skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have a fairly young sister. Just a few years ago, she was absolutely obsessed with pokemon. The only way we could get her to do math was with pokemon flashcards. To her and her friends, pokemon was their life.

Note: she's since outgrown it and is now obsessed with anime and gaiaonline (i'd never heard of the thing until recently -- apparently VERY popular).
Don't forget the Hacker News group on Chatterous:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=134464

Or the #startups channel on Freenode IRC
A mixture of Ubuntu and Mac OS X.
Financing A Startup - Not always a good idea
CentOS, SuSE, Fedora, Windows Server 2003.

I've had the most enjoyment (surprisingly) with SuSE because of AppArmor's ability to cover holes in flaws for open-source PHP software we used early on. yast is also kind of handy for some of our non-Linux gurus.
debian, ubuntu, novell netware, mac os x, win 2k3
Suggestion: Post in the URL field next time.
That doesn't make sense to me: if people are climbing the walls for positions, the salaries shouldn't be astronomical.

Something else must be at play.
"How do you give your name?"

"Hopelessly."
Buying into the google IPO is one event that would signal a money-where-my-mouth-is kind of commitment to this 'type of thing'. There might be other activities (buying yahoo+google) that signal some strong sense of special.
I too can recall being moved by the successes since they survive - I don't have to note this down somewhere. It's harder to remember the companies that fail into obscurity that you had a good feeling about.
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=hating
He's not dismissing it or saying that it's not valuable.

And, for the record, AOL had a staggering percentage of eyeballs at their peak.

I think the distinction is that Google is a technological advancement/phenomenon which seems lasting. Facebook is a SOCIAL phenomenon which (to Matt) does not.

I'm inclined to agree with him. I think we'll be talking about Facebook in a few years the way we talk about AOL right now.
IBM’s Racetrack Memory Speeds Past Moore’s Law
"None of which are very applicable to the original question, which is about web software startups."

You must have read a different question than I did. The original post mentions "startups", not "web software startups". Many News.YC readers are building things that Sun would find interesting, so I think Sun's acquisition history is relevant to our interests here at News.YC.
62%? Considering the vast number of bands on MySpace, I'd say that's a huge number.

For most web apps, that's a good number of active users.

Why do you say "only"?
> generalizing is never good.

Remember, every rule has exceptions.
The Internet Isn't Shit, We're Shit WITHOUT The Internet
And before they were using Google they were using Altavista, I don't think Yahoo were using their own search results for very long. I remember switching to Google from Altavista. Mostly people changed to Google because it indexed more stuff (hence Google) not because of the better search results. The importance of better search ranking became apparent later, initially you just tended to try to come up with better search terms.
Here's the YouTube video (1min 27sec) showing how the "race-track" memory works. Unfortunately the rest of the video is filled with pointless images that are irrelevant to the topic.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJf3z9AfiVM
There was also Inktomi in there somewhere too. They were eventually acquired by Yahoo.

To be fair, Yahoo had a winning strategy of just licensing the search tech from other companies all the way up until Inktomi. Which is part of why it's funny they didn't buy the Google search when it was handed to them on a silver platter.
Chia pets were profitable. The pet rock, too. That doesn't mean they were important, except to the people who realized the profits.
I agree - assuming the calculations are correct, that's impressive on myspace's part.
Why Microsoft wants Yahoo -- it's losing at paintball
They need something to attract the talent and make them "climb the walls" for the position, especially investment banks where the work can be extremely tedious.
He's wrong because for most people, their friends and their social life are more important than the rest of the stuff on the internet. You can't google your friend's birthday. You can look it up on Facebook. You can't google for photos of what happened at the bar last saturday. You can look it up on facebook. Oh, you didn't get that cute girl's number last night? She's a friend's friend right? Sweet, she accepted the friend request. You can't do that on google, and previously, if you forgot to get her number on the spot, you were out of luck in real life, too. You can't google for "what should I do friday night" but you can use facebook to find out what people you know might be doing. If you are already anti social and simply sit at home in your boxer shorts, then yes, Facebook makes no sense. But if you actually have friends and do stuff with them, it is a very useful tool. I'm almost certain that 90% of anyone that went to college in the USA in the past 5 years has 2 sites they visit every day: facebook and google. There is no other way at the moment to use the internet to do the things I mentioned above.

