skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Evolutionary algorithms require quantitative object functions. The set of problems that have those are pretty small. Lots of design has to do with beauty, which almost by definition isn't easily quantifiable.

Another issue is the complexity of the problem, which might make convergence on even a semi-optimal solution difficult or extremely time consuming to find. Complexity, even of a quantitative problem, makes for difficult objective functions. Different dimensions of optimization require fairly arbitrary weighting.

But the future is still exciting. iRobot is working on a new software architecture for robotics, called Aware2. It will allow EA to permute fairly high level pieces of code and behaviors. The system is still under development, but it has great potential. If you're curious, it is in C++ for component speed with boost.Python for glue & configuration. Similar systems can be made for other complex problems, not just robotics.
Jquery Essentials
Scott Adams talks about Affirmations here: http://www.mindhacks.org/2007/01/18/scott-adams-affirmations...

A friend showed me the chapter at the end of The Dilbert Future - I definitely recommend giving it a once over.
Are you a Canadian YC News reader?
Are there any Canadians reading YC News? Please respond and/or vote up, if yes.
http://web.genarts.com/galapagos/index.html

http://web.genarts.com/galapagos/galapagos-images.html
"It appears to me that nobody is doing blue sky research in the computing field. Rather, it has all become a case of building a better mouse trap."

You don't hang around the Haskell crowd very much. ;-)

Seriously, blue-sky research is alive and well in the computing field. You just don't hear about it much because blue-sky research, by definition, is useless. And usually highly technical as well. Techcrunch gets far more readers by covering the latest Reddit clone than Lambda: The Ultimate gets by covering the latest advances in dependent typing.
Hopefully I can speak better than I can spell [sorry for spelling your name wrong]. Looking back at my first submissions I am embarrassed at how insecure I sounded. I hope this does not get in the way of an interview if you like our idea.

Dave Bosson
> From what I've seen, getting rich doesn't seem to change most people's level of motivation much

That is interesting, because when I lived in Cambridge I worked in a circle of serious lisp/hacker nerds who busted ass to get rich, and then promply retired from doing anything once they cashed out. They are now exactly like what the guy mentions in the first post; they chill on the sofa and read stuff on the internet. Maybe the Harvard grad school hacker scene had a different personality type than the one at MIT.
Thanks Jamie, Sumon, and Tim 
I appreciate you guys opening your doors last night for an entrepreneurial get together. I had a lot of fun and look forward to watching everyone's ventures.
What was the deadline?
Figure out what you want to have, do and be. The have part is easy, most people can work that out on their own. What do you want to do? Do you want to learn something new (foreign language, to tango, a new programming language, etc)? Do you want to do something physical (run a marathon, achieve weight lifting goals, swim the English channel,etc). Do you want to be a philanthropist? Do you want to run a non-profit organization? Figure out 3-5 things you want to do.

Be is harder IMO. Do you want to be a husband? father? grand father (you need help on this one obvious)? Do you want to a champion whatever? These are the questions I would ask myself. With the answers, you can start taking concrete steps.
I follow LtU not always able to comprehend the points made after all I program in a language worse than blub, I kid you not.

But nothing on there has ever come across as radical more of an evolution and sometimes it's just plain ego stroking.

As for Haskell, it's in danger of losing it's chance for wide spread acceptance. The further they take it away from being a good language for multi-processor machines the further away it is from being useful.

With the death of Von Neumann in sight, at last, Haskell is galloping away from it's biggest selling point to the average pgmr. I'm starting to think Erlang might become a mainstream language instead of Haskell. Would sort of prove the need for a language to have a single designer.

The sort of things I'd hoped to see in research are :-
Genetic design of machines with 1000+ simple cpus with multi level communication and storage.
Proof that the brain works on a quantum level.
Cyc tied into machine learning so that it auto updates it's rules.
Rules for understanding complexity from simple components.

