skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree. Aquiring the right tools is important. As long as you remember that the tools are there to get the job done not the other way round.

Preferably you can do the majority of your 'technique aquisition' on someone else's time so when you are coding in your own startup (or mine) you can focus on the problem at hand. I know I've implemented things before in ways that I now realize were pointlessly clever.
Google Reader, too.
WTF? That's nothing compared to UK cycle lanes...

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/pete.meg/wcc/facility-of-the-mo...
“Think of the oar as a lever,” Prof. Mark Schiefsky of the Harvard classics department said. “Think of the oarlock as a fulcrum, and think of the sea as the weight.”

This is false. An oar is a second degree lever, meaning the fulcrum is somewhere along the shaft a few inches above where it meets the blade. Thinking of the oarlock as the fulcrum is incorrect because the goal is to move the boat, not the oarlock. Ideally the oar shouldn't move in the water at all, but in reality it actually moves forward somewhat over the course of the stroke. This actually creates a small pocket of water vapor in front of the blade which is a form of cavitation; if this weren't the case then the blade would be very difficult to feather.
That idea totally rocks!
40 percent of college students say their next computer purchase will be a Mac
OOXML (DIS29500) Result: Approved
Okay, you may be named stcredzero and it may be April fools day, but that sounds like interesting stuff. Do you have anything to show yet?
Awesome! Please add me as a beta tester (gmail kirubakaran).
A cup of coffee.
Logic dictates that it’s an April Fool’s joke.
World's first voiceless telephone call
Pinoy uses wiki model to make textbooks for public schools
"More generally, I would bet that there are countless startup opportunities in fields that don't get a lot of love from hacker types, because they don't know about it. Not every niche involves social networks and tags."

Truer words were never posted on this site.

Even though this is "hacker news", it really seems like a small subset of hackerdom. Seems like every other hacker wants to write the next paradigm changing Web 2.0 social networking new media mobile app looking for a market while 7 million small and medium sized business owners would rather chew razor blades than spend one more day with their current software.

People accuse me of working on "boring" business stuff. I prefer to call myself the "digital Willie Sutton". Why play roulette when the bank vaults are open?
Barack Obama - What's Wrong with this picture? (Photo)
Finishing my degree.

And, putting together a Meetup in Mountain View the evening before Startup School: http://entrepreneur.meetup.com/1737/
The Python thing is more of an experiment as we flesh out our APIs for various languages:
http://blog.bug.gd/2008/03/29/error_help-for-python-hackers/

The bug.gd site is more like a 'recycling bin' that reminds you to come back and share your workaround so it's not lost for the next guy who searches. Searching on Google works for a lot of people, but this is a lot more focused and helps the community when it's used.

Long-term we'll be integrating client-side tools into every application/language we can.
because its a lot harder to hide them with web apps.
Let That Be a Lesson To You, Son: Never Upgrade.
Digitally savvy Filipino kids wield P37-B spending power
Beware of April Fools' Day jokes today (Google)
Writing a new essay.
Is there any article like this specific to lisp? What really turned me on to Emacs was learning about Slime, largely through Marco Baringer's videos (they're linked from this post: http://bc.tech.coop/blog/050728.html)
Digg has a couple. If you view source and go to the bottom of the page you'll see:

<!-- digg is done serving you. 2.01355321270u 137.03599911 6.6742x10-11m3kg-1s-2 6.6742x10-11m3kg-1s-2 -->
those constants spell out (of course) digg. Barely an easter egg, but thought I'd throw it in.

There's a key-sequence that mimics a cheat from some game that will expand the comments completely. You can search digg for it if you're curious.

I think that because websites do change more often than desktop environments, people don't look for easter eggs with the same passion. And maybe because the effort involved in building and distributing a website is so much less than building and distributing a desktop application, that makes it more ephemeral, and programmers less likely to put in the time to build elaborate hidden functionality.

The constants thing was there for over a year before anyone noticed it.
I disagree.

