skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't see what's business-y about this thing at all. Press photos show Videos, Photos, Music apps. In the FaceTime-like app, it is a dad chatting to a baby.

Just saying.

I presume hackers will love the dual-core goodness (I wouldn't mind experimenting with Clojure on it).
Wonder what their development environment is like and how good the UI kit is.
Bravo! Good for you -- we need more people questioning the assumption the college is always worth the time and money. The opportunities for those who have demonstrable abilities without traditional credentials are steadily increasing. It's a good curve to ride, given the upside and opportunity cost.
I wasn't so much thinking about the funding provided by YC; but rather that if you've reached a stage where you can raise enough funding to hire yourself into the US, the fact that YC provides connections to angels and VCs is probably not tremendously useful.
http://www.quantifiedself.com/
After reading the post by PG about 'what goes on at YC', this article definitely has elements that feel like it was written by PG.

E.g. "Similar to Yammer, users sign in with their corporate email address and can then search for information by keyword. You can also ask questions, and answer directly from the platform. There are a variety of uses cases for the platform. For example, an engineering firm could use the platform as a way to sort through commands. And because most companies are tied to email as a main communication platforms, questions and answers can be distributed and answered by email as well."

That definitely sounds like PG's voice.
The friends list can be accessed without asking for permissions via the graph API and an API key if your user id is known.
Genius Gets Its Reward
I'm still waiting on the carrier-billing charged app store.
There is also the Rust programming language being developed by Graydon Hoare(the Mozilla Tracemonkey compiler dude), Brendan Eich (the Javascript creator) and Dave Herman (of PLT Scheme - Racket ?)
http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/4009

From the language faq : http://wiki.github.com/graydon/rust/language-faq

"Have you seen this Google language, Go? How does Rust compare?

Yes.

Rust development was several years underway before Go launched, no direct inspiration.
Though Pike’s previous languages in the Go family (Newsqueak, Alef, Limbo) were
influential, Go adopted semantics (safety and memory model) that are quite unsatisfactory.
Shared mutable state.
Global GC.
Null pointers.
No RAII or destructors.
No type-parametric user code.
There are a number of other fine coroutine / actor languages in development presently.
It’s an area of focus across the PL community."
If my Stanford co-founder wouldn't have scaled back his involvement recently, we were just on track to apply for the YC fall batch. Now, when he is not there as technical co-founder, the situation does becomes different. Earlier, our chances would have been good as we brought in a decent balance of complimentary skills to the founding team - we could have managed w/o traction (if I may say so). But as a single non-technical co-founder, showing traction becomes a must-have.
It's okay to use it for templates only (and the same is true for php if you use a sane framework). If you use erb files to quickly hack together a dynamic web-page I'd be wary though.
In my fantasy world, Marco Arment would buy Xmarks and combine it with Instapaper. I'm sad to see Xmarks disappear without any viable alternative. I'd gladly pay $15-20 per year if that's what it took, but I imagine it could be even cheaper since cloud storage is so cheap: http://www.nasuni.com/news/nasuni-blog/whats-the-cost-of-a-g...
"(inc clojure)".

which is probably really good marketing. (About e.g. "succ ml", I'm not sure.)
I don't know about that... consider Facebook's billion+ dollar offers. Zuckerberg has turned them down. He's stated many of times that's he not in it for the money. Once you reach a certain level of money, e.g. 10 million or so, much more won't be as life changing.

So I disagree. Not all businesses are for sale at the 'right' price. What are other's thoughts?
So how does it work any better than Google Suggest without also having the same drawbacks he mentions for those users?
Perhaps you could take it one step further from karaoke and put an American Idol spin on it. Competitions, prizes, Internet fame. If you could somehow pull in a celebrity partner or sponsor, this could become an even greater possibility.
Just to be clear, it's not my work.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_bias

What about the great thinkers of humanity whose writing only became popular post-humously? What about all of the thinkers whose beliefs got them executed? What if their writings were so unpopular as to lead to their persecution. Surely, they were just consciously or unconsciously holding those beliefs to signal social standing!

