skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Seems like the argument is that the Semantic Web (or downcase) has merit but requires coded trust relationships between data providers to work. So, the problem is that intelligent people are busy working on things that rely on the problem already being solved--which it very much isn't. That's a cogent argument.

So I've recently been dabbling in XFN and FOAF, which are like baby steps towards some kind of coded trust relationship and the problems there are: 1) they are insufficient for non-personal relationships, 2) the cost/benefit for personal users maintaining these coded relationships isn't there and 3) no one appears to be solving these problems at the moment because they don't really need to be solved right now.

Architecture Astronauts?
A little more research on Delaware's Department of Corporations website (which is where they are incorporated) allowed me to find out the total number of authorized shares: 52,503,000

30,000 / 52,503,000 =~ 0.06%

With the package they're currently offering (a little below market and not very good benefits), I'm probably going to pass.

Thanks again everyone.
Just want to point out, this is dated April 2001.
"HTML 5 is currently a work in progress. Although the specification can be used in some cases now, it is not likely to reach completion until 2010 at the very earliest."

Flash and Silverlight WILL take over if the W3C cannot decide on HTML 5 standards faster than that. People aren't going to wait around for some standards committee to deliberate years on a final spec. 2010 is sooo far away in internet years its ridiculous.
The Google Talk Labs Edition will launch a YouTube video in the chat conversation based on a link someone chats to you so that it continues to run while you continue to chat. This is, of course, not any kind of universal standards-based solution but for me it illustrated the value of being able to view a video without it dominating the context in which it's being viewed.
I had exactly the same reaction when I got to that part of the letter. I think you can take any trend and extrapolate it into incredulity -- Buffett's career is certainly evidence of this.
1. The DVD drive is region coded, and has been region changed the max times, so I can only play half of my DVD collection in it.

You should be able to play any DVD with VLC. The region-code is just a flag that Apple's software pays attention to. (Unless it's enforced by hardware now, which would be insane but not surprising.)
Maybe the fact that you feel like you have to keep this a secret is a clue that you're not at the right place.
Lots of haters == Lots of fanboys
"How is managing a team of techies different from managing other kinds of office workers? Technical people are motivated by interesting work. They will put up with abominable working conditions if they get to work on something that interests them. I've managed people who had to be sent home at night. But technical people without interesting work are very difficult to manage. Their active minds tend to get them into trouble. A happy team is a group that is busy and too intrigued with their project to get mired down with internal politics. In contrast, I find office workers to be more interested in the overall job than the task at hand. Environment, recognition and security are more important to them.

I've also found that technical people need to have adequate playtime. Ideas are exchanged and expanded while they play ping-pong or walk around the parking lot. Allowing people the freedom to wander when they need to returns high rewards that far offset the apparent lack of focus. Technical workers work all the time. Their minds are constantly mulling over problems and possible solutions. What looks like slacking off may be the most productive time they spend. Give them the freedom to work. "

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewA...
Amusing Thinkpad X300 vs. Macbook Air ad video:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-136851774381520099&...
He conceded that "if you want to have a commercially viable website, in most cases you need Flash,"

What?

Anyway, it's true that Flash is "The Next Frontier." Remember when you couldn't bank online from Linux? Those days are mostly over, but now it's "I can't use Scribd from Linux."

What someone should do is make javascript + svg as easy to develop in as Flash. I assume that means some shiny IDE, but I've never used Flash so I'm not sure. Basically, make it easy for people to do things portably, and they might try. (Then again, some people don't really like learning, so they'll use Flash forever.)

Oh, as always... some great comments on the site:

Quit trying to paint proprietary software as some dark evil and open source and open standards and open everytyhing as the only true way of the "good people".

It was a closed network in teh beginning and only those that want to make their code, site, whatever open should do so. Those that do not, have no obligation.
Proprietary software has created a huge amount of business for the world at large and has been nothing but beneficial by and large.

Socialism is nice, if you don't mind suffering through crushing government control.

