skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The genius of Toyota is that they now operate fundamentally on the "pull" system, where customer demand pulls to have products created rather than the traditional approach of "pushing" products on the consumer and hoping there will be demand for them.

Using the pull concept, Toyota redefined their entire management system to create only customer value when that value was demanded, and eliminate all waste: Lean Management. They have taken the idea to such extremes now that if you need spare parts at a Toyota dealer, you will find that only a few parts are stocked, and when the stock runs low they produce new parts on demand. These guys are unbeatable using the old way of doing business - they can do their work with this approach twice as fast with half the labor required and radically higher quality.

Several other manufacturers have taken on Lean as well, such as Porsche. For those who don't, it will only be a downhill slide into oblivion against the Lean competition.
Web robot names considered, and rejected
Ruby 1.8.7-preview1 has been released
Maybe make another way of browsing on-going topics/articles other than by searching. I tried a few keywords and couldn't get any results so I gave up. If I had been able to click through a menu or what not to find "most active" or by category I would have spent more time and had the opportunity to see your product "in action".
RuPy 2008 Review
My thoughts on this years RuPy conference.
Block 'em.
This was nice of them. It didn't bother us too much. We were indignant the first time someone copied our application form, but at least these guys admitted it.
Actually, Lippman's "Essential C++" is probably more what you're looking for. It's designed to get you up and running in a short amount of time (~300 pages vs ~900 pages ).
"(But don't break into it.)" LOL!
Why Social Communities Will Fail: Marketing Advice
Air travel is about to further crush the bus and train
I love C++

There are so many crooks and nannies, pitfalls and gotchas in the language that most people either give up, or they take the time to learn to do things the "right" way. I fall into the latter group.

However, I absolutely despise the C/C++ compile/link model. And I hate STL errors, or any sort of error that arise from the incorrect use of templates. And header files need to die.

I learnt most of the C++ I know from tutorials on the Web.
DIY Sawed Off USB Key
If you would like to do something significant within a months' time, learning C++ by reading a book is the worst possible course of action.

Start by following along with some basic C++ tutorials. Once you're comfy enough, start implementing your own small applications. (Write a program to accept a sentence from the user and print it out. Then write a function that takes two strings and returns true if the two strings are anagrams. Keep thinking up small apps.)

It is my opinion that you must avoid learning STL and Boost if you want to be productive within a month. Both libraries have enough quirks that it takes a significant amount of time and experience to use them correctly. For example, you don't need the std::vector or std::list containers. Simply allocate a sufficiently large array to hold your items, then allocate a larger array when the first one fills up. A std::map container (a dictionary) is also not needed if you're tracking a small number of items. Simply loop through all items until you find the one you're looking for.

Basically, start actually writing code as quickly as possible. If you feel like you're burning too much time trying to understand one tutorial, move on to another one. But make sure at the end of each day that you can look back and say, "I wrote a lot of apps today and I feel like I learned a lot."

Most importantly, don't be afraid to throw your old code away once you have a better understanding of how best to solve the problem. Implementing components as quickly as possible is the key to productivity. Rewriting your old code is the key to not making a mess.

Contact me at palish@gmail.com if you have any questions along the way. I'd be happy to help. I'm a self-taught graphics programmer, so I can relate to how scary C++ can seem at first. Try to implement each application in the simplest possible way.
Why there aren't more Googles, redux. (Umair Haque), an alternative perspective to PG
Look Out Twhirl, Alert Thingy Adds Twitter Support
1.3% of web pages altered in transit
Supply chain management is an advanced field. Inventory levels are computed to an optimum from many inputs.

This buzzword cheerleading for "pull" and "lean" is just silly. Some consultant types want to sell books and conferences with tidy little concepts.

