skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Only one major problem I see; you can't "hold" any colors that are under the hex or rgb values, because if you click there it copies the values instead. But of course that's a trade off, because that's a cool feature to have.
And I can't even find a good wireless mouse.
Paul Graham: The Disruptor In The Valley
It's all subjective, but for me the usability enhancements of GMail are far, FAR more than evolutionary.
I agree with this, but I think putting in the effort to learn the language or the infrastructure enough to be able to manage a contractor or distinguish between crap code and good code will not only serve you well in the tech startup world but also win you accolades from your team/peers.

I strongly believe being really good at one thing means you shouldn't try to multi-task or wear too many hats. That's counter-productive and recipe for moderate work quality. At the same time, the early days of the startup are the most fragile times. The business guy who speaks engineering or visa-versa will have a huge competitive advantage.
Amazon is growing, no doubt. They should have a premium on their stock price, but Apple is also growing rapidly and has a much smaller premium.

Maybe Apple is seriously undervalued.
Then why do you see smart cars everywhere? They're millage isn't that much better than a yaris! I would love to have a climate controlled aerodynamic motorcycle (which is what he 1L car is) A ton of people would purchase the car. Hell you can go from SF to NY on 13 gallons of gas with it. Hell you could put 2 Jerry cans in the trunk and never have to stop at a gas station! Most of the time when I'm driving, it's just one or two people plus a few bags of groceries, it's a great second car for anybody who has to commute 1 or 2 hours every day and have a family pile into the sedan when you all want to go together.
I've been thinking about this for a long time too. One of the questions Im sure other people in a similar boat would ask is: which programming language?
Nah, you associate the credit card after making the account. I'd created an account a couple weeks ago, but didn't want to enter my credit card until I was actually going to use it.

Cancellation is done over email, and I haven't gotten anything back yet. I used another email address to make a new account.
Revenge is satisfying, but misguided, because most people assume that is enough. Criminalizing business will mean that only crooks will want to run businesses.

Instead, most problems of this sort can be prevented in the first place by full transparency. Put the books and records of financial companies on the web, continuously updated, and you won't see as much bad behavior. Of course, this is nothing like our current system and would make most business leaders howl in protest, since they would not know how to "add value" in such a world.
WebGL w/ HTML5 canvas will let you build Cover Flow.

As to burning CD's, I did say that it would only get you "most of the way" there!
Price Waterhouse Looks at the Cost of Climate Change and Drought
Apple doesn't want to spend their time on any other platform's maintenance, make sense.
The Age of Exabytes: Tools & Approaches for Managing Big Data
That's true but Apple's not going to front you any money to develop your app.
Actually there are more ways to use the system than what you may traditionally think of when using a computer.

For example, Boeing has patents related to controlling a swarm of UAV's via a g-speak based system. There are more applications where that came from but this was the only example that is public.

Its collaborative features are a huge draw. Would you ever use photoshop via gestures, probably not, but you would use it for command and control systems with more than one concurrent operator.

I recommend that you go to oblongs website and watch some of the demo videos. A computers interface can be anything from manipulating a physical object on a table to "wearing funky gloves and waving your arms around". Its not limited to just a keyboard, mouse or touch pad.
This reminded me of Andy Wingo (http://wingolog.org), a Guile hacker who works with/for Underkoffler (Oblong).
You also need lots and lots of self-discipline. Of course, that is true for serious study in any field, but unlike many fields no one would call a mathematician someone who wasn't serious about it.
Dup http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1764895
Chrome actually ships with its own, integrated copy of Flash. Which, coupled with Chrome's automatic updates, should keep you nicely patched.
"We thought when we started Y Combinator that the most important quality would be intelligence."

Being intelligent in Silicon Valley matters about as much as the price of tea in China. It's not that being intelligent isn't important, it's that there is such an oversupply of intelligent people that being intelligent really doesn't add that much value or differentiate you. Especially since everyone you meet is more than happy to tell you what to do, along with the market itself.
I've got a startup that is based solely on AWS. In fact, I just asked for feedback on it: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1820622

The startup is a Virtual Demos, Evaluations and Training solution. It uses the EC2 back-end to issue machines (eg. to give out a demo to prospective customers, or to issue a training environment to a student in a classroom environment).

In practice the startup uses EC2 to lease out machines, but itself is running on EC2. We use all the AWS goodies to scale the environment as demand builds up. So far I've found AWS to be an awesome service, and quite a game changes. If you're not aware, they now offer 'Micro' Unix boxes for 2 cents/hr and Windows boxes for 3 cents/hr, which is an awesome price point for any startup.

Simon @ LabSlice
"the Germans produced 255 tanks per month -- a fraction of the 1,400 estimate produced by conventional intelligence. (Want to see the math? Click here.) And it turns out, this method worked best: after the War, internal German data put the number at 256 tanks per month. "

Obviously, we were counting from 0. Stupid off by one errors. :)
> IT'S NOT HARD.