On the other hand, the applications can be overwhelmingly irritating. The news feed is a blessing and a curse. I like to know when there are new photos of my friends to check out, but I don't care about what Zombie they just became. And regarding the app signup notifications in the feed: there are some things I'd rather not know about my friends, and one of them is how much time they are spending goofing off on Facebook...

Note to startup hackers: if you're on facebook and more than 50% of your news feed is your CEO's random facebook activity, it might be time to look for a new job (or start your own thing.)
for starters, the title. "not really that special" is the sort of passive-aggressive thing someone says that often leads to flamewars. the text of the article continues in that same vein.
Interesting, but I have the impression that The Street likes to hire "PSDs." As an anecdote, check out this posting:

http://www.schlaikjer.net/reviews/100.htm

"I would also remark that many of these now very wealthy people were not born with silver spoons in their mouths (I consider myself spooned right up). The Harvard donation-dunning people loved pointing out that Lloyd Blankfein started life on the wrong side of the tracks in a school with double shifts. So say what you like about the huge income-spreads in today's first-world; it is still a place where you can go from a modest income to an obscene one with the right amount of brains, luck and getting yourself a good education."
I agree with it, too. I don't see the big deal with myspace or facebook, in a big picture kind of way. Now that people are on it and have built out some social graphs, they're asking "now what?" and there is no good answer. What is the big itch that facebook scratches?
Does this say more about MySpace or the people forming bands?
Yep, their recognition software looks neat.

There are a ton of Notepad apps out there, but they are all clunky to use.

My goal is to make 3banana as easy to use as a Google search. I'm writing plugins so you can post notes from QuickSilver, shell, FireFox, or write your own using the Python API.

Here is my updated pitch:

3banana makes it easy to jot things down and makes your notes more useful, whether it is by helping you find something on the go or by allowing seamless collaboration with your friends.

Tap into your friends' ideas and expertise, and get instant feedback by sharing your notes on Facebook, Twitter, Email , AIM or wherever your social graph lives.

3banana, your notes are social.
I really enjoy coding, so I plan to stick with it. I am hoping that programming jobs will be similar to other jobs I've worked, in that where you work does make a difference as far as "corporate culture" goes. I've been researching internships, and I've found a couple of companies that might be a good fit. I'm sure I'll find somewhere to fit in doing what I want, but I also expect to have to look a bit harder for it than the average male CS major would. But hey, isn't that what internships are partly for?
Or perhaps it means it is getting closer to reality in peoples' minds if it is an April Fools Joke

I think that's true, but I don't see it as a shame to be a joke in any way. I mean, in Google case, the joke is more in the application form and other subtle things, like the last FAQ question (http://www.google.com/virgle/faq.html#11) and the error page (http://www.google.com/virgle/error.html), which says, amongst other things:

"... Virgle isn't real.

Yet."
FreeBSD (6.3) on one, OpenBSD on another.

Both choices were made mostly for the fact that I'm familiar with them, and they seem trustworthy (reliable, lacking gaping security holes out of the box, though I'd hope the latter is the case for most Linux distros as well). While I'd probably enjoy spending time improving my sysadmin-fu, it wouldn't have been a wise way to spend time for either of these projects.
Hehe, I also use text files. I can never find anything.

One of the cool things that 3banana does is that it labels your notes automatically based on basic patterns, so you can query it to give you all the Phone Numbers you jotted down in the last week.
Mean Salary at Goldman Sachs last year was $650K. Obviously, the distribution is non-gaussian, so the median salary is significantly lower.