Very low inventory means no buffer. 9/11 or Katrina shuts you down completely.
These guys have suddenly gained a lot of respect in my eyes.
I was just going to recommend that book. Gets you in the door, which if you've done any coding before, is all you will probably need.
"Cool people" as far as nightlife goes tend to like being elite. Everyone likes being with "cool people". So once a bar gets popular and is always packed it stops being elite and the cool people move on. Once that happens the rest of the crowd moves to.

It's like cat and mouse and the only way to avoid it that I've seen is to maintain eliteness by turning away 95% of your potential customers.

Edit: or target university/college students with cheap drinks and cheezy promos and try to make them think your bar/club is a tradition. That works too.
why not block all search engines?
The Library of Congress Flickr Account (this set is color photos from the '30s and '40s)
Ask YC: Best Javascript/CSS/HTML Compressors?
I'm trying to bring down the size of a very well trafficked website and the next step seems to compress the Javascript/CSS/HTML so a smaller file(s) is sent to the client.

I see many different tools out there, but none seem to be canonical. I would also prefer open source, if possible (or even start an open source project), as it may be possible to contribute back improvements.

Some notable examples I will be trying to emulate are:
http://www.google.com
http://www.msn.com

If you have any experience with this problem, please speak out! I'd love to hear about your experiences. I especially would appreciate information on how to ensure that the resulting output file is identical (functionally) to the input file and how to gauge how effective the compression was. (One has to take into account client-side caching and JS-processing time over a pure size comparison.)

Thanks!
I agree. If you look at the frequency of posts containing "I like" or "I hate", for example:

http://twist.flaptor.com/freq?gram=i+love%2C+i+hate

or

http://twist.flaptor.com/freq?gram=great%2C+sucks
http://twist.flaptor.com/freq?gram=awesome%2C+awful
Yeah Harj, look at the passport you american by mind, british by blood, dude :).
Poll: Should we have a moderated announcement list for the LinkedIn Group?
As administrator of the recently created LinkedIn group, I have the ability to see all of the email addresses there. Unfortunately, other than viewing the members, there are no communication possibilities for the group. I don't want to abuse group ownership, so I thought I'd poll as to whether or not you'd like to have a moderated announcement list. Things that I'd consider relevant would be, i.e. launch of a group member's startup, or the announcement of a regional news.YC meet-up. What do you think?

Note: I rejected a few requests for membership because I couldn't find a way that you were connected to the community. See the instructions in the previous thread and I'll add you: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=160398
I appreciate the use of the tripwires for detecting the modifications, but the article also suggests using them to fight the practice. This is basically a man-in-the-middle attack, so wouldn't using secure http prove a better solution than tripwires? Anyone know why you would prefer to use the tripwires?
Because liquidity is valuable and cash cows don't live forever. VCs and aggressive investors are looking for big returns, not cash thrown off. If does make me wonder if a VC or angel fund could solicit patient capital, like from a pension fund or life insurance, that would be content with owning dividend-rich stock. That's an area as unexploited as YC's niche was three years ago.
If I understand correctly, the description is off. Ford pioneered the assembly line which outputs cars one at time through a continuous flow. Japan's innovations have more to due with labor management if I recall.
Perhaps this should be "outproduced"..... these ideas are, at this point, creaky and ancient. I'd be willing to concede that they may have been an advantage in the '70s.

Heck, you could paraphrase it as "What Henry Ford did, but even more so!"

Edit: with a bit more thought: The example is completely contrived and misleadingly false. For "batch" processing you have 30 person-minutes. For continuous flow processing: 30 person-minutes as well. The example cheats by throwing two extra people at it.
I also had to learn C++ fast, and "Accelerated C++", by Andrew Koenig and Barbara E. Moo was great. The book assumes you are a programmer, it's not dumbed down and most importantly it's only around 300 pages. In the time contraints I had (a month) I couldn't afford to deal with Lippman's C++ Primer or Stroustrup bible (both reknowned books, but over 900 pages). You don't even need to finish Accelerated C++ to start coding in C++.
http://www.acceleratedcpp.com/

For STL, I recommend Josuttis's "The C++ Standard Library". It's a STL reference book, very complete and easy to browse. There are also brief examples on own to use the classes and templates.
http://www.josuttis.com/libbook/
I sit here with egg on my face as I reply to myself. davidw, you were absolutely right and I never saw it.