What if they had a conscious and explicit reason for why they held their beliefs? What if said explicit reason wasn't to increase their social standing? Does their explicitly stated reason for why they hold those beliefs become invalid because, hey, the REAL reason behind that must be an evolutionary function of genetic reproduction? At what point do we allow others to be conscious of their own actions? Isn't it extremely presumptuous to project unconscious social basis as the fundamental derivative of all their beliefs? Does going down this path lead to interesting discussion or zealously quash it?

My argument was NOT that on average, the population of people do NOT follow ckuehne's and the article's assumption of motive. That is trivial and not very interesting, we can even assume that is true if you wish. My argument was on the top of the pyramid, it is less likely to hold for the greatest thinkers and philosophers.
David Brooks - The Restoration of California.
Hopefully they'll open source the plugin so we can keep it updated for changes to Firefox. Though I'll probably just switch to another solution, especially if there's another that uses my own server. Or maybe just Dropbox.

I only switched to Xmarks after Google Browser Sync went away, I guess I should just get used to this.
The category existed long before (take a look at, e.g., win ce-based tablets/pads that were released from 2000 on). They were the first though that used an OS that is truly optimized for a capacitive touch screen (those pads had resistive screens that weren't all that useful).
Say what? - An HTML5 speech game
I actually have a Kindle and seldom use it any more: http://jseliger.com/2010/04/13/kindle-land-with-requisite-ru... , but as someone with ~1,000 books I can answer:

1) Moving is a pain in the ass, to put it lightly. No, excuse me: to put it heavily. Very, very heavily. Especially cross country, though I've acquired a lot of books since starting grad school.

2) Shelving is expensive.

3) At scale the right book can become harder to find. The other day I spent 15 minutes looking for Tom Perrotta's Election because it wasn't quite where I thought it was.

4) Most of us don't have infinite room and therefore eventually run out of space.

5) Searching is still pretty nice.

That being said, why do I still read paper?

1) The note-taking function on the Kindle sucks ass, and I compulsively fill margins.

2) Page turning is still too slow.

3) I actually flip back and forth between pages quite a bit.

4) I'm not convinced that DRM isn't going to bite me in the ass 1 to 20 years from now.

5) Anachronistic attachment to paper.

6) I'm a grad student, and the citation / edition situation hasn't been sorted out for the Kindle. This is very important when writing academic papers.

Note that I'm not making some kind of moral argument about whether electronic reading is good, bad, or indifferent. To me, it just is. I foresee eventually moving chiefly to electronic reading, but I'm not sure when or how that shift will happen. I'm also not interested in the iPad because I spend enough time staring at LCDs as it is.
that's interesting - did you evaluate something like Node.js or Clojure/Aleph for the same purpose ?
One killer setup for Plan9 would be to package it up as a VM and distribute it. May be Amazon can pre-create some Plan9 EC2 images.
Flexible compared to languages that don't use prototypal inheritance. Metaprogramming is part of every-day use for js developers; and it's a frequently used (and yes, sometimes abused) tool. As a result, developers can significantly change the way the language itself functions.

While this is amazing for smaller groups of disciplined developers; it can certainly cause maintenance pain. So, I guess I'd flip it around and call it praise with faint damnation.
there's also a couple of reader's guides, some short, with a thematic focus (http://amzn.com/082641477X), some longer and more exhaustive (http://amzn.com/0976146533/) that can help.

when I was first reading infinite jest, there was a section about fifty pages in that stopped me cold a number of times. it was written using a black vernacular, and was about wardine and roy tony and whatnot. for whatever reason, I re-read the first fifty pages until I got to that part, couldn't get through it and put the book down. it turns out that that section has no real bearing on the plot and can be safely ignored, especially if it's obstructing one's first read.
The situations that deal with numbers that large are usually a bit nuanced. (i.e., "it's 1 in 2^63 of the time that I need bignums for day-to-day programming"). I agree that losing accuracy needlessly sucks (and I've been burned by floating-point), but 64 bit ints are usually good enough.

