skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is satire. And I wouldn't call Campfire much, much more than in-browser IRC. In fact, 37Signals wouldn't even call it that. Campfire is simple, but well-designed software.

That's one reason I was confused that they saw the wireframe of a design that is HuddleChat and claimed that their look and feel was stolen . . .
Could you explain how it is more?
It updates every hour so it should show new stories pretty regularly, I made this for myself but I thought that other people on here would fine it useful too
IBM chip is fastest on Earth
I'm sure your intention wasn't to spend a hundred on the subject, but Somorjai has an introductory book which I think is worth noting.

http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Surface-Chemistry-Catalys...
Why does everyone always leave out one of the greatest ways to fund a company: customers?

Yes, I know, raising money helps you scale up to become huge ... but most startups never get to that stage. The easiest way not to run out of money is to make something that people want so much that they'll pay you for it.
Five surprising salaries
Two years ago I wrote http://formula1db.com , to teach myself sql. To get the data, I had to screen scrape formula1.com . Once I had the data, learning SQL became a joy. I haven't done much with the data since I built the site, but I am considering open sourcing it.

What I don't understand is, why don't sport leagues open source their data. What do they lose? Its a good think that people are so excited about your sport, that they build custom apps based on it. Sadly sport leagues don't seem to get it, I remember the MLB cracking down on a fan generated datatbase of baseball statistics a while ago.
The missing opensource software for web development: a scalable database
Northeastern VCs Still Bullish
Reminded me of my favorite planning quote: "I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable" which comes from Eisenhower.
Hourly is good. Any more frequent and it might be annoying ;)
Also a nice (although minor) feature would be to add a link back to news.yc when the expired link error occurs.
It's not that important but it would be nice not to have to delete the url parameters in order to get back (or find the bookmark again)
They do this with tokens at arcades. They rig it so that no matter what, you're going to end up with an extra token -- incentive to come back and spend it.
Who answers the phone?
nice work mr lomas.
It's so painfully obvious that this is a good idea, and yet people are skeptical of the Semantic Web, which has been promoting this idea for almost a decade (and doesn't require centralization). Why?
Engineers Develop Bendable Silicon
I made a very similar bot for del.icio.us popular too, if anyone's interested:

http://twitter.com/twittilicious
Courts chip away at Web sites' Decade Old Legal Shield
An open translation dictionary is a fantastic idea. You would have to be careful to clarify the context. A word in one language can often translate to several words in another language, for example. But I think it's do-able.

And I think you meant 100 thousand words per language. :-)
it was that addictive chemical that makes you crave it fortnightly
wow how cool, they listened
Yeah, sell something. It is not only a great way to fund operations, you also learn what people really need. How cool is that?
What you need to know about Intel's Nehalem CPU
Do these people still have time to hack?
Start-Up Kids Grow Up to Be Millionaires So Fast
heh. I like how the top story is this story.
I don't get it...

svn commit file1 file2 somemorestuff

Surely you just commit the files you want, and leave out the ones you're still working on :/

What am I missing?
I guess it wasn't so much more that it was not possible to copy it in a few days work.
I never stated it was an original idea but copying features plus innovating which was the course Google took with Gmail and their product releases was innovation. However, when you clone someones app feature-for-feature down to the nearly the exact design then that is a rip-off.

When Microsoft created .net both pro and anti-Microsoft supported complained rather largely to answer your question. This was during the aspx days that eventually was scrapped in order to support common languages across their platforms.

You seemed to have missed my point though, this isn't Google or Microsoft creating a competitive product and going to market with it. It's Google asking developers and startups to trust them with both your code and data but they'll do the right thing with it. I wouldn't have trusted Microsoft back in the 90's before they were depicted as the borg on Slashdot and I don't trust Google now based on their decision to copy an application from the same market they are trying to encourage to use Google App Engine. This isn't Microsoft vs. Google or Adobe but it was in bad taste and they obvious agreed since they took down the app.
You're missing that you may have made not one, but multiple substantive changes to file1, and you want to commit those changes separately.
Looks like the spot goes to Embought.com, please send me a 125x125 image with the url you want to link to the email below

advertise ..... at .... simplebucket.com
Wow! Companies like Reuters charge $5000+ per month per seat for data like this! Not to mention that their data is pretty crappy. Too bad they don't have any FX data.
You seem to be missing the point though that campfire is very far from original. To say google ripped them off is to imply the developed the basic chat interface themselves which is wrong.

Google developed a basic web chat, the likes of which have existed online for years before 37Signals was even a glint in DHHs eye. And almost all have shared a very similar look and feel because it makes sense.
PDB not working on the dev_webserver, no dbshell, well they are almost showstoppers for me. I might use this to learn, ant to keep up to date if situation changes, but not for everyday use.
Joins in Appengine work almost like Django orm, `object.foreignkey`. But of course session, auth, admin, the things which make django such a joy are missing.
Right on the money...

