skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Notch's success and that of other indie developers don't support the claim made by most game studios and their publishers that the weak market and rampant piracy is forcing them to take drastic measures.

If you look at Minecraft, it has the worst graphics possible and, in the Alpha that Notch is selling, half of the features don't work in multiplayer. The main thing the game has going for it is its limitless replay value with the ability to create and show off things (however tedious I think the average person would find the process).

Despite its flaws, Notch seems to be doing something right. He doesn't have much overhead and he can sell the game for cheap (although not very much so by indie standards). He doesn't even have an effective copy protection scheme. The login system is easily bypassed, and multiplayer servers hosted in "offline" mode are no different from a regular server.

Granted, there are previous incarnations of the game that did not take off and Notch has a lot of open promises about what he will deliver with the game. Yet, the game is in a state that is highly addictive and people have nothing but good things to say about it. Word of mouth and social media (namely youtube tutorials and showcasing) have rocketed sales.

Obviously, this game is a different caliber than most big budget games, but they are at a disadvantage to Notch's straightforward development style. Game studios are often rushed to finish their game and they need to see immediate success upon release. Yet, they are almost always still working out bugs. Beyond patching and token DLC, the game is considered final. Some games have even lost modding support despite how much value that adds to a game.

Blaming the current generation of consumers doesn't fit. There is an exponentially larger consumer base buying games. Most gamers are always ready for the next game and often games are sold on hype alone. Maybe this is an overstatement, but we have attained what is close to rabid consumerism. There is a lot of competition, but when a game hits, it sells big.

Could it be that there is something else rotten going on in the games industry? Look at the surefire success that is the Call of Duty series (even despite the supposed boycott). Activision apparently couldn't afford to properly take care of Infinity Ward and there was a huge falling out. Can this be explained by greed, incompetence, or what?

Even if piracy is to blame, games are already harder to pirate. You can probably fight it head on to a certain extent, but I doubt you can stop it. At some point, it will hurt business more than it will help. The type of article Notch has written here has become fashionable among indie developers. It makes them look good, while making big game studios appear to be at a loss. Maybe they are also trying to serve as an example of how you can rise above piracy concerns rather than getting hung up on them.
Thanks, that's a great idea and something we are considering as well. It would be nice if we could make money off of premium features but the ad-sharing would let us at least pay the bandwidth costs.

Sunny
There's a live stream of BGP updates that are published by a university server.

http://bgpmon.netsec.colostate.edu/index.php/live-data

You can also telnet to some CISCO routers and access their routing tables.
Host: route-views.routeviews.org
Port: 23

Follow instructions. It looks like it doesn't work well. Either characters are scrambled, or the echoed characters are capitalised (it shouldn't be).
IMO, a large part of underrepresentation of women in software is due to the following self-reinforcing stereotype.

1. For historical reasons, men got a head-start in the software sector.

2. Software sector came to be seen as a male-dominated field.

3. Both the recruiters and candidates adjust their behavior based on the "knowledge" that software-jobs are more suited for men than women.

I think such accidental clustering happens in many other fields. For e.g., here is a situation where men are the victims: http://www.nurseweek.com/news/features/01-05/men.html
Same in the UK.

Sales tax in the US is just ridiculous. I've never understood why they would prefer things that way.
personally, would like to hire more women. At least that way I wouldn't be tarred by the same brush as those who really do discriminate

Despite the fact that you actually would be sexually discriminating.
True, hence the qualification "judging by the success we've seen so far" at the beginning of the paragraph. Based on what we've been seeing so far, and since the classes appear to be getting both stronger and larger, it's reasonable to expect this success to continue in the future. Even more so as the economy gets better.

Do you really think that out of 25-35 per class we won't see at least 2-3 who successfully exit or become profitable within 5+ years? If the YC team didn't expect as much, they wouldn't doing this anymore.
Did you mean to say this?

> But, no, when you ask someone whether they're really going to be able to take care of their kids and handle the demands of the job you're interviewing them for, you're clearly not being equal-opportunity, douchebag.

The way you originally posted it, it sounds like you're implying that equal-opportunity people tend to be douchebags, which doesn't seem to jive with the first part of that sentence.
maybe directly embed the screen cast in the starting template
it would be a lot more efficient if we went to only 1 decimal place and got rid of everything but the dime.
Eating Intelligently: Nutrition
(what's 6% of $1.65 billion?)

YC won't get 6% of such a deal. A massive acquisition like that usually happens after a round or two of funding diluting the original ownership interest.