Basically, I want to see the big problems that are just within grasp tackled.
Converting Money into Girls, if your not willing to engage professionals, is not as easy as you'd imagine. Or rather, it is about as hard as you'd imagine. Money doesn't make that big a difference.
Getting Things Done, in Emacs
July 7th Loco Fights - TvByDemand | Forums | Loco Boxing
Hi Robin,

You bet, I never miss YC News! I'm in Calgary, AB
I'm a dual US/Canadian citizen, does that count? I'm currently residing in the US, but plan to move to BC within the next year.
I'm from Calgary, AB - currently residing/working in Seattle, WA.
yup - calgary also
'Alex' here, I had a good time and met some interesting people. Thanks again for putting it on guys.

(just need to figure out an easier way to park or bart up there)
Agreed. It looks like the author got a few press releases and decided to include whoever came to mind first.
I am in Calgary too. Lets have a Calgary meetup!!!
I'm in Ottawa.
LOL, I love guys like Joel Spolsky-- self anointed gurus handing out really terribly advice to uncritical lemmings.... this reduces competition in the marketplace for those of us who think (and have experience.)

Joel is like one of those infamous Lieutenants in Vietnam-- all book learning and zero experience getting people killed-- usually to get fragged by one of their own. Since fragging is uncommon in cubicle farms, Joel still lives.
I'm in Fredericton.
Hey Dave, great to meet you too. While we're in the san francisco area we hope to do another one of these meetups. Just leave a message if this would be of interest and any feedback you had on making it better.

Everybody is welcome for the next one which we will put on soon :) shoot me an email.
Yes, from Vancouver.
this is a useless list
the sites are not even on alexa

bestparking -> 600k +
loopt jus 100k users lol
http://www.collegeprowler.com/ - 255k wow

http://www.inc.com/30under30/2007/26-hamilton.html do people even use this

it is a good loser list at best!!

http://www.mentalfloss.com/ - 35k lol
Yes, i'm near vancouver
Originally from New Brunswick, living in Cleveland Ohio now.
Yes -- originally from Toronto, but I've recently moved to the Bay Area.
how i make furry secks?
Purchase an your own personal airplane and realize just how freaking cool it is that a trip from wherever you are to 3 states away is just 3 hours away, no airport hassles & wait times included. It makes the world feel a lot more closer. All of a sudden, a trip to LA from Seattle is just like a trip from LA to Fresno. Except your flying, in an airplane , inside a 180 degree view angle canopy.

Purchase time with your money in hiring other people to do the chores in your work & life.

(This may not apply for you) Purchasing real estate close to your work, reducing commute times to 10 minutes from maybe the hour or two you have already.
"any feedback you had on making it better"
--PeepFlow--
I don't know too much about the product, but I definitely think you guys are on to something.
You make it a royal pain in the ass to do it beyond the typical user scale to the point where it's cheaper to create their own similar data than to attempt to copy yours. Myspace does it for example. You can search their enitre user database with just clicks, but good luck in trying to scrape their entire user database.

Anything beyond that and your talking DRM.
Editable folksonomy
Ok, Im curious. Tell me about your experiences.
Facebook account disabled because I wasn't confirmed by my high school within 60 days
Should a startup bind to these kind of policies?Is this policy required by state laws?
Its still a captcha.
So do we say the Terms of Service suck if they can remove you from your social network based on what they "believe"?

Or perhaps the people who depend too much on any service (instead of an open platform) should bear the risk?
Mike and I enjoyed it alot too - especially seeing the infamous Yscraper for the first time and meeting the Weebly's in person. If the group gets any bigger, we could also host it at our office at 2nd/Folsom (right across the street from cnet.com). We could probably hold up to 50 or so. (There is another conference room half the size of our main work space in this picture http://streamfocus.wordpress.com/about/ which only has a conference table in it) Maybe we could have a two pronged approach to this - a purely informal side like the get together at your place which was great, and a "demo day" where people could demo their apps.

