skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think it depends on how confident you are that the 'other investors' you mention want to invest.

If they want in, you could be seeding an ego battle which your startup can leverage to get better terms.

If they don't and start dissing your startup then you could be shooting yourself in the foot.
The F|R Interview: Y Combinator’s Paul Graham
I mean to correct any common vision problem that would make it difficult to see what's on the screen. So this would include not just farsightedness but also astigmatism.

Some people don't like wearing glasses. At least with such a display, they won't need to when using a computer.
Nice to hear. I was beginning to think I was getting to old for this stuff ;)
American media | On the brink
Robot to conduct symphony orchestra
The problem there is that, even if it were possible, most people do not have the same astigmatism in both eyes... so which eye would you calibrate the monitor to correct for?
Ask YC Community: What browser do you use and why?
I just read that market share of Safari is increased by 3 times, which to me is not true unless all the users who downloaded Safari are also using it as their primary browser. So if you have safari but if you are not using it (for whatever reason) then you should not be calc as a part of market share. Just by forcing users to download your s/w doesn't increase the market share in reality. It would be interesting to know about popular browser within tech community and why (technically and by usability)?
Get more sleep.

Do non-intellectual stuff (breakfast, clean the kitchen, etc.).

Do some light physical exercise (go for a walk, light yoga, etc.).

Meditate.
You would use a special sort of display that would direct a distinct image to each eye.

3D displays that don't use special glasses already do this.
Language will be difficult for quite some time due to its links with culture and the fact that it is always evolving and cross polinating between languages.

I don't believe there's any way to solve that without an AI that can actually learn and drive it's own understanding by observing and interacting with its environment both physically and through mimicry.
I don't read this guy that much, and (to the best of my knowledge) I haven't griped about his style.

I like Groove, at least until Microsoft bought it. I use it everyday and it rocks. Whether or not something is over-architected or not is beside the point: does it deliver value for my needs. Groove does.

You can make the case that it does a lot of stuff that I don't care about. So what?
For a good read on the subject of AI and how humans think check out the book OnIntelligence by Jeff Hawkins. It covers some about the previous attempts at AI and why they failed.

http://www.amazon.com/Intelligence-Jeff-Hawkins/dp/080507456...
That's disappointing. Is it just me, or is the BBC getting noticeably softer in their science reporting?
Strictly Guessing, but I would suppose that you could make a "Lens" out of a polymer that would direct different images at each eye, for a given distance of the viewer.

I don't know why I guess about such things though, it' just an interesting problem.

This guess was based on the following: when I was a kid I went to a polymers camp, one of the doctorate candidates students there was working on a covering for LCD screens to correct the distortion at different angles, so it seems possible.
Google, IBM join forces to dominate cloud computing
How can you monetize a Google App Engine site?
Would you be able to charge users for parts of your service that are provided via Google App Engine?

1) Is it technically possible to build in a payment method to accounts? (I'm pretty sure it would be if you have a free product and ask your users to pay for additional services and features.)

2) Is it allowed under the Google App Engine terms and services?

3) Will end users who are used to having everything free from Google pay for a service that they use their "free" Google login to use?
"Article content is pretty empty, other than saying she uses statistics. Any pointers to her papers?"

http://ai.stanford.edu/~koller/papers.cgi

enjoy!
Is this article for real? It's 8 short paragraphs long, and a single sentence at the end indicates that nVidia has big plans without any details, facts, or techniques. The link to "more info" at EE Times is broken, and there is no indication of "shaking things up." The article is entirely subjective, and misses out on all the finer points of parallel programming....
There are a number of computer controlled glasses. Adaptive optics for example:

See:
http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2006/02/70181
Exercise Your Brain, or Else You’ll ... Uh ...
Why MS just not go ahead and copy Xobni? it is not like they would need to get users, they are already there.
That book is in my top 5 favorite books ever!
I use Firefox primarily, but I am not completely satisfied by any means. It has memory issues, stalls sometimes, and crashes occasionally. I use it primarily for the add-ons, in order of importance to me: Google Browser Sync, Firebug, Web Developer, ForcastFox.

