skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yet another variation involves an IQ filter so that you can filter out submissions and links submitted by dumb people.

You could even do it with votes as well, so that a link submitted by a high IQ user but endorsed mostly by dumb people would not appear for you.
Is the 'Web OS' just a geek's dream?
Cheap shot.
Perl w/ Catalyst/DBIx::Class/Template Toolkit and MySQL
The World's Most Surprising Shortage The Global Guru -
My idea is a web application that manipulates a particular set of data, so of course I use BRL.
your sheep analogy is terrific. just... brilliant.

I think PowerReview has an interesting strategy in that, aside of your sheep analogy, they aim for corporate partnerships; they are closer to the "B" in B2C. revvu's strategy, if I'm not mistaken, is much closer to the "C." And in this aspect I would think the "it" for the B-approach and C-approach are different.

A more immediate competitor for you might be epinions.com?
sounds like a pretty boring place to hang out.
"..Even when you find genuinely good things to copy, there's another pitfall to be avoided. Be careful to copy what makes them good, rather than their flaws. It's easy to be drawn into imitating flaws, because they're easier to see, and of course easier to copy too. For example, most painters in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries used brownish colors. They were imitating the great painters of the Renaissance, whose paintings by that time were brown with dirt. Those paintings have since been cleaned, revealing brilliant colors; their imitators are of course still brown." - Copy What You Like, by Paul Graham
Warning: contains lots of ads and self promoting spam. A decent read though.
The Imaginary Concurrency Debate
GDrive Google's next big thing?
Python (Pylons, Mygthy), MySQL, ActionScript.
- python, c (django, wx)

- sql, (mysql)
Perfect. Brilliant. Yes we have known it but you encapsulated it so well. At Atlassian we focus our attention on the still impressive accomplishments of Google and companies such those you fund and work with. The New World wants things lighter weight, cheaper, but with no trade off on usefulness. And without a salesman or any annoying popups or other crap. Thx Jeffrey www.radiowalker.com
C# and .NET framework, because my project is a distributed multi layered app. Plus I know it too well to use sometings else
BTW, I upmodded you for helping me improve, thank you.

I see a few others may have felt that the observation was not valuable to other YCombo readers.

Please do not be discouraged from supplying authors with constructive criticism. If you care about karma, you can always use email or the comments on blog posts themselves.

Thanks again.
Thin is in? MS changes mind on Vista & thin-clients
11 tips to reinforce a purchase decision and establish a customer for life
u didn't explain why u count MS out of the web 2.0 world. may be because as u confessed u never use MS products and are so unaware of what they are up to.
The problem with the net is that the hordes of people who do not and may never understand metaphors or the rhetorical history of phrases such as "X is dead" will swamp you every time with their literalism. At some point you have to filter them out and trust that the people who are able to understand have understood and move on.
Filing a provisional patent -- a lawyer tells me $5,000.
Some of the smartest people I know read Us Magazine and People religiously. If you want a certain population of users target what they are interested in.

Once you've screen them with your IQ test, do they really have to prove themselves again before submitting another link?

If you just want to write and take tests go play on okcupid.com.
So a lawyer tells me $5,000. Google Adwords says as little as $200. Is it better to do it myself or get a cheapie provisional patent online? Can I hurt my chances of a full patent if my provisional patent isn't any good?

http://www.patent-patent.com/ has a $199 provisional patent service. Bad idea?
check out nolo.com (no affiliation). I bought the patent book. If anything, it's cheaper than $200.
There are benefits to ongoing IQ testing.

First, this allows the community to raise or lower the bar for continued participation on the site.

Second, it limits cheating whereby you have a smart friend write the test once for you.

Third, this gets around the problem whereby you get an easy test just by luck.

