skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I can echo what pkaler said.

I personally received a handful of unsolicited phone calls from local VCs (including Growthworks and Ventures West - the one with Paul Kedrosky) asking for a meeting. All based on a couple of posts in high-profile blogs.

It does drizzle in a winter, but (a) that's actually helpful if you need to work :) (b) Whistler is just an hour away. There's also Okanagan Valley 400 km to the east, which is our smaller version of Napa Valley.

What's completely out of whack here is a real estate market. 500 sqft condo in downtown may easily cost 700k and CAD:USD is now 1:1. The correction of the market has already started, sales are slumping, inventory is spiking, but it would probably take at least a year for prices to start really falling. I'm mentioning this because this causes certain problem with rentals availability and this problem may actually worsen. Especially in Downtown. Make sure to research this subject prior to making a decision.

Another note is regarding the labor laws. BC actually has a funny law saying that if an employee owns a company share or is on an stock purchase plan - they are considered co-owners of the company and therefore are not eligible for an overtime pay. Allegedly this law was passed specifically to stimulate high-tech industry.

Lastly, if you haven't visited Vancouver before, I would strongly recommend a surveying visit. This is not a megapolis, it's not fast paced nor is it expansive. This may require adapting to.
The Old Design Argument, Now Politicized
Interestingly, especially looking at the BDD movement, I don't think that unit tests are opposed to Literate Programming. In fact, so long as the unit tests are written in the right language and with the same attention to the reader, they are, in effect, simply an executable version of the "literate" part of Literate programming.

One of the best things about BDD/TDD is not the fact that you have tests, but the fact that it forces you to think about what you're going to build and how you'll be interacting with it, before you actually start writing the code. That would seem to be the advantage with LP as well.

So it seems it all boils down to "think before you code". Maybe all those development methodologies revolve around that idea, and the desperate attempt to force programmers under time pressure to actually spend the time to think before they write code :-)

Daniel
Wikipedia bots (ex. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:ClueBot) have been using this for a while (at least a year).
IRC: irc.freenode.net, channel #startups
He also talks a lot about x86 having disadvantages as a CISC that are just wrong. He says:

"If there are instructions that will never be used, why spend the silicon real estate to hard code them? CPUs optimized for OS X would be smaller, cheaper, and use less power than any Intel or AMD alternative simply because they could be simpler overall."

The problem with this statement is that PowerPC is a RISC architecture, and it clearly was insufficient. Despite having tons of unnecessary instructions and backwards compatibility issues, x86 has huge economies of scale which is why very few people buy SPARC or PowerPC anymore. The core of an x86 is a RISC processor anyways, and the complex instructions get translated into micro-instructions for execution. The only way the x86 is going to be upset is from embedded processors or from massively parallel, but it's definitely not going to be from a processor "optimized for OS X", whatever that means.
Gin, Television, and Social Surplus
Calculus is, hands down, the best textbook I have ever bought.
You could also try Israel - anywhere between Haifa and Tel Aviv. Living costs are much lower, it is easier to get work visas, and the entire tech sector is based around a startup mentality. It also has a vibrant VC community.
Semantics are the future of the web, and always will be.
What sample size of non-US trained programmers have you worked with?

I've worked with many from all parts of the world, including many SE Asian/Indian devs. And I can't think of one who I would qualify as 'not thinking for themselves'.

Of course, I wouldn't generalize this to all s/w devs from these countries, but I'd be willing to bet that the proportions are similar to devs from other countries.

Disclosure: I'm a 'non-US trained' programmer, having graduated from a Canadian university.
Thanks for the detailed response, I'll keep that in mind as the number of servers I manage increases.
Insanely cheap (nice meal out = 5 Euros), loads of alternative stuff: squats, parties, gigs etc. Very young, very friendly. Not sure about the start-up scene.
You know you can purchase the whole keyboard at once or purchase it by the key...as demonstrated by Art Lebedev in the video: http://www.engadget.com/2008/01/08/video-optimus-maximus-cau...
This changes my perspective on SQL. It is not enough for a programmer to know "enough SQL to get by". He must know every feature and syntactic quirk of his targeted engine to write secure code and paste up queries. Here we see an obscure vendor specific function that almost no one would ever seek out leading to a security failure.