I'm thirsty for counterexamples.
Sublet available immediately at Palo Alto Hacker House
A spot in a triple is available immediately at the Palo Alto Hacker House. This triple will turn into a double on November 12th -- eg. one of the people in the triple will be moving out then. If you are into startups and want some cheap housing blocks away from University Ave, this is a great place for you! Check out the link to our
facebook page. Email xin.tim.gu@gmail.com to apply!
I'm missing something, how they are hacks? Surreal juxtapostions yes, but hacks...
For being greedy consumers. Using up the mineral, natural and other self sustaining resources at a tremendous pace and asking them to find a solution for the environmental problems we created and are unable to solve.
Facebook Friends, Veganism, and Afghanistan
And the result: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NszGurDUlHc
Modnique.com - All Sales Events - Men's Gold Jewelry
Looks like it's pretty much an anti-PirateBay bill. I wonder who exactly paid for it?
He didn't address what the screen is like for reading on (compared to an eInk reader like Kindle etc).

I have a Kobo Reader, and it's pretty good. The DRM is a hassle, so here's my workflow for buying a new ebook (and yes, the fact I have workflow to buy a new ebook sucks, and says a lot about where my time goes):

Prerequisite:

You'll need Adobe-eBook-DRM-shit-whtaever it is called installed before you begin. Otherwise you'll download the book and won't be able to use it. OTOH, it does run on Linux, so that's something.

1) Find the book you like. I find http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/ because they have a good range and good prices on ePub books, and give you 3 copies

2) Download the book.

3) Using the following search, find the python scripts to remove the DRM: http://www.google.com/search?q=python+remove+epub+drm+script

4) Use http://calibre-ebook.com/ or the KoboBulkFixer program to remove fixed font sizes from any styles (the Kobo won't scale those, so everything appears in about 8pt writing)

5) Put my eBook in dropbox so I don't have to do this again

6) Copy the eBook to my Kobo.

I should note that I need to remove DRM to fix the font problem.

Like I said, this sucks. But OTOH, ebooks are good.
But given the current arrangements, I’m being charged just a little bit less than I pay for paper and getting a whole lot less, and it just doesn’t feel like a good deal.

Speaking as someone who's moved more times that he'd like to count, I enjoy getting a whole lot less--less weight, fewer boxes, less room taken up in my home. My Kindle's lighter than a thick magazine and takes up way less room in my bag. When you compare it to a hardcover (especially a fantasy hardcover) the difference is amazing. Try reading a Wheel of Time book one-handed for an entire afternoon in paperback or hardcover. Then try flipping the pages one handed, too.

For me it's a question of convenience, and I'll take my convenience over that of my friends in this case. If they don't trust my recommendation enough to track a book down in a library (or download the free sample from Amazon, if they've got a Kindle), then I really don't care what they're reading.
A constant, for simplicity. Call it your lower threshold of the impact one good idea makes on your business. (I have a mental target at C = 1.05 but at YC stages there is almost certainly a company with C = staggering.)
Not a fan of the ginormous block comments. Why do people like these?
2) Shelving is expensive.

This is so true. Or if it's not expensive, it's not strong enough. I have a wall of Ikea shelving, and have to stabilize it using old Oracle books (our floors aren't totally flat, so I use the books to adjust the lean angle against the wall). I guess that proves Oracle is good for something though.

2) Page turning is still too slow.

This is a big problem. I have a Kobo, and the slow startup time and page turning time are the biggest issues.
I generally agree with you that there is no direct evidence of "tribute collection." However, if you look at the most recent example of Iraq, we could make the case that the U.S. has placed permanently placed its military in a country with a lot of oil reserves and could assure itself of cheap plentiful supply from not only Iraq but from the region. Putting my conspiracy theory hat on I would say that the Iraq war was not about WMDs but using it as a excuse to go after the oil reserves.
That video is seriously cool.
Z-test gives you confidence intervals on conversion rate with G-test or Chi-square test doesn't
Maybe pick a better school? I'm not from the area, so I've never heard of Michigan Technical University and don't know what their merits are from a CS perspective.