So in the same light as things like this:
Proprietary software is patriotic and good and keeps the government out of our lives, where it belongs. Less government control and a free society is GOOD..GOOD..GOOD.

Open software relies too heavily on the government and government control and living under the government's thumb. It's is socialist software. Socialism is BAD. BAD BAD...

Stuff like this makes me want to cry.
My guess is that after taxes, but in the US they are usually talking about salary before taxex. So basically your $30K is about $40K here.
I understand your point here, but this situation appears to be a bit different.

- VC money and some salary is on the way shortly http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=178290

- The idea seems to have matured and people want it.

Sounds like a good deal to me.
hah i have the same problem, signed up a while ago. Does dropbox work with linux?
I've been working for over 10 years, and I've found that most companies offer 2% - 5% raises, a little more if you are a super employee. The only ways to get more than a 10% raise are to change jobs or to use another job offer as a means to extract a counter offer from your current employer.
"If we used the exchange rate, the value of a new skyscraper in Shanghai would count much less toward China's GDP than an identical building in Chicago would count toward America's, which makes no sense."

Somehow, I don't think the author has thought very hard about this. The value of the building isn't labor plus materials -- it's not like he'd make the same argument about putting it in the Gobi desert. It's possible to estimate the proper exchange rate, and use this to estimate China's actual GDP.
In D.C. it's about 55-65, but if you have clearance it can go 5-10 more.
Can we "pls" leave the expression "pls" on Reddit and Digg?
In terms of deploying an app for a customer without giving the customer source-code level access, then what you need to do is structure in terms of Software as a Service, where the customer is only able to access the application and not the server itself.

As others have pointed out, it might seem like an idea to "obfuscate" the source code, but really this does nothing to protect your application. For one, any obfuscation trick, no matter how obscure, is usually easily undone. Secondly, since Rails depends heavily on the use of eval(), there will be large chunks of raw code in your application even if, theoretically, it could be compiled.

Keep in mind you still have a lot of latitude in how you deploy Software as a Service. You can give your client DB dumps, you can run off your client's DB platform, if they want their data "in house" and not at some untrusted facility.
Or video games.
I think there are two sides to what Warren Buffett is saying. One side is nonsense, I agree - that he can make a prediction like that based on early trends. The other side, however, which is what I think he actually meant, is that, in fact, predicting from trends is not nearly what it's cracked up to be, and that there is no real guarantee of continued healthy returns from US equities, or even long-term returns to capital that are comparable to the low double-digit returns of the 20th Century. That's a legitimate point.
A MySQL model actually makes more sense. Thanks for clearing that up.
I started with Slashdot, got disillusioned, then went over to Digg, then Reddit, and now I'm here and have a better appreciation for Slashdot. This experience prompts me to formulate a law:

When you start wishing social news site X won't become like social news site Y, it's probably inevitable at that point.
Stop bringing up non-web products. This is getting idiotic.

Indeed. You still don't get it.
It is utterly reasonable to argue that past returns are no guarantee of future returns, but if that is the argument he meant to make, he did it exceedingly poorly.
I am hoping for a quick and widespread adoption of various mobile devices without Flash and Silverlight support with embedded Opera/Mozila/WebKit as primary web runtimes. I hope Adobe will lead the way and refuse to include Flash support into their next iPhone/iPodTouch.

Once mobile standards-compliant users start representing sizeable portion of the web traffic, idiotic website builders will learn to stay away from Flash.
Well if they'd let the programmer come in at midnight, then his productive time would be tapering off right about the time the MBA shows up at 6am to get all his work done. It would be perfect.

But no, programmers must pretend to be generic office cogs. 9-5 just doesn't make sense for a creative profession. Working hours should be whenever the person happens to be working, and managers should be good enough at knowing whether things are getting done that they don't have to watch all their employees (pretend to) work on a set schedule.
I think he was trying to spin it in a folksy way, but ended up dumbing it down to the point that it came across as a weak argument.
No, flash is slower and more bloated. Both of my PDF readers (on mac and ubuntu) work much faster than flash plugins.