Meaning, you start working at GS for $100K/year, because, in a few years (if you're good) you'll grow to the $1M+ category. On a risk-adjusted basis, ibanking is the most lucrative profession.
I don't think so. I'm not clear on the timeline exactly, but weren't they open to the public for some time before Yahoo licensed their technology?. I know I must have found out about Google in 99 or early 2000, because I was living by Akron U at the time. When did they partner with Yahoo?

Also if I remember correctly, when you searched on Yahoo for, say, poker, you saw whatever was in their directory first, and then any further results were from whoever their provider was (I want to say it was Inktomi before Google). Am I wrong about that?
Grayboxx Sells Assets, Shuts Down
As Paul Graham has pointed out, there is a salary premium associated with work that sucks the life out of you one day at a time.

Forget about working on open source stuff at night after work. You'll be too burned out and depressed.
Email was clearly a paradigm shift, but I wasn't there during its inception. It was well established by the time I got wise.
Thanks.

One of the problems with email is that it is "offline" in the sense that I can't link to an existing conversation from AIM or Facebook.

Launch will hopefully be next week. crosses fingers
There's badass large-scale neural network implementations like Visa's fraud checking, and then there's maintaining 100 KLOC of spaghetti shit.

Hint: the leet Visa mainframe programmers are not the ones who write the systems that are the reason even simple things at a bank take a business day.
What percent of users are inactive?
I think they have legs. I mean, I think people will still use social networking in 5 years. And they may do it primarily on Facebook. I'm not trying to say that it or Facebook are a fad, or that Facebook isn't very good at it.

I just don't think their value at the time will even be 1/10th of Google's because of the distinction you accurately summed up.
Google is the 'ahha' tool for introverts. Facebook is the 'ahha' tool for extroverts.
This is actually one of my big gripes with Python: loops don't scale.

If I've got something small, it looks great to say [f(x) for x in Y], and then I add "...if x.z > m", and then I add something else, and 10 minutes later I say "ugh, too much!", and have to rewrite it as a for-loop. If I want to add a "print" in there while I'm experimenting, I'm completely SOL (yes, I know about 3.0a). The final form of a loop might not look anything like its initial form, even though they're nearly identical, both to me and to the computer.

In Common Lisp, in contrast, I can start with (loop for x in Y collect (f x)), and then add clauses all day -- LOOP, for all of its flaws, scales great from a couple words of pseudo-English surrounded by a pair of parens, up to just about anything that can be expressed as a loop. (CL-ITERATE might be even better, but I haven't gotten around to learning it yet.)

Maybe if I had an Emacs function to convert between list comprehensions and for-loops this wouldn't bug me so much.
Cool. I'd be interested in seeing the results of the same test using 1 million random myspace id's rather than sequential id's from 100-101M.
Exactly. His argument is fallacious. I never would have guessed GOOG in particular would get to where it is today.
12 Tips for Getting Your Startup Featured on Mashable
Internet truths that are often wrong: Disintermediation, Death of Distance & Open beats Closed
HuddleChat Debacle, Lesson for Web 2.0 Startups
Is Walmart really more evil than Google?
The coming Digital Presidency
The difference between this and the athletic thing is that it gives athletes an unfair advantage in competitions, whereas science is not primarily competitive.
Crime: Which top three social network is "going around the country committing felonies"?
Per the LinkedIn group:

If you're currently waiting to be accepted that means your news.YC account name isn't visible anywhere. Please either add it to your profile, or mail me with it and I'll approve your request.
I think this is a bug.

My browser keeps caching the "get back to work" maxvisit screen, resulting in "expired link" when you click on "override".
The Economist is lousy. It's just current events. It won't give you the frameworks to understand what's going on, economically or politically. An Economist reader would not have known not to buy a house in the last three years, for example.
The insight re: tight integration of data structures into the syntax is pretty brilliant. I've struggled to articulate that several times, but never managed to get it right. It makes C laughable, highlights C++'s improvements were bolt-ons and Java's verbosity.

