skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You need an SEO with the best SEO pixie dust.

See this YouTube video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7aGTKcg0QHs
Steve Wozniak Speaking LIVE at UC Berkeley!
Twitter Japan launches, with ads - CNET
All Captchas should have animals in them
Too much fun. Almost as much fun as creating your own with Bitstrips.
Just like their are varying degrees of skilled programmers, their are SEOs across the spectrum of skills and experience.

It's not hard to learn the fundamentals of SEO yourself. Incorporating the best practices from the start is what is challenging for most, and dedicating the time to doing it right.

Head over to SEOmoz read the Beginners Guide to SEO and once you got that down, they have many more articles to guide you.
> I grew up in the suburbs and never met anyone who met that stereotype.

I've definitely met those people in Texas.
I don't really use Facebook so I may not really appreciate the problem, but I don't think you can call messages from people you actually know and sent specifically to you "spam", for any reasonable definition of spam.
> "you are going to be 45 minutes to an hour away from anyone you want to visit" -- that's called life in any big city.

Hmm? Not my experience in three east coast cities.
Not to mention that California is probably the most fiscally screwed up and one of the most tax heavy states in the country.
Some colleges encourage something similar. The Acton MBA program encourages alumni to sponsor new students so that their education is free (and based entirely on their ability to be accepted into the program). Once these students graduate, they are encouraged to turn around and to the same thing for the students behind them (out of a percentage of their earnings over the following years, until it is repaid).

It's not exactly the same model, but it does represent a take money now and payback out of future earnings template.The thing is A: repayment is encouraged, but not required, and B: the amount taken out of your future earnings is fixed and will end once paid.
Don't forget, you can always take a word and add an r to the end. Flickr, coordinatr, tshirtmonstr, Ycombinatr...

Actually, don't. It's a fad and it should be over soon.

For me, the biggest issue was making sure I had a .com to go with it. Go to instantdomainsearch.com and just start typing as things come to your mind.

There are other sites that automatically mash words together and check their availability, so search for these generators. There are a few generators already posted here, so be sure to check them out.
Even worse: A partial derivative captcha

http://brad.livejournal.com/2331278.html
For those who don't want to read the book, it was something about Russia.
To YC or not to YC, that is the question.
Hello guys,
Well, i have been working on my startup since last august, taking everything into consideration it has been going as planned. except the plan it self

We started with 30K dollars and it has ballooned to 150K.. all that aside here is the million dollar question.

The site will launch soon, money is sadly an issue but so far hasn't been a really big one yet, some people took a dive with me unexpectedly and i owe them lots of money, they truly believe in the idea so they feel they will get paid back *mind you, they are NOT VCs.
I have always liked YC and the little money they fund companies with obviously wasn't what made me like them, every YC company I have seen gets tons of attention from the media and god knows how much that is worth.
So, should I approach them, do they have different approaches to funding, because I frankly don't want their 2K that they give you, i just want their experience in this whole startup scene.
I wounder if they would meet you to analyze the situation and maybe go from there?
thanks
> makes family life much easier.

In the suburbs 15 year olds are still tethered to their parents for transportation. It's ridiculous. Realistically kids are tethered even longer than that as a third or fourth car is not an option for many families. How does it make life easier to be stuck chauffeuring teenagers around for years? Move somewhere they can walk and take public transit from around age 10.
You can rent an appartment for U$S 300/month in a very accesible and centric place. You don't need a car here. There is plenty of work on IT, but we are talking about startupping here, so yo have everything.
This country does not request visa for work or tourist, so you will not have any problem. Mail me pablocorral at gmail.
http://www.brijit.com/
Controversial?