A few years ago I went to a talk with a serial entrepreneur with one of the most impressive CV's I've ever seen. This guy has started more than 40 successful companies, the first one when he was seven, and had one of his companies sold for more than a billion dollars.

His formula for success is respect for customers. He said that he has never started a company without first having at least one customer. He also insists on taking engineers to sales meetings because they are great at selling technical products: They understand what they are talking about and they think what they're doing is really neat. Customers notice that.
Open-source trading system provider Marketcetera raises $4M
On the contrary, iPhones are a great way to get around the network lockin they've sort of fell into.
Closely-watched case may spell trouble for software patents
Have you checked out socialpicks.com? Sounds kinda like what your doing. I know about it because I was working on a similar idea that never took off a few years ago. Gotta be aware of the competition :)
So when will Kanamit be up and running?
This is a dupe of the Newsweek article.
Understanding the Efficiency of Social Tagging Systems using Information Theory
Ask YC: What is the average growth, in terms of traffic, for a startup?
We all know success stories of startups that became big overnight. But how it goes in regular cases?
There's a Python wrapper to the C++ API floating around too

http://sctrading.blogspot.com/2008/03/opentick-python-api.ht...
Exactly my thought. Freebase is awesome, I just wish they didn't use JSON.
I've thought about this before... Wikipedia covers unstructured data, but we need something to be its analog for structured data. Others have pointed out freebase (which kicks ass IMO), but there's also swivel (http://www.swivel.com/). Swivel's correctness model, however, doesn't seem to be the same open idea that freebase is. It seems more to be focused on data "authorities" and "official" data providers as opposed to just an "accuracy of the masses" system that the more open sites rely on.
They think that they can't sell the data if they open source it. They probably also have control issues.

They think that a popular application using "their data" is necessarily lucrative and they think that they should get a huge hunk of that money.
"They called the company Boso ("Buy Online Sell Online"), unaware of the clownish connotations that word would have in the States."

It wouldn't be Levy if it didn't have a grating line like this. Of course nobody could have a successful Internet presence with a name that connoted stupidity or ignorance -- what kind of yahoo would think otherwise?
I really think that this is the big plus for Google's app engine. Most web sites are essentially front end GUI's for a database with a sprinkle of data crunching thrown on top. It's all about the database. And, one of the biggest pain points for a growing startup is scaling the database.

Enter App Engine. Google has spent years developing Big Table and their underlying distributed OS, and they are probably years ahead of anybody else on this one. Essentially what App Engine consists of is giving 10,000 developers read/write accounts to the worlds largest distributed database management system.

Now, it's up to the developers to add their HTML/CSS/Javascript GUI's and a little data crunching middle-ware all the world to use.
He really drives me nuts. I don't know the man, so maybe it's just an Internet persona thing, but his writing just really rubs me the wrong way.
Well... You know that all the major hard to do components of our little imaginary framework already exist: there already is a Lisp-based web server that could handle HTTP requests (we assume it would stand behind a cache such as Varnish) and there must be at least a good few RDBMS persistence mechanisms for Lisp by now. As for the template engine, I would tend to go for something like ZPT (Zope Page Templates) as mixing code in the presentation layer does not hit me as particularly fancy. AFAIK, there is no implementation in Lisp, so, it would have to be done. For the rest, the glue connecting the HTTP to the persisted objects, it would be rather easy to do patterning after Rails or Django.

So, I think if we decided to really do it, even without full dedication, we could have it ready for release in about a year.

And it would be cool to launch it on April 1st.
Then you have a mess whatever revision control system you use.
You have to manually decide which changes you want to commit in the file, and which you don't.

I still say it's better to avoid that mess in the first place.
we use svn at work, and i like it okay.

i suppose it has happened that i've got two sets of updates in progress that are tangled up somewhat, but i try to avoid such things, and usually succeed.
mIRC sues Campfire over design infringement...

Campfire heard telling mIRC the 90's called and wanted their software back.

More at 5!
Care to share how you hacked this together?
for your average "good idea" startup targeting an average niche market, one to two years with a two founder team until you're in the black (i.e. you're making more than business expenses + a reasonable living).

edit: even the popular websites take that long. for example, it really took digg.com 1-2 years to become substantially popular. reddit came in about a year after digg started and caught the same wave, so it took less time for them to become substantially popular.
The thing that bothers me is you only tend to hear about the successes, so it's hard to get a feel for the true success/failure ratio.
"Why does everyone always leave out one of the greatest ways to fund a company: customers?"