I do wish regex's were as tightly integrated, a la Perl.
Fedora 7 64-bit.
Why I didn't delete my Twitter account
> If your periodical of choice sits on a story, or misreports,

If you relied on esteemed mainstream media you're underwater on a house right now. You also probably bought Cisco in 1999.

Not me. I should be running a hedge fund my returns are so great. It's because I voraciously seek out good analysis, typically non-mainstream.
"They look sort of baffled when I explain that no, I want to write code, not manage coders."

Not to condescend, but that will change in ten years.

I base this not on your gender, but on the observation that there are very few old programmers. Everyone debates the reason for this (i.e. is it age discrimination, or is it programmer preference?) but the fact remains that most programmers end up doing other things as they age.
The serious question is if it can be replaced not if its currently popular.

there are already so many social networks, so facebook is not dominant where as Google has penetrated globally due to its quality.
The bands. I was in one for a long time, and until we finally settled on a name, we would make a brand new page three or four times a week.
I am not surprised by this finding at all. My old band, myspace.com/sometimesitrains has been inactive too.
Ahh, but would their use of drugs interfere with your freedom of choice more than a flat-out ban would?
Slackware and Slamd64 on ~190 servers, stripped down to 120 megs. Downloads root filesystem with netboot and runs it in-memory.
I'm not disputing that the salaries are high; I'm saying that the high salaries do not fit with the demand for the job.

There has to be another filter at work. Specifically, I suspect that luck plays a highly significant role.
If a programmer really types 12 hours a day, something is amiss...
Wone:  fun, elegance, and two buttons [flash game]
Investments are not as likely to be subject to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindsight_bias

Unlike human memory, investments keep track of false positives which is why I suggested that as one possibility. But, there might be other ways to avoid forgetting.
The Millionaire Mentality
While J. Paul Getty believed that luck, knowledge and hard work were all necessary (with an emphasis on hard work) to become a millionaire, he insisted the single most required trait, is the millionaire mentality. Do you possess the millionaire mind?
Startup Reactor
Six startups give their elevator pitch. Can they succeed? Which one do you think will take it to the top?
Top social networking sites:

Facebook
Myspace

Bebo
hi5
LinkedIn
Orkut

I'm pretty sure this guy is talking about either Facebook or Myspace. Either way, it seems like things are going to hit the fan at some level.
Is that a joke? Are there more levels of activeness besides Inactive and Active?
Brands and the Declining Power of the Firm
Web.py works on google app engine
Ruby’s not ready: comments, corrections, and clarifications - glyphobet • глыфобет • γλυφοβετ
Transfer of Learning
at 5-15 and even more so at the 1-5 range (where we've seen a decent amount of activity lately), user base isn't the defining factor in the acquisition. in the not-very-well-named "hiring bonus" style exits (who receives a hiring bonus of $1.5M anyway??) certain acquirers will be paying attention to the language you're written in. others might not.
Good point. I'm not sure if the highway used billboards for funding.
This Steve Rambam can dig out anything on anyone! I remember reading how on one of the security conferences, he asks for a volunteer to give him his name etc and then he in real time he goes and searches all kinds of "scary" databases.

Edit: video here: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1634316293369601334
Luck and Survival... Jungle smarts. Desire to become BSDs

Liar's Poker is an excellent first-person view of the NSFW work environment at Salomon Brothers.

But don't read LP - read Fiaz's top-rated (34-point) personal story of becoming a trader: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=121413

"After racking up some rather hefty losses, I was determined to quit at one point during month four, but because I had a habit of waking up at 4:30 am I simply "forgot" that the night before I told myself I would quit and spare myself further humiliation...by then I was warned that I was now on the red list of traders ready to be cut."
Windows Server 2003/2008, Ubuntu 7.10, CentOS 5, and FreeBSD 6.3/7

I'm hoping to move to Windows 2008 and FreeBSD 7 or Ubuntu 7.10 everywhere.
(ritalin isn't prescribed for OCD. My bad, should of said ADHD, but too late to edit)
Another vote for Debian. I've been using it for years, so I know how to secure it really well, it's solid, easy to use, all that jazz. I run OS X for my local development machine, but in production I use Debian everywhere.
Did you sign Google's noncompete? Good, you're fired
"there are very few old programmers"

"most programmers end up doing other things as they age"

You base these statements upon what data? Your own observations? Then maybe you need another set of glasses.