Most people here trying to create startups are wasting their time. They want to have a startup so as to become financially free, but it is much quicker and more dependable to save up money, stick it in an investment account and then live overseas.
But it isn't on HN, and I bet lots of people don't know about it. So, posting there effectively silences controversy.
Twitter in Japanese is on twitter.com with ads
http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/www.bvp.com
Not sure if you know, but they have 2 funding cycles every year. One during the summer, and the other during the winter, I believe. The application window for the last cycle closed a few weeks ago. If you wanted to approach them on terms outside of the usual funding cycle, I guess your best bet would be to email Paul directly.

My advice, as much as the experiences YC offers are valuable, if you've been working on a product and plan on launching it soon, I'd launch it. Sure, things might be more difficult, but generating buzz, etc., can all be done by you sans YC. It seems like some here tend to give too much attention to YC and its offerings, not realizing that most successful startups were never given a launch pad the likes of YC.
Interesting technology.

Side note those two are the definition of geeks. But if that tech works out they will be some wealthy geeks.
Karma should be a function of whether highly rated posts (either submissions or comments) also have highly rated responses. This would encourage good dialogue and minimize the influence of anonymous knee jerk voting.
Thanks, I been thinking the same thing, maybe launch and revisit the possibility later.
One more note. I don't think people are consciously judging me, it's just their natural reaction. I realize most people are much less aware than I am.

But, it isn't my natural reaction, which is why I have to learn how their system of interaction works, which seems like too much trouble.
I wonder how Sony will put the screws to Apple/iTunes after this deal goes through.
Very cool. The "life mode" is the incredible part. Here's a thought about where this could go: Imagine if multiple Android users could have their locations published live to the other devices. You could look through the life view screen and track the location of your contacts through walls or other obstructions.

(Edit: I saw the end of the video and it looks like they're already one step ahead of me with the live location broadcasting).

Parents who want to keep track of their children at Disneyland could spot them through a crowd of people without calling them and getting them to describe where they are. Maybe this could be useful in search and rescue missions. The ELT (Emergency Location Transmitter) on downed aircraft could be equipped to broadcast in this way, to make it easier for teams trying to find the aircraft.

Something about this reminds me of FPS video games, where the "Objective" is marked on your screen so that you can see where you need to go even though it happens to be on the other side of the map.
google explicitly prohibits doing that with adsense; other ad networks may be similar.
But it is for this very reason we geeks always gripe about higher management, at least the ethically loose people who blended in with the crowd to work their way up the ladder.
By the time you slapped him down I had completely tuned the guy out. It wasn't until after the applause that I realized he had even gotten up.
Could this make real life FPS? I haven't read the article, but I've been trying to think of a feasible way to make a real life multiplayer FPS that also virtual players could interact with. I think that'd be pretty sweet!
You could argue both ways about 37signals, since if you consider Rails as one of their products, they are becoming pretty big through that. Considering the arguments made in Be Good, one can take the point of view of a startup being a startup not because it's chasing huge amounts of money or huge corporate growth, but because it's trying to make a difference in the world. 37signals certainly does that, firstly through Rails and also by providing an interesting reference point for how to design software and run a software company.
> In the words of 37signals -- and Dr. Phil -- get real. Winter is hell in Chicago, summer is a pressure cooker, and fall and spring are tolerable for a few days.

You are entitled to your opinion, but I disagree. It's just the weather; if that's the defining feature of your life, try to do something more interesting :)
Follow brainstorming techniques. Write everything down, no matter how bad. Write down fragments that characterize your idea. Explore metaphors: If your site is about finance, maybe think about up/down movement, growth, even gambling and excitement. Visualize these themes and keep writing things down.

I found that you don't want your name to be too descriptive (e.g. I find the name "FriendFeed" way too descriptive and boring), but on the other hand it shouldn't be yet another five-letter, random-string, 2.0 name.

Twitter is nice because it plays very loosely with disseminating information to whoever's listening out there. It's better than smsfeedr.

Google is nice because they've identified a large number as something that loosely characterizes what they do.
Yes, good phrasing. I think I feel some of that less now, i.e. social shame and getting closed out. But this was very true especially when I was in high school.