YES IT IS.
the biggest problem with non technical founders, from my perspective as a programmer who has dealt with many of them, is that they don't have the foggiest idea how long it should take to build something. I've heard far to many say something like, "I told an investor we'd have this built in 3 months".

I generalize of course, the best person I've ever worked for was a non technical founder and he had an uncanny ability to understand this stuff at some level despite no direct experience in it.
Well I believe my startup will be successful even without a co-founder, so I don't think wanting to meet a co-founder makes someone less determined. Even though I am confident I can make this happen on my own I would still rather have a co-founder than not for all the reasons that PG describes. If better startups comes from an event that helps founders connect, I think it would be a good thing for everyone.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. As a non-technical person trying to become technical (as an intellectual exercise as well as work on my own stuff), the simplest, yet hardest, thing to understand is "something easy" really isn't.

You think you got a minimal feature set for your project? Think again. Cut it in half.

I have a travel site as my personal project, and I still don't have the ability to select the dates for when you're traveling. Sounds crazy, but it's something that not many of my users have asked for... yet. It probably helps that the main focus isn't about selecting dates you want to travel, however.
I think its less of a friendship issue and more of the ability to "get" each other.

My co-founder and I have been working for almost 1.5 years on our startup. We have gone through so many iterations, we can see into each others minds. When an issue comes up, I know exactly what he is thinking and vis-versa. This ability is invaluable during negotiations, meetings, etc.

I don't think of us being on a friendship level, but its something greater. Its been said, its almost like your married to your co-founder - an analogy which is pretty much true. Your futures are tied together.
How about try to code for yourself, but learn where your strengths lie. If you hate coding, and really can't stand it with tons of navigation through way too many odd details and abstractions, just draw the line. It is a classic case of weighing the pros and cons.

Being aware of the basics is a huge advantage, but after some serious time invested, don't ignore that coding really may not be for you. It is going to take you forever to get up to speed. You may waste a lot of time and it may become a big mess. It is more beneficial to find a technical co-founder, code less, search more. You also may find that you're a born coder, and it is an extremely valuable to continue going at it, keep coding.
OK, why? I can't imagine it being very much more exciting that flying in a plane. Perhaps you'll get a nice view of the earth, but what else?

edit: Yes, you could just downmod me, or you could explain why you're excited about being able to go into 'space'
They license it?

Or it's different enough to not conflict?

I don't know.
Quite a few sites use Flash sockets instead long-poll to maintain connections. Hypem.com is the first that comes to mind. Zed Shaw's Mongrel2 also features JSsockets [1] which uses a .swf for connection persistence as well. There's quite a few apps use Flash behind the scenes, and you won't notice it until it breaks.

[1] http://code.google.com/p/jssockets/
I would strongly doubt there'll be any difference in penetration in the short-term. You may not be able to think of common use cases, or any at all, off the top of the head, but over the course of a year, chances are you'll come across some interesting website or feature on the web that requires flash. And the barrier to viewing it (installing Flash yourself) is really not that high.

If you want to test it without actually uninstalling flash, just install ClickToFlash (for Safari) and you'll see many sites even use flash for non-dynamic things like buttons.
Innovative Cloud Phone can Make a Difference for Developing Nations
I live here in the northwest and I don't see smart cars everywhere. Sure, I see them here and there but nothing approaching enough to call them ubiquitous. A brief check in sales figures shows 12,421 sold in 2009.

Seriously, why wouldn't VW and the like bring over ultra efficient cars if they would sell? Reason being is it costs $$$ to license a car for import, to get DOT stamps of approval etc. If sales won't cover those costs, it's a loss for the company.
I'll have to try a performance comparison, but the native HTML 5 video only uses about 10-11% processor power on my MacBook, allowing me to run it on batteries longer. I doubt that even Chrome's integrated flash can provide that sort of performance.
Part of what makes CrashPlan so killer is that it's not cloud-centric. It also offers backups to local storage, backups over the internet to authorized peers, and in the pro version, centralized backups to one's own servers and storage, which is obviously what Apple uses.

Check it out. It's the only offsite backup utility I know of which not only covers all the bandwidth conservation bases (compression, data de-duplication, block-level updates), but also allows you to do an initial backup to local storage, ship or transport the disk, and then continue to back up to it over the internet.

And before some intrepid nerd starts waxing rhapsodic about rsync and tin cans joined with string, CrashPlan also offers a respectable UI, sensible default backup selection, end-to-end encryption, firewall traversal, email notifications, total OS agnosticism, and a free version with all of the above.

