skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think he is slowly working out Boyd's OODA loop (Orient, Observe, Decide, Act) which says that a faster decision cycle in a competitive situation will allow you to outperform your competitor. Fire and Maneuver are two types of action, but I think he misses one of the key challenges most startups face: they are in a battle of maneuver. They have to substitute agility for mass in taking on more established competitors. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_Loop
Feel free to post in their comments (when appropriate) and send them email. There's nothing wrong with being upfront about it. Just make sure that you're not in any way obnoxious about it and no one will mind.
I'm very happy with my Thinkpad T60. I got a big discount for buying it with Visa: http://www.visaperks.ca/visaperks/
Haha. That's terrible advice! :)

How about just checking your email once every few hours or when you feel like it? That seems to be a less extreme reaction.
Or better yet, just assume you're not getting it, because even if you get invited, you statistically still probably aren't going to be accepted. Keep building your application, chasing up contacts, figuring out the next step and planning on taking over the world with or without YC.
Nitpick: "know economics" sounds bad. It sounds like "I know programming" or "I know physics" or something like that. Adding a "something about" in there would make it work better.
I like National Geographic:

pangolins
http://youtube.com/watch?v=r2cyp8k8uuM

pygmy seahorse
http://youtube.com/watch?v=k4q3sBuCkRQ

critter cam, turtles:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=Q_D51Ui_XMI

These things calm me.
At least everything works asynchronously now. Waiting for a phone call used to be excruciating, before voicemail. Thankfully, we don't have to worry about someone "tying up the email" while we wait.
Cleanly Migrate Your Subversion Repository To a GIT Repository
A year ago they kept 2 out of 3 invitees IIRC.
Up until a year or so ago, you could buy a one-handed input device called the Twiddler:

http://www.handykey.com/

You may still be able to find it secondhand. It has more than five buttons (12?), but they are chorded like Engelbart's design to access the 100-some necessary scan codes. Some users reported typing speeds approaching QWERTY, and supposedly with less RSI problems.

Edit: Wikipedia has links to a number of other prototypes and (mostly defunct) production models at the bottom of its chorded keyboard article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chorded_keyboard
Advanced obfuscated JavaScript analysis
We were students on F-1 which turned out to be just the right thing to have. We went on an OPT immediately and by the time we needed H-1Bs for ourselves, we had raised enough money to be able to justify the INS that we are a totally legit company capable of paying H-1B level salaries.
While a watched kettle never seems to boil, my ruby script that scanned for a pg comment did signal.
Bubble 2.0: The recession is here
Various companies have tried to make five-finger chording keyboards over the years, but I have never seen one in person.

I strongly suspect that they don't really work very well. Hacking one together wouldn't be that hard, and yet you never see anyone but the diehard wearable-computing hobbyists using them. (The wearables folks, of course, really need the one-handed-typing feature.)

If they bought you so much as a 10% improvement you'd expect to find hobbyists using them and raving about them... just look at the adoption of Dvorak, or ask me about my awesome Kinesis keyboard.

The violin metaphor is a telling one: Despite their cost and the difficulty of learning to use them, violins and violinists aren't that hard to find. People take the trouble to learn violin because it pays off. So if you invent the chorded keyboard and twenty years later nobody has adopted it, you have to ask yourself whether you've really invented the equivalent of the violin. Perhaps you've invented the theremin instead: An instrument that is nigh-impossible to learn and that has no real repertoire beyond Good Vibrations and late-night monster movie soundtracks.
You gotta share that script or give it a web address
Thinkpads are great. I'd avoid the R series unless you're looking to include your laptop in a weight lifting routine, but the T and the X are nice machines - and you can get certain versions preloaded with SuSE instead of Windows (unfortunately only with integrated graphics) for a little less money. Thinkpads aren't what they used to be, but they're still tougher than average, with magnesium frames and waterproof keyboards.
IANAL, but there might be other ways. Send me e-mail. ashu [AT] buxfer
about that... http://xkcd.com/357/
http://theinfo.org/
How's "...or even just know some basic economics..."? That's what I changed it to.
I would suggest one of the new sub notebooks that comes with Linux pre-installed. The ultra mobility would make for a better companion to your MacBook than having another full sized notebook. And, as an added bonus, you don't have to worry about driver support.

