skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Startups - like any market - are a parimutuel system. Your payout is determined not just by whether you're right or not, but by how many other people are also right. If you bet on social networks in 2004, you'd be right, but unless you're Mark Zuckerburg or Tom Anderson, you wouldn't have gotten rich off it.

So really, you need "a crazy idea that most people think is stupid, but is less crazy for customers than for competitors." Either that, or there has to be some barrier to entry that lets you execute but prevents everyone else from executing, even though they can see the same opportunity that you can.
For what it's worth, last year, a handful of companies didn't end up launching on the day(s) of the conference (probably because they weren't ready vs strategy)
Agreed, with one caveat: I don't define a successful startup as one that makes you wildly rich. (i.e. given Zuckerburg's "paper" value, I don't consider facebook as being successful... yet)
In a RESTful world you might thing of moving a chess piece as POSTing a new location value to /chess/game/1234/piece/. To concede, You could POST a "concede" flag to /chess/game/1234. That seems to me like the simplest way to state the actions, but I'm sure there are many semantically equivalent ways to accomplish the same thing.
While I can't speak for all people, the aspies I know use "neurotypical" as a neutral label, not a derogatory one. What would you have them call everyone else?
Certainly. By 'avenues of complaint,' I was referring to the FDIC and other regulators he was seeking out, not to the Hacker News post, which clearly has relevance and value to others.

The heart of my suggestion was that while it is easy to pour a lot of negative energy into fighting 'their unethical business practices' that 'fleece consumers,' it is more profitable (not to mention ultimately more satisfying) to keep one's focus squarely on creating value.
TechMeme Leaderboard's Top Ten: Six Months In
Yahoo unveils a smarter mobile search
>In retrospect, I should have left it out.

No, in retrospect, the company you were interviewing with would not have enjoyed your services anyway, if your disability was indeed the key factor. More importantly, you probably wouldn't have liked the environment either.

You've created an immensely popular and beneficial website (no, I don't have AS), which is something to be proud of. You shouldn't be hiding that from potential employers, regardless of the fact that some of them may be unscrupulous.
Google to Lay Off About 300 at DoubleClick
It's true PG says this, but at least on a subconscious level (if not a conscious one) its probably not 100% true. There are practical limits to the number of companies YC can fund (space, time, money).
Setup.

I flick my TV on, you go plugging things in and finding a nice wall to point at.
When you say out loud or write in English what you intend to do you will say 'I moved my piece from b2 to b3'. When you invoke a method to accomplish this inside of a single process you say (move piece :b3) or piece.move(:b3). Why then, when the network gets involved do we do the semantic gymnastics to recast this to 'I posted a document describing a move that a piece could take to a resource identifier describing such a piece'? Why would 'piece' even be a distinct resource in the first place? What would come back if you GET a piece? I'll argue that 'piece' is only a resource so that it can serve as the implicit first 'self' argument to the 'move' method call.

My assertion is not that it is impossible to torture some domain into a document centric model, I'm just saying that the limit of your motivation for doing so as the distance from 'document' to your specific domain goes to infinity is 'fashion'.
Rails is moving from SVN to Git
Never underestimate the lucrative "t-shirts that say things" market.
Thanks. That was the main reason for posting our experience. In California, it's sad that credit card companies get away with predatory rate hikes and retroactive finance charges when individuals face usury charges for rates over the higher of 10% or 5% + prime:

http://ag.ca.gov/consumers/general/usury.php

I think it's much more damaging to allow massive rate hikes than high static rates. At least with high rates, we know enough to avoid them.
I don't think so. Most people don't want massive screens and don't know how to effectively use more than one anyway.

Game developers are already having problems with the expense and time required to push out the artwork for today's games. There will come a point, and it might even be here with games like Spore, where the industry will focus more on gameplay than having the most advanced games possible. Regardless, there are quite a few laptops that can play Crysis without problem. I linked to one earlier, and it costs under $1300.

/And/ with more people playing games on consoles, the need for high end PCs just to play games is less important. I think there are many factors that are coming together to make desktops less useful.

Of course there will always be those hardcore fanatics that just need the speed that only a big desktop tower can push out, but those numbers are decreasing by the month I bet.
Unless my info is out of date (Checked this a couple years ago), the projectors use something like 2 orders of magnitude more energy. Over the long run this can lead to a significant cost difference.
what do you have to lose?! just writing the application is a great experience -- the process helps you think carefully about many of your ideas and how you articulate them.

you better hurry though, just a few hours till the deadline. We started working on ours very early, put it through many revisions and edits and that really helped.
Ask YC: Should a startup's business model be kept secret?
While most startups are focused on making something people want and getting users, they might have half an eye on a business model.