An oar is a first degree/class lever because the rowlock is not at the end of the oar, but somewhere between my hand and the blade. But perhaps we learnt different definitions of first/second class levers.
1) Dataflow engine for a new kind of spreadsheet
2) Business idea brainstorming
3) Ignoring all the April 1st internet BS.
for the even more curious, the konami code on digg expands all comments on a page.
finishing up the last of our politics stuff: http://poliquiz.com and http://www.fantasycongress.com

trying to figure out what changes need to occur to our YC app to make it more understandable
A centralized syslog database with rule based systems to block malevolent sorts at our firewall boundaries. Didn't like any of the solutions I found to scratch my itch.

(Ok,not technically a start up, I started up many years ago. Been there, done that, forgot to sell the company.)
Very cool.

How to instal extensions manually: http://wiki.mozilla.org/Installing_Extensions
Interesting points. I think your comments help elucidate my point that evolution is not so simple as to be glibly thrown around as the reason for every human behavior.

>> Taken to the extreme, why have we even developed arms, legs, eyes, ears, and minds? Simple bacterial reproduction does just fine.

> I don't get what you are trying to prove here. What is your explanation for the fact that we developed those things?

Back to my point, everyone assumes that evolution simply means "survival of the fittest" or the "propagation of the gene". If that's all there is to it, there's no obvious explanation for the emergence of higher-order organisms, since bacterial reproduction provides by far the most efficient mechanism for copying genes. All this is to say that the devil is in the details and there is actually quite a bit more to evolution than what is taught in 7th grade biology.
Working on http://www.thephotostream.com. Suggestions, comments are welcome!
Are you in Ottawa (Silicon Valley North)? I read in the business section that lately Ottawa VCs aren't investing very much.
A new way to organize things/data online to enable greatly improved retrieval.
I working on mobtropolis. http://www.mobtropolis.com ,
which makes it easy to photo stream your experiences, big or small, and inspire friends or strangers to try new things.

I had posted it earlier, and took most of the suggestions, though still working on some of them. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=109155

Since then, I've added facebook integration, and not just a new look and feel, but made it more "me-centric". Just working on getting some bugs ironed out, and will be rewriting the incomplete "tour" section today.
Microsoft and Yahoo agree a price
Does anyone know if this is true or an April Fool?
Innertoob- Podcasting Site that is Part Blog, Player and Social Website
What's the konami code?
Building a better dzone, mostly just to learn the Apache Wicket framework. I like the idea of dzone, but I hate the layout of the site, and I can't be the only one.

I might re-implement it in Django though, just for fun.
Whoever sent me the Microsoft recruitment letter today...bad taste.
Wow, that's pretty much what I'd be doing if I had infinite free time and much deeper knowledge of CS.

Have you written any more about this anywhere? I'd be very interested to read about your game & systems design and the process you're going though.
What's wrong with white?
Happy Birthday, Apple
rewriting the server software behind a psudo first person shooter game in flash.
http://www.ultrakillz.com/play

Note the current version is prone to restarts...
I'm working on a hosted load testing solution. The idea is to make it easy to find scalability issues in advance, like the signup scalability issue HN had when it was TechCrunch'd. The tests will require no hardware, be on-demand, and use an open source tool people might already be using. It should make the process ridiculously easy and scalable if I get things right.
The last line:
"[ April Fools! Click here for more InfoWorld April Foolery. ]"
That's the one I meant in the last part of my post.
view source on http://mootools.net/ and you are treated to some artwork
I agree.

These also look nice - http://www.jitterbug.com/Phones.aspx.

Although they are not so cheap initially, since they offer lower-priced monthly plans than I have seen elsewhere, the cost of the phone is paid back relatively quickly if you only need an hour or so per month.

Also, I think they have a kind of Kramer appeal.
Novel learning algorithms.
Of course implementing someone else's algorithm is fairly easy. Coming up with the next RSA, though, is very difficult.
And that probably means there's no addressbook either. I don't know if I could go back to remembering all those phone numbers.
Damien Katz: CouchDB switching from Erlang to Java
the perfect homepage for average web users
I'm building better MRI reconstruction software. Most existing software does a filtered FFT + standard image processing. This throws away information solely because radiologists and other humans can't use it directly.

