skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I didn't mean to imply that the Ipad is a fashion statement, my point was that whenever someone comes up with a X-killer they've usually already lost. For example, I think that Diaspora will never take off because they've positioned themselves as a facebook-killer. What happens is that a user who switches from facebook will look at disapora and say "what? How can this be a facebook killer? It doesn't even have (whatever feature of facebook). it's terrible market positioning.

the android/iphone example is a good one, but I don't think Android tries to be an iphone killer. It's a phone with it's own values. It's about choice and open-source, whereas the Iphone is about closed-source, proprietary code and a closed ecosystem. This is probebly a major reason why Android is taking marketshares. Google has different values than Apple, and it shows in Android. It has a different soul.
You can't vote without a login.
Ordinarily I'd agree... but as another commenter pointed out, there are issues with small towns... but there's also a time-issue involved.

I created this idea because I'm a hacker, and needed to find business guys... it's taken me a year of joining every entrepreneur/networking group in London - ad I'm now starting to be confident that I know which ones to bother with and which to avoid.

I can imagine that it'd be even worse prospect for a business guy trying the other way around... which of five hundred "user groups" would a know-nothing business guy join to go find smart hackers that can get things done?

As a newbie, you'll join a lot of the wrong groups... and waste a lot of time at them. The two different crowds have an extremely small overlap... this site is intended to cut across the networks (well be going to networks on either side), and cuts through a lot of the time spent searching.

ie - first find a few people that might match your needs, then go join their network and see if you like it (kinda like the "first date")... then see where it leads from there.
That higher level abstraction is called "threads" and that is exactly what node.js tries to avoid :)
Anyone else think it was weird they said it will be "an incredible gaming platform for publishers and the players"?
no php has native lambdas and closures since 5.3.
Yes that's why everyone else's attempts to put email on a phone and copy the Blackberry has failed.

What made the Blackberry a success was the fact that RIM created a new category ......
Couldn't agree more, and plus the longer the wait the less it competes with the iPad first gen and the more it competes with the second gen iPad.
Pardon my ignorance, what are the concerns about Godaddy?

How do they relate to price of service?
It's on imageshack or photobucket or somewhere. It was a last minute google images addition. On a mobile so can't resize it ATM. Sorry.

Edit: Fixed. Along with an issue where wordpress for iPhone ate HTML entities for a canvas tag and the following paragraph.
They don't show a physical product in the mockup. I suspect you're right - we won't know for certain until someone does a hands on. In particular, I'm skeptical of Flash's performance, unless they've done some neat HW acceleration.
On LinkedIn - I can reach out through my known network... through six degrees of separation, and not knowing which contacts are the ones I need to reach out through.

This site will have one "level" of separation - and you can define who you're looking for and get them straight away.
yup. We'll be adding that too.
Git-achievements: Earn geeky merit badges while learning Git
Why the Basecamp API sucks (an update on Basecamp for Salesforce.com)
Since OpenID is coming up a lot in this thread, I've been meaning to set up my own personal OpenID provider on my colo
box for a couple of years now, but every time I look around for a free
software implementation that supports SSL client certificate
authentication, I'm stymied. Does anyone know of one?
Probability and religion are not well suited terms to use together, probabilities are for stuff you can measure, religious stuff is usually something you cant measure.

The math would go something like this X is gods existence with given definition of god, Y is all the possibilities where god may or may not exist. Then probability of god is X/Y and you should get somekind of percentage for it.

Example, Let's define god as creator god, plus there is the possibility of no god, wikipedia has 109 different entities for creator god and there is roughly eight(?) different breeds of atheism. So we have 109/(109+8)

We get 93,2% probability of god existing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Creator_gods

I'm not really trying to say anything about gods existence. I'm trying to say that don't use math where it's not applicable. To me probability is highly mathematical concept.
The BBC article refers to the people who took down MPAA/RIAA etc with a DDoS script "hackers", interesting.
The result will be:

A fine, possibly into double figures, for the Data Protection Act Breach

A sympathetic cup of tea from the Law Association for their
negligence

No more business for them from anyone except the MPIAA - would you trust them with your business data?
Make Art Every (Week)Day
Wow, this list really made me glad we applied for the next cycle.

