skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No. However considering I met him on Twitter, and I was already online at the moment, it was convenient. Probably the most overt thing people are missing about Twitter. I know that he checks it regularly, which is less than I can say about his skills at answering a phone call.

It's not a matter of "sense". If I could recount the number of times that people told me Facebook was irrelevant because "email" existed and I could use it for the same reason I use Facebook (to stay in contact with people), we'd be here all day. The fact is, I've connected with lots of people in my industry and area with Twitter, and lots of them if not all have become valuable assets in what I do.

I wouldn't be so crass to quickly dismiss it as THE method of communicating. The marketplace wont let that happen, and social dynamics wont let that happen; and in my opinion I think that is another crucial thing people fail to realize when stacking Twitter up against traditional communication: the social dynamics of how useful it can be.

But again, there's no archetype for how you use this type of service, or any service. It just so happened I was online at the moment, I knew he was online (by virtue of the fact that he had posted a tweet not even 10 minutes earlier) so I alerted him to where I was.

It's really that simple.
The UI is the most noticeable thing. And if it's bad, then that doesn't give you much confidence in the rest of the implementation. And indeed, I hear Twitter has scalability issues.

As for what's wrong with the UI, here are some things:

* replying to people by including a @ with their name somewhere in your message is really silly

* no search feature that looks at the content of messages

* doesn't look right when you use a larger font

Basically, it looks like it was hacked together in a week and not much was done to improve it later.
Multi-Inflection-Point Alert
d Microsoft was started by a guy who wanted to put a computer in every home and on every desktop

There were no desktops when Microsoft started. There was the Altair, and they started by writing a basic for it. The market was not planetary as it is now.

Apple was started by a guy who wanted to make the best personal computers

Woz was making computers for himself and to show off at homebrew. From his own words, the Apple I was a PC board they sold to hobbyists for $40 apiece after manufacturing them for $20, per Jobs's egging. You're probably right about Yahoo, but MSFT and APPL did not start out as global reach companies. They started out as local restaurants.
Nice! I like it. I just hope it gains critical mass.
It is actually less risky to start a "startup" than it is to bootstrap your own business. If you are a parent, you're better off trying to grow your business with someone else's money than you are with your kids' college fund.
Well after playing with it restarting X seems to make it work fine but thats a bit annoying when you just wanna yank the external and move around. Without restarting X it just seems to think the monitor is still attached and things are not visible.

I also had the same panel problem where they will move to the single monitor but not move back when the other is reattached.

I hear the next version (intrepid ibex) will be focused on mobile computing so maybe some of these issues will be addressed.
I'd love to be able to know exactly what Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were thinking when they started their respective companies, but I'm pretty sure they had bigger designs than what you're suggesting.
GitHub RubyGems
If I understand this right, the article proposes IP addresses as a replacement for domain names in URLs. This would be a bad idea:

- They'd break if you wanted to load-balance with something like round-robin DNS.

- They'd be a disaster whenever you changed hosts.

- They make it impossible to tell (without clicking) where a link points to.

- They're broken with respect to IPv6 (and any future protocols). By specifying an IPv4 address, you're intermixing a transport-related detail with the semantics of the page.
Tell YC: The Diminishing Marginal Utility of Twitter
Lots of folks are questioning the marginal utility of Twitter at the very front of what it is.

Ostensibly, Twitter is a beacon for what you are doing, should you decide to use it. It's not for everyone, neither is the Internet, neither is an education in molecular physics. This is something I think a lot of people don't yet understand about the Internet, yet they make use of it every day. A new service is out and curiosity begs that they take it for a spin, but ignorance begs that they find a reason to share with us their complaints why it will fail.

The number one reason I'm beginning to notice is this "I can't see myself using it very much, so it must not have a place on the sacred data grids of the Internet".