I'm trying to extract that information and turn it into something usable by humans.
Working on a keyword research app for SEM. The first step to bringing my internal PPC management system to the masses.
Working on my YC application
Sadly I doubt it will ever come to the US. You couldn't text on that (with no screen and all), which kills it immediately for major US companies, who increasing depend on data for revenue growth.

But I would use one of those in a heartbeat.
An RDF triple store based on CouchDB and an S2O layer (SPARQL to Objects) mapper.
Rapid application development in web applications. I'm developing an embedded domain-specific language in Haskell that basically constitutes application metadata which then gets converted to Ruby, Perl, Python, or PHP.
I am currently researching an idea.

PROBLEM: Search results are full of noise.

PROPOSED SOLUTION: (1) Take a raw search feed; (2) Give searchers a tool that enables them to maintain a persistent search state (i.e., it keeps track of your previous queries and all the results you have clicked on while using the tool); (3) Use results from user data to aid in constructing a better ranking of the raw search feed.

The seed for this idea came from a link given to me by one of the professors at BGSU: http://research.microsoft.com/~merrie/collaborative_search.h...
Apple lawyer going after gnome projects?
First she calls the cheese project (photobooth clone) and gets it taken down, then the Xesam (shared search spec)... there must be some prior art for "IC 009. US 021 023 026 036 038. G & S: computer software used for image editing, image acquisition, and image viewing"

[or this is a very bad April fools joke by someone!]
my abs
I know it's not exactly a Hacker Startup, but my wife and I have been building www.realphotography.com steadily over the past year

We've tried to leverage the internet and digital media as much as possible: the business has a blog, the vast majority of our promotion is on the internet, we sell the digital files, all proofing is done online. But I'd happily solicit any feedback from the resident hackers as to how we could do this even better.

And I'd like to head off the comments about Flash, yes we're aware of the disadvantages, and you'll see we do off a non-flash site for weddings. ;)
Ask YC: Who are you using for DNS?
For those of you who aren't running your own DNS server, who are you using? Free hosting (e.g, EveryDNS, ZoneEdit, EditDNS) or paid hosting (e.g, DNS Made Easy, No-IP, EasyDNS)?
vi might be on any unix box, but not vim.
Perhaps because easter eggs are a symptom of stifled creativity, which isn't as much of a problem with startups?
Microsoft Stands Firm On Yahoo Offer: “There Is No Reason To Bid Against Ourselves.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konami_Code
Open source, open markets
I've been named stcredzero for a very long time.
They aren't in most countries - AFAIK, bundling with the service is mostly a U.S. phenomenon. That's why you only see SIM-locked GSM phones in the U.S.
Working on writing a blog to help me learn arc.
markkit in your blog/website http://markkit.net/in-your-site.html
I did it!

Open Firefox and go to http://adsl2.ctc.cl/adsl2/

See the Telefónica logo on the upper left? Click on the dot in the "i" on the logo to see the credits of the authors of the application.
The summary at the beginning of the article reads:

"Michael Whitehead is selling the idea of collective software wisdom. The Goal: be quick and cost-effective. blah"

Notice the final word :D
What's wrong with its ties now? :: ducks ::
Right now, an EEP for Unicode support in Erlang.
(EEPs are like PEPs in the Python world).

Apart from that, I've got about 10 other things on my "current stuff" list, most to do with Hypernumbers (http://hypernumbers.com), but there's a couple of Arc-related things as well.
AideRSS + GoogleReader = solve information overload 
We launched a new firefox extension which intergrates PostRank into GoogleReader. Would love to hear some feedback. First come, first serve invites: http://gr.aiderss.com/?ycomb
>People accuse me of working on "boring" business stuff. I prefer to call myself the "digital Willie Sutton". Why play roulette when the bank vaults are open?

