skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Chrome has built in syncing. Options for setup are in the options panel, at the top of the "personal stuff" tab.
One of my favorite services, up there with Dropbox and Xmarks (which is now shutting down).

Slightly off topic to Ben's post but did MailChimp ever raise financing?
Option 4: use an address book, spreadsheet, or database to list passwords.
I don't know of any successful medical startups that didn't have strong involvement (usually as founder) of an MD, usually with some experience and connections. Perhaps it's possible for a group of twentysomething techies who are complete medical-industry outsiders to produce a new disruptive product, but it's at least uncommon and makes things harder (especially to get regulatory approval and buy-in among physicians). And I'd guess the overlap between YC applicants and MDs with significant experience is quite small.
Exercise For A Healthier Heart
A few issues with this article:

Edison did not "come up" with the lightbulb - he improved upon the existing design.

Range isn't the only important thing in a car. Efficiency, speed, torque, and hundreds of other factors have to be taken into account. If you want range on a single charge, a camel might be your best bet.

It's an entertaining read, sure. But I wouldn't consider it hacker related news by any means.
Interesting.

I just flipped the free plan back on over at: http://goodgecko.com

I'll write more about this on my blog soon, but in a nutshell my reasons were thus:

1) It helps mitigate some marketing costs

2) I'd also rather the user tries out my app rather than the competition's :)

3) It shifts the focus of development slightly. I noticed that with the Free Trial (that kicks into paid after 15 days) I was so focused on feeding visitors through the funnel that all my time was being spent on the sales funnel; building a nice sales site, setting up A/B tests, worrying about my pricing etc. Changing to Freemium yesterday, I immediately got a bunch of signups and my mind started focusing on the app again. The onus is now on the app to be as awesome as possible in both free and paid versions. It's exposed to more people. I think this is a better long-term situation as it will help me focus on the right things, not just short-term funneling people into a Free Trial to make $$$.
Ask HN: How can we pivot our startup?
I have submitted a previous thread on HN (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1711585), basically describing our no-traction situation. Our idea mixes social with ecommerce, and we work with retailers to introduce social throughout the buying process. However, we're not seeing adoption because -- and we guess -- people just don't want to shop that way. But we don't know for sure, as we don't know if it's a "marketing" problem.

We are in public Beta, but it's been one month. We have an okay number of sign-ups but actual adoption and usage have been very poor. We have repositioned and reiterated the product multiple times and have not seen much improvement.

HN has always been my go-to source for inspiration and good ideas, so I was wondering if anyone has a pivot suggestion for us. We don't know if this idea has legs, but our experience so far has been discouraging. Any feedback/quick thoughts would be tremendously helpful.
Michael Heilemann's analysis of user behavior by blog
I'm afraid to go back to Google for bookmark syncing because the last time Google offered the service they shut it down. That's how I got to X/FoxMarks in the first place.
Or 1960s advertising executives.
This is not a knock off. It’s a very distinct and unique product. RIM deserves a lot of credit for not merely creating an iPad clone.
I think that is the big oversight in a lot of green tech. Sure we could make items that have super impressive green specifications, but making them to achieve the same/similar performance to the not so green counterparts is the tricky part.
Alternatively, RIM are perfectly secure in their castle - there's little sign of any movement in their core corporate market to alternate devices. No need for them to panic, they want to do this right.

When I commute to work in the morning, and they announce the train is delayed (again!) out come 500 BlackBerries... It's quite a sight!
Wow that's amazing - I always assumed that only the text went to a simple PS renderer.

One of my colleages once wrote the universities crest in PS, by hand - and it's a complicated one with lots of lions and crowns.
Advertising billboards use facial recognition to target shoppers
What was the value of blogger over, say, geocities?

Sometimes structure adds value, and the most general tool is not the best.
A promising Mathematician
'.... Me in the process of mathematical discoveries without advanced category theory is like David overcoming Goliath without serious military equipment ....'

Check out this promising young mathematician:
http://portonvictor.org/

Also, he would like to be nominated for the Abel prize. Let's help him out:
http://www.mathematics21.org/abel-prize.html

Also, check out his religious blog:
http://endofgospel.wordpress.com/

The longer I read through his websites, the more intrigued and disturbed I am becoming. Quite fascinating actually, if you take a couple of minutes. Don't spend too much time on the math though....
They talked up the POSIX environment and OpenGL, as well as a JVM for classic BlackBerry compatibility. But for now it appears the only dev kits available are HTML5 and Flash, which isn't surprising.

