skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Lesson 10: Get Feedback, Edit, Repeat

Michael Arndt gave an interview at the recent Cinequest festival in San Jose. He's the guy who wrote "Little Miss Sunshine" and now works at Pixar on the next Toy Story.

The most interesting thing he said about Pixar was how they have a rigorous testing process where they go through years of test, edit, shoot (generate) iterations. It sounded like agile development applied to movie making, which is only possible because Pixar does animation and reshoots are only limited by money. Real-life shoots aren't as amenable to long iterative shooting schedules because actors move on to other gigs or physically change.

"[Jobs] realized that when people run into each other, when they make eye contact, things happen. So he made it impossible for you not to run into the rest of the company."

There was a similar design criterion for the Clark Center (http://www.stanford.edu/home/welcome/campus/clark.html). The only staircases are wide ones on the outside that maximize chances of people running into each other, as does the single restroom per section. And then there's the coffee shop on the 3rd floor.

Software developers, on the other hand, might want an opposite environment so they don't get distracted with random encounters.
If that were the case, then the happiness of the couple would be independent of the attractiveness of the man, or at least have little correlation.

Anyways, it's probably because the match hits an equilibrium. Men are statistically much more likely to commit adultery than women (22%:14%).

http://answers.google.com/answers/main?cmd=threadview&id...

A difference in attractiveness in the woman's favor means there is much less incentive for the man to cheat, since a woman more attractive than his wife is unlikely to try and seduce him. Consequently, it isn't worth the risk for the man.
No, any web crawler would have done the same thing. It is simply an error to modify content with a GET.
http://wiki.ycombinator.com/presentations/

You can subscribe to the 2006 lectures through iTunes ("Startup School Podcast").
Actually, most the time it's not detrimental. As the post above mentions, it's a very useful heuristic.
And the solution is simple, remove the annual fees, and/or require that the GP invest their own money into the fund.
a lot more people can replicate a social network feature set than a search engine. That's why is harder to replace Google.

the moment any networking site begins charging for any of their service they will lose 90% of users, and they know it and then the rest of the 10% will abandon because there wont be any value for them to stick around.
Although this isn't an effective tool for websites that actually sell something, a community I was part of a few years ago was experiencing a very malicious and heavy DDOS for almost 30 hours, so during 2AM CST they set their DNS to forward their domain name to 127.0.0.1. The attackers ended up DDOSing themselves. When they set the DNS back properly, for some reason the attackers had stopped. I guess they felt too ashamed to try again!

EDIT: It might also be possible, of course, to blacklist certain IPs and force those to be redirected to their localhost.
Its a cool enough idea but what's even more interesting is the extent that 2 behemoths of programming blogs being behind something like this will help it be a success.
I think my country produced more successful startups than any other country comparing its population (the whole country including the occupied territories has less people than NYC or London)
While I strongly believe that an engineering school is going to give one a much stronger CS foundation, what ultimately was most important in my undergrad and after was doggedly pursuing internship and real-world experience opportunities. Of course, going to a good engineering school will mean these opportunities are more readily available.

If you work hard at it, you could have nearly four years of relevant industry experience by the time you graduate from college, making you a much more attractive candidate to a company compared to contemporaries who have no practical experience.
"The most likely answer is that"

There are books on the history of education you know. It's not like you have to guess.
Facebook is more like eBay than like Google in this respect. It is easy to replicate the computer technology, but not the social aspect of the site.

Except that eBay has stopped innovating (in either the technical or the human/social part of their technology), while Facebook is constantly trying new things.
The Perfect Desktop - Mandriva One 2008 Spring (Gnome)
allow me to say Fb is not any close eBay
If you submitted something good on this problem I'd vote it up, but this isn't it. There are too many better articles written on this already. Try Googling phthalates.
I'd say Paul is biased on this one. His own startup revolves around people keeping track on their friends, and their company's value is on knowing who you are, and who you are connected to.

So, since is selling lemonade, he is telling you that lemonade is really good and valuable.
I agree. It tells us what we already know, a lot of people here have respect for pg and it's reflected in his upmods. He founded the site and has written the essays that have struck some resonance with most of the users and drawn them here. They upmod him a lot. What else would you expect?
Well, there you go. You're really the only one who can decide what the appropriate weights are, based on your own individual preferences.
I remember how most of my friend were on ICQ and suddenly they all moved to MSN, I never understood why! ICQ had more feature + offline message. Very few at the time used Yahoo's messenger program, even when it also had more feature!

Now most of my friends use facebook, I don't use it as much, but thats mainly because it's blocked by work. Hi5 and myspace never really made that big, at least here in egypt. Hi5 was perceived as something nasty or dirty. Facebook had respect

Anyway, my moral is, it's really non trivial to understand what makes a site popular, and what make people switch.

