skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Even if a YC-like firm starts up in Australia (and I know of a few people who think it's a good idea) it won't be of the calibre of YC, if the track record of emulators even in the US is anything to go by. Like Silicon Valley itself, the further ahead YC gets, the more it attracts the best startups and investors, and the further ahead it gets.

The most determined Australian founders are leaving Australia to try and make it on the world stage, so any Australian-based version would be limited to startups that are less determined, or whose ideas are Australia-focused, which by definition would be smaller in scale and ambition.

@Bootload is right to point out Pollenizer - Mick and the crew are doing great things to help develop Australia-focused startups, though the type of investment and support they provide is quite different to YC.

Your best bet is to find the startup community in your city and start interacting with them and sharing your ideas and experiences. The Silicon Beach mailing list and weekly meetups in Sydney and Melbourne are the best way to find fellow founders. The Hive events are also great, though less tech-focused. They started in Melbourne and now happen in Brisbane and Sydney, each month. We also run Hackernews meetups in Melbourne a couple of times a year. Follow @ycmelb on Twitter or stay tuned to HN for announcements.

Ultimately, rather than hoping for a YC-copy in your local area, your best bet is to develop yourself to a point where you can get funded by the real YC.
Acne
Well there is drinking coffee, and DRINKING coffee.

I sure enjoy a cup or two a day and I doubt that is excessive. Drinking lattes also has another nice side-effect: you get to drink some milk, for your daily calcium needs.
The mission of MIT seems to be: gather together lots of smart ambitious people and get them to work on problems of DOD interest.
See you all there.
Samsung G phones, using the android OS, are available on all carriers...

I'm with Verizon and their version, Samsung Fascinate is expected sooon, likely after the launch of the Droid 2
Well, it depends on what cup, what coffee, and your body weight. If you're a skinny dude downing a venti from starbucks every morning, you're in a world of difference than if you brewed a lighter blend and drank from a small coffee cup.

I found myself quite addicted drinking a grande from starbucks every morning. Before that cup I was pretty much useless.
It's harder to verify that a program doesn't violate the browser's security policies and try to get out of the sandbox. That's why NaCl is such an impressive project.
Good for Mozilla, I hope this doesn't get dropped from 4.0 due to deadlines or other reasons. Making it easy and fuss free for users to get security updates for your product may not be a sexy feature but it is a great one.

The reason Safari is the browser that takes the longest for users to apply security updates is because at least on the Mac, most (all?) require a reboot. I still have't updated to 5.01 because of this. Not good. Not good at all.
Geddy - A modular web framework for node.js
It's a game that game developers love. Mostly due to it's unique style and genre defining gameplay. After seeing the 500th FPS we're all eager for some fresh ideas.

The game has been getting tons of attention from the game development community for months. Much game developer productivity has been lost. The threads on it go on with hundreds of posts each. One guy is working on a clone of his own.
I applaud you for your sanity, despite it risking not being politically correct.

I'll risk being even less PC and point out the elephant in the room: illegal immigrants aren't an insignificant factor.

If I'm to trust my anlysis of the context of popular media[1], illegal immigration was already considered a problem by the late 70s. Does anyone know how many people were included in amnesties[2]?

My belief here is that "undocumented" workers aren't subject to the same rules, parrticularly minimum wage. If there are millions of illegal immigrants (not all of whom are workers, granted), there are already jobs out there.

The question is, can those jobs pay at least minimum wage? Even if they could, how many currently unemployed would be willing and able to work them. This, as it applies to farm labor, has been discussed previously on YC[3].

Your mentioning cleaning houses, however, is what prompted me to think in this direction. One of the most valuable things the agencies provide is a membrane of legitimacy, shielding the customer from the liability and administrative headaches (insurance, which you mention, being one of them) of being an employer.

In any case, I agree that finding or creating productive (even minimum wage worthy) work for unskilled (not-yet-skilled?) labor is beneficial to the economy and society as a whole. The confounding factor is that such work in the US tends to attract such labor from outside our borders. I posit that even a successful effort would have no effect until the flow is stopped.

Whether stopping the ingress of unskilled workers is feasible, politically or economically, is another matter.

[1] Borderline (1980) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080465/

[2] e.g. IRCA, NACARA

[3] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1500872
Ah, you added the `</sarcasm>` tag while I was responding …. Anyway, it was an excuse to break out Frink (http://futureboy.us/fsp/frink.fsp), which reports that the resolution required, which (I think) is (1 foot)/(50 terabytes/byte), is 6 * 10^(-15) m, i.e., on the order of the diametre of a proton. Honestly, I thought it would be much smaller.