Like Apple and iOS, RIM will need to finish writing v1.0 of their own native apps before they will have a good idea of what the public APIs should be. And it remains to be seen just what that native API will resemble, what language(s) it will support, how good the documentation is, etc. Those things just don't fall from the sky. On the other hand, RIM has lots of experience in that area.
Presumably roughly the same as the difference in value between Quora itself and a wiki.
Cia.gov uses HTTPS by default
Well even if that's true (n=2 isn't a sample), it doesn't affect the article's claims. The pilots mentioned performed better than the baseline.
I'm pretty sure I stole that interpretation from this guy: http://moldbuggery.blogspot.com/ - I spent a while looking for the exact article, but didn't find it. Most of them are very interesting anyway. He's a fascinating character, and even if you don't like him, he refers to great primary sources. But do watch out for three of his big biases: 1) assuming everyone is as smart as he is; 2) growing up as a "Brahmin" (his neologism); 3) preferring that the U.S. solve its own problems somehow (patriotic but very difficult).
I'm in the same boat. The article didn't explicitly mention the situation where users are syncing to their own servers. I'm wondering if that would really be impacted seeing as you're not really using any of their server resources?
Why the "(J2EE)" .. Java is not equivalent to J2EE. There are much more flexible and down-to-earth approaches to Java development.
Here's another exercise: In the past 20 years, how many millions of citizens has the US killed in the other 6 countries that were mentioned?
I think Henry nailed my experience thus far in the Seattle TechStars program. The activities, presentations, midnight oil burning drinking bin... I mean. It's been great growing my network of friends and colleagues, while receiving the highest level of input from some really high caliber individuals that genuinely want to support you in building a great company, a great product and knowing the handbook of how to get investment.

My answers to your specific questions are as follows:
A) Giant Thinkwell made a video of us changing diapers and getting peed in the face, as well as sending Andy Sack ransom notes and cupcakes. That's out of context, but the point is, we let our personalities show through and allowed ourselves to have as much fun with it as we have with our product.

B) Understand that time is ticking and this opportunity will come to an end. Absorb and contribute to every possible presentation, meeting, pitch practice and social outing as you can. Know what your values and standards are for the company you want to build, but take heed to the advice being given and apply where you can.

Best of luck! If I could do it all over again, I'd absolutely shoot for NYC. David Tisch is geyser full of wisdom. RECORD EVERY MEETING AND CONVERSATION!

- Kyle
I thought OAuth2 solved this?
My electric bicycle also goes 25mph like that old electric car.

I can tell you it takes exponentially more power to go faster than that because of wind resistance, so that's why it could go that far at that slower speed. There's some nonsense in their numbers though, because my battery is state-of-the-art and it can "only" go for 2 hours, so that's 50 miles max.

Also, the batteries they used a century ago were very dangerous because of their liquid (acid) chemicals and had to be replaced constantly. The lifepo4 battery my bike uses is good for over 5 years and can survive being crushed without any explosion/fire.
State income taxes are generally pro-rated on the number of days in the calendar year.

The only place I've really seen the one year clock is just as something universities made up to keep their tuition price discrimination effective.
not exactly the same as open-sourced and maintained code, but, fwiw:

http://wiki.foxmarks.com/wiki/Foxmarks:_Using_Your_Own_Serve...
12 Things Every Programmer Should Know
I'm an "IT professional" and, worse, an old IT professional (closing on 40.)

I strongly disliked the idea of instant search when it launched, but to my surprise, I'm actually finding it very useful. I've been able to train myself to avoid focusing on the results pane until I get deep into my query string (3rd or 4th word.) That tends to be where I organically pause anyway, while deciding whether I should tack on another word to my long-tail queries.

By that point in the query process, the noisy and wildly-irrelevant entries have already been weeded out, and I can start focusing on the results pane. Interestingly, on several occasions recently, I've seen a promising result flicker past as I'm in the process of adding that 4th word to my query. When I'm done typing, I see that none of the results are as good as the one that flickered past when I had just 3 words in my query, so I delete the last word and voila. Result that I might not have found without instant search.

I'm still not crazy about some of the larger implications (pushing most users towards the same query strings, etc.) but am finding it surprisingly useful on a personal level.

FWIW, YMMV, etc...
Most technical question/answer:

"11. Ahawks This may be "confidential" information, but I have to ask: As a developer, I am amazed at the amazing world that's created dynamically. Towering mountains, twisting caves opening up to caverns, islands, precious ores sprinkled throughout, etc. Notch, could you explain at a high level how the world generation algorithm does this?

I'm not sure how to explain it without getting technical.. The complicated high level technical version is: First I generate a linearly interpolated 3d perlin noise offset along the y axis. I fill that in so that everything except the top x blocks is stone, then I do a second pass to add features like grass, trees, gravel, sand, caves and flowers. The world is generated in chunks of 16x16x128 blocks, based of pseudorandom seeds that are a mix of the level base seed and the chunk location in the world. This ensures that you always get the same terrain in an area regardless of what direction you traveled there from."
xmarks: @PinboardIN hey if you've got some good ideas, we're all ears!

and, of course, pinboardIN: @xmarks the model that has worked well for us is 'charge people money for a useful product or service'
Cloud storage doesn't mean one gigantic filesystem. ZFS can easily handle as many drives as you can fit in one machine and if you scale horizontally then that's all you have to worry about. It also provides checksumming, compression, and ease of management which are really important on a large scale. If you need a single 2 PB filesystem then you should look elsewhere, but if you need a local filesystem I don't think there's anything better than ZFS right now.
I was in TS Boston 2010 with Loudcaster.