Personally, I've been pretty pleased with my OLPC XO, but that's mostly because I use it as an ebook reader all the time. If I just wanted a laptop, then I would have gone with the EeePC.
I've gotten this only when I was using IE on a school computer.
Go out with your team and eat something tasty or drink a couple of nice beers. There should be an endless amount of things to talk about regarding your startup that don't depend on yc.

Come back and check your email around midnight, then decide what your next step will be.

(this is exactly what I'm doing)
I used Hpricot to scrape web.archive and reddit to make http://reredd.com.

Plan on scraping past billboard charts to let people listen to the radio back in time.
I like them more because they use JSON.
The problem with RSI is that it's extremely personal. One person's wonder-working invention is another's torture device.

I don't doubt that there are many users who could benefit from a one-handed chorded keyboard -- I once met a programmer with the use of only one hand -- but many others will see no benefit, and others might have bigger RSI problems with chording than with regular keyboards.

Meanwhile, I find that the phrase "speeds approaching QWERTY" is not a very effective sales pitch. :)
I think Emacs/vim are better examples of the violin. It's atrocious to start learning them, but once you do they're so much more powerful and efficient than a regular text editor.
I have both an x61s and an XPS m1330.

The only problem I have with the x61s is that the 1024x768 screen res is horrible in today's high res world.

And I've had lots of quality issues with the XPS m1330. Bad screens, cases, etc.

Both run ubuntu well though (intel graphics and wireless on the x61s and nvidia graphics, intel wireless on the m1330).
A little more than $1,000 (at least in Canada) but we use Toshiba A200-AH9 laptops running Ubuntu. Intel wifi just works. 9-cell battery. Only downside is the resolution if you don't use an external monitor.

Cheers
"I have been coding for 30 years using a variety of languages and platforms, including C++, Java, and PHP."

He says he's a generalist, but that sounds like specialising in a few popular languages...
Lower-noise version:

http://web2.sys-con.com/read/536976_p.htm
Why would we want him to chill out? So we can enjoy yet another pointless fake tech "blog" by yet another always-politically-correct faceless programmer that reads like an extended version of his resume?

I think we have enough of Rails "blogs" or PHP "blogs" filled with nothing but technical documentation with "Digg it!" slapped on top. Every day (even on YC news) I see 2-3 "blog" posts that have nothing in them but "to code, you'll need an editor and a debugger" or "there are two types of investors: angels and VSs" from yet another cubicle worm who feels like bloggin.

Nah, thanks. I'd rather have Zed and a few others who still have guts to write what's on their minds and sign it with their real names.
Updated for IE7 and FF2 though.
Acer. I've got a 3.5 year old Travelmate that was only $1600 when I bought it (probably a lot less now). The headphone jack just gave out (and it's still good for mono, I just lost stereo) and I've had no other problems with it. By contrast, the Sony Vaio I had before that had lost its headphone jack, Ethernet jack, and CD-R by the time it reached 18 months. There are occasional duds (the first unit I got was DOA), but I bought it on my former boss's recommendation and he's owned a string of Acers with very good reliability.

It also ran Linux fine except for the wireless, and that was because the Pentium-M chipset was too new at the time to have full-featured Linux drivers. I'd imagine that that problem was corrected long ago. And I like how Acer doesn't load you down with bundleware - my laptop came with just enough software to use all the hardware features, and none of these applications that I didn't want.
I use curl, wget and links to retrieve data from sites and then I filter it with old sed and grep.

I created a mashup of AIM + Flicker.

If you use AIM 6 or AIM lite send a message to MyPictureBuddy

then send a message and enjoy.

basically You type a keyword and it gots to flicker and retrieves image information to display pictures right inside your AIM chat session.