Another problem is that any rod etched in this way will have two decodings. :-)
I think you should wait and have a look at Dell Streak. The word is that it would be around $500 without a contract
How many digital devices that were created in 1960 are still running today? Most digital devices back then were created using vacuum tubes. How many vacuum tube makers still exist? The military was buying vacuum tubes from Checkoslovakia in the 80's to keep the SAGE early warning system running. ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semi_Automatic_Ground_Environme... That's because there were no American manufacturers of vacuum tubes after the late 70's.

Sure, we still have the technical specifications for how to build it, but manufacturing the individual components would be a giant pain in the ass.
13 Ways to Promote your Local Business for Free 
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I can't imagine forging something that big and casting at a foundry wouldn't I think produce what you'd need (maybe, and it would be a cast iron b----, so to speak to do :-). A bit of work with Google came up with this NRC Fact Sheet: http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/pr... which says they "are made of thick steel plates that are welded together" which is what you'd expect. If this was good enough for later 20th century warship armor (which most certainly got put to the ultimate test!) (ADDED:) and submarines (which get put to the test every time they dive) it's good enough for this purpose.

Given that, it wouldn't take too much effort to cobble together what you would need to do it (stuff to hold the work in progress, like the two submarine shipyards we keep alive for the obvious reasons), but it's specialized and low volume enough I'm not be surprised there are only a handful operational in the world right now, and of course post-TMI the US wouldn't have one of them.
Flipboard Turns Twitter Into Your Own Magazine
I find it amazing that somebody came up with a universal language for data extraction and nothing is being done with it.
> People said floppy disks wouldn't last 30 years too. Yet, I've got some C64 disks that are approaching that age quickly. While I'm sure there is some corruption, most of them still work just fine.

I think that this is luck; I found a batch of 8-year-old floppies a few years ago, and more than 2/3 of them were unreadable.
I just got an iPhone4 so obviously that would be my recommendation. I don't think you could go wrong with it or one of the new Android phones.

Since you're already on AT&T and don't mind staying I wonder if you could buy one phone and try it out for a couple weeks and then take it back and try another. That's the only way to really find out about each (Android vs. iOS) since most discussion on the internet about them has reached emacs vs. vi level.
Mind reading is on the market
http://www.blueprintcss.org/ uses an 800px wide content area.

1024x768 hits the sweet spot for my clients.
But your 286 is already exceptional, how many other computers of that vintage are still functional today? This is analogous to particle decay in a radioactive material, you can't predict accurately when any given atom of uranium will decay, but you can describe the rate of decay by the time at which close to half the particles in the sample will have decayed. The half-life of the typical consumer grade PC is ten years or so, from what I've seen (this is an estimate, but this would be a good research project for someone), but just because a model of a given computer still works after 20 years, doesn't mean it will work in another five.
If you have sleep apnea, go get yourself a damn CPAP machine and wear it when you sleep. Sleep apnea is almost, but not quite, as bad as never even sleeping. That means dozing off during every quiet moment of the day, having waking hallucinations, waking up just as tired as you felt when you went to bed, even sleeping all weekend. Your concentration and mental abilities end up just plain shot. I've known two people with sleep apnea and they both turned their lives around considerably when they had it treated.
I'd give a shot at DVD, make 3 copies of each disk, put the physical media in an air-tight container filled with helium, and put it all in a salt mine used for physical records storage.
America's has decided on a solution that is politically correct. After this decision was made, all other ideas are considered null, void and being preached by idiots.

The solution it has decided is: Stop buying products from sweat shops and fly to poor countries and have 10 college students build a house. Generally the politically correct solutions are ones that provide no solution but make people "feel good." Also discussing why it is politically correct is not politically correct (so you'll have a hard time finding people willing to explain this to you).

This is all part of a larger movement that (here is where the facts stop and my analysis starts) seems to be a rebound from the industrial revolution.
You're coming up again? Sweet!
punchcards.
When I used to work in an office we had this kid who worked with us who I don't think washed his clothes ever. He would have stains on his shirts and pants and was just generally disgusting. We finally had to tell him that he needed to clean up.

His clothes are now cleaner, but he's still pretty dirty. It's especially noticeable right after a new game comes out that he spends all night playing (WoW, and I'm told now SC2).
That one requires you to be an Android Developer (for $25), and it doesn't work with AT&T's 3G.
Time to Say Goodbye to Yahoo
Leak case spotlights an MIT divide
People - please stop using FTP
I'm very OC about this. Anytime I eat or feel my fingers have become oily or dirty I have to wash my hands before working on the keyboard. Of course my keyboard still gets dirty over time, but not nearly as bad as some peoples I've looked at.
What's going to defeat Google at Search is when generic search engines become "good enough" and every website has an excellent integrated search engine. The competition is catching up faster than most people think. In the future nobody is going to ever type http://www.google.com into their web browser and Google knows this. That's why they're pushing into Mobile and Facebook so hard -- they're screwed if they don't.
If you're making $25k * 12 = $300k just by working you probably have some kind of specialized skill. If everyone could do it, the price wouldn't be so high.
I'm curious if you'll end up saving money.
Berlin as explained by many here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1565375
Even so, it should be possible, especially if full documentation for the interface and filesystem used is included. There will probably still be a few computers around which still use SATA interfaces, even if it's only because of how old they are.