You get in by applying. I would apply early and send TS regular updates regarding the progress of your project since applying.

I have my own opinions about which model is better, but if you are willing to move to be in a business acceleration program for three months, then you should apply to both.

I think I recall some TS staff suggesting people apply to both, otherwise you're limiting your options, and you're in a great spot if they both want you.

You'll get the optimal experience by dividing and conquering. You're supposed to come out of it with a better business sense and a product.

You need to find the right balance between product development and business development, and having the right partners is key to that.

Whoever is the CEO for all intents and purposes should probably go most of the sessions, but not the whole team. This can be a little tough if the CEO is also one of the coders, so it's extra handy if your partner is also a coder.

You should also be very proactive going through the mentor list and reaching out to mentors early.

Oh...and when you get accepted, grab your office early and get the one closest to the entrance because a lot of mentors will drop in the first couple weeks to meet everyone ;)
They need time to get developers working on products for the thing so they don't get caught out in the cold with nothing good at launch.
You may find "Doing Y Combinator in your 30s" useful & interesting: http://zencoder.com/encoder-blog/2010/09/21/doing-y-combinat...
Does Facebook know in advance that they're going to become the 2nd biggest site on the internet?

And are they starting over in 2004 or 2010?

I think both of those significantly impact the answer to your question.
Medical analogies for financial markets are pretty tenuous, but I find myself in agreement. A big issue from my perspective is that everyone is ringing their hands about home values and trying to prop up the deflating bubble. As someone with aspirations to own a home, this is infuriating. I can't afford a home, and neither could all the people who bought them. They need to let the prices fall to where people can actually afford them instead of trying to save the speculative value which we already know was based on hot air.
I would suspect much higher than that. TC was rumoured to be making over $10m a year even 4 years ago before their conferences and Crunch Gear etc. It's a solid blog network and still growing in influence and mediums (TCTV, Disrupt etc).

Given how much stick MA gave entrepreneurs for not swinging for the fences in the angelgate panel this morning I would guess over $100m.
More interesting tidbits on this:

- "A source close to the negotiations tells us AOL has tried to buy TechCrunch twice in the blog's five year history"

- AOL didn't execute purchase price @ $30m in 2009 because TechCrunch didn't fully own it's conference biz, that it's since seperate from Calacanis.

VIA -

http://www.businessinsider.com/aol-tried-to-buy-techcrunch-t...
But PHP is just as confusing. When you say:

foo("bar", "baz", "quux")

and

foo(array("bar", "baz", "quux"))

you have the same confusion problem as Perl. Except there's no explanation for it at all.

I guess if you don't know anything about programming and never hope to, "Oh, well, uh..." is good enough.

This makes me sad.
Think sports metaphor.
I2P a real versatile anonymizing network for Linux and Windows
On Ambition
Wait a minute....they polled a bunch of Appcelerator Titanium developers and found that 59% of them think Android has the "best long term outlook"?

That poll is about as useful as polling only iOS developers and finding that 90% of them think iOS has the best long term outlook.
Xmarks is shutting down in 90 days, apparently. =\
I love it when the Ruby community discovers a tool that a few kernel hackers wrote over a long weekend.
Monetizing & Profiting off of SaaS
I thought I was one of those people too... every time I try to nap it seems to end up with me just lying down and trying to fall asleep for 20 minutes. However, after moving in with my girlfriend she has confirmed that I do indeed manage to fall totally asleep during these attempted naps.

I did some looking around and apparently earlier sleep stages can easily be confused for being awake, especially for light sleepers. It may sound weird, but sleep perception is a funny thing. Some people nap quite easily, yet conclude they did not sleep at all because they never perceive themselves falling asleep or waking up.
364 days ago with 0 karma, right!
Google Invests In Human Monorail Shweeb
I played with this a bit (the Microsoft network has some fledgling activity). I think its a good start and the founder behind it seems impressive. However, I'm a tad disappointed by how similar to Quora it is not just in terms of functionality but also in concepts and look & feel. Maybe these will change or maybe I'm off base to expect a lot of innovation here :).