When I wrote, "What data could anyone possibly add that would change my thinking?" I never expected an answer. I just read the Crash Dev apology, and that's the data.

My apologies. Now I understand the difference between "learn" and "infer".
Why does it matter how many useless urls they visit? If you're trying to fix the "expired link" issue -- there are better ways to fix that.

I think you should ban google too if you ban the others. The only disadvantage I can see is that people from here who want to find something they've seen on news.yc can't use google anymore.
Also, does anyone have feedback on <http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/compressor/>; versus other alternatives?
I tend to use Yahoo search instead of Google, but I guess I'll just use searchYC or something to search YC.
Latency and throughput of HTTPS is much much worse than pure HTTP, the original paper has more details on this.
Why Facebook is destined to beat MySpace outside of the U.S.
Nothing well-formed; I've hardly thought about it. By the way, I didn't mean "self-describing" in any technical sense (like the way Alan Kay might use the phrase - though that is super cool). What I mean is, if there's context that's essential to understanding what you're saying on page X, maybe you should include it in X, or at least a noticeable link to it. Even at the cost of some duplication.

For example, would it have changed your perception of the Founders Co-op application if it had, at the bottom, a link to a FAQ like "Isn't this just like YC" or even "How is this different from other early-stage funds"?
It would be difficult to implement Megatexture in Python without writing most of it in C/C++ and a shader language like GLSL/HLSL. Also, having a Python interface to Megatexture wouldn't buy you any flexibility because Megatexture's job is well-defined. It's mostly an optimization problem. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MegaTexture
lol, thanks
Open Source Merb Apps
Because News.YC doesn't have it's own search engine. So I use google to search the site.
http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+y...

There's no other search.
Googling for my name lists my Hacker News profile as one of the top results. I think that is really cool.
Don't read a book, write code. There are lots of open source projects that use C++, maybe try to get involved.

Or just give yourself challenges. Rewrite some non-trivial code you did in Python to use C++, for example, and ask experienced C++ people to comment.

Also, as others have said, use Boost and STL if you value your sanity.

In practical terms, I'd rather use C+Python or C+Ruby than C++. I template in a high-level language and move the stuff in tight loops or otherwise performance-critical sections into C.
That actually really surprises me. Is this just a limitation of the major implementations, or is there something fundamental about the design that slows it down? (I'm not familiar with the details of the protocol)
> There's no other search.

http://www.searchyc.com

(edit: I'm not the one who voted you down)
How to Deploy a Rails App with mod_rails on Slicehost (using an Ubuntu slice)
Hey thanks...
The only thing I really worry about is that competitors will use artificial deadlines to panic founders into taking offers from them before they've interviewed with us. 100% of the clones make decisions before we even do interviews, probably not by coincidence. Last year when they made offers to groups that had also been invited to interviews with us, they tried to pressure them into accepting before they'd heard from us. I assume they'll do that again. That makes me mad, I admit. It seems such a nasty thing to do to a group of young founders.
A good follow up project would be to investigate whether or not there is a correlation between meditation, rhythmic accuracy, and changes in mental ability/capacity.
The old bait'n'switch at work ;)

Do something a bit bad, get some publicity, then apologize profusely!
and

http://nycs.bigheadlabs.com/
Language you should have learnt: Python :)
(In good spirit)
google knows how to crawl, slurp 3 is out just today so maybe yahoo will improve but even if you give it to them on a plate (sitemap.xml) they still seem to screw it up. The traffic is not worth their bandwidth imo.
You're an evil person for throwing out a challenge like that to a map/demography nerd :). A little trip to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_metropoli... and a little spreadsheet gives 75 million if you only count LA/SF/San Diego in CA, or 85 million if you count all of CA. That's 25-30% of the US population, hardly most.

