problem as quickly as possible. Maybe even impose a limit on the number of connections you can have to encourage high quality connections.

What do you receive from your connections? Ideas, partial solutions, etc. If someone is not contributing in this way, then people would disconnect from him/her.

Moreover, once the problem is solved, you can have some sort of credit assignment so that people/neurons who have contributed to the solution in a meaningful way receive more points.

Finally, you can have a real-time global visualization of the network so that the more active regions are easily found and you might consider connecting to people in those regions. You could even have summaries of what those active regions are thinking about (so that you can join a region that's working on a subproblem that interests you most).
I would suggest Vim, Emacs, Apache, MySQL, and PostgresQL. Plus all the various languages you either work in or are messing with ;-)
I don't agree with the supermarket analogy. I think the "popular bar" analogy is more appropriate. People go where everyone else goes.

There's a bar down the street that was packed every Friday night this time last year. Now it's dead. Everyone is at another bar 3 blocks away. Why? Because everyone else is there. How did this happen? I don't know. But if I was a bar or a social network, I'd try to figure it out so I could stay "hot". Otherwise, I'd die and never quite know why.
Simply, I'd say money buys freedom. Potentially. Because earning a million dollars through legitimate hard work gives more freedom than earning it through fraud (you don't have to hide and/or get arrested).
Having money lets you trade one set of problems for a different set of problems. That second set generally consists of "nice problems to have" but they are problems nonetheless. Whether or not you're happier depends on which set of problems you prefer.
"if they can read it as being about them, they will"

That means you've reached them. Good job.
Ask YC: Feedback on my new project http://www.askurpals.com
I have seen lots of good information getting exchanged (things like answers to common questions, reviews etc.) on internal mailing lists - especially on my "off-business-topic" office mailing list that eventually gets buried in individual mailboxes and lost. It's a shame, particularly because the information is of really good quality (no spam/trolls since it's on a closed trusted mailing list). http://www.askurpals.com is my attempt to harvest it for the use of wider audience.

Any feedback is greatly appreciated. Also, if you can suggest an effective way of reaching wider audience/users I'll be very grateful :)

Thanks!
Love what you’re doing or get out. Goes with the other one my mentor says "If money is your measuring stick, get a new one"
Must be a location thing. I'm in NJ and I hear a lot of the graduating seniors getting offers in the 50-60 range aound here. 80 is a great offer. And most of these guys consider a bittorrent client in java to be big and scary, so someone who actually knows what theyre doing could probably do a lot better..if you're willing to write back-end shit for goldman or merrill or whatever.
http://www.hackrtrackr.com shows that a kevTheDev is coming from Brighton.
New EEE PC Specs
I love how he gives the headline then basically goes about explaining that it's just linkbait and not really accurate. Shameless.
Remember the Name by Fort Minor. The chorus:

"This is 10% luck, 20% skill, 15% concentrated power of will, 5% pleasure, 50% pain, and 100% reason to remember the name"
I thought the last statement summed up the thesis of the article quite well:

"It’s less about competing technology, and much more about competing user bases."

I happen to agree with this argument. It is PRECISELY the core reason why I always laugh when I read about the next "Digg killer".

If this thesis is correct, then the only way to create a "Digg killer" would be to build a community around a celebrity instead of around a technology. The technology is only an enabling factor, NOT the primary factor for social applications to become popular.

The focus on technology is misplaced when it comes to the viability of social applications.
C++ is on my list of 'languages I was forced to learn but would not have chosen to'

1. Languages I chose to learn: BASIC, Assembly Language, C, LISP, Perl, Javascript, Ruby

2. Languages I was forced to learn: C++, Modula-2

3. Languages I have actively avoided: Tcl, Java
I honestly think your application could leverage facebooks userbase to gain traction.

But then the problem of monetization becomes a lot larger.