Not everyone. Of course, those who would mention customers are too busy pounding the pavement to be here right now.
If you haven't already, watch Linus' Google tech talk about git.
me also, I think he's off the rocker,

"Zed's dead baby, Zed's dead" -pulp fiction
What you mean "the black", in terms of traffic, page views, uniques etc.? The business expenses vary, as well as what you mean by "reasonable living" (depends on the state a lot).
the gate keepers, of this information are profiting off of it. As long as that continues they will resist change.
There was a rumor that Google would host scientific data

http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/01/google-to-provi.h...

I am not sure if this is true or what the status is.

Open Data Commons has an interesting license for open datasets

http://www.opendatacommons.org
Good point, although that's generally the slowest way to raise money. :-)
Interesting idea about govt grants. Never thought of that one.
yes, everything depends. being "in the black" depends on your business plan, operating costs, cost of living, etc..

the only real indicator of a "past this point, you're successful" is when you start making more money than you're spending on expenses and paying yourself and your other employees/founders as a reasonable salary.

and even then, it is not necessarily the case that after you pass that point, you'll be successful forever. things can change.
So what? Even if they did -- that's how the world works. Take ideas, ostensibly improve them, and put 'em out there. Witness the computer you're in front of right now. What part of it and its OS came from Xerox PARC? The idea did.
Getting Rich off Those Who Work for Free
JRuby 1.1 released with major performance improvements
Amid all the criticism I'm seeing of this guy in the comments - yes, as jgrahamc pointed out, this post expressed a thought that shouldn't have been made public - let's back up and discuss what he's really talking about. Imagine if he had expressed the question more tactfully, by not mentioning his team specifically: It does raise an interesting question, one I myself have often wondered about. How/why do some (most?) people go through life with no ambition? What makes them tick? How do they stand crap jobs and not want to have a better one, or want to be better at what they do?
But this is obvious and is not what I'm asking for.

What I'm asking for is your experience with traffic. When you launched the site, how many users you had initially, what is the average monthly growth and such stuff.
IMF slashes world growth forecast
Can Y Combinator Be Beaten At Its Own Game?
Here's hoping. Software patents are an unnecessary drain on the economy.
Ask YC: What do you scrape? How do you scrape?
Theory-wise, there's regular languages, context-free grammars, and combinatorial categorial grammars ( http://openccg.sf.net ). But regular + lists seems adequate for most tasks.

What sorts of scraping do you find yourself doing?

What are your biggest frustrations?

What's the coolest hack you've encountered while scraping?

My cofounder and I have been working on a domain-specific language to make scraping quick and easy, so that you can write, say, 100 different website scrapers in less time -- http://dartbanks.com/simplescrape . We'd love feedback on this approach.
Beware governments bearing gifts...

Edit: Context of that statement is that this makes me particularly nervous in light of how the NSA pushed an elliptical encryption algorithm through the review process and into common libraries, and it turned out there probably exists a set of "skeleton key" parameters that if someone has them they can decrypt any of the messages.
Teens and Social Media [PDF]
Massively scalable relational database using TABLE tags and jQuery
I think stating an average grown is a very difficult thing to do but probably slightly above 1%.

Thats taking into account the few sites that blow up huge quickly, the other sites that gradually grow and the vast vast majority that never grow.
"startups that became big overnight" most overnight successes I've seen have been a 3+ year timeline.

Your question is too vague without knowing things like the application target/purpose, number of users and pricing model, and what a page is made up of (in terms of bytes and server load (ie: database driven, are db queries heavy as reads, writes or both? Are any objects cachable?).

Also, how are you looking to measure the growth? CPU ticks consumed per page load over time? Server costs per month? Bandwidth? DB storage growth? User registrations? Unique page views?

Maybe it's just me, but the more I read your question, the more vague it seems :)
Not exactly open source:

"Can I redistribute the market data?
Unfortunately, at this time, opentick does not allow redistribution of the data due to various rules and regulations. However, when this possible, we would be happy to notify you." (from the FAQ)

but still, this is awesome... becoming a quant millionaire just got a whole lot easier ;)
Network solutions has to hear the out cry from their last mistake and now this one!?

- where is their leadership? or Public relations?
Millennium prize nominees announced
Thanks for a much better breakdown. My only point was that "survival" and "mortality" rates are often bandied about as a simple way of rolling up historical progress in diagnosis and treatment, and that if I was diagnosed with some nasty form of cancer, I'd be more interested in the latter stat (for my particular age group).
Why not write something generic that lets you follow any RSS you want on twitter in an hourly interval...
Then you have a mess whatever revision control system you use.

True, but some make it much easier than others. Git is one of the easy ones.

I still say it's better to avoid that mess in the first place.