One question though, what about startups from outside the US? Can you offer advice there visa-wise and such? I know it doesn't really matter for the three month period, but what about after that. It would really suck for a startup to do well on Demo Day, only to be unable to go to any meetings because they can't get back to the US for a few months (I think the wait period is another three months)
I think that's a fair analysis. It wasn't how I took it, but I could see that being the author's intent.
I found the following sentence to be hard to parse:

"The general answer is to pick something where the product of how fast it can be built and how excited users would be about it is high."
How frequently do companies grow (hire, add a cofounder) during the YC term? Does that ever happen? Is advising on that ever part of the YC role/conversation?
If they do announce in Jan and ship in April (probably quicker this time), then Blackberry might not look as good in comparison. I really don't get why you would tip off your competition unless they are counting on a lot of companies doing budgeting for this new device.
Thanks and agreed. I'm surprised I haven't seen many (any?) medical applications from YC companies given the margins available over consumer applications. Do you think it is the uncertainty of the FDA regulations or just a space that Silicon Valley doesn't tend to mine as frequently? Make something patients want is particularly alluring to me.
Well, it's been my (and many people seem to agree) experience that the design patterns -- at least from the GOF book -- are really only recurring patterns in inferior languages. C++, java, etc. In languages with better abstractions, most of their patterns are useless or trivial.
Internet Innovation Is Like The Auto Industry In The 1950s
Goodbye Microsoft, Hello Facebook
The Case for Shared Nothing
Yeah, I agree with your overall point. In general, a sign of mediocrity in any field is someone who over-uses jargon in any field. As much as I hear people throw around "design pattern" terminology, I also see overkill on the now-en-vogue topic of "useability", with phrases such as "use case" being applied at any and every possible opportunity.

In fact, though, what has proven my comment wrong is that the HN community has not chimed in as I predicted. This is a(nother) really informative and thoughtful conversation... I love it here! :D
How Much Should We Practice?
I think what I did, when I was using lighttpd with Wordpress, was to look at the .htaccess files that were being used, then translate them (by hand) to lighttpd rules. It requires a bit of expertise in both Apache and in whatever web server you're using, but it's another solution to consider if you're looking to "use" .htaccess files.
Alien Flux. Thrice cursed. Mention it not.
I'd guess the fact that education (giving back to society) has fallen prey to acquisition (taking from society) - in terms of priority, anyhow.

Don't get me wrong here. I'm all for making money with crazy business ideas, but it's important to make sure that we're giving back; we need to make sure that future generations have a foundation upon which they can build, not just survive.

A net positive for society - not just your bottom line - is pretty damned important.

</idealism off>
I've had this argument several times before, and frankly I'm not interested in having it again right now. If you want to understand, I suggest reading the Wikipedia page on algorithms for a start. If you don't, this is also fine by me.
Experiences with leading teams (without any experience whatsoever)
It's not about company size - it's about vision. If you look at the Ipad and the tablets that came before it it's pretty obvious that it's another category. There's a vision with the Ipad that wasn't there before. It just works. The problem with the RIM tablet is that it looks just like an Ipad, it seems to me like the management of RIM has looked at the Ipad and said "hey what's going on here, they're going to steal our marketshare. Let's make one just like it." I just don't think that kind of strategy works. Copying a product without intimately understanding why it was designed the way it was just isn't a good strategy.
One of the big advantages of Android's openness was that even the Marketplace itself could have alternatives. This is a good thing - it puts competitive pressure on Google's, and provides an outlet for developers who have issues with the payment structure or the deployment process.
A better model would probably be a Markov chain, where the states are "don't want to die", "want to die", and "dead". If you can show that the transition probability to wanting to die is very low, then you could show that you'll want to live a hell of a lot longer than is currently possible.
Maybe 15-20% do. And yes, we care a lot about that, and often help not only in advising but in recruiting.
This sounds cool, but how is this not a solution that's already been considered? It seems intuitively obvious to me that you can use a circuit simulator to solve this problem pretty quickly by assigning conductances to the edges of the graph. Modern circuit simulators are pretty good at converging on a solution in the presence of strong nonlinearities, so in principle you could even have edges that are more than simple conductances.

(I have a CS degree, but I'm a circuit designer, so it's been a while since I've thought seriously about problems like this and I'm clearly not in touch with the state of the art. This question isn't snark, it's really a question.)
You think it's bad now? When i was young my dad was a real estate agent and the MLS had a total monopoly on all the data... so you basically had to have an agent to find out the comparable house prices and get good list of all houses for sales. these days with sites like zillow... make it much easier as a buyer.

however, unless you buy from a FSBO (for sale by owner) the selling agent will take both sides of the commision.

on the selling side... having a good agent can be a big help... especially in this market, an aggressive agent may be the difference in selling or not.
Sure, but consider the cost: all those people, dead!

Doesn't that bother you? More to the point, does it bother you enough that you'll consider possible nonlethal ways for society to advance? If you're biasing your arguments in favor of the status quo, it's easy to forget to look for a third option.
No support for apt-get installation?
I'd rather not, thanks ;)

I'm sure if I challenged someone to come up with a result of 170, there'd be at least one person out there who could do it. My money is far better spent on tuition and beer.