If you dont want to do that, let me import my gmail contacts or yahoo contacts and pick them, then have their email responses threaded. or dont make them log in to answer, just let them click a link and enter the answer.
Learn STL and Boost if you want to enjoy your experience a little. I first learned C++ like an extension of C and it was hell.
Thanks for your suggestion. I'm not too worried about monetization right now.
Do you mean I should create some sort of Facebook widget to link to my site or just try to get the word out on the facebook?
Purina launches Digg clone: It's for the dogs
Why do we need managers anyway?
I enjoy reading your essays. I think the concept of heroes is a worthwhile one and I might compile my own list. Einstein would be there for me but probably as much because my mom put a poster of him in my room when I was six (which remains there today) as anything. I'm also from the 'burgh :) and as I grew up in the next generation of Steelers football, Hines Ward would be my Jack Lambert. His love for his work is truly inspirational and infectious.
Did you cancel your Virgin account already? Or waiting for Cory to tell when?
It is valid even when they have some financial interest in the cause?
> all he had to give his limited partners was some highly illiquid stock.

Why would these people spit on a stock that's throwing off nice dividends?

> a company that became very successful, but never got bought or went public?

Option 3: Stay private, finish growing, throw off fat dividends until the cash cow dies.

What's the problem?
I think he means a Facebook app. That way you don't need to explicitly email your friends.

But I think there's currently a Facebook app that does something similar, can't recall its name...Questions or something.
I think the tulip bubble was the Dutch, not the Ottomans.

Either way, great book on the subject:
http://www.amazon.com/Extraordinary-Popular-Delusions-Madnes...
I don't have any direct data about Clustra but I read the Hypra/Clustra book[1] a while ago. It uses a tightly coupled scheme of parallel hardware, software and networking to provide high availability. Scaling that sort of system will cost you a lot more than running H-Store on a cluster of cheap boxes.

[1] - http://books.google.com/books?id=KH_kfSsMu80C&printsec=f...
From /etc/apt/sources.list:

# Video stuff
deb http://packages.medibuntu.org/ gutsy free non-free

That has some helpful 'non-free' stuff.
Yes, people are naturally risk-averse.

But if you're a VC, you have thrust yourself into the spotlight as someone with an appetite for calculated risk and a willingness to live outside your comfort zone. You are saying that you are someone special.
hey kong,

great point. totally failed to mention vulnerability to supply chain disruption.

have since added this - thank you
have you tried adding a simple decay (exponential might be too sharp - i start with logarithmic and tweak from there) based on the amount of time that the rivalry has existed?

hotness could be as simple as starting with #votes/time alive and playing around with the variables from there.
And they're probably busy using those skills to be that awesome schoolteacher we all fondly remember.
“Get answers from people you know!” Is the first thing that sticks out from your site ...What problem is this solving? Isn't this why we use e-mail for? Those were questions I asked myself when I first looked at your site... After reading on I got to the ACTUAL point of your site… what is: neatly organized community knowledge base. So in my opinion you need to emphasize this part more…or even change those two sentences. I am just afraid that lot of people won’t read on if their first impression is same that I had…

All the best to you

Your idea isn’t bad at all.

a guy from Estonia.
Bayesian Rating
also: http://www.thebroth.com/blog/118/bayesian-rating
Well played :-)
You misunderstood. It's MORE vulnerable.
Here's their apology:

http://crashdev.blogspot.com/2008/04/sincere-apologies-to-pa...
By "most of the country" I mostly meant two coasts: Seattle, Oregon (Portland), California, Boston/NY/DC. Plus some other technology hubs: central Texas (Austin) and Chicago. That is not a small list of cities, certainly deserves to be called "most of the US", weighted by population.
I work really hard because I'm not bold.
Sincere Apologies to Paul Graham and the Y Combinator Team (from the Seattle Founder's Co-op)
I'd install the Opera browser. Firefox didn't quite work correctly when accessing my Linksys router (I blame my router and not FF, of course).

It wouldn't hurt to install PHP either; a worthy Apache companion.