The thing is, should business models (whether it's advertising, a buyout, etc.) be kept secret?
We should note that IT itself is a kind of an "Aspergism-Amplifier": When one has an aspie-bias before, IT might make it stronger. And when one switches from math or IT to project management and similar social activities, aspergism steps a bit back (even if the untold rules, rituals, and mean social games can be a real pain). I experienced that myself several times and know of other people who told me that, too.

And sometimes I feel that being an aspie is even caused by a dumb social environment that isolates normal people with interest in math, tech, logic, a.s.o. as nerds.
You're right. We won't waste much more time unless there's some sort of class action lawsuit that is real profitable (and consequently, highly satisfying) :-)
Think of us as The Week for the Facebook set. ;-)
Twitter, The Social Lubricant of the 21st Century
Why does Clickpass not work for me?
I put my openID in, submit, and it takes me to claimid.com, which is where i have my openID, and I enter my correct credentials there, and then I am returned to the "Bad OpenID login" ID page at Hacker News.

Am I missing something?
Ergonomics. If you want to keep using your computer for years to come, you should learn something about it.
Great feedback we'll definetly apply changes. Thx.
Well, just to get this out of the way: no, it's not in geostationary orbit, it's just a big balloon. It is, of course, not possible to be in a geostationary orbit above Texas anyway, because Texas isn't on the equator.

Anyway, I'd have much more respect for this project if their justification for wanting go launch a giant banana-shaped balloon to fly over Texas were less like:

"One is in terms of arts; this project will help to consolidate the beginning of an art practice, using the sky as a canvas for artistic expressions. Also adding to the visual arts discipline, are all the characteristics of this new practice, like visually communicating with a large audience instantly, or evolving the concept of space in the arts (for example, from perspective to orbital space), and so on."

... and more like ...

"Because it'd be awesome. Duh!"
An Employer’s View: Teamwork
Living With Autism
7 soon to be released Ruby and Rails books
Most credit card companies are based out of Delaware because of its absence of aggressive usury laws. With no physical presence in California, California's laws are mostly inapplicable to the relationship between an interstate card issuer and you.

Fundamentally though, anyone who supports free markets and the idea that you are capable of (or at least responsible for) managing you own life better than some state or federal regulator should see usury laws as an unnecessary and unwelcome invasion on the freedom of contract.

When you or I sign up for a credit card, we freely enter into a contract with the issuer that has certain terms, which may include the lender's right to increase the rate of interest at any time. If that term isn't acceptable to us, then there is nothing that forces us to accept the agreement. And no regulator is necessary to prevent the issuer from offering us those terms. We can simply walk away. No one is holding a gun to our head and making us take the credit card.

As as aside: if you think the terms for consumer credit cards are bad, you've never read and signed a merchant agreement! Those are fearsome. ;)
Back in the 90s there was a reality show where an urban Japanese family traded places with a family of some primitive African tribe. The bits of it I saw were fairly hilarious. There was a lot of mirror image confusion about things like preparing food, how to use a bathroom, etc.
Former Facebook employee sheds light: never going to make money on apps.
Actually the bonus with t-shirts is that it doesn't cost a ton of money. I used to work with a company that made most of its money off of t-shirts.

Getting 144 t-shirts printed with one color costs about 500 dollars, including the shirts. You can sell these for $20, which means you make about $2300. You don't really need to make more than 144 (unless you are at the level of CollegeHumor) because there are so many just-in-time style print shops. If you sell out, you can have another run made in less than a week.
people definitely need to think different!
REST does have an advantage over SOAP in that it more easily takes advantage of the properties of the HTTP over which it runs: verbs, caching, etc. With REST it's very easy to separate requests which change data from those which don't. Also, it's usually more concise.

I think it's easier to code for REST than SOAP, although, by choice, I've done more of it. I have worked on some SOAP processes; while I concede it's easier to drag-and-drop SOAP objects in an IDE, the verbosity of the ensuing transactions makes it easy to overlook errors and much harder to fix them.

It may be more fashionable to use REST (although I know of some circles where the opposite is true) but just because a trend is growing doesn't means it's bad. REST seems like more of a grass-roots trend while SOAP is more something that's sold to its users (that's just my impression; I'd be glad to hear arguments to the contrary.) There are a lot of technologies you could describe as more "fashionable" because their use is growing - but their intrinsic merits or suitability for an emerging purpose might be the cause of that - e.g. the web, email, pork-based cocktails. Er, strike that last one.
From the article: that elusive space between laptops and smart phones

Well, the laptops are getting smaller and the phones are getting bigger. It should be obvious that they'll meet in the middle.
Linden Labs Make Enhancements To Second Life Grid
G. Polya: How to Solve It
unless you're doing something truly unique with it or by giving it away you give away your startup's idea which itself might be somehow secretive, why bother keeping it secret? seems like it would be more of a hindrance than a benefit
congrats -- wasn't dissing the 7% was just surprised. 12-14% ain't bad :)
http://www.clickpass.com/docs/contact
You might have better luck asking Clickpass themselves - they probably have a support/help form. I don't think most hackers enjoy the tech-support role.
this is a hacker crowd -- I imagine most people here have a ton of content already on a computer, which using a projector makes it much easier to watch.

