skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not sure why you were downvoted - the age of this is relevant. Example:

> "Convergence is happening faster, and with more dramatic implications for the net, in Canada than anywhere else on earth. We outpace even the United States in this regard, with its richly-financed WebTV and AOLTV experiments."

And yet the situation has reversed. Streaming media in Canada is almost non-existent - it took years for iTunes to show up in the great white north, Pandora, Last.fm do not exist there, nor does Hulu or Netflix (though the latter is about to change). As a Canadian living in the US, the pervasiveness of the internet in our media consumption here is earth-shatteringly far ahead of what we have in Canada.

Canada, at the time of this piece's writing, may have been ahead in its experimentations into the internet. At this point in time though, it is a virtual internet backwater. I lay the blame squarely on archaic protectionist media laws, as well as a thoroughly uncontrolled telecom monopoly worse than the most terrible of American telcos.

Canadians now live in an information backwater - where many innovative forms of media distribution and production are simply not allowed to exist, due to laws originally designed to prevent over-Americanization of our media. Other forms of media are allowed to exist, but cannot because most Canadians, despite having broadband, have onerous bandwidth caps (that are being lowered over time!) that prevents the streaming and constantly-connected lifestyle from proliferating. The traffic-shaping that the ISPs practice (and that the CRTC regulators conveniently overlook), along with the telcos stranglehold over the government (almost all attempts at allowing third party ISPs to compete have failed) do not help matters either. The situation of the internet in Canada is truly dire.
Eh, I actually think that for Entrepreneurs, income is more important than average income minus average expenses.

The thing is that yeah, a room in a shared house in San Jose is going to cost you twice what it costs elsewhere... but it's still only $700 a month.

Yeah, as I get older and start a family, I'll care more about the cost of a reasonable standard of housing... but while I'm bootstrapping and willing to live in a place that is beneath my means, I think average income matters more than average cost of living.
I did read Postman's book a few years back, so there certainly may be themes from there that I've inadvertently referenced. I feel that Postman was talking more about the challenges associated with media, while I was looking at our ideas surrounding consumption.

For the record, though, "Amusing Ourselves to Death" was quite a good read. :-)
sometimes it just takes someone to get the ball rolling. we'd honestly really rather have this be "everyone's project" instead of "our project". Please contribute. This is ideally going to be a very open process with lots of people committing code and ideas.

It would be a waste to ignore whatever ideas you came up with in 7-8 months of thinking about the app.
> "Argue with the person across the table as though you love them."

Excellent. Probably one of the best way to be willing to actually change your mind. http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/How_To_Actually_Change_Your_M...
This particular piece was "heated," in part because such things sometimes need to be.

From what I have seen, the only need that serves is the emotional gratification of the author and, sometimes, a few of the readers. It doesn't generally foster constructive change.

I live without a car. People find that shocking. Most folks assume I am simply "poor". But people in my neighborhood are walking more and the neighborhood itself is healthier, with cleaner air and healthier plants and so on. I live without drugs, in spite of a serious "incurable" medical condition. this is so shocking to people that I get accused of being a liar, charlatan and snake oil salesman. I have found that handling such information quietly and non-confrontationally is the only real hope of getting the word out. People that I argue with about it wind up defensive and even more committed to doing destructive, counter-productive things. In contrast, people who went googling for such information and tripped across my little website in some odd corner of the web are thrilled to pieces. Someday, I will get better at "marketing" myself and figure out how to make money so I can leave my day-job. In the meantime, I continue to keep one small candle burning. It greatly reduces my need to piss and moan and curse the darkness.

Peace.
The same way I would turn $25000 into $25001, use $25000 to create something with a higher value. The easiest route would be carefully purchasing $1000 - $2000 cars, get them running/AC/etc, then slap a $200 paint job and sell for $2500 - $5000. You'd have to be careful and selective so that your time and the parts line up for the margins you're looking for, and then the resale process. This doesn't scale since if you continually buy up low priced cars, you'll drive thw prices per car up in the region, but it's nice for extra cash to do 1-3 cars at a time.
Learn About HTML5 and the Future of the Web from Brad Neuberg - Marakana
"I would by an iPad if..."