I also use both Safari (on Windows) and IE6/7 for development testing. I also use Safari sometimes personally when I don't need Google Browser Sync (bookmarks, passwords, tabs, etc.). I find it really looks better--something they are doing with anti-aliasing I think.
The point of my proposal is to get rid of glasses while using a computer.
If you're looking for an economics forum, check out Freakonomics. The discussion there is pretty intelligent.
http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/
"10 people who don't matter" -- 2 years later.
I love how they put Sony's CEO up there, and now blu-ray has won the format war...
>Do you think AI progress is going to continue accelerating for a while?

From where I stand, it looks like the more recent progress in AI is due to a shift in research hypotheses. It used to be like "AI is the attempted simulation, or sometimes attempted emulation, of human cognition"; now it's more like "AI is a medium for various forms of human expression". Ms. Koller's work emphasizes numerical expression; the work in Game AI emphasizes visual-artistic and/or logical expression, the work in Natural Language Processing emphasizes expression in natural language. Few people try for machines which pass the Turing Test; many try for machines which capture a small slice of real-life semantics and run with it. As Alan Perlis once wrote: "When we write programs that 'learn', it turns out we do and they don't."

I believe that we increasingly realize what he meant with this. And that's good, because not only does it say something about what we cannot do, but it also says what we can. People are increasingly aware of this, go pragmatic (Google/MapReduce proved that you can go quite a ways using brute force), and make progress.
I just noticed that the search field is now purple...
I think they are 100% wrong about Facebook being an also ran. The author is coming from the perspective of a large corporation type and fails to see that not selling out and not compromising your ideals will win in the long term. The author would have put Craigslist's founder up on that list and a few years ago Larry Page and Sergey Brin for not selling out when they had the chance.
The short answer is no. The long answer is, anything is possible. You have to invent it or wait. Whatever you come up with is not going to look like a conventional display.

I'd suggest spending a day with the optics section of a good physics book. I have terrible vision, and both eyes are different. So the first thing I would think about is how to get different light into each eye.
>The meaning of a sentence is formed both by the grammar, which is nearly combinatorial, and by the meanings and connotations of the words used, which are hardly combinatorial at all. I doubt that this sort of thing will just fall out from bayesian networks, or from any simple development based on bayesian networks.

The most effective existing approaches to natural language understanding are purely statistics based. This works fairly well (about 85% error rate) in narrow domains. Most approaches aren't even bayesian network based, but use Markov chains/models which can be called a precursor to bayesian networks.
Xobni: Goodbye, Organize Tab
I just noticed that the search field is purple and the organize tab is gone. I guess they got rid of the organize tab a while ago though.

http://www.xobni.com/blog/2008/04/04/goodbye-organize-tab/

Joking aside, hats off to xobni for making outlook almost bearable.
Study: U.S. entrepreneurs are educated, experienced
Can your model be replicated?

YC's competitive advantage is their "brand", which existed before they funded their first startup.

I'd bet a huge chunk of YC applicants read PG's essays long before they even heard of YC. Applicants completely and wholeheartedly trust YC before they fill out the application.

I would not have felt comfortable submitting the most intimate details of my company (including financial) to another company but I revealed them to YC without batting an eye.
I am just testing out the buxfer iphone interface.

hn.buxfer.com
Part Time Jobs Available
Part time jobs for teens, moms, college students, retirees and anyone seeking to ... Plenty of part-time jobs are available for teens, college students, moms
Their argument is really that MySpace has already won. There may be some truth to that - MySpace is about 4 times bigger by the numbers, and in most other industries, 80% market share = winner. It's hard for us to see that because we're from the demographic that tends to use FaceBook, but remember that 2/3 of Americans don't even go to college, let alone use a social networking site centered around the college experience.