Fourth, it will result in a membership highly interested in solving IQ type puzzles on an ongoing basis.
In a very strong way I think you are away out to lunch. The only people afraid of Microsoft is the Microsoft Haters out there who for some obscure reason, can't think much about anything except bashing MSoft

If any of you knew anything about the software business, you would know that almost all the drive for making your product a great product is so M$oft will buy you out. Again for some silly reason a lot of the haters believe that all companies other than M$Soft are fair, reasonable and above board and that sure ain't true. Name me one company that M$oft took over than didn't make the owner a millionaire.

Lets get real and realize that consumer's opinion is not worth zippo to all these companies.
For a domain specific social news site, you could have a combination of general IQ testing along with domain specific knowledge testing.
Web2.0forsale.com Launches - Sell Web 2.0 Websites
Dupe: http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=574
Anyone submitting applications to them seeking funding to copy previously launched YC sites? That would be funny.
Out of morbid curiosity, what would you say comprehensively defines MS, or future MS strategies? They seem to constantly try to branch out into established markets by throwing tons of money at every area they can think of without actually doing innovative work in any area. It seems they are generally left in the dust trying to catch up to established markets because they lack the innovation to develop and market anything new and interesting on their own.
Python and web.py
Bessemer's Anti-Portfolio: Missed (great) investment opportunities
I like it -- a CAPTCHA for stupidity.

You could do pretty simple problems (like the Project Euler stuff), with a few random elements to keep things interesting -- especially because the smartest people would come up with shortcuts and be able to post more frequently than those who solved it by hand.
Java + gwt + eclipse + derby db
Python, C, C++ (Django, PostgreSQL)
Is Your Startup Destined to Fail? 90% Fail Rate Debunked
Forget about the fact they passed on all those now valuable companies. Look at how much work it takes to raise money!
Servers down right now - will de ding our best to get it back up again as soon as we can!
Here's a thought. You say cooking feels like coding to you. It doesn't at all to me. One major difference for me is that when you make a change while coding, you can see instantly what the difference is; there's no delay. In cooking, you often have to wait for minutes after a change to see if it was a good change. But after thinking about that, it dawns on me that cooking is like coding, if you're using a language that requires a separate compile step. I've always avoided those languages (all my experience is in interpreted languages, except for CL, which still has no requirement for a length compile step).

Anyway, less fancifully, I think there's a culture difference, here. If you grew up in a house where there was always a hundred things you could nuke for breakfast, why would you ever learn to cook unless you were especially interested in one dish that had to be cooked?

Lastly, I was a nerd when growing up, and we were pretty much the poorest people in the trailer park. My father knew how to cook hamburger helper and most anything else with instructions on the box or can, but I cook far more than he did when I was growing up. There's still always a strong temptation to just grab a bag of chips instead of making a meal, but my wife gets unhappy if I do that more than once or twice a week. :)
Has anyone thought much about search engine optimization?
My partner and I are trying to learn the right strategy for SEO these days. Does anyone here think about it? If so, what have you done or what are you planning to do?
My response isn't very scientific, but it seems that having to take a "test" in order to be able to post or comment somewhere would immediately indicate that the community in question would be elitist and probably boring.
Python & C
New Web 2.0 Links For 09/04/2007
No-one actually reads provisional applications. Just write up everything you've got, include disks etc, and send it to PTO - pay only $100 fee.
Ruby and Java
We're going to be creating tons of fresh local content. From a little test we did by starting a local blog it wasn't hard to get ranked well in google and the searchers are already coming our way.
The appropriate use of namespaces and developer discretion would be needed to ensure you don't F up your other code. If you want a switch that checks if one string is contained in another, you don't modify the switch syntax. You make a switchContain.

And you know what "for (x) in Y {;;some more code here}" means the same way you know what "x= someFunc(a,b,c)" means. You look it up. Of course it is best if the developer uses good names and comments so you can make a good guess by looking at it.

Yea it's hard, and yea it's dangerous. All powerful things are. I don't like being told I can't have something because you think I am too stupid to use it safely.
Some people won't be able to use it, and everyone at one point will be too inexperienced to use it correctly. But thats why you layer the more common languages on top.
And if you are running an enterprise shop where you can't guarantee the quality of the maintenance developers, don't let your developers use it. etc...