Sure it's by no means every expressed this explicitly, but I feel confident that many people can see this sort of mentality floating around Twitter. If it's not for you, then honestly: it's not. Move on. I made the comment yesterday that there is no archetype for the utility of the Internet. There isn't a gold standard for what you are supposed to do, and how you make the best use of it for what you need. Take a moment and try to realize that about Twitter. Some companies use it to keep customers updated without boring them with walls of text. The 140 character limit lets them get out a quick update, you scan it, read it and mentally digest it and then move on.

Some folks use it to alert their friends "Hey, I picked up the milk, on my way". For them, that's a lot easier then calling just to utter a few short words. In this case, it alerts the appropriate parties that whatever task had to be done was in fact done in the simplest way possible. From that, they move on to the next.

Can you tell what the theme here is?

Move on people. Move on. Twitter is beautiful by virtue of it's incredible ease of use, and simplistic UI. It's not meant to be the grandest invention of all time, and it never will be. It just happens that some people have connected with business partners and friends with it (such as myself), other people just find it as a very handy system of keeping people up to date with a situation that people need to know about.

Imagine having to 2 way, or even 3 way call a number of people just to inform them that you wont be able to make it to the concert. Heck, even calling one person involves establishing a call tree and after a substantial period of time, everyone will eventually realize Dave isn't showing up.

Maybe I'm exaggerating the fact to say that if they were all using Twitter on their phones, they'd know immediately. But they'll move on. They know what they need to know and the problem is solved.

Don't make it anything it doesn't need to be. If Twitter doesn't work for you, there's really nothing you can do about that. Twitter isn't going away, the dedicated users aren't going to tip toe around semantics, and Michael Arrington isn't going to shut up about it (cut me some slack, we needed a bit of comic relief there), the rest of us will move on when something big happens. Everyone else will probably find out when it's too late.
1/11,429th of a burrito per visitor.I bet the TechCrunch makes a lot more than that.
You're probably right, as my psychic abilities and time travel skills have been failing of late...I can't imagine any rational business owner not wanting as much money and market share as possible. I know I do.
subtract weed and add ultimate frisbee (weird right?) and you've got me.
"* replying to people by including a @ with their name somewhere in your message is really silly"

I hate to play semantics here, but that's something users do. That's not at all a UI matter, as we're the ones who decide to include the @ symbol when replying to someone. However, it's also very handy to see it because I immediately realize the person is talking to me, and not just referencing me.
Typepad for business and Vox for personal
Using Chyrp http://chyrp.net/ . Nice open-source tumblelog software. :)
I use blogger with my own domain. Started the blog as part of a college class, use it more for personal stuff now
In the startups I've worked for, the best systems administrators were guys with 5-10 year old kids.

Experience actually counts for more in systems administration, so being older isn't a disadvantage. Surviving the infant-toddler years hones one's skills at managing interrupt-driven tasks and strange working hours.
Twitter looks for that symbol to decide what goes under "Replies".
Interesting idea, but way broken.

The problem with an IP address based solution is that it wouldn't scale well for web farms, load balancers/fail-over equipment, etc.

Also end-users/web businesses can't really "own" an IP like they do a domain name, only ISP's can technically be assigned IP's. IPs aren't portable like domain names, so you'd be stuck with 1 ISP once you built up your site.
Thank you. You may also want to mirror user data ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=173045 ).
I think Graham's analogy is more apt that he realizes. Here's where it takes us:

Yes, the majority of breakout chains/startups are started as chains/startups.

But, plenty of breakout businesses aren't built to scale out fast. Starbucks didn't break out for over a decade. Microsoft didn't get the DOS contract until '81.

Meanwhile, lots of small businesses are small deliberately. Thomas Keller isn't franchising Per Se. Grant Achatz isn't franchising Alinea.

So what does it tell us when a company runs a single restaurant for 10 years, or refuses to take VC funding or hire ahead of revenue?

Exactly nothing.
http://www.x.org/wiki/Releases/7.3

The latest RandR added support for that, which appears to have gone in about a month before Ubuntu 7.10. I haven't tried it, but it's a safe bet it's better now. Whether it's good enough for your setup, I can't say.
What about e-mail?
> throw away the big dreams

AFAIK all he meant was: don't throw away your easily achievable dreams.