Be sure to run this: sudo apt-get install build-essential

When attempting to install some modules, you'll get a "C compiler cannot create executables" message and build-essential fixes this.

I don't know why build-essential wasn't included on a base install.
That's something I hate about the internet. The constantly repeating memes is like standing in an echo chamber and feeling my brain melt because of the incessant repetition. Also why I detest pop music.
Poll: Should this site be visible to Yahoo, MSN crawlers?
A large fraction of our http requests come from Yahoo crawlers--
almost 20% yesterday. Their crawler seems significantly stupider
than Google's. Yesterday we got 12,423 requests from the Google
crawler, of which 4148 were for x (= mostly useless) urls, and
43,087 requests from Yahoo crawlers, of which 30,652 were for x
urls.

Unlike most sites, I'm looking for ways to constrain our growth. News.YC is deliberately not intended to become a
massively popular site.
So the thought occurred to me: why not just ban Yahoo crawlers?
And MSN too, while we're at it. I don't know anyone who uses either
of them for search. I'd just as soon have the site be invisible
to them. But what does the community think? Do any hackers use
Yahoo or MSN search?
Remain visible to Yahoo, MSN search.
Be invisible to Yahoo, MSN search.
I wonder if happiness is rising in wealthy countries because it has also become obvious (to anyone who looks) how much richer they are than people in poorer countries.
And the concentration of tech companies is so great in Israel that even Yahoo and Google share a building (http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2229/2419149286_0dfc4bbab4_b....).
the site has since been amended to indicate that it was a joke.

http://www.ciieindia.org/?page_id=93

"We don't want you to go to your accommodation before 12 midnight - so we provide you mattresses near your workspace for resting. There's anyways a security guard outside your work-area - so you don't get to leave the office before 12 midnight and you don't get to sleep in the office. Attendance happens at 9:30 am every morning. Sundays are off if you have met your weekly goals!

"(The team has tried to be funny with having framed the above rules - obviously none of these rules are for real. It was a failed attempt to be humorous, which unfortunately not a lot of people understood :(. However, guys/gals with less than average IQ and humor - who fail to understand the humor in the above para may not kindly apply. Being fun-loving and sharp are pre-requisites!!)"
Chris has responded to this issue on his blog: http://crashdev.blogspot.com/2008/04/sincere-apologies-to-pa.... Those of you throwing around uninformed, flaming commentary would benefit from a quick read followed by a few deep breaths.
How about embedding Lua and writing most of your app in that? That's what game developers usually do when they get fed up with C++. Lua is much lighter than Python and intended for embedding in C/C++ apps.
My favorite relevant quote is "For problems that can be solved by money, there's nothing better than money." For instance, commuting time. I drive 30 min to work in traffic because houses are 60-80% more expensive by my office. If I had double the money, I'd move closer and get more time with my family. My options are 1) drive more or 2) have a smaller house. More money would solve either of those.
And this is why I think Paul's essay was interesting and eye-opening, while this essay is a statement of the blindingly, no-duh obvious. (no offense - you seem like a smart, nice guy, hank :)
sorry if this comes as a shock, but you're british for life :)
you get what you pay for...
Sequoia's $750M Hedge Fund
Rather than looking for ways to constrain growth, why not use this as an opportunity to invent a better social news site?
got it - ty
maybe one way of constraining would be to limit access say by invitation only or some other method.
Entrepreneur 2 be » Founders At Work
i see a lot of people bashing c++ here, and rightly so, i guess. its evolution was too heavily influenced by backward compatibility and pleasing too many masters, in my opinion. i still like to program with it anyway, because i use my own restricted subset.

if you're in a hurry, maybe you should learn just plain old C, which is a lot simpler, and then sort of quickly rush through classes and other stuff specific to C++.

i'm kind of in the same boat. i'm teaching myself ruby, so i can eventually become an RoR programmer, and join all you hacker news types in the web 2.0 world. before that, i taught myself objective-c, so i could do cocoa programming on the mac. there's some surprising similarities between ruby and obj-c that i wasn't expecting.
C++ feels like a Japanese sportbike for small projects: your code will run crazy fast and it's easy to kill yourself if you're not good enough at it.