Personally, I never paste up queries anymore. I always use parameter substitution. It leads to some awkward but idiomatic constructs when dynamically constructing a predicate, but I sleep better.
I agree. Waterloo is a great for startup, Toronto is a great city with lots of entrepreneurs, and Montreal is pretty great too excluding the language barrier.

On that note, I wouldn't mind meeting up with smart folks to talk shop - any suggestions? Are the Barcamps good?
Thanks - this helps.

I had read the FAQ but wasn't certain what to think after reading the plugin question. The library I have in mind definitely doesn't call back into the main app (as the faq answer says) and they share data structures only in the sense of the library taking parameters.. not sharing in the shared memory sense of both accessing an in-memory structure being maintained by the program. Quite a gray area.. but it does seem clear as to the intent now. Thanks for the sanity check!
Montreal has some great VCs, but for early stage funding I think Waterloo is actually the most forward looking.

I don't know enough about Vancouver's scene to know the differences that way.
"Soon he was on a plane to meet Trevor Blackwell in California."

To me, this fact alone (single data point, an outliar) ... is enough to predict Ben's future

"The next day a copy of SolidWorks and a SolidWorks for Dummies book arrived"

This one is also a strong clue, although not as strong as the former (and the fact he got a machine shop running - now he can prototype in both extremes, CAD and machining)

Independent, outliar data points can tell a lot more than large, 'normal' data points
Having visited Vancouver I can echo, as an outside, that the women are great :-)
WordPress 2.5: more than 500k downloads in less than 1 month
Baghdad, Iraq - although it may be "slightly" dangerous and has no dependable infrastructure, if you manage to get up and running successfully then you'll receive tens of millions of dollars worth of free publicity from freedom-loving news media and be the new darling of Silicon Valley upon your safe return. Risk/reward is probably about what VC's are used to anyway!
We make it easy for customers to provide feedback and ideas to companies, and to make it easy for companies to manage these ideas. http://whisperlabs.com
I agree that it's not very useful for normal typing, but I'd love to have had it when I played World of Warcraft!
If all of the code is yours you can add an exception specifically allowing linkage to that specific library. The GPL has a special provision for doing just that.
Most geeks don't look at their keyboards.
Some app developers have solved this by adding an exception to the GPL stating that linking to the library is allowed. You can only add the exception if you are the copyright holder.

Some apps have switched to LGPL to allow linking proprietary libraries.
"The women are gorgeous and fit."

Way to enforce the stereo type, bro
Cheers, I'll check it out
Bill 101 kicks in after 50 employees. Not really an issue for startups!
Wow! That is really cool. It is really great for comparing different SSL Certificates and it even uses Ajax.
Reminds me somewhat of http://me.dium.com/
This article is ridiculous. It just bitches about the drop down menu and other random stuff. I just took a look at the checkout process. Since I already buy stuff from Amazon from time to time, my info is all stored once I'm logged in. Once i'm in the purchase page I just have to click "Place Order". The purchasing page is separate from the normal amazon page, but I would never have noticed. I would say that its really not a big deal that once you click "Checkout" that it takes you to a separate page. I for one, don't click checkout unless I mean to with the items I have. And if I did have second thoughts its super easy to get rid of them or back out.

And honestly, if there UI design was that flawed, as the guy says, they wouldn't be a profitable company because they rely on purchase volume, which if not super easy, wouldn't happen.
Thanks, I totally forgotten about Amazon FPS. Looking through their API document, it's really very comprehension. Makes me wonder if someone can build a Mobile Micropayment service on top of it.
One way of looking at it is this: Does the plugin make sense without the context of the program which calls it?