That is not the opposite of pg's thoughts.
Filtering Google Searches By Freshness
Wrote my own with Rails.
Servee(.com)
Hey Rails, nice Rack!
Thanks, that's actually really reasonable. Might be better than hacking down zencart to do only what I want.
Celebrity chef restaurants are not really businesses - they are more like old-school arts patronages. They are started with funding by rich finance guys who are looking for a hobby project to make themselves feel cooler. The only people who go there are also uber rich finance guys, other people in the celebrity class, and the occasional not-as-rich foodie. As soon as the rich people and celebrities get bored with the restaurant, it shuts down.

Alinea was funded by 8 futures traders who each put in half a million dollars.
There is No Web 3.0, There is No Web 2.0 - There is Just the Web
Unfortunately, trolls are able to find invitations where there are none.
Would you be surprised to see Threadless described as a startup? What was American Apparel in 1997? A small business?
I'm most looking forward to Pulse Audio, I end up doing a lot of switching of sound cards that's really annoying with Alsa.
This is the most astounding news story I've read in a month. It is amazing that something like this could have happened as recently as 70,000 years ago. It does finally explain the African Eve, though.
> A startup as most people use the word means a comparatively small, comparatively young company that is designed to grow very big.

How many YC companies fit this definition? I thought the goal was to make the founders rich, which so far hasn't included growing into a big company.

Amer. Heritage: A business or an undertaking that has recently begun operation: grew from a tiny start-up to a multimillion-dollar corporation.

Note that's just example usage; startup doesn't denote a design to become a big company.
They only started doing that because users were

http://help.twitter.com/index.php?pg=kb.page&id=63
Your voice has changed, 1958 to 2008
Your voice as a young generation has changed ways, has it been silenced by technology? Intellectual thought required.
People do it here too. In fact, at startup school, Jessica told people just to search for something (I can't remember the specific topic, or find the video, since Omnisio clipped out the intros from their videos).

I don't think we should go to the extreme of losing domain names though, I get to maybe as many as half of the sites I visit in a day by typing the url. Plus, legible domain names are an important part of human readable URLs, which are pretty valuable things.
I wish I could remember where I read about it, but a common technique is to wash the ink off real bills to obtain the genuine blank paper.
Pardon me for quibbling: it's not about potential growth, but about having an extended period of time at the beginning without significant revenue. A shoe repair shop is not a startup because its debt is expected to stop deepening as soon as the doors are open, not because of its limited growth potential.

I got an accountant to do my taxes this year for the first time. He called my sole proprietorship a startup and did the accounting accordingly. Bootstrappers: keep records of all your expenses, even if it takes years for you to get everything going. Eventually it will all be deductible, amortized over 5 years from the time you start getting revenue.
Charlie Trotter, Frontera, French Laundry, Babbo. All successful businesses. That there are unsuccessful businesses in the same category does not make them "old-school arts patronages".
The experiments were done on college students, and yet they seem to be trying to draw conclusions about elementary school students. This seems like a pretty big flaw -- I suspect they learn in very different ways.
I don't get it - who compared the odds anywhere in this discussion? It seems to me that the goals are just completely different. DHH is not explicitly aiming to grow the company into a billion dollar mammoth. A startup and its investors are very explicitly aiming for that (or somewhere close). Both are viable but completely different ecosystems.
Well, yeah. That's why it says that in the article.
You are, I believe, almost completely wrong.

You've assumed that 37Signals refusal to staff up and take speculative VC rounds means they're steering the ship away from being "a billion dollar mammoth". But 37Signals is more successful than most of the companies (yes, most) that take VC rounds, and has enviable revenue growth.