When your project grows beyond a certain size, C++ starts to feel like early soviet ballistic rockets: plenty fast, but a nightmare to maintain while on the ground, take forever to prepare to launch and can explode at any moment while in flight.

I used to love it, up until I bought a Pentium-III 800Mz with 512MB of RAM somewhere around 2001.
You are going to have a hard time making a case for a situation where C++ is better than C + Python.
> 12. Why would your project be hard for someone else to duplicate?

Heh
Where would one look for one? No, seriously. Where would one look for one?
Effective STL Programming by Meyers is probably your best bet for comprehension and fluency.

Stroustrop is surprisingly good as a walkthrough of the language itself.

Modern C++ Design by Alexander Alexendrescu is the best advanced book.
First:

Accelerated C++ by Andrew Koenig and Barbara E. Moo

-Great book aimed at absolute beginners written
by top of the line experts. Koenig worked at
AT&T and was a major player in the C++ standards
committee.

Second:

Effective C++ by Scott Meyers

-This book is spectacular and will take you from
beginner to the next level. It is very well
written and an easy read. More Effective C++
and Effective STL are also good.

Reference:

The C++ Programming Language Bjarne Stroupstrup

-This should be your reference book.

If you want some Guru level references I can list
a couple more advanced books if your interested...
FWIW, I know one of the guys and he's a decent fellow-- he's sharp and has several exits under his belt. He drives a Prius and loves his family. He's not the anti-christ (or even the anti-PG). He spun up Seattle OpenCoffee a year back (before this venture was a twinkle in his eye), just to help the Seattle startup community.

I think this is probably a case of then launching this before they even had a web site up and getting buried in random solicitations. They probably tossed that up there just to start getting coherent submissions.
sudo apt-get install build-essential

This is exactly what I was looking for; there is no way I would have figured that out easily on my own.
Well, I'm very glad that he responded so quickly. I was so excited to see something sort of like YC in Seattle but I was worried about the whole very-similar-application thing. I am glad to hear that he just really admires the YC program and is going to fix up the application.
I worked for Ford 18 years ago. They were well aware of these production systems. They knew Toyota was a leader and they always compared themselves with Toyota. I think, their problems are more complex than this.
Srsly? Do you really think that? Really stretches the definition of "all press is good press", don't you think?
I found reddit in mid-2006 when I was searching for widgets (or whatever they were called) for "My Yahoo" page. Without that I probably would have never foundit. So, I am very thankful that it was listed in the top 10 or 20 of their widgets (which is different from being in their search results, I know).
Waving the free market flag and complaining about MS in the same comment is contradictory. Sure, I'll concede that MS products aren't the best products out there, but customers decide what has the most value. Here are some of the ways that MSFT products, while possibly technically inferior, created value:

-hardware didn't matter. DOS/Windows would run on any (sufficiently powerful) PC

-everyone had it, so it was already familiar (people value consistency)

-MSFT on a PC has always been cheaper than a Mac, and people valued the stuff they could buy with the difference more than they valued the qualities of a Mac

-there has always been more software for Windows. This matters less now because of virtualization and the internet, but this was a big deal in the 80s and 90s.

-the money they spent on marketing and bizdev made their products easier to buy

Basically, they did this: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000052.html
I'm not putting the idea itself down at all. In my other comment I saw the likelihood of these types of investment companies increasing since YC proved the concept viable. This one here was blatant plagiarism though, which make it look like they didn't put the time into starting it properly, which means they're not likely to put due diligence into the companies they investing in. Trust is a big factor in accepting someone's money in exchange for part of your creation, and that doesn't instill it. Looks like they did apologize now though (haven't read it yet).