To replace facebook one have to come with something that is very very very attractive
>Silicon Valley is filled with thousands of ugly rich dudes who can't find a date.

i suspect it is relative -- SV is also filled with thousands of average looking, rich dudes get enough dates -- the point is the pool of rich people in SV is larger than in many other places in the country, hence there is a larger barrier to entry.
The guys is arguing that because degrees are held more widely now, they are less differentiating. That's not a reason, necessarily, to stop valuing a degree. Perhaps it indicates that employers and resumes need to look past "went to my classes, got As, was in fraternity F and honorary H" and look for things like "dual major in CS and Film, part of student team who designed university online film archive."

In other words, look for people who demonstrated non-rote talent while in college and were ambitious enough to capitalize on their education. Otherwise, I could say that almost everyone goes to high school so why go to high school and fund it with taxes or private fees? That's a bit unfair, but also a bit fair as an extension of the argument.

I don't have anything to say about the rising cost of college. I need to look into this. I know it increased every year I was in college due to projects like a new gymnasium with a big rock wall (to impress the alumni foundation) and other things like that. Much of what universities do could probably be student designed and run on the cheap, while providing practical education of the above-mentioned kind.
That's an argument from authority, plain and simple. Whether or not you know anything about lisp, your comments about it should be judged on their merits alone. If you truly don't know what you're talking about, it should be apparent to those who do know what they're talking about.

A master and a novice might sometimes come to the same conclusions, but seldom because they followed the same thought process. And I sure hope you aren't upmodding posts that don't share any of the thought process behind what they're saying, the reasons why they conclude what they conclude.

Knowing context might make a post more valuable, in the sense that you understand better how it fits into the wider world, but it won't generally make the content any smarter, more valuable, or more correct.
http://news.ycombinator.com
I wonder how many other YC startup products we can use for startup school :)
Wouldn't this depend entirely on who considers your application or interviews you? If so, what you might be suggesting is that, on average, significantly more people that are likely to consider you for CS employment will be concerned by a BA than not. Have any evidence for that, or was this a personal anecdote?
Thank you for describing the mundaneness (is that a word?) that is currently my everyday life, and is the everyday life for a huge portion of the working world. It's not sexy or glamorous, but there are small opportunities everywhere in the nitty-gritty of daily business that often don't involve social networks or the cool technology du-jour.

Maybe that's the problem with getting youthful entrepreneurs straight out of college. PG discourages young entrepreneurs from settling down, and getting trapped by employment by someone else. In so doing, these people never see the opportunities for solving problems that small businesses or mega-corporations need.

Perhaps it's just the makeup of this little YC-centric microcosm that is tilting my perspective on entrepreneurship.

Oh, and I don't know why anybody hasn't fixed the Exchange server problem yet. If Linux and Apple can mount a real challenge to something as complex as Redmond's operating system, why not something silly like their groupware server?
Radical Move: Paying for Digital Content
I would pay for twitter. Definitely.
Man mistaken as torch grabber
This is really interesting.

Is this inspired at all by what Fred Brooks talks about in the Mythical man Month, where each run of a program had to be recorded, and was public within the project?

No hiding your bugs there...!
StreamFocus - An Organizational Power Tool Waiting To Be Unleashed
Or you might conclude that he is confident enough that he is right about this that he started a company in order to benefit from it.
So everyone is a clone.
This is easy to protect against. Just obscure pg's real name from a portion of the YC userbase.

This is really an extremely easy test to get right if we think for a minute.
You fail at statistical analysis.
i'm a member at the MeFi too, and agree that even that little fee helps keep the morons out (the odd misguided marketing twit notwithstanding).

Want proof? Check this out:
http://www.thatsaspicymeatball.com/comments/

Compares the latest MeFi comments with the latest Youtube comments :)
Additionally, the interface to web crawlers (robots.txt) is well defined.
My favorite technique is:

wget URL > HTML
tidy HTML > XHTML
xslt [identity transform based content extraction] XHTML > XML
XML > DB

The whole process glued together with PERL or shell scripts. Depending on how you construct your content extraction, this technique can weather lots of the inevitable content style changes and easily adjusts when changes need to be made.
I'm not entirely sure what problem you're trying to solve. Are you trying to "fix" the impression that PG-pandering is present so more outsiders make their way into the community?

I don't particularly care if PG gets tons of karma. I love the submissions, comments and community here.

I think it's best to just let it be exactly the way it is, even if there's some pandering.
Nice to see I'm not the only one here in my situation, mosburger. I think our everyday "mundaneness" and yc/hn are perfect compliments for each other. I've always had more problems to solve than I could get to and I've always found the technology to do a better job of it. With this group here, now I have that additional "oomph" I sometimes need to do something. It's silly to whine about bad database schemas when our compatriots are using the same skills and technology to change the world.