Also, dropping out near the end of your junior year seems a poor return. You've paid 3/4 of the tuition and are getting no benefit from the degree. And if everything was as easy as you say, then you should have a near perfect GPA.

As for why your employer cares. It's an easy screening criteria. Chances are % of people who don't have a college degree and are any good, is pretty low. So, it's easy to just interview the ones with college degrees, good GPAs, and come from good schools. It's an employers market out there.
> But don't you have to consider the number of times Buffett exercised his investment decision, and not only when he's put money up?

You might think so, but as it turns out, no. Try simulating it.
This article is complete garbage, and I'll tell you why. Being a competent programmer is about being good with logic, constructing a detailed mental model of a system in detail, and thinking across multiple abstraction layers. The problem is there is no litmus test for this. You can glean something from clever interview questions, or coding tests, but even other programmers won't know for sure until the person cranks out code for a while. The problem with using design pattern knowledge as some sort of test is that it's too high level. It's just some observations about things that tend to work in certain situations. But anyone can read about them and if they are moderately intelligent they can talk the talk even if they can't code their way out of a paper box.

My other problem with this article is that the author starts off sounds like he almost understands a bit about programming, but then he veers off unforgivably about the divine superiority of design patterns. "They are worked out for you and bestowed from on high by geniuses so much smarter than you that they solved all problems at once better than you will ever solve your specific problem, and therefore your code will automatically be better if you use them, and suck if you don't!" That's a ridiculous overstatement at best. Knowing design patterns is better than not knowing them, but only if you have the chops to apply them properly. If you don't then you may just be adding complexity without solving anything. Furthermore, design patterns are actually just an emergent property of working systems; just because you don't know what they're called doesn't mean you're not using them. To work with code, such as to make bug fixes, or to extend it you need to go to a much finer level of detail, and to make a large scale system you need to think about overall data flows that are far higher level than the design patterns used in individual components.

Design patterns are to programming as literary devices (allegory, simile, onomatopoeia) are to writing. If someone knows them you can tell they have studied literature, but it doesn't mean they can write worth a damn.
I have much respect for the company, but I hate to say that I did not want a single one of their concepts. Every screen change, the only thing I could think was, "ok, now how do I go back to that previous screen?" every new screen showed a completely new confusing interface with non-intuitive interactions. And some screens were just plain poor usability. Example, the book browsing screen where you swipe left and right to browse book covers one at a time. Repeat...one....at....a....time. How about showing me a grid or list so it'll be easier for me to decide which of my 50+ books I'd like to read?
I use pretty much the exact same system that you do and have done so for many years as well. Recently though, I'm starting to think I might try out the password management software route. I've haven't yet had a problem with any of my accounts being brute forced and I guess there's something to be said for "if it 'aint broke...", but reviewing the passwords I use, even the more secure ones, I have this nagging feeling that they are more similar to each other than they should be. If a resourceful and determined attacker was to somehow figure out one of my secure passwords, then that would be a good ways towards figuring out all of my secure passwords and I don't like that possibility, however remote it may actually be.
Main Street Blog - Is your main street business website effective?
Another similar library: http://gevent.org
What Is Good Customer Service?
Yes that's the quote I was thinking of, I think he also said it during a talk with Bill Gates on CNBC during 'Keeping America Great' special: http://classic.cnbc.com/id/33604479
Ok, just curious. I use Lua quite a bit, and I find its mix of prototype-based OO and clean functional programming to be very practical, as well.