Hell of a product. I have no relationship to the company except that of a satisfied customer.
Sure, upfront salary is an issue, caring about your product too much to put it in someone else's hands is another, but I'd also add that the actual process of learning to build ends up having an enormous (positive) effect on whatever it is you're making.
If you have a startup idea and you don't know how to code, learning how to code enough to implement the idea all on your own is probably not cost-effective from a time standpoint and you're more likely to end up with a mess of non-functioning code than anything else.

That being said, at least to me, knowing even a layman's amount about programming will gain major points with the potential technical co-founders you do meet.

I get approached by friends/acquaintances on a weekly basis with some startup idea. And I mostly think, "So basically you're suggesting I spend 10 hours a week of my free time for six months to build Facebook For Cats, while you make some half-assed attempt to do some marketing or whatever, and if there are any technical issues I can't even discuss them with you because it'll go over your head, and if there are any tedious technical issues you can't even help with those." It's pretty much a non-starter right there.

But knowing even a little bit about programming could go a long way. It means your idea is probably a little bit better than "Facebook For Cats," because maybe in programming you learned about some company's API and how to leverage it. It means I can split up work and give you some of the easier programming tasks and feel like we're putting in close to the same effort. And it means I can tell you things like, "the service doesn't always return well-formed XML so we should find a validator and then run it on the response before we insert it into the database," and you'll know what I'm talking about.

It all starts with the product, and the product usually means code, and having one and a half heads coding will usually be more productive than just one. Learn enough to be that half a head and you'll go far.
Accountants don't get involved until the company makes enough money to need an accountant.

Actually, here in Croatia every form of company is obliged by law to have a licensed accountant (working for them or contract). You can't do your own paperwork - and TBH I wouldn't want to, it is too much liability if something goes wrong when filing papers.
From my point it depends mostly on your role and your responsibility. If you're responsible for the architecture, design and concept, and beside you also other resources in your company are available - you're right, that you won't spend the most of the time for writing the code. From my personal experience I can say if you deal with IT-operations, even if you automate the processes (deployment, roll out of new servers etc.), there are still about 1-3 hours a day that I hack into the terminal/console to take care and improve my infrastructure.
Why not use a js ntp library?

http://jehiah.cz/a/ntp-for-javascript

Then have a dedicated ntpd daemon running. That will be way more extensible, maintainable, and scalability than a custom C program.
I guess I mean that FaceTime doesn't support all the iChat features and would be hard to just fit into iChat. Not to mention iChat is based around buddy lists, AIM service (or Jabber) and FaceTime uses your address book, push notification server, etc.

You can't screen share, file share, or multi-person video chat in FaceTime. It would be confusing to users if FaceTime was just tacked onto iChat as is.

It just makes more sense to have it be a standalone beta.
It sounds like you're trying to find a cofounder amongst people you don't currently know.

I'm not aware of any examples of successful cofounders who hadn't previously worked together.

What about your current colleagues? Long lost friends from university? Neighbors?
Programming is easy to self-teach because you can immediately verify whether you've got it right -- compile and run, see if it works.

Mathematics is harder to verify, though easier than (say) physics because you can test yourself by proving theorems. However, your proofs might be wrong because you're under some misconception. And, as the other response said, it requires an incredible amount of discipline.

Ramanujan was probably the last great self-taught mathematician, and I'm sure most would say he could have been a helluva lot greater if only he'd been sent off to Oxford at sixteen instead of twenty-seven.
Regarding using pen and paper, for certain tasks, I'm never fully satisfied with either working on paper or doing it on a computer.

For things like UI, mapping out the basic architecture of an app, on one hand I find that pen and paper is much faster and more convenient: you can scribble notes here and there, easily scratch out parts, draw arrows; but on the other, I wish it were more digital to reorganize things: make more room here, duplicate this, move that...

With software, if I want to add a small note, I need to select a different font or a different tool, click where I want to put it... On paper, I can just write smaller.

But on paper, if I realize that I need to add an element in between two others, the best way is often times to start all over again,

So neither are perfect, but maybe some touch interfaces will get us there.
As a "non-technical" person who has had success finding "technical" people to work with, instead of trying to learn to code:

1. Become a domain expert - know the problem you are trying to solve inside and out. Know the market size, sales cycles, etc. Make connections in the industry.

2. Find Customers - Bring an idea, along with a 14,000 name mailing list that you generated via blogging on the subject.

3. Bring a design - Actually mock up a set of flows for an MVP. Show it to 20 people, and iterate on their feedback. Find out what is important so when you do start building you build traction right away.

All of these are things that a good "Business Guy" should be able to do and will ultimately be responsible for when they do find a cofounder. Sure, pick up a little RoR or JS, but you aren't going to become a startup quality dev in 6-12 months (or likely more). However, in that same time you could do all of the above many times over.
The Savings & Loan scandal in the early 80s sent hundreds of financiers to jail and almost ended John McCain's political career.