I also have another Bot that parses HackerNews XML and then display it on the chat session. The bot name is

HackerNewsYC
The M1330 is the one I'm leaning towards. You can get them with Ubuntu installed direct from Dell (http://www.dell.com/ubuntu or http://www.dell.ca/open in Canada).
There's largely no such thing as "closed source" data. Many of the restrictions people claim on publicly distributed data are bogus: you cannot claim copyright on a comprehensive collection of facts.
http://www.iusmentis.com/databases/us/
http://blog.infochimps.org/2008/04/02/good-neighbors-and-ope...
I don't think baseball is cracking down on people making money on this, unless they infringed their (quite reasonable) hot news claims to the real-time data.

Baseball is the leading example of why giving away most of your data is the best use of it. The sport of baseball -- the way it's played on the field, the way players are scouted and trained, and the way it's enjoyed as a fan (Moneyball? Fantasy Sports?) -- have been revolutionized by amateurs making use of free open data.

If you give out the great bulk of your data, people will be enhancing it with metadata, building tools on top of it, and most importantly connecting it to the rest of humanity's knowledge store and mining it for connections you'd have never conceived. Giving out "up to last month" or "daily intervals" will grow sharply the market for "real time" or "second-by-second". Baseball's mission statement concerns bats, bases, butts and seats -- not visualizing correlations among heterogeneous data stores. By releasing their data for free they let the smartest people in the world have the opportunity to perform that second task for free.

We're about to enter the age of ubiquitous information. Drawing these data stores into open formats, making them discoverable, and interconnecting them across knowledge domains presents explosive opportunities. But who will own this data and what access will they allow? If you want to help ensure that the answer is 'everyone' and 'all of it', come join the http://infochimps.org project, a free open community effort to build an Allmanac of everything.
Yahoo in talks to outsource search ads to Google
Thanks for reminding me. I don't even remember that they will give out the interviews today. Take it easy.
Possibly.

But less ambitious: it's actually not a bad way (I think - I don't know enough about JQuery to have an idea about the performance of this) to do client side filtering of data presented in tables. His technique, at least, is more readable than the kludges I've come up with to do that.

In any case, this is fairly cool indeed.
The reason HTTP is trivial to scale and databases aren't is that the HTTP daemons are largely stateless, while databases are all about managing state. Doing that in a scalable, reliable, consistent way is just a fundamentally hard problem. Oracle and DB2 haven't done particularly well at trying to solve this (within the constraints of a traditional RDBMS), let alone the various open source projects.

I spent a while trying to build a synchronous multimaster replication system for Postgres. I think we made two main mistakes:

1. Trying to provide the traditional ACID semantics that people expect on a single-site DBMS isn't feasible, at least without incurring a very significant performance and complexity overhead.

2. Horizontal partitioning is key. If you make it easy for the user to partition their data, you now only need to maintain consistency over a single partition.
Many people who took the application seriously will have been working like crazy the past couple of weeks, and the very serious entrepreneurs have months or years more of it ahead. A "night off" would probably do a lot of good for some of the applicants.

Getting a relatively healthy drink, enjoying some leisure time, and going to sleep at a reasonable hour... I can think of much worse advice. :P
startup vs. small business.
EMC Snaps Up Iomega for $213 Million
What: Banks. With: lib-www-perl.
Bad analogy. Watching TV is always passive. Users of Flickr upload content, comment, categorize... even the most pssive use possible, just browsing, leaves a useful clickstream trail.
Old but still very true
He conveniently forgot to mention that most (if not all) "open source companies" do not pay their programmers to write open sourced code. Most of them simply take what's been done by others, repackage and then "sell as a service" essentially profiting on someone else's sweat. Periodically these companies feel a bit guilty and find ways to contribute back, usually in very insignificant ways, but most are just parasites.

Google, Yahoo and most other "OSS-friendly" companies built their stuff on top of mountains of open sourced code that they had no chance of re-creating commercially, yet only tiny, truly negligible percent of their own code is available for others to use and benefit from. In that regard you have to respect Microsoft, whose programmers essentially coded their way from the bottom (at company's expense): from boot loaders to OS and compilers and hardware drivers - they've done it all.