Because it's too powerful is not a very convincing argument for me.
Java + GWT
"Our Name Says it All!" (Uh, No, Actually, it Doesn't)
Great essay but the death was previously called

http://www.marketwatch.com/News/Story/Story.aspx?guid=%7B629B28CD-9E0E-48CA-8E8B-243AA6E2CB92%7D&dist=lycos&siteid=lycos
after I'm done reading applications
The SEO Industry and practices are fundamentally against the goals of search engines. I wouldn't want to base my business on something that Google's core product aims to destroy.
The right strategy for your company depends on many factors including what sort of traffic can your website support and if you plan to roll out your site slowly to work out the kinks (many beta launches are quiet and quite effective). If you don't have the content to support and engage your users, then you are wasting time and money.
SEO strategies should be reflective of your overall business strategy.

If you're looking for basic SEO info and how to do it, here is a cool link: http://www.portentinteractive.com/seo_3.htm.
PHP and openlaszlo
I've done a lot of patent filings, A good provisional looks like a real patent and can be turned into a patent with little hassle and not much more expense. The downside is that there is a lot more work for the lawyer to create a good provisional. A $200 provisional is a joke (just look at the form) and not worth the paper is written on...you need to have a lawyer spend time writing it up properly (esp. the claims). I'm not $5000 is the right price either though. In comparison a full patent filing will cost $15K from a good firm.
It takes even more cojones to host your applications there ;)
The problem is not the students themselves, but that their circumstances make them a flight risk. If you encourage people to start a startup as an alternative to a summer job during college, they won't be very committed to it, and commitment is the most important thing in a startup.

The moment someone graduates, this problem goes away, because then all the social pressure switches to encouraging them to work on the startup, instead of encouraging them to go back to school.
For those of you who are still in school, especially in graduate school and want to obtain free law advice..I would suggest you go to the law school.

Most law schools will provide their students free advice about everything and will help you as long as you're a student. At my school, they will help you do paper work and find proper paper work to fit your needs. Granted you will be working with 3rd year law students, those 3rd year law students are managed by the law professors. Besides, it will give you an excuse to network with some lawyers. It's always a good thing to know good lawyers.

Call the law school up or email them to see if they have a program like that for students. You have to pump your resources to the maximus while you're a student because once you graduate, advice costs.

Cheerios
The very first one did.
Develop a Clear Vision for Your Business
If you want user customizable keyboard shortcuts on the Mac, use QuicKeys...

I run Office 2007 in Parallel's virtual machine software, since I have necessary add-ins, and reboot the machine to Windows when needed for a project.

Since the release of Tiger, I have been performing many conversions from Windows to Mac. There are also large corporations like Mastercard, which are mainstream Mac.
Angel Investor Preferences Right Now: What areas interest angel investor groups the most; where to find them and results of 1st-ever survey
What are you going to do after you've sold your company?
Lisp + MySQL
When you file yourself (pro se), the PTO is gentler and kinder than they are if a lawyer files for you. If you have the time and energy, file now to get the early filing date and call a lawyer later.
Perhaps the best test would be having two buttons displayed to the user before they post a message:

"Please take an IQ test before you post" and "Post your message"

Since the people who take door #1 demonstrate intellectual penis envy and a lack of judgement on how to best spend their time (a fair criticism of me right now, since I'm responding to this post instead of working), you should only allow people who pick door # 2...

Seriously, I think the idea is a non-starter. Here are a few problems I have right off the top:

1) Big assumption that the quality of submissions and/or discourse is proportional to IQ. I don't think you can use IQ as a lever in this regard.

2) Even if 1) is incorrect, the IQ curve has a normal distribution. So, you'd cut off most of your users pretty quickly as your IQ requirements get higher. Last time I checked, it is a bad idea to actively trim a large chunk of people from your community. Especially by effectively telling them that they're 'too stupid'....

