skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Good questions. It was an RSS filtering, reformatting and republishing service, so the audience was mostly geeks and what I call "media geeks".. people who run Web sites who wanted to republish blended feeds on their sidebars, stuff like that. One important unique feature in our case was that NO "Powered by Whatever" nonsense was added into the republished versions people put on their sites. Secondly, we let people blend feeds, rather than just republish a single one (this was very new in 2005!). We also supported filter by query, stuff like that. Oh, and perhaps biggest of all was allowing users to ENTIRELY change the template, free-form. We had predefined templates, but gave the user TOTAL control over the output.

I'm not really sure about how those people found the service. There were a few minor writeups on reasonably unpopular blogs at the time, but 100 signups a day were coming in so I didn't care. Unfortunately I focused on the technology instead of the business so never bothered to keep track of it.
exactly! This leads to people having inconsistent (with reality) information about the availability of other people who have just logged on or off!
Yeah, I've really enjoyed reading PG's essays, especially "How Art Can Be Good". I wish I could get all of my artist customers to read that one.

I think their original idea was actually a web app/site builder for existing art galleries not an online art gallery that they would run.
Maybe. Here is my opinion.

The poor need goods and services just like the rest of us. More to the point of the article, they also require credit and some faith in their productivity, to even attempt to rise out of their situation.

Theoretically, an efficient market will help provide credit to the poor people most able to use it in a productive manner. In reality, it seems like things get a little non-linear below the poverty line. By definition, those in poverty can't reach up to meet the price of goods (including credit) in the general market. Also by definition, a market exists only when buyer and seller reach a mutually beneficial agreement. So it seems that when those who are not poor are dealing with the poor, they are not acting as rational market participants because they may not reach a mutually beneficial equilibrium. Who would even try? I think this is why micro-finance needs to be a somewhat humanitarian effort.

Coincidentally. the economic crisis engulfing the U.S. right now is an example of why profiting from the poor doesn't work (well...without some productivity requirements). Not lending to the poor, per se, but lending to people who had no chance (and possibly no intention) of using the credit productively and paying it back. This has partly been due to incentives which are/were outside of the market between lender and borrower -- fees, and a secondary market which was hungry for securitized debt. The demand in the secondary market was met by trying to do the impossible (lending on bad bets) and selling it off as a package of good bets.

This last bit should actually make you upset on many levels. The U.S. patent office won't accept inventions which violate the laws of thermodynamics, and I'm still confused why the Federal Reserve does...sorry, on a tangent. Back to the salt mines for me!
The best overview is PG's essay:
"The Word 'Hacker'"

You can read it at:
http://www.paulgraham.com/gba.html

As far as finding one....you're in the right place. However, there is a theory that only an accomplished Hacker can truly recognize another Hacker. So unless YOUR a Hacker...how will you know?
If you can afford to learn Emacs, then do so. It is well worth the time and will increase your productivity.
How so? He said, "...we would like someone ... with experience in scaling web applications, and in building innovative services." What marketing manager has that XP?
Did they raise money? Angels/VCs would be my first choice for referrals since networking is so powerful.
BlimLimb, _why's Travelling IRC Bot Troupe
Vim. It's Vi-iMproved. Once you know a vi clone, you will be able to hack fast, and on any unix machine. Very valuable.

Recently, this was posted to HN (and I quote from it): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=151637

"Paul Graham still uses it for his lisp and arc hacking, Tim O'Reilly is a confessed vi-er, SlickEdit and Crisp have vi emulation..."
Holy crap - conde nast is really spending the cash for the tech market.
regarding side-1:
I started out as a windows user using pirated copies in india... this discouraged me from using linux for quite some time, as we used to have phone modems and bandwidth was pathetic... one day i got a mandrake linux cd with a magazine... it was great fun using it, but gnome sucked then, but now i prefer linux over windows. so for windows at least, side-1 did not have any benefits. in fact, windows helped me start using computers and i 'converted' to linux!

i had another question:
suppose a person cannot check out a book from a library (copy is out), so he downloads an ebook off the net and reads it, then deletes the copy as soon as he obtains the copy from the library.... so what effect did this 'piracy' have on the book producer? the book is quite old and i doubt whether the author (hint: amoeba) would be getting any big royalties on the book....
this sounds a lot like what I did. I own a license to textmate, but lately i have been using Emacs a lot more. I love it. Textmate still has a special place in my heart, but right now Emacs just supports more of what I need, and it works with all my platforms.
Software and physical goods are not the same thing, the loss of a "copy" of software doesn't make the original disappear too like stealing a physical item does. Also, personal and company goods are different as well, since one uses them for profit and the other does not.