Yes, the Future is to have all the programmers sit at home and build products for free, and then take it and make money on "service and contracts". Why the hell not, especially for Sun, who's never been successful in commercial software business and has always looked at software only as a free commodity that helps to sell their expensive servers.

I'd love to see how these OSS-friends would react if GPL required them to publish code of everything they use it for, not just the products they allow customers to copy. Heck, I'd love to hack around with original BigTable and MapReduce code, I am sure GCC/Linux hackers would do too.

I see the very same attitude here on YC.news, when every 18 year old with a weekend project is looking for VC funding and educating himself on business plans as opposed to just simply posting it to sourceforge, just like programmers, whose libraries represent 99% of his codebase, have done.
I agree entirely (hence the various qualifiers in my post). The amazing WPM cited on the Twiddler page comes from a quote from Thad Starner, who is a prominent wearable computing researcher and one of the Twiddler's leading advocates. Some of his research on actual typing speeds, here:

http://www.cc.gatech.edu/fac/Thad.Starner/030_research.htm
Second that - I have an x21 that has served me 8 hours a day for 5 years. It just keeps on ticking.
hooande

http://pastie.caboo.se/178157

just replace the to and from number and excuse the lack of any error correcting. go out, get a beer, and wait.
dude, you're confusing the concept of 'effort' with the concept of 'labour'. The fact remains that I go to Flickr for purposes of entertaining myself, not for purposes of performing work.
Yes, if you make it to the interview, your odds are excellent. In our batch roughly 50% of interviewees made it, and that number increased in subsequent batches. I've suspected that the application phase is where all of the downward pressure comes in--since they get so many, and the interview weekend only has so many slots available for talking to people. The quality of the applicants that make it to the interview has probably gone up remarkably. This time around, pg has enlisted the help of prior founders to get a better feel for applicants (and give the applicants a chance to ask all the questions they have about YC of folks who've experienced it), so it seems likely that those that make it to the interview are even more likely to be accepted.
The Yahoo!/Microsoft chess match continues: Yahoo! enters trial partnership with Google
oh, i guess i should mention. it sends a SMS to a sprint phone via Sprint's www interface. i do not know (nor do i care) if it works for other cell phones. you can see if it does by setting the starting_count variable to 0.
The "one pair of glasses" theory
Just put it in the back of your mind and continue executing everything you wrote about in your application.
Once every three months or so FSJ says something that makes people laugh and think (the rest of the time he settles for just making people laugh).

This one struck me as summing a well-known phenomenon up rather well, and with a catchy phrase to go along with it.
Guess this is in light of Google's App Engine page getting hacked?
RubyRDF
Indeed he doesn't mention it, but this gives me the impression that he does _get_ it:

"Clever entrepreneurs and even established companies can profit from this volunteerism--but only if they don't get too greedy. The key, Benkler says, is 'managing the marriage of money and nonmoney without making nonmoney feel like a sucker.'"

When IBM invests in OSS the above is exactly what they're doing: giving back part of their profit to keep everybody happy.
Thanks, I'll give it a try. I'm collaborating on a project which involves getting info from online financial markets, btw, but it's getting held up because of this scraping problem. So new ideas might help get it moving again.
You Get What You Pay for With Online Q&A Sites
"As the dollar drops, outsourced labor costs more."

But selling overseas becomes easier.
Does Blogging Need Consistent Titles?
I'm pretty sure Yahoo! has it's own ad system. Does this mean that (Yahoo! thinks) adsense is better?
What is the sense to run Linux on Unix platform? What tasks are you doing that make you want Linux also?
The Problem with FireEagle
Agree.

I got a MBP and immediately threw 4GB RAM into it (~$80 these days! Obviously buy it online and not from Apple). I now run an Ubuntu VM 24/7 that I keep minimized and just ssh into.