Still it would be a nice return on investment.
Here's some demo orbs that we created.

http://honeymoon.orbs.com/
http://hrteam.orbs.com/
http://ultimate.orbs.com/
http://teacher.orbs.com/
http://mominvancouver.com
http://foodies.orbs.com/
http://mominvancouver.com/

Sunny
If you do end up playing with this, take a look at node.js and socket.io. Here is the relevant part for tailing a file over ssh:

var tail = spawn('ssh', ['user@yourserver.com', 'tail', '-f', '/path/to/some.log']);
tail.stdout.addListener('data', function (data) {
listener.broadcast(data.toString());
});

I did a really simple version of what you're talking about with some client-side parsing of rails logs for fun. Feel free to contact me and I'll be happy to zip up the source and send it your way.
Welcome to the wonders of the future tense.
On the other hand, maybe it's just about having an excuse to socially interact with your workmates in a non-work context?

I have coworkers that I will go out to drink with and have over at my house on weekends, and I have coworkers I don't associate with at all outside work hours. Somewhere in between are the guys in my office fantasy football league.
Anyone want to join my IE9 beta launch party à http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gyas7BrbUFY ?
Clarification: late Soviet ruble (1961-1991) had the following coins: 1, 2, 3, 5, 10, 15, 20, 50 copecks and 1 ruble
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_ruble

I think if you really want to minimize the number of coins per transaction, you can always add more (than four) denominations of coins, up to some reasonable number.
Surely that first class will have a disproportionate amount of success compared with further years though.

It's like the first season of American Idol produces the most successful winner...
I'm sorry, I don't like it. The editing interface is way confusing and cluttered. Sorry.
I am totally stealing this joke for the next faculty meeting. But, we have to make some assumptions in life. Until we get that cranial recording unit running.
We don't know ourselves yet, because it takes so long for startups to exit. But we have a decent idea how many are successful at the next stage after YC-- the number who are either able to raise more after YC, or don't need to because they're profitable (or in very rare cases acquired). I think for the winter 2010 batch the percentage was in the low to mid 80s.

Incidentally, I wouldn't want it to be much higher. If it was 100%, it would mean we were picking too conservatively.
Evaluating Amazon’s EC2 Micro Instances at DocumentCloud
What should every programmer know about programming?
It's entertainment. A game you play and can win. In the same way that Farmville is an easy time waster. Fantasy football doesn't require a lot of time investment if you are just trying to have some fun.

Add in the fact that it involves watching sports, which is something many already enjoy doing on it's own.
Actually, the book has a lot of completely incorrect information. For example, it has a recipe for bananadyne. That's what I find offensive about it. I wouldn't trust any of the other recipes to not just blow up in your face even if executed correctly, since the author didn't test them to begin with.
Thanks for the honest feedback. I just want to clarify whether it was the "snap", the fact that editing happens inline or the editor toolbar that you found confusing and cluttered. Or something else.

Sunny
Show me a company that is willing to feed and take care of _every single_ poor, elderly, and infirm person without the need for tax-exempt status, without the need for spiritual conversion or religious dogma, and without the "overhead" of paying executives millions of dollars for "administrative" purposes, and I'll urge Congress to redirect ALL of my tax dollars toward that company.

Oh, and btw, this company also has to defend our shores, find cures for disease (or at least fund them) and manage distribution to those affected, assess and remediate damage on massive scales when emergencies strike, set standards and regulations of measurement and safety so that industries can interoperate and first-responders can (for example) plug their water hoses into a hydrant and it actually fit, etc.

It's not just a couple rich charitable dudes that can handle all that. Sorry if I don't worship them as much as anti-tax crusaders do.
Yes credit cards are more prevalent in the US, but they have a 3% overhead, retailers eat the cost. With value points and clubs you can recover 1-2% of those fees. I think a fee-free anonymous electronic cash system like Suica would be a great alternative.
Agreed all all points!

Sword of the Stars is annoying because tactical combat is half-broken - you can't pit fleet against fleet in any meaningful way. E.g. if they can beat 1 of your ships, then they can beat all of them (1 at a time).
Micro instances are great if you want to spend the least amount possible and don't mind sacrificing raw speed. You are paying a penalty of having a quarter of the processing power of a Medium instance. Oddly, though, the CPU in a Micro is about 15-20% faster than the Medium instance, but when looking at the CPU time versus Real elapsed times, you can see how Amazon is holding back the power.
What Is The Semantic Web and Why Should We Care?
Very true...in the case of YouTube, there were two rounds of investment at $3.5 and 8 million I believe. But still, any percent of $1.65 billion is a nice chunk of change.
Adobe brings out native 64-bit Flash Player for Windows, Mac OS X & Linux
I realize it's a different piece of hardware than the one he's describing, but it's still at least a little funny that the picture toward the top has him drawing on a device running Mac OS.
Beauty of the Web - IE9
The really curious thing is that the first programmers were women. This was back in the ENIAC days, before anyone appreciated how difficult it would be to "program" a general purpose computer, before the word "software" existed, or even before "program" was a verb. The ENIAC designers figured the programming part would be easy.