The current fraud-ridden crisis has damaged both the economy and government much worse, but has only seen a few show-trials like Bernie Madoff. Moral Hazard is all but non-existent, Wall Street is laughing behind closed doors, the US Government is their mark/whale now.

Lawrence Lessig has a good TED talk linking problems like this and others to the influence of money and revolving doors in Washington:

http://www.fixcongressfirst.org/blog/entry/lawrence-lessigs-...

Edit: Direct link to the video - http://blip.tv/file/4266077
The first thing that crossed my mind was: "Apple wants to force Adobe Flash into the Mac App Store".

Now, the current App Store terms of service seem to preclude the distribution of plugins like Flash. But let's pretend, just for a minute, that they didn't. Apple would see the following advantages to having the Flash plugin on the App Store:

1) No need to worry about syncing Flash updates to OS X updates. No more risk of shipping an "outdated" version of Flash like happened with 10.6.4 back in the summer.

2) There is a visible, user friendly update stream (that is separate from the OS update stream.) This should enable users to easily always be using the latest version.

3) Apple can wield the hammer (as hard or as soft as it chooses) against bugs in the plugin--that's part of the terms of service in App Store. It makes it easy to push back on Adobe when they find bugs during the review process (even if the bugs they "find" are bugs that were known from previous releases.)

And, who knows? Now that Safari 5 has an official plugin mechanism, perhaps the App Store will open up for Safari plugins in the not too distant future.
Maybe they don't want it to be compatible.
If you are a non-techie founder, then yes, you probably can do it, but you should not. There have got to be a zillion other things that you should be doing -- raising funding, talking to potential users, researching the space, finding employees, finding office space, and yes, finding a tech co-founder.

I've been a tech co-founder a few times. If you can't convince me -- someone who wants to be working for a successful startup -- that your idea is worthwhile, I really doubt you will be able to convince users and investors either.
Niklaus Wirth's _Compiler Construction_ (free online, http://www-old.oberon.ethz.ch/WirthPubl/CBEAll.pdf) has a good intro to parsing, though for better or worse it's skewed towards recursive-descent parsing and has a "hit the ground running / focus on theory later" style.

After that, you could dig deeper with Andrew Appel's _Modern Compiler Techniques in {ML,C}_ books. The ML one is better, IMHO. Those cover other methods (LL, LALR, SLR, etc.) in greater detail, and I'd also recommend either for learning compilers in a heartbeat. (Appel's _Compiling with Continuations_ is also excellent, but doesn't cover parsing.)

Following that, Dick Grune's _Parsing Techniques: A Practical Guide_ (http://www.few.vu.nl/~dick/PTAPG.html) is a good reference...and thorough. If you're reading it to learn the basics, it might seem a bit dry, but I think it's at a sweet spot between depth of coverage and deference to the extensive bibliography. I have the second edition; the first is free online. Not sure about the differences, but the coverage of fundamentals probably haven't changed much. Also, while the other two are compiler books with chapters on parsing, this one is 100% parsing, and gets to a lot of interesting parsing algorithms (e.g. Earley parsing) that don't usually get much love in compiler texts.

Some people will also recommend the Dragon book, but I think those three will be more helpful. I haven't read the new edition, but the old seems drier & less thorough than the Grune book, less direct than the Wirth book, and less modern than the Appel book.

Also: For learning lex and yacc, the intros in the _4.4BSD Programmer's Supplementary Documents_ ("PSD", included with OpenBSD and probably the other BSDs, and not hard to find online) are hard to beat. The O'Reilly _Lex and Yacc_ book somehow manages to be roughly ten times as long yet less informative.

And if you have full control over the syntax used, S-expressions (Lisp), RPN (Forth), or Lua/JSON will let you dodge the issue of parsing entirely.
China Kneecaps US Clean Energy Industry - Or Does It?
Was he talking about the unincorporated business structure or just going into business with each other? Partnerships add all sorts of weird exposure to liabilities that you don't have to have with a corporation.
Making things hard to read 'can boost learning'
There are some very nice feeling styluses (and some that aren't nice feeling at all, too) that work on iPad - this one from Griffin is by far my favorite from the ones I've tried. http://www.griffintechnology.com/products/stylus
heh. Maybe I should reiterate, this time with only a caps :)

LEARNING to program, with the goal of building a prototype or MVP to attract interest (investors, better devs) is not hard.

Programming WELL, as in solving large technical problems, is obviously hard. But how many founders stay on as technical leads?

Not many.

I saw Dennis Crowley (of Foursquare) speak a few weeks ago. He and Naveen built the prototype and as soon as they generated some interest, they hired Harry to be the dev lead so he could "fix up their crappy code."

The code for your prototype is allowed to be crappy. It probably SHOULD.