I can kinda see FaceBook vs. MySpace as being today's Apple vs. Microsoft (or IBM) battle. FaceBook's cultivated a sort of elite brand - "we're better than Myspacers simply because we're on FaceBook". But remember that Microsoft eventually won: the masses, by definition, are far more numerous than the elite.
I think early adoption is a fairly immutable aspect of product marketing, especially in the technology industry.

Courting these early adopters will never stop being an integral part of any product launch. Of course facebook is past the point of early adoption, because that was about 59 million users ago.

But any new tech product will have to face the same arduous task of finding people to use its wares, tell their friends, and move their product along its life cycle...
I would say that business2.0 doesn't matter, since they went under about 6 months ago.
Nice argument.

If we swallow Pauls line of reasoning that constitutes an oppurtunity: They could get even 'better' (i.e. profitable) by open-sourcing.
Nice - thanks for posting.
One problem w/ y combinator is there is no easy way to report spam. Maybe it isn't a big deal today while it's small but if it grows then it will become an issue.
DoubleFLA
doubleFLA

They say all the four letter domain names are already taken, but I hereby invoke the rule of internet shenanigans:

What is an FFLA? Have you used one at work,school,bar recently? FFLAs are SOPs in MWFL-isms (modern work force lingo)

Fake Four Letter Acronyms

'as-in': a twitter channel where people can twitter-in their own FFLAs

HFWW - Have Fun While Working,
kleevr
Firefox as main, IE7 as backup. Do you have the link to the article that says Safari is up 3x? That's like saying Xobni has 50k users b/c 50k people have downloaded it.
Found the link: http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/08/05/01/safari_for_win...
Watching NVidia make this transition has been fascinating. The world changed when a guy wrote a log(n) sort in a graphics shader. GPU's were really dumb parallel processors that could only work w/ 4x4 matrices. Now they are much smarter general purpose parallel processors with languages and debugging tools. The GPU is not just for graphics anymore. When I read the orange book years ago, http://www.amazon.com/OpenGL-R-Shading-Language-2nd/dp/03213..., I told my sister on Wall St. that NVidia would soon be competing in the same space as intel.
I don't understand why, if this is such a good idea, they can't just start a voluntary service where you can download all the music you want for $5 a month. I'm sure plenty of people would be happy to pay that without cramming it down their throats.
He may be not someone who matters anymore in terms of "money & success", but my bet is on Linus Torvalds -- 100 years later. He is the only one on that list who has created something that is transcendental, wich won't stop after his death because it goes beyond himself and is slowly but surely shaping History, in a virtually unstoppable way.

Oh, and I'm a proud Windows XP user, no fanboyism inside :)
The (Original) F|R Interview
I was definitely enjoyed that essay and want to spread its message; it's why I linked to it and quoted from it :).

However, I've been writing about these concepts in this way since 2001, way before I ever heard of the essay (here's my earlier website from school, which was the the precursor to this blog: http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~kazad/resources.htm).
The questions and answers have been edited so much that I often seem to be saying something different than I actually did. So I posted my original answers:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=180299

I used their new questions when possible, but the original ones when they'd changed so much that my answer would otherwise have been mysterious.

Edit: Problem fixed. They replaced the interview with the original questions and answers.
Why remove it? They can simply make it hidden by default and to enable you go to preferences.
Thanks :). I don't know what it is, but for a field concerned with abstraction people miss the forest for the trees.

I try to catalog insights right as they happen, and try to capture the before-and-after: what, exactly, was the turning point that made it click? Unfortunately that makes articles slow coming, but I think they can be more genuine than explaining something after you're already an expert. Most of us can't remember what it was like trying to learn to read, for example -- it's too hard to relate to that problem.
Honestly, I think that I NEED to improve my network and my blog is a attempt of doing so. I'm also joining entrepreneur groups and attending to meetings. Yes, I do have some people whose judgment I trust and respect and I go after them all the time but they are most located in England and Brazil.
"... but it is not our model that distinguishes us. It’s the people that make the difference ..."