This viewpoint has been used by some hardware companies with respect to their linux drivers -- they start by writing a FreeBSD driver, and then port that driver to linux. The FreeBSD driver (which contains all the details which they want to keep secret) is obviously not a "derived work" of linux, so this keeps them safe from any arguments about GPL taint.
Hey me,

I read your profile and found out that you are working on your startup and looking for someone. Drop if me a note if you want to talk -- admin -- at -- simplebucket.com
If you haven't learned anything in 2 years, you are being a lazy bastard and not applying yourself. First, you should have gone and talked to your advisor, and been like: "Look, i'm bored as shit in these intro courses, can I jump ahead?". He'd be like sure, take this class, its super hard from what I hear. Then you'd be set. There is so much shit to be learned at school. If you know so much already, try to do some research for a prof. Or setup your own research course so that you can research your own shit.

Also, bitching about general ed requirements is also a copout. You usually don't have to take psych 101 to fulfill requirements. Any 200+ level class will be much more challenging and interesting. You just have to have the balls to take higher level coursework.
this can be safely described as an instance of "pay less, pray more" syndrome, which seems to afflict a lot of folks from time to time.
I've just started mingling in the Berlin startup scene:

There's a lot of copying of the American tech market, retargeted towards a German market. That makes some investors here a bit conservative since "the proven model" is so unambitious. But there are VCs and Angels here in town and quite a few startups. Living is freakishly cheap for a European metropolis and in general it's a very attractive place to live.

Here's a map of startups registered on Deutsche Startups:

http://www.deutsche-startups.de/2007/11/29/berlin-ist-die-st...
IMHO, this was definitely one of the best key note of the entire Web2.0 conference.
iirc, feynman mentions the name of a calculus book that he used for learning calculus at a tender age. does anyone know which one it is ? thanks !
There is also another part of the the labour laws that 'high technology professionals' are exempt from a good chunk of the employment act (like overtime and stat-holiday pay) in BC.

http://www.coop.uvic.ca/assets/pdf/engrcoop/engr_prep_highte...
Engadget review: http://www.engadget.com/2008/02/22/optimus-maximus-at-long-l...

Take away: "Typing on it, well, sucks."
I prefer to think in 10-15 years we won't use keyboards (but I guess I wouldn't bet on it - they've been surprisingly hard to replace).
This is a nice piece about debugging in the light of scientific methods (and vice versa). One detail, though:

The idea goes back to Francis Bacon, who, using modern CS terminology three hundred years ahead of time, called it a "conditional inductive tree".

This is an anachronism. There's no way Bacon or anybody else used the phrase "conditional inductive tree" in 17th century English. Bacon may have anticipated the idea, but the phrase itself, and that way of formulating it, are modern constructs.

Edit: by "that way of formulating it" I mean the idea of a conditional tree with branches as alternatives. It would be interesting to know the origins of the logical tree metaphor and how it evolved as part of logic/CS.
What would we be using instead?
Tell YC: More traffic on Digg, TechCrunch, or ... Kim Kommando?
One of our sites, bug.gd, has made it to the front page of all sorts of popular sites (e.g. Digg, TechCrunch, LifeHacker, and PCWorld).

I just wanted to share with you guys some of our anecdotal numbers after looking at our traffic and the effects of that kind of coverage.

Summary: The net result is that TechCrunch and Mashable are good for getting wider blog coverage, not so much on sheer traffic numbers. Digg was awesome in terms of sheer traffic, but didn't do much "spreading" to other sites and sources. PCWorld didn't result in much traffic, but users were "stickier" and there were a few trickle blog coverages. Kim Kommando's newsletter netted a much larger influx of new users and a surprising amount of traffic (More than all non-Digg sources combined, but less than Digg.)

Some rough details:

* Front page of Digg resulted in ~35,000 new visitors first day, and 5k or more over the following few days.

* We had coverage on Mashable and Webware about the same time. This resulted in, by my best estimate, about 2k or 3k more that day. These two sites converted into dozens of personal and lesser-known blog references as the blogosphere spread the word.