(And don't even get me started about Microsoft. Fodder for another rant, er a I mean post.)
#7 make sure you actually have your hackers interview this person. They have a sense for who should be hired or not, which is more valuable than any test.
I think IRSeek is trying to do that. I know they log things in some channcels on on Freenode. e.g.:

http://www.irseek.com/result.php?keywords=xmlrpclib

http://www.irseek.com/result.php?keywords=paul+graham
I think it is a horrible idea.

Blocking search engines is evil. This site helps the search engines(allowing them to rank other results better) and the search engines helps people (by providing the missing search functionality and allowing users to find useful content, on this site or elsewhere).

Blocking traffic from MSN and Yahoo might bring less non-hackers to the site, but it would also introduce bias in the community that is not good. I don't want Microsoft hackers (presumably using MSN search) to be excluded from this community.

I believe nowadays Google is only marginally better than Yahoo or Msn search. I don't need more hacker fashions.

The last thing is, the problem with the crawlers and traffic load is easily solvable using robots.txt. Don't mess with the system more than you need.
Heavily skewed voting can be WORSE than having no information at all. Considering that 95% of the commenting here is disagreement, THAT'S a no-brainer.
ok, then maybe it will be ubuntu or something else. My point was that IBM won't stand for another vista. Especially if they 're paying for it and they love opensource like you said
Amazon Launches AWS Service Health Dashboard And Premium Support
Wishing and ignoring amounts to nothing.
At least two dimensions:

- tying the site to specific products. pg may decide firefox browser is the best predictor for being a hacker and ban all other browsers. Would you like that?

- introducing bias to the community. the search engine may be a correct predictor for being a hacker, but what about the false negtives: do we want to exclude the hackers working on MSN search engine from this community, for example? I certainly don't.
No matter how rational it would be to not attend college or reduce the emphasis on college educations, I doubt it's gonna happen. Too many people and institutions are already vested in the system, and I doubt a parent who went to college will be happy when their child does not want to go. It just seems very self perpetuating to me.
What is ALM? Traceability
True. He really believes it (and he might be very right about it, i am not discussing that point), but the essay would have been more powerful coming out from somebody that doesn't directly benefit so much from it.

A not so great analogy; would be real estate agents telling you "it is always a great time to buy a house", or "buying a house is a great investment" etc..

Clearly a conflict of interest. And, just because a real estate agent buys a house himself, doesn't make him necessary right.

Anyways, I still think Facebook will do great, but 15 billions is a strech. Maybe it would be sticky for a long time, but I still remember, when everybody I knew, my age, was using ICQ in high-school, then AIM in college, (you couldn't survive without it at campus), and then slowly people moved away from it, and now I barely use it. Maybe, once people added everybody they know, and the novelty wears off, facebook will slowly fade also. Who knows.
What Makes a Great Developer?
Meet a man more wireless than most
News.yc Meetup in KOP, PA in One Week (Thu 4/24)
One should certainly read such books (if you care enough). They almost certainly have useful information in them.

But read them critically. Most such books are written by "natives" rather than by dispassionate observers. A book on "history of education" is almost certainly written by an educator who is interested in history. Such a person will tend be less critical about the value of education than an outsider.

There are similar problems in some other subfields (e.g. history of labor/unions), and of course anthropology (most people studying the Navajo tend to like Navajo culture and have "gone native" in some sense).

[edit: emphasized word Most in response to next comment]
It's been seven months since our first Philly Area news.yc meetup. Our hackathon group has grown since then, but the core group is still the original members garnered from this news.yc comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42287

Anyway, if you are in the Philly Area, please sign up for the hackathon group. And if you are free next Thursday, please join us at the Bear Rock Cafe in King of Prussia, PA from 10AM on (till around 3pm).

P.S. The "approval process" is really just a rubber stamp thing that prevents fake or obviously inappropriate members (like someone who lives in Jamaica--happened).
It is evil. A lot of the evil things out there are business decision (e.g. Microsoft monopoly practices). Even if this decision has a positive net effect on the community, as a result the world is likely to be worse off (all non-google searchers get suboptimal search, on this site and elsewhere).
Good arguments with an interesting look at a potential future. Now what about the hundreds of millions of good citizens who don't spam or commit fraud but don't want to put their personal info on a social site like facebook? How do they fit into this picture?
Ugh.. when I worked for a local hospital, the software they used from companies such as Siemens and Medhost was poor. Poor in that there were to many clicks to get to desired information, poor in that the interfaces were not designed with the user in mind, poor in that they required a difficult update and install process. One of them would only print properly if a specific version of Adobe Acrobat Reader was installed. The hospital spent hundreds of thousands...