Now if you were to count GDP of those metro's, I'm guessing you'd be around 50% or more of the country.
Me too. I have already retracted the not so nice things I said about them here

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=165368
Why not just robots.txt out all search engines? Of course, if you did that, it'd be pretty nice to have a "Search" button up there in the orange bar.
Hmmmm...

Don't know enough about the Symbian environment yet. Maybe..
We have built a search of their sites and blogs,
whatever you want to know about Founder's co-op, just search for it here:
http://www.intelliverb.com/Search/?ul=en-us&six=src63343...
Blocking a crawler is a one liner that could be done in a couple seconds. Tackling the limitations of a continuation based architecture is a bigger problem.
We have built a search of their sites and blogs, whatever you want to know about Founder's co-op, just search for it here: http://www.intelliverb.com/Search/?ul=en-us&six=src63343...
Indeed, I work for the company you're thinking of (check out our development blog and you'll see me as the author of about 70% of the posts).

Getting good people to work for a software company writing enterprise software is hard enough, due to factors I've mentioned elsewhere (it's low profile, you're building systems you yourself wouldn't need or use, the deployment model is rough). Getting good people to work doing software stuff at a non-software company is much harder, I'd say. Even if you had great working conditions and got to use innovative processes and technology to do things, which not many non-software companies do, you're still going to get hit the "talent attracts talent" problem.

Talented people want to work with other talented people; otherwise it's a vicious cycle where the best people leave and cause the rest of the good people to leave, and new good people that come in don't want to stick around. The only real way to combat it is to start with a bunch of talented people and then keep your standards high; otherwise, the feedback loop spins you down towards mediocrity in a hurry.
Not evil at all. Letting someone crawl your site is a business decision. If you think the resource cost on your servers is worth the added traffic that the search engine can send, then go for it. For this site, I would guess the resource cost is more (because of storing continuations) and the benefit of traffic is less (since pg doesn't even want it). Therefore, it's a good decision on pg's part and Yahoo's loss.
I think constraining growth IS the way he's trying to invent a better news site.
I wonder if one could improve the efficiency of the crawlers by dynamically updating the robots.txt based on votes and time.
so many choices with Rails...does anybody have any experience with mod_rails?
> are looking for bug returns, not cash thrown off

You can get huge returns from a profitable private company out of owners equity withdrawals over a short period. If the business is not capital intensive there's no real reason to go public, growth market or not.

I see nothing wrong with focusing on the "flip" if the business fundamentally needs a lot of capital or a big parent company. But nobody ever even mentions dividends or buybacks at private valuations. It indicates to me that people are most focussed on taking advantage of a possibly irrational market rather than building real businesses.
> [...] can't use google anymore.

I think pg should just make a search link on top of the site pointing to

http://www.searchyc.com/

or

http://nycs.bigheadlabs.com/
bottom line no.
I can understand not caring how many people read the site, so long as the hacker community is well served. I guess I'm just not quite clear on the downside of growth outside of this community; more useless comments? Comment spam? I also wonder if blocking those Yahoo and MSN crawlers would make it harder for them to compete with Google, because I consider competition a good thing. Eventually, by allowing them access, they may continue to improve their search product.

Perhaps most importantly, I worry that blocking these crawlers might be seen as a political statement against Yahoo and MSN, one which they might take into account when considering the acquisition of a ycombinator funded startup.

-- Fred
Paul, why do you call the firms clones? Aren't you a clone of a seed stage incubator? I absolutely love what you do but to say that there are clones in the investment world (where there is zero scale) is a weird way of looking at the world. You probably have enough money to fund every good idea in each intake but you certainly don't have the time to spread out across those ideas. So if you have inspired more capital to come into this stage then surely that is a good thing for founders?