Now, if I was a psych major, I might be able to get approval for a study comparing the congruency of self-reported IQ scores with measured, neutral ones in self-described intelligent communities. I'd apply for funding to set up testing for those who took the initial survey, and see what the results are.
The design patterns I care about are things like "use a template system to generate HTML", and "create RESTful APIs that respond to GET requests with a JSON representation of resources", and "write unobtrusive JavaScript". The same general concept as the boring old Gang of Four patterns (describe a problem and the pattern used to solve it), but at a much higher level.
This is a comment asking if someone can provide a tl;dr version.
You can block *.facebook.com in adblock plus. Then you can allow ads on facebook.com.

So on facebook, you won't be blocking Facebook.com. But on other sites, facebook would be blocked.
What a great way of turning my argument around. Kudos :-)
Are you suggesting that great programmers tend not to have to go through the normal job seeking process, being interviewed etc, and therefore it tends to be the less competent programmers who end up having to go through interviews, and that these lower skilled programmers don't know design patterns?
x = speed-of-implementation(idea)
y = usefulness(idea)
rank(x,y) = x*y

Something like that I think.
Let's assume that someone said to me that there is pink elephant toy behind my couch. That would be weird cause I don't own one, and it would be behind my couch.

But I would not be so stupid to go and tell everybody that I certainly absolutely believe that there is no elephant toy behind my couch. And I surely would not bet on it. Maybe someone broke into my apartment, and I don't know about it. (or I was wasted and thought it was funny)

I would simply take a stand that I don't know until I look there.

Thats atheism, except that it's kinda hard to go and look.
Several years ago, I did a website for a Poet who works on a manual typewriter using sheets of lined paper ripped from a notebook. I as tasked with recreating the visual feeling of the pages in HTML/CSS, including the fact that texted would be deleted by overtyping "X"'s

Take a look:
http://agiginprint.com/poessays/sonoran-hushings/
Also, the more recent articles on Less Wrong do have a tendency towards the esoteric and insular. The best postings on Less Wrong were done by Eliezer Yudkowsky a while ago, archived at http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Sequences.
QNX Tablet from RIM
It was my idea to go there and Segway it up. We chose the U of I for reasons other than the weather, and being from the south it just didn't occur to me that cold + Segway riding = really really cold.
I just figured that the author was winking while being partially serious, and it turned out fine.
At least this is an interesting idea. I'd like to see how they can advance as computing power increases over the next few years
Visas are something I don't know much about. The rules seem to vary a lot from country to country. There is a mailing list of YC founders from other countries who exchange advice about the topic. And we've certainly funded startups from a lot of different countries. So if I were you I'd just apply, and if we fund you, you can ask the alumni for advice about immigration stuff.
I use Plan 9 extensively and intensively, and I believe there are multiple reasons why it is comparatively little-known and little-used. I think the most important reason is the historical conflict over software patents between Rob Pike and Richard Stallman, and the cultural rift that it represented. Plan 9 is now under a pretty decent permissive license, but it still doesn't really function in the manner of a conventional open source operating system project. By the time Plan 9 was under a decent license, the mindshare of FOSS developers and the corporate ecosystem were already completely committed to other projects.

Plan 9 is still relevant and interesting and useful for some tasks. It may still be ahead of its time. Plan 9 has had data deduplication for about a decade, years before network data dedupe storage appliances became an important product. The Linux kernel is still struggling to figure out a decent way to implement union directories in filesystems, but unions have been working elegantly in Plan 9 since its early days.
Makes me wonder about how selection criteria shifts based on maturity of the company.

What signaling does YC look for in a company whose idea was birthed a week before applying, versus one who applies while their beta is in progress? Is it as simple as "these guys are smart" in both cases?

I've met lots of guys way smarter than me with less motivation, so there's got to be more to it.
Well, I don't think China is living sustainably either. I see it more likely that south america and europe strengthen while the US wanes.
Their list of typical attack vectors in ES3 is very eye opening: http://code.google.com/p/google-caja/wiki/AttackVectors
http://code.google.com/p/google-caja/w/list?q=label:Attack-V...

You can also easily play with the Valija and ES5/3 dialect here http://caja.appspot.com
The New Big Tobacco: Inside Canada’s underground tobacco industry
At least the SWAT team level engineers (World's Toughest Fixes) are getting paid a lot (and may get a pension).

Part of me thinks web stuff is so hyped because it sells magazines
And what exactly is a .html.erb file? The erb stands for embedded Ruby if I'm not mistaken.
Amazon at least for now is super partes, but what about the Verizon store? If I buy an app from their store, will I be able to downloading for free even if my next phone is with TMobile?
Howdy,
I installed Plan 9 several years ago(close to 10, if I remember correctly). I thought it was interesting, but it had a few problems. 1. It was too hard to install. I figured it out, but it was difficult enough that I thought I would not be able to recommend it to many others, unless they were fairly advanced. 2. The supported hardware list was too small. Mostly, this was a problem with supported nics. On a system like Plan9, a system without a good NIC is pretty useless. 3. The community of users was too small. I did not find any other local users. I found a small community of online users, but they only seemed interested in using Plan9 to break into systems and that did not interest me.
I should probably try it again, since many of these things could have improved. I have also used Inferno a bit on a prototype ATT phone and I would like to program that a bit. Linux ended up having most of what I wanted Plan9 for and that is probably why I have not tried it for so long.
The design patterns implemented by the authors of the API you are using are probably the most important (e.g. Key-Value-Observor in Cocoa).
I think http://www.wpwebhost.com/ will likely be your biggest competitor (next to WP.com), however they seem more like a standard host that just installs WP for you.
So I start a SaaS business and put "Please login with your OpenIDv2a+OAuth compatible login below." prominently on my front page.