At the techcrunch party, we got a lot of value out of pitching what we were doing to people (shaking Guy Kawasaki's hand was a bit of fun too). At first we did a bad job, but with practice, we got better. What would be interesting about a "demo-day" version is you would get practice pitching plus some excellent geek feedback on the product. The practice could be a really big deal for those times when demoing is serious business. Just a thought :)
Im increasingly beginning to believe that Web 2.0 will die... Its an abomination think what Web 2.0 applications are

Middle ware apps
- with java script clients , a language where few people have the required skils
- A non deterministic rending system for the UI with archaic postbacks
- A back end which is also badly dated
- an inefficient protocol that sens 10-13 bytes of data for each byte if you need to send binary data .. or you need to encode it.
- A slow and polluted UI . as marketers push flash etc into pages as well as browser addins
- Security issues due to the browser architecture itself.

For a limited number of companies who can afford to hand craft their javascrips ( ie not ASP.NET / server components) and who need broad reach Web 2.0 is good , but for most enterprises its a poor solution. Delivering java /.Net apps to your clients is far cheaper / more maintanable model with betetr user experience.

I have had a look at Silverlight(WPF/E ) and it seems to have much better rendering/performance and be more elegant but its from Microsoft.

Regards,

Ben
There was an excellent article in New York Times on the subject:

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?sec=health&re...
click this link and you will see that the link does not exists and says expired,yes its ycombinator
got this from clicking on login from the new page.
That's part of the reason I disabled my account, their absolute insistence that you identify exactly who you are is a huge privacy problem.

It is because of this that facebook users experience bigger privacy problems than other sites, regardless of what their publicity tells you.
If it's supposed to be an accumulator, I take it they want the value of n to be changed each time. I'd do:

def acc(n):
while True:
n += yield n
Google launching their presentation product?
The secret to selling a business for top dollar
Finding the right buyer is often more important than your valuation.
I have no idea why MMORPGs run from virtual currency with open trading markets for real currency. Pitch that to any finance guy, and if he's smart he'd be on board. Sure there is lots of regulation. That's what we like to call a "barrier to entry" and a reason to work on the problem.

Further, there WILL be an exchange system, but it will have a great deal of loss. Think of what ebay and paypal win in exchanges outside second-life. I wouldn't call it "dead weight loss", but SL could have easily made money just on taking a cut of sales, and being the best exchange.

Either way, this glosses over the idea that SL is perhaps the most mind numbing way to waste time in video games. Maybe that will change with the crytek engine.
Finding fault is less important than the user experience. A walled garden that gets annoying to use is bound to fail.
"Jewish Girl Blues" Hilarious Music Vid From J'lem - TvByDemand | Forums | Israel
Loco Wrestling Building new school facility - TvByDemand | Forums | Loco Wrestling
Survey finds Facebook banned by 70% of British Companies
Social Network Exhaustion (or Facebook Bankruptcy Redux)
Tonight we're going to party like it's 1999!
What If Joost Were a Web App?
Nice VS 2008 Code Editing Improvements
A Social-Networking Service With a Velvet Rope
Congress Request Drug Policy Info - TvByDemand | Forums | WWE
Another Pro Dies: Manager Ronnie Gossett - TvByDemand | Forums | General
Konnan's surgery a success - TvByDemand | Forums | TNA
Dual Canadian/US citizen. Currently living in the Greater Toronto Area.
DiBiase's son signs with WWE - TvByDemand | Forums | WWE
You can tell he is a true entrepreneur. Despite the fact that everyone thought he, and second life, were crazy, he went through with it. Who's the crazy one now?
I'm in Calgary as well. Parker, I think I have seen you around.
118,254 RSS feeds
Thought some yc people might be interested in this?
I would have to disagree with this. I certainly don't like this general mentality that seems to engulf the Web 2.0 world. It is the same mentality that made the .com boom bust. A business needs to make money. That is why it is a business. I can side on not having a business plan, being flexible is very important. But to not have a business model or any foreseeable way of making money is just stupid. A business that generates no revenue is a collective hobby, nothing more.
Are you implying that you haven't made money on YC already?
Jjot - take notes online, fast.
An Honest Look at Django
I agree with this sentiment. In my opinion, the best thing money can buy is freedom. As such, the first and foremost thing you want to do is protect this freedom. That is, make sure your money level isn't going to go below certain thresholds that impact your freedom. Of course, this involves investing, diversification, insurance, not spending too much, etc.