3) I'd be willing to bet that you'd alienate an important subset of people - intelligent mavericks, who wouldn't care to be part of some club based on a number. And I'd also be willing to bet that theirs are the viewpoints that would probably make your site interesting enough to come back to.

4) Adding onerous requirements (even if they are periodic) to allow people to contribute would probably result in a huge falloff in participation, and not just by the 'low IQ' club...

I'm guessing that I'm probably not in your target demographic, since I don't understand what benefit a site like this would offer - beyond feeling good about one measure of your intelligence.
me, straight Common Lisp (SBCL)
I think the idea behind a 'web OS' is horrible. Web apps are good for certain things: mainly presenting and manipulating text. Once you get outside of that small domain, you need much richer interfaces, and the web just doesn't present that. In fact I'm not sure it should.

The browser is a great platform for certain things, but everything doesn't belong inside of it. It shouldn't be an OS. Web OSs aren't that attractive to the consumer - they can just as easily visit multiple websites in several windows, and they aren't that attractive to developers - web development is relatively easy, and you lose a lot of power once you start developing on some web OS API vs doing it yourself.

I just can't see these services catching on.
php 5 and mysql 5 w/ zend platform
Postful Allows You to Send Snail Mail via Email
Go to Disneyland!
PLT Scheme + PLT Scheme web server + flat files (actually serialized s-expressions on disk. Which aren't very flat.)
"Lotus and Compaq
(formerly known as Gateway Computer)"

<scooby>Guhuh?</scooby>
Are you currently looking into VC or are you bootstrapping your startup and growing it organically?
I used to really look for news on the rumored GDrive, but with Amazon S3 available now I'm not sure I'm as excited. I wonder if they'd have a different offering.
The Cliff Notes probably aren't the whole story: the "Microsoft is Dead" and "Cliff Notes" essays were released in the midst of the selection process for Y Combinator's 2007 summer funding program. Interesting timing...
Anyone using Lucene (or Nutch or Solr)? How's it working?
http://lucene.apache.org

http://lucene.apache.org/nutch/

http://lucene.apache.org/solr/
Care to explain? I see no relevant connection.
Good point. I considered that after making the submission, but I didn't think that there was any good reason to delete it. It turns out that I had homework due today, so late last night I was making suggestions and being pretty active on this site as a diversion. You know... :-)
We are using lucene at http://www.todotoh.com

We're using it to index questions and answers and have plans to extend it to recommend questions and answers to a user based on their interaction with other q's and a's.

What are you using it for?
Do you guys use a web framework, like kpax, or straight CL?
I actually meant that you discuss several things besides "delete me" posts, so I was thinking that maybe you would want a title which captures the idea of all the things you discussed, such as evolving communities and the idea of user moderators.

The new title is a little bit of an improvement, at least.
Zero to dogfood in one day.
Stating your chosen platform, and then feeling the need to defend it (twice) in the same sentance.. not a good sign.
The SEO industry is broader than that. When I said SEO strategy I was thinking the white hat variety.[0]

[0] http://www.silverdisc.co.uk/articles/seohats/
Lisp for web apps? Tell me more.. (seriously)
A refreshing design for Buxfer
An IM widget for your blog
Start a new one.
Yeah, FedEx got the Heisman seven times. Pretty sick.
I think they're using it successfully at Krugle.com
Legal fees--start swearing now
Find a new idea..and then build a bigger and better company!
The journey is the reward.
More than the need for different skills. I think as a single founder you have to be willing to wear all of these hats.

The big assumption that everyone makes with multiple founders is that everyone contributes and that the founders really know each other. Remember that your performance is averaged with others, so if the other founders aren't contributing, you still have the burden of reaching decisions with multiple people.