And then I have no users because nobody knows what that means.
I recently heard Obama tell a crowd of average citizens, quite earnestly, that America is still the envy of all other countries.

Until that mindset is changed, and America appreciates that it's culture is not optimal, and not highly regarded throughout the entire world, I fear for her. And consequently, us Canadians as well.
A Day In The Life Of Mark Zuckerberg (video)
Thanks, that doesn't sound too bad then.
Get a Geek in Five Easy Lessons
Logistically, it seems extremely unlikely that a new version of the iPad would be introduced in time for the holidays. It's only been 5 months since launch, after all, and they would have already had to be building them to be ready in time for the holidays. Ramping up production in April to catch up with supply, while simultaneously preparing the next model for production just a few months later? Madness!
Rate my website please: It stops you from procrastinating
I posted this earlier but did not get any feedback (maybe because it was early in the morning). Hoping to get some feedback here. Do you see yourself using the service?

I was very impressed by the AwesomenessReminders concept. After seeing a tweet from Susan Orlean (http://twitter.com/susanorlean/status/24414323004), I mentioned to Zack how cool it would be to have something called NagReminders where a real person calls you and politely nags you or reminds you of your set target or goal (http://twitter.com/rahulcee/status/25037352841). After tweeting this out, I realized how much I loved the idea. So I decided to do it myself. I got the domain the same day and created the website (after spending a lot of time trying to get Paypal to work).

http://www.nagreminders.com/

Thumbs up or thumbs down? The pricing might be a little high but I don't think it can be done any cheaper than $20/month.
Tax Breaks for Startups: The 2010 Jobs Bill Is More Than Just Loans.
maybe you can try rent a Lamborghini for this next time. I mean it has heaters and stands out on campus as well.
I tend the lean the other way. If they had excellent battery life it would have been a bullet point in the spec list.
That's just obvious misuse of probability, and if you made such silly assumptions in a probability class you would be hard pressed to get any partial credit. Who says that all the god-possibilities in Wikipedia are equally likely? You could misapply probability to the proposition that various forms of transportation would come crashing through my wall, and come up with a fairly high probability of some form of automobile crashing through my wall. The fact that you can do math wrong doesn't mean the math doesn't apply.

However, if you see (for example) someone turn into a pillar of salt, and hear a booming voice from the sky proclaiming itself god, then that should make the existence of that god more probable in your estimation. Ditto for cars crashing through walls: if it happened more often, then this evidence should raise your estimate of the probability of suddenly having your wall knocked down by someone's car. This doesn't have to be complicated; it's actually very straightforward.

To you, probability may be a highly mathematical concept that doesn't apply to everything. To me, probability is how we express uncertainty. It's a powerful way of describing the way the universe works, and we ignore or misrepresent it at our own peril.
No country is perfect, and the US is still in great shape. But I think the basic issue that Americans are fat and entitled is a serious cultural hurdle that we need to get over. People need to put this into perspective that our global dominance and unprecedented prosperity of the last 60 years was basically served up on a platter by the worldwide industrial destruction of WWII. If we can just accept that we are not in fact smarter or better than any other country, and that sooner or later we will have to compete head on with hungrier nations like China and India, and we stop looking for answers with clever accounting and protectionist policies, or burying our heads in the sand and scapegoating illegal immigrants; if we can come to terms with all that culturally, then I think we will be able to stay in better shape than most countries in the world for the foreseeable future, but that's a big if.
Thanks for the insight Paul. As an outsider, it's quite interesting to understand how (successful) startups get formed.

It's funny that in my field (economics/finance) we treat startups as black boxes, and we have no clue about how they work. We argue that they are "crucial to the economy and to growth", but yet we haven't made any progress at understanding [1] them.

Do you guys think that we (academy) have any chance at finally understanding/modelling what you do?

[1] "Understanding" = Either writing a mathematical model, or test some hypothesis with a few regressions.
I upvoted you by mistake in return.

Actually, I disagree with the downvotes. Many people have said that they must have been forced into it, and I just don't agree. They aren't prevented from publishing the book (slightly modified) and they got a LOT of publicity from this. It makes sense for them to cooperate voluntarily.