1. agreed on dark room.

2. if the projector is mounted high (as it should be) this is not an issue

3.I was in military barracks half the size of a normal bed room and my projector still had a very tight 4-5 foot screen on a bare wall -- oh and it was $600 OTB.
I think the college years in the US are partly similar to the senior years of what other countries may call senior high (it is that way in Australia) - generally that would be an exageration though to say that they are equivalent - and its kind of just a terminology thing. College does go further then seniour high though. End result of a university degree would be comparable I would think (for an undergrad) - on average (of course the US has outstanding top end universities which probably don't compare, or if they do they compare to very very few unis around the world).
and post-setup? with a $600 projector rand a $200 surround sound system, an Xbox 360 or laptop, it's honestly 15-20 minutes to setup.
$100-$200 for portable screen (or use awhite/ beige wall and you'll be fine)

Image quality imho is very, very nice on a projector.

FWIW, imho, its' about the same as a movie theater, at scale
>"laptops have always had 80% of speed at 120% of the cost."

Where do you get this from? I have the impression that the price difference has been decreasing.
Identifying Top Developers
Ask YC: Help Me With A Math Problem
I hate to admit it, but my math is a bit rusty. Can someone show me how to solve the following equation for x?

k = x/(ln x)
3b5 seems too fast. Feels like I'm being cheated out of some rendering or laying out work it can be doing.
Err... I meant AS is well-known in IT, not my site :)
I was going to post the exact same comment just now. I loved `Influence', read it in almost one sitting. Makes you look at marketing and interaction under a different light.
Applying to YC this cycle?  Please don't wait till the last minute.
The application deadline for the current cycle is tonight at 10 pm EST. If you're applying, we strongly suggest you not wait till 9:30 pm EST to edit and submit your application. Profiling suggests that due to the increase in traffic to News.YC since last cycle, if a lot of people edit applications at once, some of your http requests may time out. To save yourself the stress of wondering whether we got your application, and save us from getting a lot of panicked emails, please don't literally wait till the last minute.
this is the same as the "are ideas worthless?" debate. Your business model is nothing more than "your idea of how you will generate income". therefore some may think it is only as valuable as your experience and your credibility. a buyout is an exit not a business model. your plan will remain secret as long as you are not making money. my advice is tell your investors how you will make money if they ask, and let anyone else figure it out on their own.
No, someone has probably tried it before.
ie, if you have a patent pending on it.. keep it secret until then.
I asked that question a while ago and quite a few people responded: http://paulstamatiou.com/2007/12/21/are-desktop-computers-dy...
thank you PG ;) for adding competition from another 100 super-smart-and-hungry-geeks who can't wait to launch the next world-changing web application or hardware or whatever it is they are working on. and "good-coding" to you guys, i think you will need that more than "good-luck".
I theorize that downward pressure on group size is actually applied at the application level...since they set aside a single long weekend for the interviews, and there are only so many hours in a day...they can't possibly interview everybody, and they may (consciously or otherwise) prune while reading applications in order to avoid having too many to interview. That's just a theory, of course, and the size has been creeping up each cycle (to the point where I found the dinner I attended from WFP08 too crowded and noisy for comfortable conversation). It could be that they'll eventually switch to having two interview weekends, or a whole week of interviews.
Video: Meet Karl Pilkington
I don't know of an analytical solution (I don't believe there is one -- if there is, please correct me). The solution depends on the value of k as follows:

For k<0, there is exactly one solution for x, 0<x<1.

For 0<=k<e, there is no solution

For k=e, we simply have x=e.

For k>e, there are two solutions for x. Plot x/ln(x) on a graph and use numerical methods to find them.
What do you mean, solve it? There's nothing to solve for since we don't know whether k is a constant or what..
Well, I can't really disagree, but I would offer a slightly different interpretation: The news media, especially print media, is written by and for white-collar, upper-middle class people. It's not just the aspie truck drivers, plumbers, carpenters, cops, factory workers, taxi drivers, and salesclerks that aren't getting any press: none of these blue-collar workers are getting any press.