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1579062
It shouldn't be an issue since we queue up events and batch send them out.
I think you miss the point, there's a massive gap between understanding a market and successfully capturing it.

Regardless of a VCs understanding of it, if the founders can't capitalize on it, but can talk the talk, it's gonna fail.

Some successful sales actually prove a basic level of competence. It also shows the founders have a whole host of other skills, they can run a basic company, have some sort of idea how to market let alone gain traction, there really is a market for the product rather than vague projections, etc.
Vote up? Sure. Bury? No, since burying it in "record time" denies other people the opportunity to vote on it.
There was more driving the Bubble than investors deciding early which startups to fund. For one thing there was another entire layer of guessing, as noob LPs poured money into venture funds created by noob VCs. That's not happening now. In fact the situation is the opposite; the VC business is contracting.
I love stuff like this. Another great collection of bit fiddling hacks is Henry S. Warren's excellent book, "Hacker's Delight" - http://www.hackersdelight.org/
Android Users Can Now Bump Phones to Send Money Via Paypal
Population density: http://www.mapofusa.net/us-population-density-map.htm

There is obviously some correlation. I find it hard to tell just by looking how much of the variance that explains.
I wouldn't underestimate Julian Assange either. He made the first free portscanner (precursor to Nmap), co-invented Rubberhose deniable encryption and wrote the Usenet caching software NNTPCache. He knows what he's doing.
This is a good start, you've got my attention.

Maybe a 3rd party auction where car retailers bid each other down for your sale?
One of our axioms at Y Combinator is not to think of deal flow as a zero-sum game. Our main focus is to encourage more startups to happen, not to win a larger share of the existing stream.

When I read this it reminded me of the good things that Google does to make the internet easier and faster. It's self-interested -- the better the internet gets, the more people click on their ads -- but in an inclusive way: there are auxiliary benefits that accrue to a lot of third parties (like me, using Chrome right now). In YC's case, that would be the population of startup founders and anyone who benefits from the startups they found.

I like it when companies behave this way. Maybe there are degrees of self-interest and this is a more enlightened one. It's too much to expect companies to do good things irrespective of their self-interest, but not too much to expect the above, especially if it turns out that they end up making more money this way. Then others will have a narrow and greedy reason to go down a broader and more generous path.

Lest this seem like nothing much, it wasn't so long ago that people in this position thought primarily in terms of controlling and crushing. The difference may be one of degree, but it's not just rhetorical.
Would this be a good book to jump into Clojure with?
Because Google's job is to help you find what you are looking for, not provide you with an editorialized curation of information. Fox News, or any other major network for that matter, is not obligated to provide you with unedited information. Their express role is curation.
No, Flash apps only tend to crash on Linux and it is slow on Macs. So ignore that 0.1% of the paying online Gannt chart user market and you'll be fine.

Flash works great on Windows, and unlike HTML5 it works in IE6 which is what your market is still probably running on their corporate network.

No flaming intended, btw. I have a PC, Mac and a Linux netbook running right now on my desk. Chrome tabs die all the time in Linux when running Flash and my Mac beachballs sometimes running large swfs. My PC browsers (FF and IE) have never puked once over Flash.
The Beauty of Eyes
US "Media Shield" Bill to Exclude Protections for Wikileaks, Bloggers
depends entirely on your skillset. As other posters suggest, the idea is to take your twenty five grand and create something with more value.

Me, uh, I'd probably just buy servers for my current business, then require pre-payment. I don't know that I could sell that many pre-paid VPSs, but it'd probably be my best chance. speaking of, why am I screwing off here? I should be putting up more servers.