Odd, I know, but sometimes the OSX/BSDisms are too much for me. Also, we deploy on Ubuntu so it's a perfect setup for development. Mount your home via Samba if you want to use TextMate or something.
eh, i think that one pair of glasses likely leads to cross-pollinization across disciplines which does help us solve problems. in my world, negroponte can bring his laptops to africa, some education expert will bring their knowledge of teaching/classroom dynamics, etc, and all this will be brought to bear on the problem of poverty. competition of ideas will lead to the incorporation of good aspects of these theories and we'll be on our way. the fact is that existing orthodox strategies in these fields have failed which is why solutions from other disciplines are proposed.
Wired journalist:
"Remember Iomega? No?"

Iomega CEO:
"We have strong brand and channel presence in business and consumer (markets)"

One of them seems to be slightly out of touch with reality. I can't remember the last time I saw an Iomege product.
Elaborated in the first half of this post:

http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/articles/hacker-vs-engineer...
HtmlPrag turns any HTML into nice s-expressions. It's a Scheme library. http://www.neilvandyke.org/htmlprag/

I've used it a lot - it's really great.
Free Web Tool for Entrepreneurs to Get Free Media by Helping Reporters
But you still shouldn't bet on it. That was my point. It wouldn't matter if the odds later on were 90% or 10%, that's still several potentially wasted weeks. Just keep going.
Not quite. Flickr, Youtube, et al. all derive their most value from user contributions. What good would Youtube be if users didn't upload videos?

When described economically, labor is a resource and is one half of the production function:

P = c K^a * L^b

where a, b, and c are constants.
P is production,
K is capital,
and L is labor.

Youtube provides the capital, their site, and the users provide the labor, the adding of value through their videos.

Granted, the actual division isn't so clear cut in this case, or most cases, but by using these sites, you add value in a way that is fundamentally different than when you watch television.
haha! Thank You!
My degree thesis was on this subject, except this...

It stores the data as English text, parseable into Prolog predicates (ie, key/value data chunks), and you have a special editor which shows you the predicates generated by the English you just wrote.

Does this sound useful to anyone? I'd love to pick up on it.

The parser for English I wrote is in Lisp, and works very well (it's recursive, etc).

And of course, you don't have to make a new database, you just do the usual Wiki editing and just make sure the text you enter is parseable by the latest parser.
Yes, as long as you filed the H1B transfer application, you can work for the new company. You do not have to wait for the approval or even the receipt (it could be nice to have the receipt as it helps to prove you filed application).
If you've not been on VISA previously you might be able to apply for a J1, the application time is fairly short but for a non-established company the authorities will have to do a "site-visit" to check that you are an established company.
In practice, yes. Work is generally defined as getting a salary. In theory no, i think
For some reason I've had to say this a lot recently:

If the machine is important for work then don't get a consumer model.

The XPS and Inspirons are consumer models. If something needs to be replaced the tech support people (soon Philippines based, if you haven't read the news) will tell you that they'll send a tech in 3 to 5 business days. There's no international service and depot service takes longer still.
Before you buy an XPS or Inspiron ask yourself if you can live without it for a week.
Thanks - that was the most annoying ad I have ever seen...
No, of course not. I just thought that the product in the article is exclusively for iPhone, whereas Loopt is also available for other device. So it seemed unlikely that they are the same product.
Huddle Chat, the power of Google App Engine
To demonstrate the power and usefulness of Google App Engine, Darren Delaye, Braden Kowitz, and Kyle Consalus developed an excellent application called Huddle Chat, an open source and improved version of Campfire.

Unfortunately, the creators of Huddle Chat decided to take down the application based on allegations that it was copy of Campire. The decision came after 37signals, the company behind Ruby on Rails, and some Ruby developers complained. Of course, none of them complained when Basecamp copied Trac.

So, why would someone complain about something like that? Is this another Ruby vs Python silly fight? I don’t think so. This is because 37signal’s application, Campfire, runs on Amazon’s (AMZN) platform. And Google is competing against Amazon to develop the future Operating System for Web applications. And guess what, Google is winning.
And how many pairs of glasses does mr fakesteve own? OK, he had one brilliant idea: to pose as somebody else who is famous. Whoa, genius!!! It really dwarfs inventing ethernet.