I think there are two reasons:

Hackers tend to be male computer geeks who majored in CS or something like that, and they write for markets that they understand, so they're mostly concentrated in the same markets because they understand the same things. Even within the Web 2.0 sphere lots of markets are ignored. Here's an example of a site that serves knitters: https://www.ravelry.com/account/login
They've been around for less than a year and they have over 100K users. I only know about them because my wife knits. They have (or had when I checked it out several months ago) essentially no competition, because the intersection of people who are interested in hacking and knitting consists of very few people. IIRC it was written by the husband of a knitter.

Second, dealing with businesses is kind of daunting. I think I could write better software than my pharmacy has in a matter of months, but I would either have to sell it to risk-averse PHBs who don't understand technology or start my own mail-order pharmacy. Just writing some web app and putting it up has a far lower activation energy, even if there is more competition and the market is ultimately smaller.

But if you know your market and are comfortable dealing with these businesses, you're in a great position. I can't imagine that any software would be boring if it's for your own startup.
Well, either it has some features like that, or the pic is just an artist's impression, given that it has an enter key.
I've heard various exhibits and collections described to viewers as challenging, but this one is probably the most challenging I've seen.
We launched a new firefox extension which intergrates PostRank into GoogleReader. Would love to hear some feedback. First come, first serve invites: http://gr.aiderss.com/?ycomb
As a college student I estimate that 3 of 10 students use Macs. When I walk through the cafeteria I like to see how many Macbooks there are, to see if PGs 10 year prediction will come true.
Interesting point. A lot of quirky creativity does get to show itself these days without needing to use easter eggs. For example in blog posts, cute little "About" pages, fun features like, etc.

Do things like this count as easter eggs? Or are they "fun" features?
http://www.google.com/search?q=number+of+horns+on+a+unicorn+...
I am in Kelowna, British Columbia...aka Silicon Vineyard.
About 3 hours east of Vancouver...God's Country.
Working on a "souce code annotating debugger" for an esoteric programming language.

So instead of painfully stepping through your code line by line, you just press M-t inside a function definition and voilà: it shows you what goes on inside the function, using some example inputs to annotate the source code in a new Emacs buffer.
It is nice to recognize the development team. Cual de ellos eres tu?
Undergrad Honors thesis.
if you have a wildcard in dns records, you can effectively make it a fallback, so thats how our something.orgu.com addresses get mapped to an IP. however, we do allow tld's, we handle that by hosting our own instance of PowerDNS, which is great (u can use mysql with it)
Nope, this is the first time I've spilled the beans.
Please use a toolkit that has Mac support. Thank you. :)
This is tough to go through. However a good reminder that life is short, don't sell out.
At my day job: Just finished a django checkout/cart system for one of our websites (www.bigfootsnowshoes.com) and working on a new site and more Python/Django apps. Been using Python full time for the past 3 months and loving it. I hate fixing/updating old PHP code now :(

At night: A service that will help locals find what they want more easily for things like going out for a fun night, events, etc. Think a better Yellowpages. Where I am, nothing like this exists so it's something I will be using for myself as well. Plus it's a fun learning

And just as I was writing this post I got my Python in a nutshell book on my desk. Yay :)
It sounds totally great....interested to see Rev 1.
we wrote it from scratch
I know 5 students who bought new laptops in the last 2 years, 3 of them chose a Mac. Also, most laptops at a local Starbucks popular with students are Macs. PG was right.
Trying to wrap my mind around Arc by building an ecommerce app.
OpenDNS (http://www.opendns.com/)
On some S60 code for a paying client. Improving code not originally written by me. Oh the joys of C++ and Symbian!

Lately I have been doing quite a lot of MIDP Java development for the same client, and it was quite a bit more enjoyable. With great powers come great responsibilities.
So why ask the user to enter an OpenID login and then follow up with an email address? An analogy: you're filling out a form and you think you're done because the front page is short and sweet. Then Mr Evil Banker Man tells you, actually, you missed the back side and that's long and convoluted.

That's happened to me and I always felt betrayed, as if being led into something naughty and the person doing the leading is hiding something.