Other options, considering my skill set, would be buying server parts, assembling, and selling them... though clearing that much inventory would be something of a challenge with my sales skills, and margins on servers (unless you are dell or hp) aren't that high, so I'd need to go through several buy parts -> assemble and sell servers -> buy parts -> assemble and sell servers cycles in that month, in a business where net-30 is the norm, so that'd be pretty difficult.

but yeah... I think the key is "what are you good at?" then "how can I do using what I'm good at, plus twenty five grand, to make something worth twice that much?"
That one should be careful not to defend the Taliban, who unlike the NVA or Sandinistas have no legitimacy and are objectively evil. That giving material support to the Taliban is something to be avoided, not cheered on.

As a greater stretch, I also object to the notion that the conflict in Afghanistan is illegitimate. I've no doubt that it's been prosecuted badly, and to the extent that "badly" involves corruption and murder of innocents --- while I might not be happy to see this happen --- I can understand the moral calculus behind leaking information about criminal activity in the conflict.

But opposing the conflict for it's own sake, because "it's not about defense", strikes me as dangerously close to tacit support for the Taliban.
Sounds like a good use of a wave-like app if you include voice chat.

Are there any existing wave-alikes (FOSS maybe?) to leverage?
Plannr's promotional video: "What if the cast of Jersey Shore used our app?"
The audio quality was pretty bad. The content was good.
This sounds like a job for wolfram alpha...
Thanks! I will use the "Thank you for contacting me.
I am currently away on leave, traveling through time and will be returning last week." next time I am out of office.
Steve Furber: why kids are turned off computing
Go to Vegas, you've got almost a 50% chance.

Find some other currency that's also called "dollars", that's worth half as much as the one you have.
Blackberries banned in Saudi Arabia and the UAE
Bad news for business meetings in Dubai?
These guys are known for using bullets... I wouldn't be overconfident.
200,000 'Droid Phones Sold Each Day
They're not patenting the screen, which is what your amended title now says.

Try: "Apple Uses Copy of Existing 3rd Party App Screen in Patent Application"
Using Oracle Database for Puppet Stored Configuration
They just did - http://www.futuretap.com/blog/the-patent-case-we-havent-call...
The only reason Assange is still free is because everybody knows the documents will leak unfiltered the moment he is arrested.
My understanding: it's largely a myth that the Taliban is the direct creation of the US government.

The Taliban are themselves a direct and overt reaction to the warlordism and banditry that followed the Communist puppet regime in Afghanistan. They were formed to remove the status quo that American support for the Mujahideen created.

I understand some of the power politics involved in, for instance, disfavoring Massoud and arming Hekmatyar and how decisions (and, more importantly, negligence) in handling that stuff hurt the west in the long run. Still, though.

It's a drastic oversimplification to say that the US created the Taliban.

It also seems pretty irresponsible to suggest that the world would have been better off if the Soviets had succeeded in surpressing Afghanistan. It very well might have been worse.
Arduino-powered USB typewriter
If one could make $25000 in a month doing this, then I think there would be quite a few people considering career changes.
... and to say nothing about the many thousand diplomatic messages Manning claims to have leaked.

I would love to take a peek.
I tend to think that very few things that see widespread real-world use are "simple" by any reasonable metric.

The basic idea may be simple, but by the time you have covered a reasonable fraction of real-world use cases and error conditions for a sizeable population, the resulting code is anything but.

And 10k lines still counts as "moderately simple" - 10k lines is well within scope for one developer working alone.
Oh my, this is not the case. The clinical faculty are subsidizing the education of the students whom they teach. Basically, our educators are the same people who bring in revenue from patient care - they get paid much less than they bring in. Those who don't do much patient care are still bringing in gobs of revenue from their research grants.