See Section II, starting on page 8: http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~nathanen/files/cbi-gender.pdf
Link doesn't work, unfortunately. Hope to get around to reading it eventually :-/

I actually assume it was a good study, but still, what is self-control? It seems a rather fuzzy thing, if measured by marshmallow craving. It might be too simplistic to reduce things to it.
The dev tools in IE8 are pretty darn good. I still use Firebug as my primary, but when I'm chasing an IE specific bug, the dev tools are pretty solid. I even prefer them to Chrome's.
I never thought about evolution and creationism as mutually exclusive.
That correlation seems spurious to me, especially considering the method of study was "The researchers analyzed 350 merger and acquisition bids in the United States between 1997 and 2007, using a securities database from Thomson SDC."

I didn't notice any testosterone tests of those involved in there. What's the baseline?

Off the top of my head, I can think of several other youth-related behaviour you could easily attribute to that correlation:

* Less experience

* Idealism

* Impulsiveness

* Willingness to take risk
>>> I'd be a Windows admin today.<<<

You didn't lose any body parts with your pipe bomb right? I hope I misread your comments.
I cannot see into alternate universes

You don't have to see into alternate universes. You just have to be old enough to have already lived in one. The one before Microsoft.

I suspect that alot of the Bill Gates/Microsoft love/hate splits along age lines. If you're under 40, you're not old enough to have experienced the glorious pre-Microsoft days. We worked on all kinds of cool stuff, IBM mainframes (the good and the bad), the mini-computers (VAX, PDP, etc.), the Bell Labs stuff (Unix!), and all kinds of other wonderful proprietary systems: OS2, CPM, & Pick.

Then all of a sudden, our customers started abandoning all this great technology for Microsoft. Why? Because it was better? No, because it was shoved down their throats. Because when it couldn't win by technical merits, it won other ways, with back room deals, legal technicalities, and old fashioned bullying.

Young hackers today take great pride removing Windows from their laptops and replacing it with Linux. What they may not realize is that this technology is not new; it was around 40 years ago. They just didn't have to suffer through the 20 year Microsoft technology drought like some of us did.

I understand that industries consolidate and that many great products and technologies die. But they should die in the marketplace, not in the courtroom or the lobbyists' offices.

If Kobe Bryant beats your team with great talent, hard work, and superior play, you'd congratulate him. But you'd be awfully pissed if he never dribbled but never got whistled because his lawyers already made arrangements in Commission Stern's offices before the game. This was standard operating procedure for Microsoft for years.

We'd still be suffering if it wasn't for the internet. I suppose if I was under 30, I'd just think it was always open and hopeful like it is now. But for a long time it wasn't. And to answer OP's original question, a lot of people in Silicon Valley were in that alternate universe you missed and they don't forget.
Suppose you have an idea for a startup company and you don't want to quit your job yet because you don't know if you could bring together the other talent and resources to pull it off. Wouldn't it be great if you could perform a "hypothetical" search that collects people who would, in theory, be willing to make themselves, or their money, available if you can pull together all of the other parts of your startup? That way no one has to take the first risky step until the company is fully formed in a virtual way. You and your team of conditional future employees can work out the business model details before anyone takes the first risky step. Think of it as Match.com for startups.

Don't some people (many?) people put up a site with a 'buy now' button and count the number of clicks and gather email addresses to validate their concept before spending time coding up the solution? Or post the idea to HN? It seems possible to do some of what's being described already.
Isn't 80% already a warning signal? Do you think you turn teams down because their ideas are too ambitious? Or that you tend to talk them down from crazily ambitious concepts?

(Don't get me wrong, the number of business you get on their feet is one of the things I admire about YC.)
Richard Branson: Five Secrets to Business Success
Really awesome site, I hope it does well.

However, after signing up your welcome email contained my password in plain text. Which probably means you are storing it in plain text. Please consider doing a one way hash on it for better security.
I suppose the key rule is this: "Once submitted, a prize winning Submission becomes the exclusive property of Sponsor and will not be acknowledged or returned."
Indie Game Dev Embraces Pirates Instead Of Fighting Futile War
Officially it's a "banking note" and retailers are within their rights to refuse them (which they're more likely to do because lack of familiarity means staff are less likely to be convinced of the note's authenticity and it also requires giving more change)
I stand corrected--"and so on" is what he uses over and over in BoC. "so it goes" is from Slaughterhouse Five. Thanks.
If you are problem solving in a domain where gendered perspectives are irrelevant [1], would you then agree there is little value to having diversity?