But much more importantly, Flash completely ignores every single visual setting I have set up on my PC: from font rendering options to colours and default zooming.

But what's even more important, is WHY THE F... do I need an animation plugin to read goddamn text on the internet?
Metaprogramming in Lisp and Smalltalk Compared
When Google talks about "do no evil", who do you think they were talking about?
Slashdot went bad differently than Digg and Reddit. Digg and Reddit went bad by appealing to too many people, and making commenting too easy.

Slashdot is bad because people post the same fucking diatribes over and over. I guess this happens on Reddit and Digg too, but to a lesser extent. You could roll Slashdot back to 1999 and it would be the same people with the same views talking about the same thing. We get your point, enough already :)

Oh well, at least there's still Lambda The Ultimate.
Pretty cool and great for Canada. Good work guys
Nah, this will stay good. Why?

1-pg's financial interest is not impressions, it's the number of smart hacker readers he can attract to YC, and for that he needs high signal-noise.

2-pg retains ownership. He has control and can judiciously change the system or deputize people at any point and in any manner to filter content.
I was thinking as I read this that the "syncing" killer app would likely come from an adjacent field, rather than being designed specifically for syncing. Either version control (git) or backup (DropBox)...
Well, I'm sure it wasn't invented on Reddit or Digg. However, I think in general "pls" is a pretty poor abbreviation. Those little words we use in order to sound polite are not the place where we should try to save keystrokes.

It's a way of saying to somebody "Hi, I'm asking you to write an essay for me! But I've decided to save myself three keystrokes in the process."
Review: Google Apps Hacks
Seven Do’s And Three Don’ts For Creating New Web Products
Vizzini: BRK.A at $133,000 a share, Inconceivable!

Inigo Montoya: You keep using that word. I do not think it means, what you think it means.
If this is how it works, then here's another shameless attempt to hasten acceptance into your beta program (I've also applied for registration by the regular means you provide :-). If Dropbox works as advertised, I promise I'll pay a monthly subscription fee. This is something I want.
Inside Xerox Parc today
Print Preview with JQuery
"With bugs. One thing Apple does consistently is release buggy Rev. A products. Every. Single. Time. It's almost like they try to do it."

Yea, you could never accuse Microsoft and the PC vendors of sloppy work like that.
Should Flash and Silverlight really be put into the same boat?
Um, actually:
"This item ran on the Joel on Software homepage on Thursday, May 01, 2008"
> Oh well, at least there's still Lambda The Ultimate.

Sssshhhh! The others will hear you.
"Benevolent" != "do all the work for your competitors". Besides, if you're not smart enough to figure out how to improve on the YC model on your own, why should entrepreneurs come to you for advice?
Is that before or after taxes?
L:tU is scary enough that most of the unwashed masses take a look at it and then go away. They've done a really good job at keeping the bar high.
Product Rating Script Using PHP
Creating a function to display a product ratings is trivial using PHP.

All you need is to decide on the values for you ratings and a the image to display for each rating.

For this Example we will use a system that stores ratings as descrete values and not continous values..............
Gaah. I'd really like to know how this guy came to the conclusion that FOSS relies on the government. WTF?
dallas 65
IVentures10 - YC Clone at U of Illinois
18 months of 50% effort at no salary = 9 months full time no salary. Why do you think a 21% gap is too high for that?

Again: 4% is a very large share for an employee. When the company comes to its senses, nobody else is going to get anything even in that neighborhood.
Okay, then it's easy ...don't take the job!
You're right. I just misread the stats.
Whee! Yet another Wave of the Future!

Hmm. Quantum computers or memresistor-based computers. What to choose? Maybe both, if someone can figure out a way to convert reliably between spin superpositions and resistance.