* When we appeared on TechCrunch, we saw roughly ~4,000 new visitors that day. It evened out into a weak addition to our user base. The blog echo of TechCrunch was solid, with Lifehacker and other sites adding mentions in reaction to TC. I should mention that our coverage on TC resulted in a lot of the initial interest we've received from partnerships and VC analysts. None of the other coverage directly led to as much of that kind of inquiry.

* Our light PCWorld magazine coverage resulted in ~3,000 new visitors over a period of a couple days. It was very weak overall, but we weren't in a full article, and it feels like a nice amount of traffic for such a small mention. There were a lot of blog echoes of PCWorld (both from spam blogs and interested individuals).

* Kim Kommando's Cool Site of the Day newsletter resulted in a surprisingly influx of ~17,000 new visitors with a surprising amount of stickiness. I had never heard of Kim Kommando before (maybe I'm just oblivious). From what I can tell, Kim has a show on talk radio in some areas of the US and has very high circulation email newsletters.

I noticed today that rescuetime was just mentioned in Kim Kommando's newsletter. I'd be interested in hearing if you guys notice a surprisingly high influx of new users as well.

Share your anecdotes, too, please, if you have time.
Let me know how it works. I can't afford that.
yes i was using twist as i saw it on TechCrunch. I got to 200 out of 1220 tweets regarding my topic, where it said something like unable to show more then 200.

I assumed this is due to Twitter's API? If that is not the case can you code it to show all results on a topic from day one?

Though Im not sure what VCs or angels will think when I present my data being from Twitter. But to me its a cheap and solid way of gleaming demographics on topics; albeit the demographic is skewed for now.
I would strongly suggest Cambridge, UK. Lots of good VCs, great talent pool, and close to London.
http://earthclassmail.com

http://paperlessmail.com
Yes, just a typo due to too much Ontario in my post!
Oops, you're right. I misunderstood Platt to be quoting Bacon where he wasn't, and didn't check up on it when I skimmed The New Organon. I'll update to point out the mistake.
> I mostly did it because it was a fun exercise in javascript

Me too :) Although I'd recommend using jQuery if you have time to learn that as well. Makes DOM-related stuff easy so you only need to roll code for the things which are unique to your app.
This is kinda old news; what I would want to see is a framework incorporating persistent and updatable on the fly SVD recommendation / latent semantic indexing.
Go wherever you have access to the best talent pool. If you know lots of good people where you currently are, that's as good a place as any.
I'm hard enough on my keyboards that I would be really scared of using this.
>So I tell her all this stuff, and I think, "Okay, we're going to have a conversation about authority or social construction or whatever." That wasn't her question. She heard this story and she shook her head and said, "Where do people find the time?" That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, "No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you've been masking for 50 years."

Odd, I had a moment like this about a year ago or so…

I had just recently revamped an organizational website and made it more interactive, more user-participatory, and had made a remark to an office assistant on how great it was that new "editors" were jumping in and adding all this content, citing one in particular. Her response was the same as the TV person Shirky described - "it must be nice to have all that free time"…

Irony being that unlike me (that I rarely watch TV and basically live on the net, work time and a good bit of off time too…), most of these folks can rattle about endlessly all the TV programs they watch and how much they love their DVR…
Clever! And I do think that if we think of debugging as scientific experiments than that will improve our debugging. But if debugging is science, isn't all engineering science? It's not like the process of testing, identifying problems, and fixing them is unique to software engineering vs. other types.
Start An Internet Business Doing What You LOVE
Hi, Cory here. My report is finished and is ready for download for those of you wanting to start a business but are stumped on what kind of business to start. You can also rebrand this report and give it away to your list and/or website visitors.
The general perception seems to be that "SAP is expensive, difficult to implement and often doesn't work".