There are several million hackers that would disagree with you. Too bad you haven't had a chance to meet too many of them. Probably would have been interesting for both of you.
"the ones who go out of their way to be an ass"

Look on the bright side. You may not even have to work with them before they out themselves.

Some of us have to suffer for a while before we find out.
FreeBSD.

Makes most sense to me, but I have nothing against other oses. Just what I started with and what I keep coming back to.
I remember Yahoo coming in very late, after the G had started to seriously kick their ass; maybe 2001?. I went straight from infoseek to google around 2000. Yahoo was never the engine for me.
It wasn't really a joke, I was wondering if there was any difference in the average inactivity between users and bands.

And yes, there are more levels of inactiveness. I have a Myspace profile with 29 friends, I log in every couple of weeks, but I'm definitely not an active user.
"most people"

I would amend that to "some people". Just seems like "most people" to you.

Even if 50 million Americans are on Facebook, then what are the other 250 million doing?
The argument advanced elsewhere in the thread is that it is fine for scientists to take Ritalin because cancer may be cured faster. It's not a competition.

You still seem to be stuck on the legal versus illegal thing. I sell kratom on a website. Kratom is a drug-like herb that is a stimulant and an opiate. It could be used as a drug to enhance mental performance.

Is kratom acceptable because it is legal? Or is it unacceptable because it is fundamentally more powerful than caffeine?
How much traffic can I get through viral methods?
I'd say that for most people on facebook, it's easier to replace google than to replace facebook. You can always use Yahoo or MSN for search, they might not be as good, but they're good enough. You can use Yahoo maps or Live Earth. And you can use Yahoo email, which is getting really good recently. But it's hard to leave facebook unless all your friends leave with you at the same time to a new social network.
Why you think databases don't scale - In a few words: you’re doing it wrong!
What are some of your sources?
I also found my way back to FreeBSD when I wandered -- so often, in fact, that now I don't use anything else except OS X on my PowerBook.
>For example, could a physician decide to prescribe narcotics for anxiety? Or an athlete steroids to increase performance?

I think it comes down to the doctor's judgement, and them wanting to stay in the good graces of the DEA. The DEA has really come down on doctors that prescribe opiates lately, so I doubt very many doctors would prescribe unnecessary opiates for anxiety when a benzodiazepam or SSRI would be better served.

For steroids, they aren't really illegal, right? They're just scheduled and banned in athletic competition. I think most athletes that use steroids are probably prescribed them by a doctor.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Off-label_use (though it looks like it needs some work)
As always, the really interesting stuff is in the comments. Ideas around non-synergistic acquisitions, dividends and why they're not suitable for VC investments, "late-stage incubators," etc.
Monetizing 2010's social networks
Something I wrote on the topic a few years back:

"Human Interface Guidelines (Uhm, the other ones.)"

http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/1051

KDE has had kind of an odd history with female contributors. At the time that I wrote that article, women were leading up every non-development part of the project (translation, documentation, usability, promotion / events, financial / political organization, artwork), but still only made up maybe 1% of the devel team.

My theory at the time was that (a) most people that were majoring in CS in the late 90s got into computers because they played computer games as teens and (b) in the early 90s games were much more targeted towards stereotypically male themes, but I'd have expected things to level out a bit more by now since the primary draw of computers shifted to the internet, which had a more level gender pull.
I use Ubuntu Server since I already useUbuntu as my desktop so there's no learning curve (besides using the console instead of X).
Yes, there are some very real negative effects of hard stimulants. These studies are all for sustained use. What about someone who wants to take a ritalin or amphetamine every couple of weeks to have a super productive day?
Matt,

You're right. Inktomi powered their search results before Google.

Source: http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=2162831