As for cliques, I don't have much experience with them. Within university departments, I only observed three particular flavors of clique: domain specific (math/physics, number theory), chinese, and women. I suppose you are right - the woman clique did have women from multiple domains in it.

As for being in the minority, I don't agree with you there. In all walks of my daily life, I am an extreme (racial) minority. In the past month or two, excluding family, I've had a conversation with perhaps 2-3 people of the same race as me. It isn't an issue at all - right now, I feel like less of an outsider than during past periods where I dealt with lots of people like me.

[1] Examples would include every field I've ever worked in: trading stocks, medical imaging, quantum physics.
The snap editor is definitely cool. What is it built in?
The Origin of Our Calendar
Interoperable HTML Parsing in IE9
What Can We Do in Our Spare Time?
10k Apart contest winners announced (Web apps in
Nope! The Anarchist Cookbook did not ruin my dreams of becoming a Windows admin, either.

Seriously, though, if you asked me how I got started with my career, "The Anarchist's Cookbook" would be one of the first thoughts in my head.

The topic is interesting to me because my thoughts on the book are so complicated.
And we should be really clear. Most of those "lives destroyed" were destroyed in fair play. There are scant few developers in the world who can really argue that Gates hurt them, much less destroyed their lives.

And I think people also conveniently discount the paid software market that Gates helped create. Gates really pushed hard on the notion of standalone software that is purchased. I also think people forget how screwed up the software industry was in the early 80s. This was a time where MS wasn't dominant, yet software was in a pretty horrible state. In terms of both quality and market.

In fact, I'd be willing to bet, that even if you set aside all of his philanthropic work, he's added more net value to the lives of developers than he has taken.
You guys own orbs.com? Wow, how much did that run ya?
Incidentally, I wouldn't want it to be much higher. If it was 100%, it would mean we were picking too conservatively.

You've mentioned that the classes are getting larger and there are more companies who are applying to YC when they're already profitable. Won't there be a time when this number has to hit 100% because there are more profitable companies coming in than you can accommodate in a class?
And many of these 13 year olds were doing this before that thing called the world-wide-web was around. It made it rather difficult to do any real research, even if they wanted to.
Why can a hollywood script writer do this while Harvard research academics cannot?
Lots of sports fans follows their local teams and say "if I were the GM I would..."

Fantasy sports let them try.
If you happen to scroll down further, you might end up reading a review[1] of a person who's college ROTC instructor used this same book as training material.

For most everyone working a 9-5 in the city with a middle-class family in the suburbs, no this book won't have any practical day to day application. But the review I'm referencing is quoted as saying, "Better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it,". Having the book and being knowledgable about it's contents can be argued to be akin to keeping 30 days of food in storage for emergencies.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/review/R5M42EN2525C3/ref=cm_cr_dp_perm...
How to Interact on Facebook Without Getting Blocked
I doubt it. But I suppose somebody could potentially build a product around Mongrel2 which does.
I'm curious now. Why?

I haven't read the book, but what appealed and stuck with that rebellious teenager?
np... I wish you guys the very best of success!
Laid-off Cisco workers undoubtedly thrilled over company's planned dividend
I quit playing fantasy football a couple years ago and I haven't looked back.

I understand for some people, fantasy football gets them more into the football game. But for me, I actually prefer to watch without such distractions and perverse incentives.

Now when I watch football I can just enjoy the game itself. I root for a team to score and win at the end, not certain players to score a TD or kick a FG.
Do you think you turn teams down because their ideas are too ambitious?

I think YC has been shifting focus to evaluating teams rather than ideas. If there is a solid team with a wacky idea, they might be accepted based on the strength of the team alone.
Yeah, sorry, wrong. The best-known lesson of this book was "you can walk into a series of hardware stores and drug stores and acquire the materials needed to make a cool explosion inside of a trash can, no questions asked, even if you're in Tulsa and you're 13". Unfortunately, that wasn't all you needed to know about the topic to blow up garbage cans safely.

You may have the impression that, like "Steal This Book", this was an interesting compendium of ideas no normal person would ever put into use. The problem was, it actually included a lot of ideas that stupid kids like me certainly would put to use.
[ROM] Biffmod 1.9 - Almost 2.0 But Not Quite
Internet Explorer 9 Beta Now Out, Looks Impressive
Sometimes things need to be destroyed.
>isn't 6 exactly the age kids start asking questions?

Uh, no. My kids were asking good questions by age 3 or so.
https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AkkhSN3vaY4jdF90b1l...

Here is a spreadsheet someone put together with most (all?) of the incubators and the status of their companies.

edit: someone beat me to it :-(