I think you're seeing a business model that doesn't fit the YC get-rich-quick mold --- and that's what it is, read the essays --- and pushing it into a "small business" bucket. The real world doesn't bucket like you want it to.
AOL keywords were just this - and didn't work.
And AOL is still using them. You probably even will run into patent problems against them.
http://www.tekes.fi/eng/publications/innovative_service.pdf

i'm not sure if this is the paper, but this one explains what they mean by "customer experience design". the little table on page 12 mentions radical innovations like making something that your customers actually want, focusing on the "customer journey", talking about "brand attributes", and "storytelling." i think that all means "show your customer why they should want your product," and i'm not sure worrying about kerning is all that critical to it. can't hurt though.
I suppose the ss people don't measure based on wage? Interesting.
memphisto
Mephisto
Using Wordpress right now (voted for that one) but I'm looking strongly at Mephisto. Written in Rails and has a badass name? Sign me up!
The economics of celebrity chef restaurants are so different from anything else that they resemble arts patronages more than they resemble the economics of other businesses, including other restaurants.

You have to already be famous to start one, you have to have met a rich guy who thinks investing in you will make him cool, you only cater to a class of people who in previous centuries would be known as "the aristocracy." Etc.
Facebook v MySpace v LinkedIn v Bebo
Also: be more right. =)

From the site:

Opened in May 2005, Mr. Kokonas says Alinea grossed $3.5 million its first year, an average of $14,000 for every night it was open. There are eight investors: The smallest stake was $75,000, the largest Mr. Kokonas', at just less than $500,000. Return on investment is expected to exceed 20% per year, he says.

This doesn't sound like an old-school arts patronage to me.
Ask YC: Pitching your ideas here on YC news a good idea?
I hope to get some feedback on an idea that's keeping me awake at night but it's just an idea now, no code, no prototype nothing but just an url and name.

So my question is - would it be ok to pitch my idea here and get some feedback and just to know that I'm not alone. I'm sure you have heard that pitching your idea to family and friends but this idea of mine needs feedback from hackers
Facebook growth rapidly meets, and overtakes, MySpace? Bebo used to be more sought-after than Facebook, and still is in the UK!

MySpace still rules the US and Australia, while Facebook is dominant in Canada...and Turkey?

Or is Google Trends (ie, Google search terms) the wrong methodology for measuring the popularity of social networks?
Still wrong: Keller wasn't famous before French Laundry, Bayless is famous because of Frontera. Support claims with evidence.
but again the fear of someone copying my idea by posting on a public forum creeps in.. ;(
Suggest: hide the names of your developers. You'd hate for Arrington to find your site too slow or unreliable a few months from now.
Java Developers rejoice, Effective Java 2nd Edition by Joshua Bloch has gone to press
I should mention that I thought of this in 10 minutes, and don't feel too strongly about my proposed solution. I do feel strongly that the current system is broken and in need of institutional change.
a custom built django application powers photub.com.
DHH is saying that your dreams should have to do with the merits of your offering, not the strength of your cap table. You're caricaturing him.
I have a feeling that, if I ever applied to YCombinator, my application would end up in the wastebasket the moment they caught a whiff of the fact that I have a wife and kids. Is that fair?

No, it is not fair for you to air that feeling here. The YC partners get enough discouragement from having to reject a lot of smart people, so why add discouragement about someone speculating they would be rejected if they actually applied?

News.yc is a handout. Take it and be grateful. The information I've gotten here has been invaluable for my own work, and it's actually possible to keep up with it. (I try to follow TechCrunch for photo-specific news that doesn't rise up here, but there's too much noise. I have a day job and 3 kids, so I have to budget my time.)

If you don't want to be dismissed, implement something great. Nobody will ask about your family status.
Why go to all that effort when "The Gold Kit" will pay you for... gold spraypaint!

http://www.cockeyed.com/citizen/goldkit/gold_kit.shtml
Sure ;)

http://weblava.net/ycombinator-news-profile20080424.tar.gz
Holy geeze you even joined HN!

Just want to say that was a great talk (watched the video) last week. Also, I saw you in Vancouver (Fuck You!) a while back and was impressed with your speaking ability then as well.