I don't know much about YC since I am of a very different demographic but I would say the same thing about the people who comes to this discussion site (YC News or Hacker News) which I discovered by accident six months ago. I bet most people who keep coming back to YCN do so because of the quality of the discussion (i.e., people) as well. And my observation is that many are coming from all over the World, with very different startup experience, and obviously of different age group (i.e., very few are YC candadates).

And I bet it would be difficult to replicate YCN for the same reason that it would be difficult to replicate YC.
Looks like in the coming century, as in software, the "openest" country/economy will win. As an American, I'd sure like it to be this one, but its not looking good, folks.
I guess we'd rather sit tight and let our product do the talking. The more I think about it, the better that strategy seems!
Moving On (with the help of lots of web stuff)
That's what usually happens when a non-programmer tries to explain a programming topic to other non-programmers.
Ask HN: What load balancing software do you use ?
I'm looking into software load balancers and so far the 4 that seem to standout are:

- Nginx (http://nginx.net/)
- Pound (http://www.apsis.ch/pound/)
- HAProxy (http://haproxy.1wt.eu/)
- Perlbal (http://www.danga.com/perlbal/)

Does anybody have experience using any of these, in live production environments (under reasonably heavy usage), and if so what pros and cons do you see with them ?
Because they can? Steve Jobs would be proud.
Perhaps I'm missing something, but: did they link to a page about doing recursion in C++ to explain the concept of a Y Combinator? (http://www.cprogramming.com/tutorial/lesson16.html) .

For better explanations, this is sort of from The Little Schemer:

http://www.seas.upenn.edu/~sweirich/cse340/04/why_of_y.ps

This is also good:

http://www.dreamsongs.com/Files/WhyOfY.pdf
To be honest, Safari is bloody fast. I was using it to fix some Safari JS bugs the other day, and then was just blown away by how much snappier it feels -- even at a perceptual level that makes a big difference. I feel bad cheating on Firefox, though.
I think he's 100% correct, Zuckerberg should have taken the money and ran while Facebook was hot, because in the end, it's a fad, and worth no where near what it's hyped to be. Craigslist and Google aren't fads, they're massively useful sites for everyone, unlike Facebook. Facebook was never in the league of a Google, EVER.
A perspective on the downfall of Omnidrive by one of their angel investors:
http://www.gooruze.com/members/claycook/blog/119381/My-exper...

Rather ugly how this turned out.
Why Gas in the U.S. Is So Cheap
LyX: Open-source word processor for mathematicians/academics
I can see the differences, but the meanings seems to be the same in both: reading your transcript I never thought Oh, that's what he meant.

Where are you worried the edits changed what you said?
I would hardly say Facebook apps are useless in terms of revenue generation:

http://www.onlineepiphany.com/2008/02/08/how-i-would-get-sta...
I found the article by searching for "207403647"

http://www.eetimes.com/TechSearch/Search.jhtml?site_id=EE+Ti...
I love how one of the others on that list is some consultant for the hd-dvd promotion group. (then again, he apparently pushed for dvd adoption, which was a smart thing)
Bountii Upgrades Broaden Price Comparison Shopping
Try "M-x glasses-mode" in emacs.
I don't know if NVIDIA is going to shake things up or not, but they're defn moving in this direction. People are wary of the end of Moore's law, and look to parallel processing as the future. The types of computations that GPUs do are embarrasingly parallel, and would make good parallel processors if they can be generalized. It makes sense for NVIDIA to move in this direction.
This looks pretty good, been looking for something a little more powerful then open office for research papers.

This looks like it may fit the bill without making it completely text based like *TEX.
"The "IQ test" quote refers not to how fast they have to decide, but the amount of equity we usually ask for. In the median case it's 6%. If we take 6%, we have to improve a startup's outcome by 6.4% for them to end up net ahead. That's a ridiculously low bar. So the IQ test is whether they grasp that."

In starting to write a comment on this I did a little searching and found out that YC takes common stock rather than preferred (at least according to this: http://venturebeat.com/2007/04/16/y-combinator-continued/). It is interesting since the statement above is only true as long as common with no additional rights is given. I wonder what the terms of the "copycats" mentioned are -- does anyone know if they are asking for preferred or other rights for their equity?
Spam turning 30 this month; no gifts, please
The biggest change to an answer is the question about the "IQ test." The editing of the questions also changes the sense of some answers significantly.