Spilling my guts is something that's helpful for me too.
Gracenote should show some class and donate some funds to startup an open-source music community. Gracenote a.k.a. CDDB was one of the original crowd-sourced web applications. Thousands of volunteers contributed their time to build the CD track database.
mmm.. annotated reality

Well I'm sold, time to get a tricorder.
I can't believe you put Portland and Austin in the same sentence. Nothing wrong with Portland, but Austin is simply in another league: I don't believe there is another place in US with such combination of technology, nightlife and dating scenes. I do feel sorry for all guys in their 20s living in Bay Area.
"This is epochal stuff -- banks and pharma are notorious late adopters of early-stage technology, so to see them in the vanguard of cloud computing is astonishing."

It's not about network effects though, it's corporate purchasing policies. For under 50TB kept at Amazon S3, it's only marginally more expensive to transfer the data out than it is to keep it in (http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html?node=16427261). For over 50TB it's cheaper to transfer out. Amazon S3 is popular, not because there's network effects that are keeping the data locked into the Amazon cloud, but because of corporate purchasing policies.

When big, slow, late-adopter corporations (like banks and pharma) eventually do adopt new technologies, it usually means a multi-million dollar contract that needs to be negotiated and signed by the company's top officers. Of course this is going to take forever. No CTO/CIO wants to be blamed for a multi-million dollar investment gone sour.

In contrast, with AWS a single engineer can fire up 100 computing instances and in just one hour run a huge data processing task that would take many hours on her division's handful of Very Expensive Servers. Total cost? $10. With that kind of cost, the engineer doesn't even need approval from her direct manager, much less from the division VP.

And if AWS produces results, it's very easy to get approval for progressively larger and larger projects. By the time the CTO/CIO is asked to approve a many-millions contract with Amazon, the company is already using AWS left and right, and the benefits are clear to everyone.
Selling one particular startup != "giving up my chance to build up a google size company". Not to mention that your chance of making a "google size company" is almost indistinguishable with zero (no matter how good your idea or team is).
PrepChamps Raises $1.2M to Recruit High School Jocks
Are you uneasy even around your closest contacts, though? (friends, family, etc.) If so, then yes, there's probably something worth working at.

In my case, I get on ferociously well with a handful of people, but almost no-one else (at least, not for longer than an hour or two). That's good enough for me, but if ALL social interaction is a problem for you, then best of luck with your journey! :)
I'd have a hard time selling my life equity without thinking: "k, I'm officially someone's bitch."
It's really just the video from what I saw. The demonstration looked a little choppy but as it progressed and smoothed out I could definitely see a game being created out of this (at least it's feasible).

I doubt you would want to do this on your phone, but similar technology on a smaller scale used in a laser tag or paint ball game would be really interesting. You could set objectives and see where your team is at, and then mark locations for other team members (meet me at waypoint X).

I'm sure the military is already way ahead of us on this, but the live camera view is new to me.
Virality is only a third of the equation. The other two parts are the saturation size (usually a function of the market you're in) and the rate at which your userbase decays (do users visit once, invite ten friends, and then never come back, or do they come back every day?).

Without factoring at least these two things into your model the "viral coefficient" is mostly useless.
OK, I cobbled it together this afternoon so HN gets an early (and ugly, designless) preview.

http://www.mpghead.com/

Basically allows you to determine how much you'll spend different from one vehicle to another just for gas.

If you get 14mpg and you pay $3.50 a gallon, you're spending $0.25 a mile! It's almost cheaper to take a taxi!
I think with that much the lawyers can afford straight up coke.
* I lived in Noe Valley for a couple years and never once even heard of a block party. "The SOMA block party"? Does that go by another name I'd know it by better, like, say, the Folsom Street Fair? That's hardly a "neighborhood" event, but then, SOMA isn't a neighborhood, and hasn't been since it was debrided by "live-work art spaces" (a.k.a. luxury condos).