And currently, it's fairly easy to get data off of LPs, and they're actually somewhat popular for musical releases. There are devices which let you record LPs into computers, even. So perhaps not quite the best comparison.

(A minor nitpick: it being a SSD doesn't matter. The interface used to connect to it does. There is no difference in the hardware used to talk to a SSD or a HD, as long as they're both using a SATA connector. Note that I refer to the entire unit, what you get if you buy a HD or SSD, not to the actual internal systems that unit uses to access and store data. Those are obvious different, but the computer talking to it doesn't have to know about them.)
Ligher roast coffees actually have more caffeine than the darker roast. The roasting process destroys caffeine.

Alton Brown mentions this on the Good Eats episode about coffee :)

Even then, from my additional readings on the topic the difference appears to be very small.
E-Book Wars: The Specialist vs. the Multitasker
If he's running Linux I'd be hesitant to recommend an iPhone 4, but I've never tried. I suspect lack of iTunes would be annoying. Is there a good iTunes substitute on Linux now?
And what could possibly go wrong?
It seems everybody believes they live in an above average location for startups, similar to how everybody believes they are smarter than average.

I grew up 10 minutes from Hew Hope, PA, then moved to Philadelphia, and recently moved to San Francisco. New Hope is nice, so is Philly, but they're simply in a different league. Yet, at entrepreneur events people were excited about the prospects for becoming the next Silicon Valley.

If you don't believe this, just goto one VLAB or Hackers and Founders in the valley to realize the difference.
Build a Linux Media Center PC
So how does this work, I'm doing something in my browser and it spontaneously restarts, losing whatever I'm filling into a form?

I have noticed with Firefox 3 if I ignore its updates for too long it goes to 100% CPU and stays there until I kill it in Task Manager, then on restart it installs its updates. This never happens unless there's an unapplied update waiting...
If there is no net neutrality, is there now a new net liability?
The title of this post probably mislead you, but identifying friends is just a subset of what Google is trying to do here.

If I'm searching for a good online backup service I care more about the opinions of people I follow on twitter than those of my non-technical friends and family, etc.
nokia n900
I am surprised no-one has mentioned, Cambridge.

* 7% of all of European VC is invested in Cambridge (http://noweurope.com/2010/01/13/case-study-what-can-we-learn...), which is not bad for a City of 125,000 people.

* Close enough (50 mins by train) from London's ecosystem of VCs

* Close to Stansted airport for easy access to the rest of Europe

* Large density of tech companies, and tech competent employees. Similarly the professional advisors (lawyers/accountants) etc understand startups.

* Costs are (generally speaking) considerably less than London. Most costs (rent, salaries, professional fees) are 20-33% cheaper than London.

* Pleasant attractive historic town.

* One of the world's best universities, along with a significant research presence from the likes of Microsoft ensures there's lots of smart people about.

* For a long time Cambridge companies have been interesting startups but not made successful large businesses but the likes of ARM, Autonomy, CSR etc have all grown up to be billion dollar businesses.
your flippant comment seems likely to be downvoted by
folks who have encountered mental illness

This 'flippant' comment was made by someone with enough experience with mental illness to not warrant downvoting based on their own projection of me not having enough respect for the seriousness of mental illness.

Do you really need an explanation of why programmers might
be at risk of mental health problems?

Yes, I really need an explanation of why mental health problems would be especially common among programmers and why Zed would need to include it in a book aimed at aspiring programmers. I don't think the risk of mental problems is even remotely close to the the risk of some of the physical problems mentioned, because contrary to your anecdote, every programmer I've met so far did not work alone for extended periods and was not reclusive. You're making the same dubious generalization as Zed: turning your own experience into something that you suppose to be 'common'. I'm asking for evidence of that. Your personal experience with loneliness does not provide that.

The question is what additional risks to your mental health becoming a programmer introduces, beyond the fact that mental health problems are already reason number one for disfunctioning, unhappiness, and even death in certain age categories. Should every writer of every introduction on any professional subject include a section on mental health problems, because everyone is at risk of them? I'd rather advocate people being taught the risks of certain working conditions in highschool.
I don't know about Linux since I quit using it on the desktop years ago. Someone responded to me a couple weeks ago in another iPhone related thread and said linux works fine with the iPhone - YMMV though.
Transmit the data with a laser to a mirror 25 light years away.
Funny Beer Moments
Beer is definitely one of the man’s best friends. Don't you think so?
I am concerned, based on a friend's experience with a Behold II that Samsung will abandon the device and not provide software updates.