Definitely worth trying out.
This situation always reminds me of @shitmydadsays:

"That woman was sexy...Out of your league? Son. Let women figure out why they won't screw you, don't do it for them."
Savers told by banker to stop moaning and start spending
We are actually repositioning eLive as eDole: the first social Karaoke webservice.
Imagine: you just have the largest music catalog for cover songs EVER : Youtube :D
And the subtitles thing is definitely a good point.
Thanks so much folks !
You said it: "Parents should be teaching these".
But how can we rely on parents to do the right kinds of teaching when there's literally no requirement to becoming a parent? I suspect that one of the things that has held schools back is a hesitation to teach things that technically fall in the domain of parenting, but as more and more studies seem to be showing, parents are often the weakest point of the child's education. I think the educational models of the future will either focus on parental education or bring even more things (like values, for instance) under the umbrella of 'schooling'.
Why would you dispute that the choice of technology affects performance? V8 is one of the fastest implementations of javascript. Combine that with a culture of nonblocking libraries, and it makes it very easy to write web services that scale for 99% of what developer's need.

Sure, if you hit it big, you'll probably need to change things around a bit. But I think its valid to say that with Node, you don't have to worry about performance because by default its really, really fast.

Overall I have mixed feeling with my experience with Node so far (the libraries are very young, and extremely flaky). However it makes it dead simple to write apps that scale to a ridiculous level without huge amounts of upfront planning.
Great article! Just reading this finally motivated me enough to create an account here and seriously think about applying for winter 2011. After some reconsideration though, I'm not quite sure I'd be willing to quit my day job just yet. I have a few ideas for startups and one project I've been working on in my spare time that is interesting but nowhere near complete. Would it be worth to apply anyway? Perhaps I could list all the ideas I have or maybe just the best one? I was also thinking about applying to the YCommonApp. But I'd prefer to target my resume to specific companies just because that has worked for me the best in the past. Anyone have advice on what might be a good route to take? YCombinator funding? YCommonApp? Both or neither?
Btw, if you login on another site using Google or Yahoo, you are using OpenID.
I really didn't understand why they deprecated the wiki. It makes as little sense as the way programmers misuse the word deprecate.
That was (and is) the ironic thing about all the government sponsored home ownership programs and legislation. They pumped up demand at an unreasonable rate, causing ever increasing prices, which made it harder to afford a house, which prompted further government stimulation...an endless loop, at least until the fiat charade ends.
Goldman Sachs: Apple planning thinner iPad with camera, mini USB
Stays at Y Combinator
Notes on Performance Patterns
Is Blackberry growing as fast as Android?
Have you talked to your users about this? Try it. Also, prospects other than your users.
The Blackberry iPad Killer is here: Playbook
Many data centers use virtualization, so it makes no sense to talk about machine specs. Most VPS deployments are over-subscribed, meaning that if everyone hit it at the same time, then you'd see only a fraction of the claimed performance.
Can someone with big recurring expenses really afford to devote all their time to something that is statistically likely to either outright fail or never provide them enough to cover these expenses?
5 Reasons the Media Cover Apple So Much
Moving and Shaking: Memos from a Rookie Entrepreneur
I used to agree with you, but ever since Jobs' battle to stay alive and still not handing the reins over to someone else and enjoy the rest of his days spending his dough I find myself agreeing with the GP, it is very well possible that Apple is the thing that Jobs enjoys doing the most in the world, and that he really wouldn't give up his role there and his stock in return for any amount of money.

Those that have stood with one leg in the grave are usually pretty aware of the time they spend and how they spend it, I don't see Jobs letting up at all.
oh? really?
Thanks about this one, I never thought about it but you raised a good point.
Thanks!
Ditto here but I can't think of a way to bring those bookmarks over to Safari to sync with the iPhone, aside from using Xmarks. Any ideas?
RIM Unveils Impressivly spec'd BlackBerry PlayBook
Loudcaster looks very promising. Best of luck to you.

We will do our best to get accepted into both. Thanks a lot for the sage advice. Basically, it all boils down to who can JUST DO IT.
You are aware that asserting `len(L) == 1` excludes the possibility that it's empty, right? You know what "redundant" means, right?
what value would AOL get from the aquisition??
I wonder if the Amazon app store will end up running on the Android-powered Nook
Yes the annotations are purely optional.
Chinese developers MIUI cook up a fresh new version of Android
> like funding startups we shouldn't have, or not funding startups we should.

Examples?
Sounds like an alright idea. One thing, is there any chance of fixing the font? It looks all rough for me on Win7 x64, using Chrome 6 (same issue in Safari).
1st gen Ipod Video
However, I know from personal experience that they treat their sellers (see seller central) terribly.

I've personally witnessed arbitrary changes in listing policies (a couple of years ago they started banning all low volume sellers from offering toys during the christmas season), horrible database issues (on two separate occasions a year apart over six hundred items have just disappeared from a single seller account with no warning or explanation), and really poor customer service.

I am curious to see if they will treat app vendors in the same way.
Performance is not the same thing as scalability. A hello world app with a 10 second pause is scalable, but replace that pause with a logging statement and you've just traded scalability for performance.