In my company I assume most users will use the open source version, I assume a few will trickle into the commercial side. Of those, some might pirate, but I don't focus on those. I focus on making money and building a better product and providing value for paying customers. We've been around for over 7 years now, so it seems to be working too.

But yes, I do lock my door. Mainly because I work from home, so it's also my office. But many people up here in Canada actually don't bother locking their doors, and society doesn't seem to be too badly off because of it :)
As a CTO?

Most won't be interested, they rest won't be any good. :-)
Taking time off from something usually entails losing a bit of your "chops" to frame it as a musical metaphor. But losing your chops isn't the main issue with programming. The main skill needed is good, logical thinking.

Since so much of programming is "good thinking", taking time off can let your mind ponder the bigger picture and let you solve problems more elegantly.

How many of us have sat at our terminals trying to force a solution to a problem by brute force coding....and then finally walked away, only to solve the problem in our mind while taking a shower?
Snackr may be great for many people, but it wont work for me for two primary reasons.

1) I won't use an rss reader I have to download as an app, period. I use a number of computers so I try to keep everything I can online. I need a really compelling reason to download and run another web app or plugin.

2) Snackr would be a distraction to me. I waste enough time on news.yc :). So maybe I'm not an rss addict, but I currently use rss mostly as a tool rather than peruse for entertainment.
Of course it can handle your needs. It's no match, however, for the community around Textmate that provides all sorts of bundles and snippets that may come in handy (and most of which you will never ever use).

For example, if a new web application framework comes out tomorrow, you can be fairly sure someone will create a Textmate bundle for it the day after. Somehow I don't see that happen for BBEdit.
The continuation model is conceptually nifty but the fact that all my tabs time out before I can finish writing my response to a post really drives me nuts. There's got to be a better way to persist these things. If I can hold a tab / response open for 8 hours then that will suffice for me.
At the risk of stating the obvious . . . .

Don't build your app and then look for your first customer.

Find your customer first, find a need, and then build an app that fills that need.

Listen carefully to things people you know say, if you're paying attention, you will hear tons of needs waiting to be filled.
New Apple patent application renews speculation for location-based iPhone data networks
Twitter Live Crunch
Hire a lead developer. If they have the chops, promote them to CTO.

For a startup, there really isn't any other way unless you or your investors know somebody.
Most people have the basics covered. Here is one I haven't seen and is worth a huge amount -- not business, but it will definitely help you in life.

Will and Ariel Durant: The Lessons of History
A great synthesis by two lifelong historians on what can be learned from a study of history. Covers human nature, society, culture/morals and many other important topics and takes as objective a view as possible.

You can listen to it over and over and get some great insights. Dense, but easy to listen to. There is one small section that is slightly dated and shows that they were writers in their own time but most of it is timeless.

I highly recommend this. It will really give you insight into our world.
Make your own biodiesel
I use TextMate because it just goes. The defaults work great for me and it has builtin support for 90% of what I want to do. I was a big Aquamacs user, but when I stupidly lost my .emacs I just couldn't justify the time it would take to rebuild it.

I'll go back to Aquamacs someday, but for now I'm a TextMate guy.
About frickin time!
Actually, it didn't go unnoticed:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=190398

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=191459
Nasty move indeed!
I use TextMate but frequently threaten to switch back to vi, or learn emacs.

command-line emacs and vi come pre-installed on OS X boxes, and you can download excellent GUI versions free (MacVim and Aquamacs).

On the general topic what I would really like to do is have strong customized versions of each. only way to be sure.
What to do with old laptops?
Fermilab: Help Crack Encrypted Code
What about the Sonny Bono act? What if one finds the rules the governing bodies have made with regard to copyright and patent protection are immoral, unconstitutional, and an overall burden on society? Would you find a case for someone who says, "I'll respect the copyright laws but only as they were before the Sonny Bono act?"
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be sure to drink your ovaltine
I used TextMate for three months or so -- wanted to see what the fuss was about -- before gratefully switching back to emacs.

TextMate is the only editor I've used since learning emacs that I would even consider using full-time. (Except for vim, of course. :) It's a great product, and if you're happy with it you should keep using it. I'm not at all sad that I bought it -- there are tasks, mostly involving close integration with other Mac apps, that I still use it for.

But...

TextMate's snippets and completion were great for a while. Of course, I later discovered that the reason emacs didn't have these features is that I hadn't known that they were called "abbrevs" and "dynamic abbrevs". There's extensive documentation in emacs itself and on the emacswiki. So now my emacs has snippets, and various kinds of autocompletion.