* JWZ is certainly not a good trendspotter, but you're providing a parody of his experience. He's not complaining that nobody cares about VNV Nation; he's complaining that he can't get permits to host 18+ shows (why do you care? Because lots of touring acts won't book 21+ shows), and chronicling the demise of one music venue after another.

* You are getting a fantastic deal on office space; you're paying approximately what we're paying for finished office space in the Loop (we have a smaller space; our company is split evenly between Chicago and Manhattan).
I counted 5 words.
Darcs 2 Released
You're seeing possibilities for making a game more like reality; I also see possibilities for making reality more like a game. Think of the military implications of this. If you couple this with the other terminator-HUD-vision technology thing, you could have live team objective checkpoints and stuff... See what I mean? Also, it would be good for training because virtual enemies could be projected directly in the eyes of the soldiers. I think that kind of stuff is just around the corner (15 years?)
Here's some nice performance news for it: http://lists.osuosl.org/pipermail/darcs-devel/2008-April/007...
Or the definition of the stereotype of a geek... I like to think not every geek is like them... and me ;P
Their ad screen says "Your request is loading"... and they're a technology site! I think they have some nerve to tell such an obvious lie to an audience that knows better...

edit: Oh wait, it's probably not the site itself that designed this ad page... still, it shows how ads are sometimes so badly integrated and out of place into sites sometimes.
I didn't see anything that suggested "bullshit". I think the proposal included the business owner actually posting a note so attendants know how to turn off hybrid cars.
Some of Dilbert's content comes from anonymous email submissions. This is a game-like twist.
I think the problem here is that evil is relative. You might say that porn is evil and find a reasonable argument for it.
And somebody else might not see porn as evil but just as something enjoyable that he likes. If this person creates a porn company, how can he and his company be considered evil if he genuinely can't see why porn would be considered evil?
PE to WiiE: Games Pull Their Weight
Bad day in gym class? Just reset.
I have less than $50k... msg me
They probably pay them.

Or they have a longer term strategy that's known within the company, but frankly I like the idea of just running it like a business and paying the employees. I really agree with DHH's talk this past weekend (even though I don't always agree with DHH in general). There is a lot to be said for just running a business profitably.
No.. Y! actually didn't do much better than same time last year (2007 Q1).

It only seems so large because of their one-time sale of Alibaba stock. The actual profits from normal business were a tad-bit less than that of last year.

Basically, they still beat expectations (which didn't include the one-time event), but not by a lot. (And still less than last year).
What a terrible situation. One can only wonder how it would have played out if Ahed hadn't destroyed documents. On the one hand I want to applaud him for wanting to create something better, cheaper, faster and escape the clutches of corporate life... but it's not entirely clear and the public may never know to what degree he compromised his ethics in the attempt.
Suzuki Window Regulator
IMO,your best bet is to approach angels or traditional VCs.
Launch, listen for feedback, iterate, repeat. Do it yesterday.
Hey, reminds me of Cryptonomicon. Let's see...

The math is pretty simple here. The Dentist [eBay] has a way to claim damages from Epiphyte [Craigslist]. The amount of those damages is x, where x is what the Dentist, as a minority shareholder, would have made in capital gains if Randy had been responsible enough to write a better contract with Semper Marine [if Newmark and Buckmaster hadn't unfairly diluted their ownership]. If such a contract had specified a fifty-fifty split, then x would be equal to fifty percent of the cash value of the wreck times the one tenth of Epiphyte that the Dentist owns minus a few percent for taxes and other frictional effects of the real world [Ebay says: Can you believe all the revenue opportunities that Craiglist has passed on!?]. So if there's ten million dollars in the wreck, then x works out to around half a million bucks.

In order for the Dentist to gain control of Epiphyte, he has to acquire an additional forty [23] percent of its stock. The price of that stock (if it were for sale) is simply 0.4 [0.23] times the total value of Epiphyte. Call it y.