It sounds like other people find the same pragmatism in Javascript, but after learning Lua, I find Javascript really depressing - it had so much potential, but...it's like Lua's little brother whose mind never had a chance to fully develop (due to the browser wars). It's sad. Lua's design has been refined for 17 years, and ... Javascript was frozen after 2. Just reading about thruth-y and false-y types in Javascript makes me cringe.

Granted, Lua doesn't have the strangehold on web development that Javascript does (it was designed for scripting C/C++ instead, like Tcl), but I'm working on that.
AviGlitch - A Ruby library to destroy your AVI files.
It's interesting that there is a constant, fairly large hatred for Facebook connect.

What do you guys who are entirely not into FBC think about the last RFS?
Is this guy phishing? Why the link to hn.NET? Is that a sanctioned mirror? Why would I need to login again?

Likely an honest mistake, but what is news.ycombinator.net anyway?
Hah! Weird. No idea how I got a .net link. Fortunately ycombiantor.net is owned by Paul Graham and news.ycombinator.net points to the same IP as news.ycombinator.com

You would need to login again because your cookie was set for .com not .net.
Short answer: this is "agency" UX. If you want to work in a startup, then 90% of what you're learning is useless. You're learning traditional practices that put emphasis on planning. Startups generally need to put emphasis on speed and flexibility and adaptation to change. For that, you might benefit from learning how to rapidly prototype with actual code and when creating UX documents, stick to what you know is important and necessary and cutout 90% of the bloat that traditional UX people design for.
I agree 100%. This whole thing reminds me of reddit's recent budget issues and how their appeal resulted in a huge boost for them. Just looking at the comments on this blog post make me think that simply including a 'paypal donation' link at the bottom of this blog post ALONE would have generated enough funds to keep them running for for some time.

This is a bit of a harsh thing to say... but is it possible they were not able to find a business model due to lack of trying?
You don't think that this is going to further fragmentation of the OS?
afaik yc doesn't penalize you for applying multiple times, and there's no cost to do it, other than the time involvement.
Impact of Hurricane Igor in Canada
> Yes, but the question is, would your cards have been just as effective had you only relied on a simple, but professional looking, logotype.

I doubt it.

> The purpose of a logo is brand recognition.

That depends very much on the stage of your business, and still runs counter to the author's point.

> I outperformed and outlasted several friends who jumped in the game at the same time with fancy logos and websites.

"Fancy" doesn't necessarily mean professional or polished, and presentation is only one aspect of a business. It doesn't guarantee a business's survival, but it can help you get a head-start.
Reminds me of the old dot-com screed: We lose money on every customer, but we make it up in volume!
I use a separate browser to access facebook, on those few occasions I need to. No other sites need to now about that.
Whether the author's plan would work or not, what bothers me about it is that it seems that the 2 major actors within the US government that would have to carry out this plan, namely Congress and the Executive branch, appear in recent times to the lack the ability and/or willpower to carry out any long-running fiscal-scale mission in a consistent way. I'm in my thirties and from what I've observed so far in life it is extremely hard/rare for them to carry out any single plan regarding Federal spending consistently for more than 2 years or so, before making significant changes, adding loopholes, gutting it, making exceptions, making a total 180 degree turn in direction, etc.

To give just one example, if you follow US Congressional news you'll periodically hear about something called a "debt ceiling" that supposedly Congress has to follow, which puts a limit on how much debt/deficit is allowed to exist at the Federal budget level. The problem is that they also periodically raise this "ceiling", whenever it is convenient. Whenever there is some supposedly exceptional or temporary state. And these exceptional cases and temporary conditions keep happening. Therefore the Federal debt just keeps going up and up (mostly: except during part of the Clinton presidency.) Memo to Congress, I don't think the word "ceiling" means what you think it means!

The crack baby treatment of NASA is another example. "Give us a big plan to return to the Moon and Mars and we'll fund it. Okay, thanks, great plan, we'll start funding it." Few years go by. "Oops, sorry, we changed our mind, uh, could you repurpose that into a cute little station escape pod for us? k thx bye."