Ultimately the break fix staff spent atleast a quarter of their time troubleshooting issues and patching workstations, not to mention server maintenance. It seriously was a joke and very dissapointing.

I think there is a huge market out there for intuitive web applications for large industries. I am game for any combination effort. In fact I already have rights to the reuse of a performance management application that I developed for a multibillion dollar corporation as a contractor. I would love to redevelop it and begin selling for a fraction of what peoplesoft charges :D

Chris

------------------------------
http://www.propertystampede.com
http://www.stampedeblog.com
http://blog.itrealm.net
Please explain. In what respect is Facebook unlike eBay? Is it better or worse?
I wonder if there's startup milage in a good way of estimating website traffic/exposure?

For one, what metrics external to the websites could you use to measure traffic?

The Alexa toolbar approach skews things towards the kind of people willing to actually run a toolbar.

Maybe looking a links, maybe google rankings, mentioning on blogs?

Sounds like a nice machine learning application.
I don't know for sure (read about it some time ago), but I think iptables has somewhere an option of banning ips if they make more than a certain number of request for a given time period. You might try that out?
"Such a person will tend be less critical about the value of education than an outsider."

Check out John Taylor Gatto's book The Underground History of American Education.

C.f. also http://www.cantrip.org/gatto.html
I can't get to your site to read your article, it is slow at the moment... however I do recommend that in addition to blackholing the offending IPs, you make sure that your provider is aware of it as well. They are able to do more drastic things such as dropping all traffic at their border router, for example.
Yes, I've come to realize that investors who spend the majority of the time asking me about the legality of my startup really don't have any experience with, or understanding of these types of startups.
Intwition - A new Twitter app that lets you see whose linking to your site on Twitter
Put this together over the last few days. Let me know what you think!
it's not hard to see the difference
I've attended this several times. If you're in the area check it out its a great place to meet up with other hackers/entrepreneurs.
Let me know what you guys think!
ASP.NET MVC Source Refresh Preview
Isn't it more like a homeowner saying that buying a house is a great investment?
If you think average would be a better measure than median, say why. You might possibly be right, but given PG's track record re. Bayesian filtering, "You fail at statistical analysis" just doesn't seem like the right response. It also sounds like attacking the person rather than the statement.
It's a form of censorship, albeit a subtle one with possibly good reasons.

That's reason I voted for "Remain visible to Yahoo, MSN search." Had option two been "Be invisible to all search engines.", then I would've voted for that one. But then YC would need to offer its own search.
Yahoo, Google Tie-Up a Success
This argument doesn't hold weight at all.

"eBay is almost irreplaceble because it's a marketplace"

Are you saying marketplaces can't be replaced any easier than social networks (particularly, social networks with suprisingly passionate users)?

"Any marketplace is difficult to replace because if it already works well is because is reaching a massive audience, even if they are not actively particapating in it. At eBay there already people who have their rating etc so it's hard to beat that."

Ok, first off, the formal definition of what you describe is Network Effects - i.e. Metcalfes law. Facebook benefits from that just as well as eBay, and perhaps, as Paul said, even more so, because there is more trust. Secondly, a lot of the "rating" is artificially generated, comes from scammy behavior etc, so it doesn't hold much weight.

"Most people know eBay even if they never bought something off it" ...

And most people know about facebook even if they've never used it.

I think anyone that underestimates Facebook does so at their own peril.
I've solved that problem for me by configuring rawdog RSS reader. Now, it checks for update and generates a static HTML page. (if you are interested, here is the link: http://anton.kovalyov.net/tools/feeds/)

So I don't have to visit a website just to make sure that there are no updates and I also don't have to use some big RSS reader with a lot of unnecessary things (ajax, tags, stars, share with friend, etc.)
I think the PG bias was proven when a picture of "asterisk man" made it to the top of _Hacker_ News...
Ask YC: PHP or something else?
I am an avarage php developer,looking to develop an application (and startup around it) that would have larger number of users. Application would be database driven, so now I am stuck with the choice of either sticking with PHP and using framework like CakePHP that would help me speed up the development, or to try a new platform/language. Example would be Python/Django or Ruby/Rails. I am afraid that by using PHP, scaling issues might appear later on, and would hate if I hate to rewrite whole thing in something else. I know that it all depends on the coder, so I am not sure if it's worth diving into new technology or stick with what I already know.

What do you guys recommend?
Who said I don't regularly donate?
I had already erased my comment before you've responded.

anw, maybe I am wrong but I don't think you can easily replace a marketplace that works.