The article addressed this, and concluded as follows:

Here’s a general principle I would like my VCS to acknowledge: moving from the present point B to some desired point C should not require a change in behavior at point A in the past. More simply, the phrase: “you should have,” ought to set off alarm bells.
Thanks for the info. Very interesting stuff to know, especially your point about Bangalore being an expensive city.
I think the key difference is integrated payment.
Due Diligence Considerations
Ynews - feature request - last read link color
I read articles before commenting and sometimes I have trouble finding the last read article (as 5-10 have already been read, grayed out) can the last read article be purple, as 'last visited' and the then go to gray to symbolize 'read' .. thus its easier to comment on what you just read
Economy Has Become a Drag on Silicon Valley
Ask YC (poll): Trackball, trackpad or mouse?
When working in a desktop do you use/prefer a trackball, a trackpad or a mouse?<p>I've always worked with mouses, and never really tried out a trackball, but they seem like a viable alternative to reduce arm movement.
Here's three anti-SemWeb articles that try to answer your question:

http://www.well.com/~doctorow/metacrap.htm

http://www.shirky.com/writings/semantic_syllogism.html

http://blahsploitation.blogspot.com/2005/09/i-always-figured...
Fake Steve Jobs jokingly misquotes PG's recent essay
This is why multitaskers fail:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/timothymorgan/62139938/
It was their own site that was being spoofed. Reporting it to themselves won't help much. :P
Keep Flickr Pure - Anti Video Protests Erupt on Flickr
Now that Loopt is network agnostic, I'm sure they're developing an iPhone app, even if this isn't it.
It's Solaris. ;)

I likes me a nice GNU environment, or at least a sane BSD.
This is awesome! Google has been promising this for over a year and have delivered nothing. Great that someone else managed to release the data!
Levy is right, though -- "as in, bozo?" is the response of most Americans when they hear the name spoken.
This improves the (easy) technical hurdles, but how about (very difficult) social, economic, and bureaucratic ones?

One of the biggest competitive advantages companies have is data. Like the article and previous comment already said, adoption is the hardest barrier. Unless someone can provide a compelling reason for companies/scientists/etc to give data or data access, there really isn't much else to discuss.

I think sites like mashery and dapper.net are going in the right direction, by providing good licensing rights and monetization controls that can incent large companies with reliable datasets to participate.
IMHO Google lost a lot of credibility by taking it down. For me, it's like Janet Jackson apologizing on national TV for showing some boob.

In any event Google has proved the point - it is ridiculously simple to clone webapps like campfire.
Why is "metacrap" a problem for the semantic web, but not for data-Wikipedia?

The Shirky article is a well-known strawman.

Thanks for the pointer to the last one, I'll read it when I get a chance.
There's nothing I should have to "fix". If I own a domain, then own all the subdomains. It's not some open public space for someone to grab for advertising.
Yes! I thought about this while reading Founders at Work. Beyond just the success/failure ratio, there's all the other details we don't get about failed startups. Can you identify what went wrong by reading their story? Can you learn from their mistakes, or at least temper what you think you've learned from the successes with examples of how it doesn't always work out?

I'd love to read another book like Founders at Work, but all about failed startups.
i dont think arrington understands mobile at all ... mobilecrunch has always been awful, this piece puts waaay too much weight on the iphone - its a tiny proportion of the mobile installed base.
Ask YC: How do I promote a web app to bloggers?
I created a simple web app (Mytipnetwork.com) that lets a blogger create a page where their readers can tip them off to interesting stories, images or clips that they find on the web.

example page
http://www.mytipnetwork.com/n.php?site=adtoferlnn

It works pretty simply you add a tipbox image to your page that tells you and your readers how many tips you've recieved today from them. And you can respond back by saying what you got tipped by(meaning heard for the first time and/or found interesting)

As a tool, what I thought it might achieve is help bloggers get inspired to their next blog post by their readers.

Problem is I don't have a blog, I don't have friends who are bloggers, and my only available currency towards promotion is time and energy.
Gary the Great: Vaynerchuk sets the example of how to succeed in business today
Only 0.001% of startups (and I'm being generous) need the sort of power being discussed here. The reason "a scalable database" doesn't exist is because there isn't a big enough market for one.

I have no doubt we'll hear more about this in coming months, not because of any specific need, but because it's the latest fad.
I've really been having a tough time lately figuring out whether people think hacks like this are a good idea.
I checked the site... Do they only provide an API or can we actually download the data? It looks like they charge money for NASDAQ and NYSE. It does seem like a stretch to call it open if they charge money and only provide an API.
This has been around for at least a few years. It's cool, but I'll warn you that some of the data isn't super-clean. IIRC, there were a few daily data holes, and even more so in the intraday data

However, for the price, it's pretty awesome to play around with.
How is this better than having a public email address? How will you prevent spam?
He is not genuinely complaining about their ripping-off of anything; he's pointing out the ignorance and/or hypocrisy of these items:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=158029

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=158488
The structure of .pyc files
CS Unplugged - teaching CS witout a computer
U.S. Business Travellers Grouse; American Airlines Cancels Over 850 Flights