WTF is all of this going to do to teh intarwobs?
1. A lot more experienced. Before YC, the only startups I knew
about were the ones started by me and by friends. Now I know which
of their qualities were essential to their success, and which were
incidental.

2. This answer will sound useless, but it's the same reason anyone
is good at anything. There's no single secret. There are about
20 different things we have to do, from recognizing talent to talking
about product ideas to matching people up with VCs, and we try hard
to do them all well.

3. By accident. When we first started YC, we didn't know what to
do, so we started with a summer program. Most college students
regard summer jobs as disposable anyway, so we figured no one would
mind if the experiment was a disaster and all the companies failed.
As it turned out, that batch did remarkably well.

4. This one I already did write about: http://ycombinator.com/about.html

5. That it's not as easy as it looks. A lot of people think investing
is like betting on horses: you pick, they race, and if they win you
get money. Actually it is a lot more active than that. And the
earlier the stage, the more work it is. If you want to invest at
this stage, you need to have the same qualities you'd need to be a
successful founder.
Google Launches TV Advertising
Yerp, but not a word about this. Flash and Silverlight are here, ready-to-go now. How long before HTML 5 even remotely has any kind of saturation on the desktop, so that we can program against it? 5 years? There is some magic about an "upgradable browser" via plug-ins.
(I'm the author of the post, but I didn't post it here - thanks to whoever did)

I've got no problem with XFN and/or FOAF - I've built sites that support them. The problem I see is that advocates for those formats concentrate on the easy stuff - a data format - while ignoring the hard stuff - spam, granular privacy controls.

These problems DO need solving now, though - without them these technologies are about as useful as meta-data in webpages. Maybe they should relaunch AltaVista circa 1998 as a new "Semantic Web" search engine..
They are both plug-ins, but Flash has been around for at least a decade. Flash is used for YouTube, ensuring it has nearly complete saturation. Flash should be considered part of everyone's browser these days.
This was actually the first YC clone. They originally started it several years ago. I'm not sure what happened; maybe it didn't take then, and now they're relaunching it.
I actually like the fact that they release their products early. Since everyone knows initial releases can be buggy the bleeding edge early adopters can go ahead and buy it, while the more careful crowd can wait for the bugs found by the early adopters to be fixed in later releases.
It's hardware. The crappy Matsushita drive won't release any data unless the region code matches the code the drive has locked to.
No firmware replacements either.

It's just so ironic that I can burn it to a new DVD as region free, and it'll play fine!

edit: someone downmodded me for stating fact ;) fun fun fun
The way I'm reading this, our storage capacity today is basically like a bubble wand or a carpenter's level. If you tilt the right side down then the bubble goes all the way up on the left, and if you tilt the left side down then the bubble goes all the way up on the right. This means that bubble wand can hold two values, 0 and 1. With this new process you can essentially tilt the wand a few degrees and have the bubble move only a couple inches and then stop, and then tilt the wand a few more degrees and have the bubble move a little more.

In this way you can store any value within a single "box." So instead of it taking 64 "boxes" to store 64 bits, with this new process we can essentially store this much information in a single box. And furthermore, each box is going to be an order of magnitude smaller than our existing boxes today.

This may well be the single most important day of our lives, technologically at least. The singularity is indeed near.
Why AT&T May Deep-Discount the iPhone
It seems to me the answer here is for HTML 5's video element to gain traction. Then we can get the codec and interface out of the walled garden of whatever Flash video player sites have crafted, and put the control back in the browser. If Safari wants to offer the option to pop-out a player window, it can.
VC money and salary is on the way in 2 to 3 years (according to the initial post). And having an idea of something customers want is good, but without a product it's still a huge risk.
I worked as a postdoc for a while, too. The lower salary is the price to pay for having more freedom in our research (and freedom to publish). :-)
There is a solution to giving large percentages to every new person: pay them a salary, even if below market. If you're paying someone with equity only you're asking them to assume all the risk of the company failing, which is fine, but you'll need to compensate them for that risk in addition to compensating them for the work they will put in.
Ask YC: Oh no, I think I have serious competition - What do you guys think of this?
Excuse my ignorance but what is your app?
It struck me after reading the article that the company who has solved synchronization is Apple.