If there is competition, then founders only win out in the end. If someone was 'pressured' into accepting before other options played out that should be a huge signal to the founder that the firm is less than desirable.
Protocol itself is ok, the problem is that it is tunneled inside TCP, so on top of TCP SYN/ACKs you have HTTPs certificate exchange and then cypher negotiation just to establish connection. Once established the cypher becomes another slowdown.
Run Windows and Linux without virtualization
Allow all or ban all. let's make fairness a rule on the internet, it gives a chance to all startup to emerge by giants side. If Yahoo was not fair to Google no one knows what would have happened.
I'd just like to mention that, if YC clones use the same application forms, it does make life easier for the applicants...
I was calling them clones because that's what other people were calling them.

They are, though. All we have in common with seed stage incubators is investing at the seed stage. What these guys have in common with us is a whole list of distinctive things: investing in multiple startups simultaneously, taking about 6%, using an application form instead of accepting business plans, making founders move to where we are, using a three month timeline, having weekly dinners, bringing in outside experts to speak to the founders as a group, having a Demo Day where they all present to investors. Often whole chunks of text on their sites are paraphrased from ours.
Ok. This sounds like a plan. Thx
YC is a clone of Google's SOC project that occurred the prior summer. Taking on multiple projects simultaneously, providing about 5k, accepting applications, three month timeline, having frequent meetings between people and mentors, bringing in outside mentors, having a day at the end for people to present their accomplishments.

It is natural to be concerned about competitors, but everyone who is being abrasive to these other angels for copying a couple aspects is harming the angel investment community overall. YC is just a couple people with a couple MM, they can't fund everyone.

Bonus similarities: appealing to the young, first session occurred immediately after google's finished, setting up mailing list forum for those interested, primary announcement occurred on slashdot.
"change those two sentences" -- I concur. I would change your pitch to something like "build a knowledge base for your organization". Also, the name.
I agree to the site being invisible to yahoo, msn, ask, etc.

At the same time, please let the newer/upcoming search engines crawl the site, else, google would become IE circa 2000-2004 and there would be very little innovation in search.

my 2 cents.
Russian citizens must register WiFi devices (including laptops) and receive special permission to use them
Either ban them all (Google included) or ban none. But if you must, just limit what they can and cannot crawl.
At first I wanted to write a response to your comment claiming that the Seattle group is not a competitor. After thinking about what to write for a moment, I realized that debating whether or not they are a competitor is not as important as debating whether or not another program like YC is beneficial to the people on this site and this community as a whole.

I believe another program like YC is valuable. Paul has stated several times that there are good ideas and good teams that he simply could not invite to YC because there were more stellar groups he invited. It does not mean that those not invited by YC should not have the opportunity to be funded. The Seattle program is simply another route to the ultimate goal: a nice payday.
I agree it was a lapse in judgement - both the lifting and the lack of attribution. However, in the grand scheme of things it's not that huge a deal, and the important thing for me is that he is correcting the problem right away as soon as possible after being informed of the criticism.
How about allowing an email user interface? If I cc q+myOrganizationName@askurpals.com it'll automatically save the email (and all subsequent replies) to askurpals.com/org/myOrganizationName. That way I don't have to change my routine, or get my coworkers to change their routine.
It's one way. Another way is to use a different algorithm.
I use Yahoo search occasionally and have often been impressed at it finding exact material, with a precise search, that Google couldn't.

Separate from the local implications on News.YC, society benefits by having multiple competing search engines. Seceding from all search indexes but Google contributes to a monopoly/monoculture.

Can you just warn off the stupid crawlers from valueless URLs with some combination of robots.txt, META robots directives, and 'nofollow'? (I'm happy to help craft these signposts, with a description of the URLs to be spared.)
I suspect that it mostly matters for what you use it. Simple accumulation of goods isn't really all that satisfying, but freedom from basic necessities and the the ability to do things and make changes that you otherwise would be incapable of, are very nice.