Local is a definite plus, having to move to Boston or Cali can be a deal-breaker for some I'm sure. I'm waiting to hear when a Canadian equivalent pops up myself ;)

They also had one other interesting idea I haven't seen before, which is that they ask companies to put up 5% to a pool that's shared among all the startups from that funding round. They figure that will encourage more collaboration and help, since everyone wins a little when anyone in the group wins. That was in their FAQ. I wonder how that will turn out for people in practice.
Imitation is the most sincere form of flattery.
nerve cell have axons with receptor sites where they recieve messages of certain types. so in your model each person/neurons needs to decide what types of messages they are willing to accept. you would need to generate those classifications and integrate your point system into it so that people/nerons become specialized in solving those types of problems.
My vote is to constrain growth as much as possible, at least that which comes from stupid sources. Smart hackers will find this site just fine without Yahoo or MSN, probably even Google.

As "evil" as blocking sites and crawlers may sound, I think these types of measures will be necessary to preserve the quality of content here. Whatever actions further that objective have my vote.
I wouldn't just separate the poorer countries into their own category. Now with everyone watching the same TV (with probably a much higher emphasis now on lifestyles than in the 70s), even the poor in the US should start feeling the same way as the 3rd world countries.

Clearly their feelings wouldn't be the same but I imagine that there would still be some resemblance.
I don't use Yahoo or MSN search.

I forget how I found out about this site, I believe it was via a mention on another topic-oriented discussion site.

If the goal is to limit growth, I would recommend that News.YC NOT be easy to find, as well as continue to NOT be SEO friendly (ie: nofollows on links, etc.).
Can someone who has access to the paper please post it on scribd.
http://www.jneurosci.org/cgi/reprint/28/16/4238

Thanks.
Very true. I doubt PG and co were losing sleep over a copied application form ;) They're probably watching their competition with much interest. It's not like there's room for only one after all.
One of his points was that for most people, even if they are bold in one aspect of their lives, they have too much fear and stay in their comfort zones in others.

So for example, would you ever fight in a boxing ring? Act in a theatre production? Try to date two(or more) girls at the same time? Setting aside the question of whether these are things that you might want to do, can you honestly say that you have the courage to do what it takes to actually do these things, and go through the failures that you will need to go through in order to get good at these things?
He uses the phrase "modeled after", which is pretty light. They lifted most questions verbatim, removed the references to boston and News.YC (usernames, etc), and shuffled order on a question or two.

I'm a little iffy on whether I feel this is terribly unethical-- an application is not really a creative work. I do think it shows a lack of creativity! I can think of 2 or 3 questions that I'd add/adjust if I was spinning up an early stage outfit.
http://rondam.blogspot.com/2006/10/top-ten-geek-business-myt...

See myth #10
An old girlfriend of mine used to say: "People who say money doesn't buy happiness don't know where to shop".
Fat, fatter, fattest: Microsoft’s kings of bloat
Hey man, I see you are a Calvin grad, That's my neck of the woods :-)
Your analogies win my heart.
Would you dare?
I've written many times [...] so I was caught by surprise

Reading that, it occurred to me that one of the gotchas here is the statelessness of the web. "Statelessness" isn't quite what I mean. "Contextlessness" might be better. URLs are pointers that jump directly to content that mostly gets consumed atomically, without reference to anything else the author has said/done. Of course if readers want context they have ample opportunity to explore: look at what else is on the site, google the sources and so on. But most won't. (I often do, but I didn't this time.) I wonder if one way to mitigate this is to make content more self-describing.
What really bothers me about YC-clones copying the application form is how little it shows the group has thought about the program they're starting.

How is it possible that PG nailed down exactly what every seed investor would ever want to know about startup founders seeking funding? Don't these investors have any other questions? Do they actually call people hackers in real life? Is a couple sentences about each founder the maximum all investors are capable of reading?

So I'm left wondering if the lack of thought that went into the application carries over into the rest of the program.
Do you have ideas on how to do that?
"The Fear of Free" Part 2 -common objections to open source solutions in the corporate environment.