At least, that's what a SAP sales person said in a speech he gave at an event for SAP implementation partners.
I very reluctantly (reluctantly because pg is very kind to have any kind of seed funding program or startup school at all) have to agree with your post. A nicer way of putting it is, "we're not going to go against our #1 rule about not having startups because that would make us look bad, unless rejecting a single founder would make us look even worse." In other words, YCombinator doesn't want to prove themselves wrong except when the case is such that rejecting a clear super-star would make them look even more wrong. But that doesn't mean there aren't good reasons.

I think the idealistic idea that people should move to Silicon Valley, meet other smart people, live near smart VC's, and then start with some funding and multiple founders is excellent advice; however, it doesn't seem fair to reject those 20 year old single founders who already started as single founders, and who are fine having users instead of cofounders, because they feel they're months away from success, don't know anybody who is a worthy programmer and don't have time to look, and don't know any good VC's and don't have time to look. In fact, the whole reason single founders apply to YC is so they could move to Silicon Valley, meet other smart people, live near smart VC's, and more...

However, being a solo founder for a long time could mean the founder may not take YCombinator advice as well as multiple founders might (in which case, neither of whom may have much of a leg up or time invested in the project, and would be willing to do whatever pg says, making pg's job easier.) In general, I believe that having multiple founders makes lives better for the startup, for the users, and for investors.

I'm not sure what, if anything, can be done differently, except to take those hackers who've tried doing a startup for years without the benefit of the Valley, put them together in a room, and try to do new projects together. But if you're going to do that, you might as well take some people who apply as a group and have some experience working with each other already, versus a bunch of people used to doing things on their own and their own way.

And the bigger question would be, why would solo founders want to work on a different project, anyway? And if they were to do the same project they're already working on, where would they get a founder or employee, or would they be willing to?

I guess that's where Startup School comes in--to put a bunch of people interested in starting up together in one room, in Silicon Valley, with VC's presenting, to show them that there are definitely others out there who they could work together with, regardless of their luck finding such people back home, and that Silicon Valley is as nice to live in as it is famed for new technology.
How so... through a market research firm? Can you provide a link to such or to the resource you speak on?

Thanks
How to Monitor Websites that don’t have RSS Feeds
SQL Infection Hits Over 500K Webpages, Infiltrates DHS And UN
Good summary.

The biggest question I have for the semantic web people is: what will be the killer app that gives each individual site (and not just semantic web companies) the strong incentive to use a semantic web standard, even when that standard isn't widespread yet?
OK...so how does one find out what stage of the life cycle the fund is currently at? Is this public information?
Is it irrational or just people seeing beyond the boundaries of the experiment? Once the first trade is offered, it seems like human nature to think - "this isn't necessarily the end of the experiment - choosing the free one is the safe choice because it's possible I might get offered the same deal again, perhaps even multiple times, as long as I have chocolate kisses left."
My site was on mashable and I recieved about 2k visitors, roughly. But the amount of reblogging of the post brought me more visitors steadily over the following weeks after the post.

How did you get in her newsletter?

Thanks for sharing!
Winnipeg, Manitoba

Pros: We're in Canada for one, low cost of living (compared to anywhere in North America), great people, central time zone (only a couple hours off either coast), and a growing startup scene (www.manitobanewmedia.com)

Cons: Pretty cold in the winter (not that much worse than elsewhere in Canada though, I'm from Windsor, Ontario and at least it's a dry cold here!). Not many startup-minded people. The scene here is really small still, and it's tough to find coding talent here in general, and even harder to find ones who would work well in a startup.

Winnipeg is a great city for the arts as well, with some really cool stuff going on in music, film, etc. I find it a creatively inspiring city with a unique culture compared to the rest of Canada and the US. So I may not have the same volume of geek surrounding me ;), but Winnipeg provides creative influences of a different sort which I can see have definitely influenced some of my business ideas in a good way.

Go Canada! :)
I think people focus too much on the wheres and hows and who's too much when coming up with an idea and building it.

What it comes down to is -will you actually bring this idea into a reality-?

Get it made. Get it out. Then move if the need arises.