In short, there is something stopping me from asking for the email address, and that's usability and trust building.
I find the concept of Second Life interesting, but it is difficult to use. If you could create something along the same lines of Second Life that is easier to use and eliminates the lag problem, it would definitely be something I would try.

I found Second Life after reading about Asperger's Syndrome and the communication problems associated with the syndrome that Second Life seems to break down. (No, I don't have Asperger's Syndrome; I am just an prolific reader.) What I was fascinated with is the variety of user created items and the pseudo-economy that developed within the world.

If you could create something like Second Life, it would definitely be used.
I think it will be interesting to see how many of them are willing to put their money where their mouth is and plunk down $1000-2000 for an email/Internet research/word processing machine.

Are we in fact entering circumstances where it's believed you need a Core 2 Duo machine with 1-2 GB RAM to run Word, Excel, and a web browser? (I'm assuming most students aren't running or writing finite element codes, simulations, and other computationally intensive programs where more cores and more clock speed gives you huge gains.)
Very amusing. :)
http://twitter.com/rickroll the web2.0 april fool
I heartily encourage you put fingers to keyboard if you can spare the time (and be sure to submit here if you do).

It strikes me as a project of such complexity and delicacy that the risks involved in publicising some of your ideas are much outweighed by the potencial gains from starting a public dialog. (though I would say that, as I'd love to read about it ;)
af08
I should be personally getting paid by apple, or buy some stock.

3 of my friends have made the jump after playing with my Macbook.

It is taking a lot of willpower to not get an Air or MBP.
apple is the new (or soon to be) windows. the king is dead. long live the king.
I'm working on an online comedy troupe. Basically, there will be a blog that a cast of 7 contributors have authorship access to. All of their contributions are rated by the audience, and a the end of the week, the lowest scoring member gets axed, while a high performing member of the community gets promoted.

It's name? http://www.chompchompdead.com . It's roughly what happens when you get eaten by a shark.

We should be launching in about two weeks with a full cast of mostly professional writers.
Blizzard introduces the Tauren Marine into StarCraft II
Blizzard's April Fool 2008 arms the Terrans with these creatures from Azeroth.
I tend to think that Easter Eggs are a sign of creativity in and of themselves. In one of my unreleased desktop applications, we poured way more time into an Easter egg than we should have (and uncovered a very interesting way to DOS a mac). It's a fun creative outlet.
I've always used (and loved) It's All Text:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4125

It adds a small "edit" button at the bottom right of any textbox, which will then let you edit the contents of that box in your favorite text-editor. Works fine in news.yc, gmail, wordpress, etc.

Incidentally, a similarish extension for thunderbird is called "External Editor":

http://www.kickflop.net/blog/2005/12/22/using-an-external-ed...

(It's a little annoying to find, download, and install, but it works fine once you do.) It also works great with vim syntax highlighting for emails, with headers and quoted previous emails appropriately colored.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=128119
- Selling, improving and supporting ViEmu and Codekana:

http://www.viemu.com

http://www.codekana.com

- A few months into a new start-up in the mobile space, Kimua, working towards having a prototype by the summer (my partner and I have hired two programmers, so I don't have to do any of the coding here!):

http://www.kimua.com (still nothing really to see here)

- Doing some heavy research in functional programming for my work-in-progress text editor (codename 'ngedit', the final actual name will probably be 'kodumi'):

http://www.kodumi.com

http://www.ngedit.com/ngedit.html

- Trying to prioritize the above tasks appropriately. Some days it's difficult to get anything done just by the sheer size of my "to do" list.
This reminds me of ancient learned men's custom of keeping a skull as a memento mori. They found it so important that they placed it on their desk, always in view.
Mac rock, I still don't own one, but I use them all the till. They super cool.
Games, tunes, videos. Though you could do these on much less hardware!
Damn. I’m going to go to bed and wake up on April 2nd. My world has no anchor today.
DNSMadeEasy for all my personal domains and Neustar for our work/production domains.

Love DNSMadeEasy been using them for a while now, no problems beyond a confusing interface although Neustar's is much worse (interface).