In the case of the Behold II, Samsung promised an update to Android 2.0 when it became available. After it did, Samsung claimed that it wasn't compatible with the device. Third-party developers succeeded in running 2.1 on it, but, lacking drivers, many hardware features did not work.
Interesting question. I think once you get outside of the Bay Area, it really doesn't matter anymore where you are.

SF has the whole echo chamber thing going for it, which can be a huge advantage, and it has tons of little startups to interact with. Nowhere else has either of those, so there's no particular reason to pick one place over another.

In Europe, I've set up shop in Pamplona, Chamonix, Kalymnos, and now in a little town up in the Lake District of England. Each has pretty much exactly the same startup culture, consisting entirely of me and whatever other developers I've brought out with me.
> Mental health is partially (largely?) a function of physical health.

If only that were true, then the answer for every mental problem would be 'exercise'.

Not saying that people with mental health issues wouldn't benefit from exercise in general, but that goes for everybody, not just for them.

And even if their mental state would improve I'd be surprised to see 'schizophrenia cured by exercise' as a headline. And the same would go for plenty of other mental health issues. Mental health is influenced by physical health to some extent but to claim it is a function of physical health is a step too far I think. You can have perfectly healthy people with a very bad mental make-up and vice versa.
What a coincidence, today, several years after using several high end, cutting edge smart phones of many kinds (Symbian/RIM/Android), I simply took my SIM card and insert it into an old Nokia 3110c ( http://www.google.com/images?q=nokia%203110 ), I have found in my drawer.

It just a lightweight phone which easy to use as a phone (dial, read/write text messages).

Let us face it. Anywhere I am (home or office) I have at least 4 different ways to connect to the web and waste my time over there [;-)].
Such stories are extremely varied. You're now arguing that people in general, not programmers specifically, commonly face mental health problems. The question here is what additional risks you run when you become a programmer. If there are only few or none, then including a section on mental health in a book about learning to program is really straying from the subject of the book.
I have an iPhone 4 too and would definitely recommend it.

I know you can use Rhythmbox to sync music and videos to the device. Not sure about apps, but you can definitely just download apps on the device itself. Also, I hear iTunes runs fine in Wine, so that's also an option.
In short -

> SSD storage devices are five to fourteen times faster than their rotational brothers using a default 8.4.X Postgresql configuration

This should've really been at the top of the article ;)
I wonder what people think about the non-screened applications for Android, and that many applications have (retro-actively) been pulled because they send private information to douchebags? I'm imagining with Androids popularity, it's going to end up being a world similar to the PC world, where you have Windows cheezoid OS with some antivirus/antiphishig app having to overlook all your applications and make sure they behave properly. Personally I still think the Apple way of pre screening is healthier, as long as it doesn't get draconian. Which poison do you pick?
Yeah, this is exactly why it will never happen in Paris. (I live there too)
Between Google Sync (over the air email/contact/calendar sync ActiveSync), Pandora and Rdio (streaming music services), and the App Store updates, I almost never sync to iTunes.

I'm not sure how it would be if I couldn't as every so often i do sync some music or movies. But cloud services are making iTunes and the USB cable more and more irrelevant.

It's a shame Apple is so bad at cloud services itself.
Design to Inspire Fanatic Customers, Align with Motivated Partners, and Execute
Have fun - wish I could be there!
Out of curiosity, how large would the time capsule need to be to contain 5TB of data encoded that way?
Cost of living is very hight, taxes are very hight, there's not a lot of VCs (compared to SF, NY, london or berlin), bureaucracy is a hell in france from opening a bank account to pay bills or taxes, it's difficult to get a work visa ...
> contrary to your anecdote, every programmer I've met so far did not work alone for extended periods and was not reclusive

> I'm asking for evidence of that

I can't speak for 'mechanical_fish' but I've seen plenty of evidence of that, including two very sad cases (very smart but socially mal-adapted people that ended up living more or less like hermits).
http://browsersize.googlelabs.com/
I don't think compilation per se would make this sort of program run faster. The slowness would be better addressed by giving a lot of computation to the GPU, which is the direction browsers are headed (e.g. WebGL). For whatever reason, people don't like compiling stuff, and I think that's a primary constraint.
No quite sure what you mean, if you write something like this:

void DoSomething(Fuit fruit, uint quantity) { .. }

Inside that method you will be guaranteed to receive only apples or bananas and a non-negative integer for quantity.