All of the data people really care about is on their iPhone/iPod. Contacts, photos, music, TV shows, movies, email, web access. When you think of it, iTunes main purpose is syncing and organizing your media. And with iTunes Store seamlessly syncs a lot of the data people care about from the Internet, also (for pay movies and music, but a lot of free podcasts, too).

While Microsoft continues to try to solve the synchronization problem as an abstraction, Apple has actually created something everyone uses because it Just Works.
It comes down to an investment decision. Do you want to invest 2 years worth of salary into a company without a product in exchange for 4%? You're basically giving the company a yearly salary x 50 valuation. Pretend you're an angel investor and think about whether or not this is a good investment.
Your 'Regions' list ends at Montreal.

You're missing out on an odd 750-1000 miles of geography (and a lot of Canadian startups).
Insane. Education is really, really, really important, but there's more to life than studying. Much more. Besides, the value of Ivy-League schools is overrated.
New elements are a partnership with Mozilla[1] and opening the program to students worldwide[2]

[1] http://labs.mozilla.com/2008/04/mozilla-labs-higher-educatio...

[2] http://www.prweb.com/releases/iventures10/mozilla/prweb87868...
That's good, it means your not building something nobody wants, there's a market. If there is no competition, there's probably no market.
The Ultimate Corporation
If you're going to start spamming YC with all your blog posts, maybe you should spread them out a little more, eh ?
So, on a related note... Google has grown really fast over 5 or so years. Say, 12,385% for the sake of argument. What do you think the chances of this experiencing that PERCENTAGE growth over the next 5 years?

I think his point is-- high percentage growth is easy for small things. It gets harder for big things. Growth curves tend to flatten out.
There are a plethora of IT jobs in Tulsa and OKC. I know that where I'm consulting right now, one company they work with out of Tulsa likes to bring guys from Tulsa, pay them Tulsa salary and bill them at Dallas rates.

Now, the work likely isn't sexy. Look at the medical and oil/gas industry and start applying there.

And College doesn't teach you how to work in the real world. Why would you trust one of your college professors, who likely haven't worked at a "real" job in 20 years, with any advice relating to salary or real world type work?
Starbucks does not make superior products. The core product, coffee, is absolutely horrible. When you order an espresso you'll taste that the coffee they use is cheap over-roasted junk provided by the lowest bidder.

I agree though that - like apple - they managed to build a nice trendy facade that appeals to many people. Apple had the good sense to replace their mediocre core product (<= OS 9) with an excellent one (FreeBSD).
Friend just got offered 90K from both Adobe and Amazon. Got rejected from Google and MSFT. Has had quite a few good internships.
I think that's likely high (I'm in Dallas and have some experience in the last couple years with recruiting college people).

I'd say the average is around 50k, only people with real experience getting more than that. Some companies are paying higher, but they are turning around and billing them out at a stupid high rate (EDS I'm looking at you).
The DJIA is not a single "thing" that is subject to the same growth rules as a single organization -- it is just an index of companies. The same properties that allowed the index to grow from 66 to ~11,000 in the 20th century could just as easily allow it to grow by a similar percentage in the 21st century: the absolute value of the index is not relevant (it already accounts for stock splits).
No, as someone doing a lot of interviewing lately, it really doesn't matter. YMMV, of course, I know more good programmers out of Drexel than Stanford, and am in Palo Alto!
Or Winamp.
Too much code. Too many "if" statements that have to be executed every time.

Try:

<?php
function getRatingImage($rating)
{
$vals = ['zero','half','one','one_half','two','two_half','three','three_half','four','four_half','five'];
$ndx = intval($rating * 2);
if($ndx > 10){$ndx = 10};
return "./" + $vals[$ndx] + ".jpg";
}
?>