I just wanted to make it clear that our educators are subsidizing us, not the other way around.
Far better than I. I can read French and German but my speaking French makes native speakers cringe. German is easier for me but I've lost too much vocabulary to hold a long conversation.
He didn't write the first free portscanner (all portscanners were free in the '90s, and most still are). He wrote the first fast one.
It clearly reads on the USPTO site: "United States Patent Application". This is an application for a patent, NOT a patent! Just because someone files an application does not mean they are going to get a patent (even if they usually do).
I think that's illegal--offering equity investment in small amounts to members of the public is legally a public offering of stock, which falls under the jurisdiction of lots of ugly federal regulations.

Angels exist because there's a big legal distinction between offering stock to ordinary people and offering stock to millionaires.
A business certainly can raise private capital, become profitable and remain privately owned. It would be like investing in a public stock because you expect their dividend to grow.

I think there is an assumption the VC agreement is structured without any sharing of operating profits, but I'm not sure why it has to be this way... anyone care to enlighten?

If a profit sharing component was added to this model, you could significantly reduce investor risk, possibly offer better terms to founders and create an added incentive for finding businesses that have a monetizable product or service. Maybe YC is trying to avoid founders that bow to these constraints in favor of startups focusing purely on the product? There is nothing wrong with this, but it might just be delaying the inevitable; someone, somewhere will need to make a profit from it or the business will surely die.
The world is actually not a giant spy novel; the reason Assange is free probably has more to do with jurisdiction and the likelihood that he has not actually committed an identifiable crime.

Just because some lunatic at AEI (AEI: the morons that got us into this mess in the first place) says the FBI should kidnap Assange from Iceland doesn't mean that it's actually US policy to kidnap people who post embarassing things on the Internet.
I have tried that, and it is not really what I want. I believe that solving the stacktrace problem is a big job for the Clojure dev team, so patience is in order. That said, in doing Clojure development, this is the only thing that really bugs me.
TxtBOMBER: like a dot matrix printer for graffiti
90% of billionaires have not committed to give away most of their wealth.
It would be my instinct to group health care and education jobs in the service category rather than the creative class category.
I'd also recommend checking out my MongoModel project, especially if you have been dissatisfied with the way MongoMapper or Mongoid do things.

http://github.com/spohlenz/mongomodel
http://www.mongomodel.org

It's not quite as mature, but more documentation updates are currently in progress.
What's the magic number of LOC that any markup language should be implemented under?
Legacy of the 'Flash Crash': Enduring Worries of Repeat
Scaling startups
This is what wikipedia says: "In 1995, Assange wrote Strobe, the first free and open source port scanner. Strobe inspired Fyodor to develop the Nmap port scanner."

Is that incorrect, or weren't the other ones open source? I'll trust you over wikipedia :-)
An easy way to do it:
Buy undervalued and poorly monetized but well-established sites on flippa, optimize advertising and grow traffic, resell on Flippa in a few months.

If you've got $XXXXX to play with you can pick up some incredible bargains for a quick flip.

EDIT: I didn't see that you only had one month. This is still feasible, but would require some paid traffic/PPC skill to pull off.
It's my observation (there are exceptions, but in general) that the awesome people are busy doing awesome things, not idling somewhere. So I would optimize for the busy person, not the person who can set aside 8 regular hours every week. Set a low commitment barrier, and attract great minds.

For me personally, there's a list of people 3 feet long on HN that I'd love to pick their brains about something. But I feel like a bother. (In a couple of instances, I've even been told I'm a bother. Sorry guys.)

Don't optimize it for me. Optimize it for the people way busier than I am. If pg (or grellas, or patio11, or ...) start using the service, it will both be unimaginably useful and also gain traction.
FutureTap responds to Apple's patent application
Howto: Build and scale a Cassandra cluster in five minutes
That's an excellent form of "pull" marketing, or, the idea that speaking softly results in people trying harder to actually listen.

My rationale for taking a more spirited tone here is to spur discussion. It's frightening to think how much money is put into messages aimed at increasing consumption and how little is put into asking what we really need.

I like your approach; I really do. More than that, I admire your resolve in a more quiet resistance. I'm an outspoken person and have a hard time not opening my mouth. Believe me: I would love to have the same self-control you do.