E.g. in the answer to their version of the question about the "IQ test," it seems like I'm snarkily concluding that except for one who got an acquisition offer during the interviews, none of the startups that turned us down succeeded. In fact I only talked about this because they explicitly asked about it, I don't remember exactly how many there were, and I don't know for sure what happened to any of them.

In the last question it looks like I'm introducing pmarca's belief that markets matter most, when in fact I was parrying their introduction of it.
Sometimes I'm amazed by the innumeracy (or perhaps it's just being US-centric) of people who seem to be in positions of importance.

"Everybody pays more, but the U.S. pays more in absolute terms," said Lee Shipper, a visiting scholar at the University of California Berkeley's Transportation Center. If you're already paying $4 in taxes, said Schipper, then an extra $2 a gallon isn't that big of a deal."

From some random cruising around wikipedia, there's an obvious flaw with that logic. Most fuel taxes around the world are sales taxes, and either based on a percent of the underlying price, or if they are an absolute price per gallon, they are adjusted periodically based on inflation.

So any price increase is going to be magnified by the increase in taxes - people in countries with higher taxes will see the same proportional increase, and a larger absolute increase.

In addition, in that quote above, he seems to have meant to say "relative" where he said "absolute."
Right. LyX is a graphical front-end to LaTeX, meaning it can do virtually anything LaTeX can do. I'm a pretty avid user, since I also find that Word/OpenOffice lack many features that scientists use.
Well, I was worried about leaping into it feet-first and the application was emerging and needed lots of massaging. So I got a contracting gig that requires 1 or 2 days a week but lets me work full-time if I need to. I choose when to work on what, depending on what needs it most. Now that it's getting somewhere and I'm happier to take more risks, I'm spending some money on other people doing stuff for me.

What I love about it:
Feedback. Really nice feedback.
Meeting people I'd never interact with in my day-job.
Not throwing the code away when the project is finished.
Each bug fixed is one that matters a lot to me.
Payments while I sleep!
Lifehacker links that set the server on fire. I didn't work for them - they just arrive.

I finally did it. Who knows how it'll work out, but after a long time of killing myself for projects I got limited benefit from, I finally dragged an application from idea to release under my own steam and it's making money. That's a great emotional boost!
I can kinda see FaceBook vs. MySpace as being today's Apple vs. Microsoft (or IBM) battle... Microsoft eventually won: the masses, by definition, are far more numerous than the elite.

To say that Microsoft "won" is to be mired in zero-sum, winner-take-all thinking. If you can look at Apple Computer's earnings reports and see a company that has "lost", you're smoking something.

Microsoft is profitable, Apple is profitable. And the masses may outnumber the elite, but the elite has a lot more disposable income per capita.

There's no reason why both MySpace and FaceBook cannot "win" simultaneously.
LyX is nice, but I eventually got frustrated with it and went back to emacs+xdvi. Nothing beats a well-customized emacs for me.

Emacs actually has similar functionality to LyX (I don't use it, so I don't know how well it works) in preview-latex:

http://www.gnu.org/software/auctex/preview-latex.html
I commented on the blogger's post that I don't think this is really accurate. It doesn't take into account smaller volumes of submissions in the middle of the night, i.e. it looks at the absolute number of items being made popular rather than the probability of any particular link being made popular. This is not entirely clear because the aiderss ranking algorithm is opaque, but I still think its the case.
Never simply give them a list of names. But if you're starting to get serious interest from some VCs, you can convey this in various vague ways to other VCs to make them interested.

(Never try to fake this. VCs have a lot more practice detecting such lies than you have making them.)
They don't tell each other everything. So while you have to assume that anything you say to one VC might be told to any other, you can never take it for granted that it will.
Always, always, politely decline from naming another firm. It never does any good.
i looks a lot cleaner now than the previous one.