If x > y, the Dentist wins. Because then the judge is going to say, "You, Epiphyte, owe this poor aggrieved minority shareholder $x. But as I look at the parlous state of the corporation's finances I see that there's no way for you to raise that kind of money. And so the only way to settle the debt is to give the plaintiff the one asset you have in abundance, which is your crappy stock. And since the value of the whole corporation is really, really close to being zero, you're going to have to give him almost all of it."
I've lived and started a business in both Austin and Silicon Valley. If you're starting a tech business the valley is a lot better. I miss the weather and the live music scene in Austin, but the tech startup climate is orders of magnitude better in the valley. I'll go back to Austin when I've built the business that I want to build. Until then, I'm staying where the ground is most fertile.
I'm not planning to have kids in the near future, but sincerely hope that this trend shifts (as more people move out of the suburbs and into cities) when the time comes.

I walked to school as a kid, and could walk/bike to my friends' houses until I was 12. Then we moved to the suburbs, and visiting friends had to be worked into my busy parents' schedule -- hence, life got less social.
If you have the opportunity to do YC, do it. That said, it doesn't sound like you have that opportunity at the moment, since the application deadline was last month.
Bootstrapping Your Startup – 12 Rules of Bootstrapping
It's cool, but lets keep a few things in mind:

1) When navigating a 2d plane, or looking for things in a 2d plane, an overhead view is just as practical. Although you could argue this lets you see data points farther ahead of you, a good overhead view implementation could do the same thing.

2) This would be nice viewing differences in elevation. Finding your car in a parking garage for instance. However, GPS has an elevation error rate about 3 times larger than its horizontal rate. (Also most gps's don't work well in things like parking garages). This means you'll only be able to detect the elevation of something within ~30 meters on most phones.

Mostly I see this being fun, but not anymore useful than other, more traditional ways of looking at maps. It might prove helpful to people with exceptionally poor spacial thinking (if thats the term you use to describe people who can't read maps, I'm not sure).
Ask YC: Let's talk about Lisp(s)
I finally have a little time to get more serious about picking up another language, and my time here has made me decide that (a) Lisp would be a great addition.

However, I have too many choices and I'm not sure where to start!

I'll probably use whatever Lisp I end up picking up for exploratory programming since it seems very well suited to that. However, my 'exploratory programs' tend to turn into real applications that end up living for a little while.

Here are the biggest contenders that I can think of:

1 - CL by way of SBCL: The "Ford Truck" of the options; this has been around for awhile and while it has some warts, is pretty well known for getting the job done.

2 - Scheme via PLT / MzScheme: Lightweight, etc.. Lacks the number of libraries that CL has going for it. I would have felt more comfortable with a Scheme if r6rs weren't so controversial. I think I prefer a BDFL to design over committee.

3 - Getting into the more exotic lisps, Arc. I think the audience here knows enough about Arc that I don't need to explain it. However, I do have my concerns about the velocity of Arc; PG is a terribly busy guy and language design is not a small task.

4 - Clojure: Previously I'd knocked Clojure for living on the JVM. Now I realize it was a knee-jerk response to some bad Java experiences in the past. After looking at it in a little more depth, it's a pretty cool language. However, it still appears to be in the stage that very low level things are being decided. That's not necessarily a bad thing as Rich Hickey seems to have great reasoning behind his changes. It's just one of those language stability concerns.

If you were going to spend the time to learn just one of these languages today, which one would you choose?
Apple buys into the chip business, acquires P.A. Semi for $278 million
Question to Matt:
How much do you think your yc startup draftmix is worth?

How much would it be worth if it came preinstalled on every facebook users profile... with social aspects built in... and with the name brand of facebook behind it?

Facebook is worth a ton of money because people under 30 with money visit it several times a day... and its not like other sites like cnn or espn.com or whatever because there friends are on it and there is an emotional attachment to it.