Keep up the good work man.
Mirror: http://weblava.net/ycombinator-news-profile20080424.tar.gz
conclusion: get drunk and party with your friends on your birthday.
'Scuse me, is this the kegger?
You feel guilty about all of these?
While not directly related to this methodology, in my work (as a business coach) we observe that adults learn through experience, not just observation, which may support your point.
Fuck You?
Death? Come on freenode
Yeah. I'm sure you'll get great feedback here, but you do have to put your idea out there. Usually it's said that no one cares about ideas and it's all about execution but still, I certainly understand the values of stealth.
Wait, why is this news? This has been out for a very long time. Has anything changed about it?
Thank you.

For what it's worth, here are additional mirrors.

Posts: http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/315/programming/datasets/ycombina...

Profiles: http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/315/programming/datasets/ycombina...
Additional mirror: http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/315/programming/datasets/ycombina...
I'm going to go with find some hacker friends, and you solve the problem.

Ok, that was facetious. :) But still, I'm sure if you look you can find some hacker friends you trust, not only to not rip off your idea, but also to give you some pretty good feedback. Maybe some other entrepreneurs you know, a college professor, etc.
And the laws are kind of weird. If you say you discriminate, but don't, you've committed a crime. If you say you don't discriminate, but do, it's not a crime. (I think the reality is that everyone discriminates in favor of "people they like" anyway. It is somewhat scary that we have so many thought crimes now.)
YouTube University Fails
A real solution for domain names
I don't know, I think its simplicity is a positive thing. I'm sure there was a real temptation to add file sharing, etc. etc., but I like that it's been pared right back to the core functionality.
I think he was referring to one of dhh's slides at the meeting where he saw his presentation.
There are certain examples of hiring discrimination which are pretty clear cut. I am not sure if the cases have been tested in court, however.

See for example http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/pto-20030430-000001....

The paper is "Implicit Discrimination." Marianne Bertrand, Dolly Chugh and Sendhil Mullainathan; American Economic Review, 2005, 95(2), pp. 94-98.

if you have access. Unfortunately, I don't at this time.

The basic results are that a resume with a 'black' name versus a 'white' name (and no other difference) are far less likely to fetch callbacks. Further, there's no appreciable difference in callbacks for black candidates with increasing skills, whereas there's a drastic increase for white candidates.

There are many other studies, and then there's my own, personal experience, which I'm not about to get into.
Not sure if this is the same as the Mt Toba supervolcano eruption 74,000 years ago in Sumatra that started a 1000 year long ice age and probably reduced the human population to 10'000 individuals: http://www.bradshawfoundation.com/journey/
You might have a web browser that allows the user to assign pseudonyms to websites. A user could have the word "news" mapped to "news.ycombinator.com" for his browser. If such a browser collected pseudonyms from enough people, then the pseudonyms applied to each site could start to have importance and make it easy to give an intelligent guess on what the user might want. I guess the idea is to apply del.icio.us type information to the url bar.
You still need absolute domains as one form of brand-awareness.
Like, kernels?
OurDoings (my own). It started out as a photo-sharing site, but it grew into blogging. It now integrates with Disqus for comments and Technorati for trackbacks. It also integrates with FriendFeed (ff) using a push system that automatically includes thumbnails of photos related to your posts. In this way it's better than letting ff pull from your blog's feed, because media RSS is not yet supported by ff.
Ask YC: What do you use to develop applications for Macs?
What tools do you use to develop applications for Macs? When developing on Windows, I've used Microsoft's .NET platform and Visual Studio. Now that I have bought a Mac, I want to become familiar with Mac dev tools. What are Apple's counter parts to .NET and Visual Studio?
New letters in domain names in Argentina (and Spain)
From now on you can register domain names in Argentina with some non-ASCII charcacters line ñ (~n).

I coudn't find an english version of the new, so I put a link to a similar change in Spain.
blogger for personal and corporate