At the same time, I don't think protest is without its merits. Sometimes one has to rattle the cage a little. In my mind there are many ways to affect how people think, which is best, I don't know. As long as we're talking, though, I think we're getting somewhere.

In college, I heard about this thing called, "Buy Nothing Day." This was long ago, and I was very naive. I saw the posters and thought, "what a waste of time." Here I am, 20 years later, and I think, "what a great idea--I don't know why I didn't admire it more."

If even a "lunkhead" like me can finally get it, because someone was willing to go out there and make a bit of a stink, perhaps we just need to keep asking people to think about this sort of thing.

Here's Kalle, talking about that event. The points raised by the anchor are quite comical: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PPQY_Cb4IlI
Borrow it. $25K is unsecured personal loan money, so depending what I urgently need 50k for, I could probably get it then pay it back over a few years.

Why the 1 month time limit?
Amazon CloudFront now supports default root objects
Redshiftgui - open source alternative to f.lux, gui port of redshift
Thanks for the links to the wiki--I'll take a closer look at them on my bus ride home. (This afternoon got a little hectic, and I wasn't able to give them a look yet.)
In a couple of weeks? Late August, or early September?
The homepage is here: http://www.mao-yu.com/projects/redshiftgui/, but there's not much useful info there.
New Amazon CloudFront Feature: Default Root Object
Part of a series:

memcached - http://blog.gridcentriclabs.com/2010/07/how-to-build-10-core...

Hadoop - http://blog.gridcentriclabs.com/2010/07/howto-build-hadoop-c...

An early take on Hudson / Continuous Integration - http://blog.gridcentriclabs.com/2010/07/elastic-build-system...

As always, we'd love any feedback the HN community might have!
Yes, but even trying is both dishonest and a waste of the patent office's time. The patent office can still make things right, but Apple just did (some) Evil™ here.
I suppose you're unfamiliar with Venture Hacks - it's the accepted HOWTO bible for startup entrepreneurs navigating the funding battlefield. They also do Angel List, which is the most important innovation in startup funding since YC.

So rather than downvote you, I wanted to explain why it's not SEO spam.
Is this not an echo chamber of 'we're doing this so everyone should'?

Has YC actually made a lot of money yet? I ask because the web does not provide a definitive answer. I see a few YC companies doing well, but there's no 100 million dollar companies there, let alone billion dollar companies.

Given that YC had to raise money last round to fund companies, one wonders.

I have a lot of respect for pg and read everything he writes, but I'm asking out interest in the actual reality of the situation, it's hard to tell.
There were definitely port scanners before Strobe, but Strobe was the fastest port scanner. The notion that there would have been a commercial port scanner in 1995 strikes me as funny.

If you just need me to "win the bet" here I'll point out that even SATAN scanned ports, and the netcat man page (also '95) shows how to use it as a port scanner. Hobbit "invented" UDP port scanner (which Strobe didn't do) in '94.

If you were thinking that maybe portscanning was an original idea, I'll recommend that you research NUAA (a "port scanner" for X.25 networks) and Tone-Loc (a "port scanner" for telephones).

Remember that 1994 is before the web and before ISDN. The Internet was mostly a means to get on IRC, which was in large part a place to talk about attacks on dial-up systems. This is back in the days where there was a "commercial" UUNet and a "noncommercial-only" NSFNet, and actual splits between the two. To some attackers, a high-quality NUA scanner might have been more valuable than a high-quality TCP scanner. Who scans TCP ports when 1/3 of Unix systems are running rexd and another 1/3 are exporting / to "everybody"?

For the record, I 100% believe Strobe inspired Fyodor. I don't want to take anything away from Strobe. It was impressive for its time.

(Late edit: I'm reminded by a friend that Pluvius wrote pscan.c before Proff wrote Strobe. So there.)

(Later edit: here's probe.c from Phrack in '94:

http://www.phrack.com/issues.html?issue=46&id=23

[look for probe_tcp_ports]).