In emacs, if you don't have exactly the right keyboard shortcut, you fix it. Here's one pet peeve of mine: Steve Yegge's essays have taught me to use isearch-forward and isearch-backward for navigation in long documents. In TextMate the backward search is bound to Control-Shift-S, a key combo that's torture to type compared to Control-R, that I can't remember to save my life, and that AFAIK cannot be changed (and it's not as if I didn't try). In emacs, where any key combo can be swapped for any other key combo in seconds, and any search command you hate has four built-in alternatives, twelve downloadable alternatives, and all the source code available to be edited on the fly, crap like this need not bother you for long.

I've got my emacs rigged so that, when I type source code, I don't need to press Shift to get symbols out of the top row of keys instead of digits. I type a lot more symbols than digits, so I use Shift when I need to type a digit. If I find myself typing a lot of digits, I press Ctrl-0 to toggle back to the normal behavior. You can't do this kind of stuff in a closed-source text editor.

And, mark my words, that's still the big problem with TextMate. I'm not generally a zealot about free software, but a text editor is the kind of tool you will be using for thirty years. It pays to invest in one that you will choose to abandon, and not the other way around. I'm inclined to use emacs instead of TextMate for the same reason that I'm inclined to play bridge instead of Magic: The Gathering: it has lasted for decades, it will last for decades more, I don't need to own special hardware or pay for any upgrades, and the whole thing belongs to me...

Plus, you get folks like Steve Yegge, working in his spare time to make your editor better. 10% of that guy's time is worth a fortune, and there's more where he came from! The problem with a closed-source editor is that there's only one or two people who can fix or improve the core code.
The "clown" mentioned in the article (dubbed "mic troll" by folks around these parts) was also at Startup Camp a couple of weeks ago, sharing his gas-baggery once again. And, apparently he is a regular at many valley events...pretty much any place with an open microphone and people who will feel compelled to listen out of politeness.
Wewt. So kids go from having Python on their machines to... ?
I never understand these text editor questions that come up every few days on every site about hacking.

There are two text editors: vim and emacs

Editing text is a solved problem. Pick one, and get back to work.
Sorry it was not clear in the article, but here's the basic decision:

1. Have a large percentage of a modestly-sized pie

2. Have a smaller piece of a very large pie

Of course, there's always the "large percentage of large pie" option, but that seems to be pretty rare.

I've done Option #1 already and wanted to take a shot at Option #2. It's really early in the process, but there's enough reason to be hopeful.

Apologies if the article came off as boastful. I didn't know how to say it any other way without compromising truthfulness and making my larger point -- i.e. the VC game is a tough game unless you've got some leverage, and most entrepreneurs are better off working on the business in the early stages.
Ask YC: How do you keep your place cool in hot weather? 
I live in an apartment, its getting really hot. I am not going to invest in an AC. I have bunch of fans and so far its setup for corss ventilation. Any other tricks you guys have to keep your self cool. Hot weather is very distracting and energy draining.
The Blizzard Challenge: judge the output of experimental text-to-speech systems
I use BBEdit, it's expensive but It's the only text editor I feel comfortable using.
Coda is smexy if you need to do alot of FTP related hacking.
How well does vim work on a Mac? I'm a regular (g)vim user on Linux, but am thinking of getting a Mac for my next computer. I'm a little wary of using standard *nix tools on platforms they're not native to, though, because I tried emacs + GHC on Windows in college and found that Windows did things differently enough that all the normal help resources online didn't really apply (emacs users tend to laugh at you when you say you're using Windows anyway ;-)).

Is the Mac/vim combination better in that respect? Things reasonably similar to how you'd use gvim on Linux?
Yes, definitely just use the built-in Emacs from the command line. Less flash & less Mac integration, but it works the same whether running on your system or running ssh'd into a Unix-based server. (But be sure to (10.5) use "Preferences > Settings > Keyboard > Use option as meta key".)

Also, note that you can customize the Cocoa text environment to be pretty much straight Emacs keystrokes (it's already there, but you have to configure it). See http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~jrus/Site/Cocoa%20Text%20System.... for a wonderful set of tips and hints.

It's heaven having Emacs editing commands in any web-based text widget (like this one), and everywhere else that's Cocoa-based text.
Good for the site owner. The last ten years has been a fantastic run. He's been putting up a great show and ars has a great forum. Hope CN don't make it a corp shill.
Seems like there's good community support behind VIM/Emacs and TextMate. Though mainly I get a sense that many try a few and settle into one. I think my strategy will be to try VIM or Emacs or both, and if I find the learning curve too high, switch over to TextMate. Thanks!
keyboard macros, tramp, gdba mode, ESS (emacs speaks statistics), and far more.
If you ever seriously question this, try picking up smoking and quitting.