I find that with one founder its easier to divide work.
Open source tools, low cost on bandwidth and storage space have all triggered low cost and overhead involved in starting something. When you have a passion for what you are doing and costs are way too low, then any wise person would run it on his own. Now a days everyone knows that going to a VC or scouting for funds would lead to power struggle inside the company with the result being the founder getting kicked out.
It is very important for any Social News website to cater to the lowest common denominator. I agree with some of the comments here that suggest that a lot of people might feel alienated.

It would probably work to abstract out the IQ of the user from the user himself. This means NOT having an IQ test per se and instead using relevant data mining techniques to measure the knowledge of the user based off of the user's posts and the rating that the user receives. I guess knowledge is a more relevant criteria for most people to read a given post, unless you expect someone to solve/crack a problem, rather than add content.

But, at the same time, if the metric (could call it IQ or KQ??)) can be internalized, and used to group people together and in turn used to attract people falling under a given group, might be valuable. A notion of relative IQ (of groups) would probably be more relevant here. (Creating an e-harmony for people in the same group and cater to their needs based on a given metric)

I also agree that this will apply better in a domain specific platform more than other generic social content platforms, simply because it would be easier to measure a given user metric. So, it needs to be as domain specific as possible.

Is anyone working on this kind of a model? Definitely an interesting problem!!!
C++
I need to support embedded systems, servers and everything in between.
Ruby on rails + Postgres
Make urls in parens link right by ignoring the final paren in the href

see:

(http://bugbear.com)
I could read it a thousand times, but it would not be able to convince me.

The only one definitely convincing me was the (well-known?) "7 primitive operators" rant. All other things are only natural consequences...
We're using it at my day job, for search and indexing of financial news. I'm not directly involved with that part of the product, but I haven't heard any complaints from the programmers that are, and it seems to give us fairly nifty capabilities.
I believe that paulgraham meant that Microsoft is a DEAD-END.
My opinion as to what killed them: suicide by REGISTRY. While any operating system needs a file system, the usual critical lack is a DATABASE system. But instead of a (relatively) simple, open relational database, MS chose some key of hierarchical network database they called the Registry. This made Windows suitably arcane, but rediculously hard to manage and maintain. Coupled with the security holes, and the advent of a capable unix-like OS, makes Windows obsolete, if still operable.
O man , they did lose out by not able to understand the business model. Bad analysts? They must hire some fortune teller instead who could predict future of companies :-))
Not exactly related, but doesn't Thinkature fit into this space? I've played around with that a bit.
Biggest cost to Google? Sergey says, "Opportunity costs." Schmidt Wired interview
Number 1 problem is privacy, how safe is it to put in things?
another cool bit in interview:

What is Sergey's hot button?
He cares a lot about the culture. He cares a lot about deal structure. He is the better negotiator of the three of us.
Larry is the deepest of the thinkers in terms of the strategic technology.
For example, today, I said, Larry "Larry, what are you doing tomorrow?" And he said, "I really need to work -- I need to go talk to these three teams." And he has this face - you work with people long enough you can sort of tell - hes thinking  I don't have good enough touch (with the teams) on an issue. What that really meansis Larry is going to gofindtheengineers and torture them until he is really, really sure (they are all in sync). And he's very good at that. He's very, very good. I mean, he is really extraordinary.
And that talent is a useful leadership skill because?
Well, here's another example to illustrate what I mean. We're arguing over the structure of our datacenters -- this was yesterday -- I thought the presentation was excellent. They had the datacenters, the components -- absolutely brilliant. And Larry says, "I just don't think that's a very good strategy," and I go, "What's wrong?" I'm a computerscientist. Ithinkit'spretty good. And he comes up with this thing that nobody had thought about -- that he and one of the engineers had been cooking up, which involved changing the way the data centers are built that was the next logical evolution.
The point is he ignored every possible chain of command. He didn't tell anyone. He went to this particular engineer who's experimenting with this idea in his 20 percent time.So what I've learned here is you don't say no to that.
Did Anybody (actually) Read Getting Real?
http://www.zachbaker.com/articles/2007/04/09/mspw-trumps-technique

nice followup..