One reason that aspie IT workers got enough media attention to become a stereotype is that white-collar workers actually have to interact with them from time to time.
I would presume k is a constant.
Normal banner impressions are not worth the space on Facebook, but there are various sponsorship opportunities which show potential. Many of the top apps make quite a bit in revenue, even if they do not rely on canvas pages. In general, any app that is being used has potential to make money.
Very cool - and it's free!
I'm not generally an advocate for SOAP. SOAP is good for basically one thing, which is sending Java/C# objects over HTTP and having them arrive on the other side looking the way you expect. My preference for languages like JavaScript leads to a preference for lightweight (mostly JSON-bearing) web services that most people would call REST. I agree that SOAP has been the subject of way too much promotion of the part of tools vendors trying to sell bloated web-services stacks.

The reason for my rant is that REST has become a battle-cry in some kind of reactionary anti-vendor uprising, which obscures the issue. The word REST has a very precise meaning and almost all of the celebrated 'REST' services (Flickr, Amazon, Facebook, etc.) fail to meet the criteria. Those services are just lightweight RPC over HTTP, and there's nothing wrong with doing a service like that. For client programs written in 'dynamic' languages, those kind of services are preferable.

REST is for documents, and time spent trying to find the 'resource' to be POSTed to in 'finalize this multi-step transaction between these two interest-bearing accounts' is time wasted. The linguistic gymnastics necessary to jam an RPC peg into a CRUD hole just make the service developer look silly.

Cheers.
How We Tweet: The Definitive List of the Top Twitter Clients
This is a repost. See:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=101601

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=101527

A search feature on News.YC would be nice.
You can use profile boxes to send people directly to your own site - as long as it's the "application" itself, not just an ad.
From the article: Even the 3ds Max 9 and POV-Ray rendering tests seem slower in 64-bit mode.

Rendering using many instances of many data structures. This requires a large number of address pointers. When you move from a 32 bit environment to a 64 bit environment, those pointers grow from four bytes to eight byte each. That can reduce the effectiveness of a processor cache by 15% or more. Switch to 64 bit only if you're squeezed.
Microsoft OOXML was NOT approved by ISO
haha.... it is like my CS professor. We had to submit our programming assignments before midnight, and if it was more than a minute late, we would get a 0. Needless to say that 90% of people waited until last minute to submit, and his little server will crash often (and you would hear screams from students not being able to submit). Programmers are some of the bigest procrastinators, ever.

So, he decided to give 4 points bonus if somebody submited at least 24hrs before. That actually worked, as more people started submiting earlier.
So, pg, maybe you need to give some incentives, or at least look at earlier sumissions more favoribly.
The Top 6 Non monetary Features I Want In An Employer
Getting the .com name is right - but don't try to just on the "creative" bandwagon (http://www.cederman.com/?p=30).

It's interesting that people do go for such similar patterns, when easily memorable stuff is still available (eg, I named my blog before I registered the domain, and the domain was still available - http://www.ofallandsundry.com/)
I disagree. If everyone knows that an area is an amazing opportunity, then it's probably not an amazing opportunity. Every single runaway success at some point had a whole host of people saying, "That's ridiculous-- it'll never work" on some level.

examples:

1) When google was on its way up, it was a well-understood fact that no one could make real money on search. Oops.

2) When Excite was getting funding, everyone told them that search was dumb. People would do 1 search and bookmark what they cared about (and would never search again).

3) The very idea of youtube (giving away tremendous piles of storage and bandwidth) didn't seem very smart to a lot of people. Plenty of online video startups had failed.

4) Blogger couldn't get more funding and had to lay off their entire team.

5) If I described twitter to you 3 years ago, would you have been blown away by the idea?

6) Salesforce.com was not exactly warmly embraced by the enterprise when they first launched.

7) Marc Andreessen said he was constantly stonewalled by businesses when selling them stuff at Netscape. "The Internet? Inside our network?! MADNESS!"

Hindsight make these ideas seem obvious-- but at the time, they were pretty ridiculous.

As you say, most ridiculous ideas ARE really ridiculous. Thus the "necessary but not sufficient" part.
pg: here's an interesting statistic you might publicize in a future cycle - what is the average length-til-deadline of successful applicants vs. unsuccessful ones? While I'm sure there's a lot of noise in such data, my intuition is that people who wait til the last minute do a sloppy job and it affects their chances.
People who apply early do have an advantage, because we read their applications and sometimes suggest changes that would improve their chances.
Seriously guys, I know becoming a successful entrepreneur requires taking some risks, but for Pete's sake, stay away from funding your aspirations with credit card debt. If it hits the fan, your credit rating could become ruined forever. Not to mention you could easily crater into bankruptcy, which is a predicament that not only has financial and legal implications, but social and emotional ones as well.

Fund your start up with equity, not debt. Either your own, or somebody else's.

Too many lives are ruined with credit card burdens...