After that, it really is not what can you do with freedom, but what do you want to do with your freedom? For me, at least at the moment, I like to work on Internet startup ideas and help people (as best I can) who are doing the same. For you, maybe it is something different, perhaps along the lines of some of the other comments.

Finally, I think your situation just lets you slow down a bit. That is not to say you have to have less motivation, but just that you don't have to run at a million miles an hour all the time and hit potential burn out periods. You now have the opportunity to take things at a comfortable pace. And that can be a good thing for innovation because you can read more disparate things, try different projects, and even work on may projects at the same time.
Yes, I'd think that actually having released something is prerequisite to being one of the "top entrepreneurs." I'm just saying.

edit: Oh, it's for the "coolest." Ok.
Of all the JS frameworks I've used(mind you I used to use Prototype and the like) I was most productive with Jquery and I will continue to use it in all of my projects. That's how much I love Jquery!
True. Talk about busted. These lists are always sloppy, but this one takes it to a new level.
We're in the black, but not by much.
I'm in Toronto.
WWE Shorts - TvByDemand | Forums | WWE
In London town.
If Twitter generates enough traffic they can revenue share from the cell phone companies. So they have a business model already. I get the feeling that they don't want people to know this.
The TechCrunch party (Y Combinator startups were there in full force)
The TechCrunch party was fun. I had taken out a stack of what I thought was at least 1 billion business cards, plus another 10 or so in my wallet, and managed to give them all away and get a few dozen in return. I plan on following up on pretty much all of them.
Characteristics That Make a Startup a Startup
What characteristics do startups have that small businesses lack?
News.YC layout broken - random space between entries
I'm running the Firefox in Debian: Iceweasel 2.0.0.5-0etch1. The results are not deterministic: when I reload and turn CSS off and on, sometimes the page layout is fine, sometimes the spacing between entries is too much, sometimes I have to scroll down the page even to see the first entry...

First I thought it was some CSS or rendering engine problem, but perhaps it's some javascript incompatibility?

[Update: I can't find any complicated CSS or javascript, so what about incremental display of images? With CSS off the page is always fine. Also, if I go to the page with CSS off, turning it on renders the page correctly. Is anyone able to reproduce this weirdness?]
Another New Brunswicker here.
Heh, I thought it was going to be about: http://www.top20network.com/
I'm an Australian, now living in Waterloo, just outside Toronto.
Virtual Graveyard Holds Dead of MySpace
Someone here at news.yc was talking about this very concept; I'm not sure if this is his site, or if someone else had the same idea and executed it.
Kelowna, British Columbia
It would be easier and more accurate simply to define a startup as a company which intends to derive its profits from a product which it has not yet finished building.
Halifax
I've been using gnus/muse/bbdb/planner/remember and of course emacs itself for a while now (years). It is a helpful combination of tools and extremely flexible. Not perfect of course, unless you think that living entirely in emacs is perfect.
What does it mean to "finish" building a product?

FaceBook's product is on the market, and it's profitable. It's obviously not "finished", as they're adding to it daily. Most people would call FaceBook a startup.

Microsoft Windows is on the market, and it's profitable. It isn't "finished" either: just look at Vista. And certain areas of Microsoft - Silverlight, F#, LINQ - are most definitely not finished, and nobody knows if there's an eventual market for them. Yet most people would not call Microsoft a startup.
Representing Kitchener/Waterloo Ontario Canada, the Silicon Valley of the North. (RIM, Sandvine, Dalsa, Open Text)