HTML needs a <rhetorical> tag for statements like this. Your follow up posts make this clear, but just for the record: For the love of god, do not try picking up smoking and quitting! ;)

Ironically, though, I did have a friend that craved cigarettes only when he was really, really drunk. He would smoke at those times, but never wanted to smoke any other time. Lucky for him he's not an alcoholic, or he'd be in a race to see if the lung cancer or the liver disease would kill him first.
abbrev's aren't quite as "powerful" as textmate's snippets. luckily, there are many elisp packages that provide this functionality, yasnippet is what I'm using.
Brains. They're just not that well standardized. Sometimes it's really hard to get parts.
Investing in AC. :-)

It's well worth it in productivity costs alone. Even one of those portable units that you can park next to your window works wonders.
FYI i believe it's not too hard to change keyboard shortcuts (or add them) for anything in a menu on a native mac app using the xcode interface builder (maybe it got renamed recently, can't remember).
For legal advice get a lawyer, preferably one that has worked with startups before - don't cut corners. Some law firms will defer payment until you raise funding if they like your business.

StudentBusinesses.com (of which I'm a member) offers free 15-minute consultations with a law firm for its members. If you're a student or recent alum, email me and I'll invite you.
Aliens Abducted My Wife! Truth is Out Now!
Well, not exactly 100% free. VirtualBox itself is free -- but you need a copy of Windows to install on it (which is most certainly not free!)

I use VirtualBox, and highly recommend it.
Go to the public library.
I guess it's not, but lots of things that appear on Hacker "News" are nothing more than "bookmarks"
Can I assume that you (lyime) have at least one computer in your apartment and that you have it on most of the time? I hate pointing our the obvious, but excessive heat is not good for computers. If you are not comfortable there, you could risk baking your cpu.
Justin.tv is looking for a Lead Flash Engineer!
Justin.tv is the biggest live video site online. We serve hundreds of thousands of video streams a day, and have supported up to 50k live concurrent viewers. Our site is growing every week, and we just added a 10 gbps line to our colo. Our unique visitors are up 900% since January.

There are a lot of pieces that fit together to make Justin.tv work: our video cluster, IRC server, our web app, and our monitoring and search services, to name a few. A lot of our website is dependent on Flash, and we're looking for talented Flash Engineers who know AS2 and AS3 very well who want to be leaders in the development of our Flash.

Responsibilities

* Contribute to product design and implementation discussions
* Implement projects from the idea phase to production
* Test and iterate code before and after production release

Qualifications

* You should know AS2, AS3, and maybe a little be of Flex.
* Experience building web applications.
* A strong desire to work on website with passionate users and ideas for how to improve it.
* Experience hacking video streams, python, Twisted or rails all a plus.

While we're growing rapidly, Justin.tv is still a small, technology focused company, built by hackers for hackers. Seven of our ten person team are engineers or designers. We believe in rapid development, and push out new code releases every week. We're based in a beautiful office in the SOMA district of SF, one block from the caltrain station. If you want a fun job hacking on code that will touch a lot of people, JTV is for you.

Note: You must be physically present in SF to work for JTV. Completing the technical problem at http://www.justin.tv/problems/bml will go a long way with us. Cheers!
First thing I did when I read this was think about killing my forum subscription. Conde Nast will definitely ruin the Ars forums and I wouldn't be surprised if the recent forum problems were somehow related to this recent news (e.g., testing integration issues of some sort). I might have to return to AnandTech forums.
I agree 110%. Ars has produced some of the best writeups I've seen; I'll cry if they turn to shite when a bunch of jockeys ruin the site just to pump out articles about products they'll probably never use.
Considering that major countries (read: Brazil) were rejecting the XO for its lack of major software (read: Microsoft's stuff), this seems to be the logical next step for the multiple parties involved.
Window unit AC?
I have to second that recommendation. I've been studying Pimsleur's excellent Mandarin Chinese I, II and III in my daily commute and road trips for some time, and I highly recommend it. It requires reasonably active listening and sentence production, so it helps you avoid drowsiness on long trips.

Coincidentally, I'm leaving soon on a car trip to Morocco and was just preparing to sync the free Michigan Modern Standard Arabic and the Pimsleur Egyptian Arabic audio courses to my iPod.
But bookmarks of new pages at least, which are notable for their currency. This is just an emacs site. It's like posting a link to http://google.com and calling it "Search" or something...
Well my machine is properly cooled. I built my own machine, so picking the right cooling for my case/cpu/gpu was my number one priority :)

You are totally right though.
Ask YC: What do you want?
Pg advocates a simple model when deciding what product to offer as a startup: Make something people want.

Since I've decided to target the tech startup world for my first venture, this seemed like a good place to ask a few questions. What do you want? What do you need? What service would add enough value to your startup that you would be willing to pay for it?

I also have a follow up question. I am currently building a peer-to-peer microlending service targeted at startups. I'm doing this because I noticed that many startups get their initial capital from credit card loans. Would this be something that would help you?