and fellow Canadians planning on applying this fall?
I don't call Facebook a startup. They were once, but they're an established company now. Once your first product is earning a profit (and I mean your real product, not Reddit T-shirts), you're out of the startup phase.
Waterloo, Ontario
A proposal for a service to make random people famous
1) Install Viper and Vimpulse... :)
WWE, TNA has split the Rhoads Family? - TvByDemand | Forums | TNA
Ottawa reprazent. ;)
There are times when features are better than benefits
Yes, Toronto.
I don't get how this works. They want cell phone manufactures to pay them money for having an integrated twitter client? I know Twitter is pretty big in the valley and amongst geeks, but I don't see them getting enough market penetration for the cell phone companies to consider doing this, let alone pay for it. I know that Nokia has teamed up with Jaiku, but I doubt Jaiku is getting money out of this. It seems like Nokia is just doing this for fun and to show Finnish nationalism.
first, what does it mean to finish building a product?
--take a look at this interview i did that was in the same series of posts as the article in question: www.startuporbust.com/2007/07/dharmesh-shah/
To me finished, is the first time you "release to the unexpecting."
second, would I describe a startup as dfranke did?
i think he's on the right track but also have trouble with the idea of an unfinished product; a little too vague.
third, is facebook a startup?
i think so, although they are a pretty established company, they appear to still have a startup mentality.

just my two cents
Why failure doesn't hurt so much with startups (and why you will try again and again failure after failure)
Although you may encounter failure often with startups, it's not so bad because you are doing what you want to do. And working for yourself is infinitely better than working for someone else.
What idea(s) do you regret not implementing? 
Believe or not, I had the grandcentral idea ( ok it was almost like it ) way before the company launch. I am not saying I had it before they did, but when I start researching the idea and talking to developers, I did not find anything quite like it.
The funny part is I wrote that before all the news of the DeLorean comeback. I originally wrote "time machine" until I saw BT was 1985, which of course combined with time machine means one thing...
It hurts a lot my friend. Have you not received that email from ycombinator after they made the 40 some invitation calls? Or have you not launched a product and have 100 users after 5 months (knowing that 95 are from your friends network)?

That being said, startupreneurs are usually go-getters by nature. It hurts us more to stay inactive than to to fail. So it is more like choosing between two pains. THIS (startuping), my friend, is an incurable illness. The only way to stay alive is do work on something you like. If you do not, you are slowly making yourself weaker.
Are you now in NB? Where in NB?
Do you ever return to NB, to visit family, say? Where in NB?
I sort of agree.

I've seen a LOT of entrepreneurs with this attitude of "well, statistically, I'm supposed to fail 9 times before I win on the 10th. So I'm currently working on my failures so I can get to my success."

I think that's a terrible way to go about a startup. Your startup should be what your passion is, and not some light-hearted lottery ticket. I've seen a lot of people who could easily do something great, but they're not even letting themselves do it. Probably because they're scared. They think they're not self-worthy or something. So they're just going through all of the "failures" in order to become worthy of achieving success?

Doesn't make much sense. Just get it right from the beginning, and don't buy into the mindset that you have to constantly fail in order to achieve. Yes, you'll make mistakes. You'll probably fail. But don't make it part of your mission statement.
One could argue that a very serious attempt is an even longer shot than trying something new every 6 months say.

Startups based on good ideas take off very quickly. So it's not good to waste your time on something that is going nowhere.
The author is in search of generalizations where none exist. The closed nature of the Mac and the iPod says more about the personality of one individual -- Steve Jobs -- than it does about some larger trend. The statement that "new technologies are becoming so complex that many are beyond the possibility of democracy playing a role in their development" is belied by Linux and other large-scale open-source systems, which are every bit as complex and as impressive as anything produced by "corporate or government initiatives overseen by elites."

There are plenty of successful examples of both top-down and bottom-up approaches to innovation in the marketplace today. Innovation is alive and well, especially in the high tech world, and attempts to put the great diversity of innovation happening today into one of two tidy academic cubbyholes seems like a waste of time.
Are patients the right people to rate doctors? Can a patient reliably tell if the doctor is ordering the right tests or not?
Yes, I don't understand the people with the statistical mentality. I'd be more confident in the person trying to convince himself that he was like the 10% or at least the ones that work out a little bit.
There's one root difference between startups and other small businesses: startups are meant to grow very fast.

The other differences all follow from that one. Startups do technology. They're usually product companies rather than consulting companies. They have exits (either IPO or sale) and give employees options.