skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
hm, spare computer with wifi card is an interesting idea.
at least it gets around the router limitations...
you got it. Powerful tools require a large investment of your time. I was never an emacs user but I am slowly changing that, as it seems to still be relevant and you can get it anywhere.
But that's true for anything you read, online or otherwise. All advice or opinions have qualifiers that you need to evaluate.
Google's Facebook App Is Real, Developers Sworn to Secrecy
And the evidence for this is a few undocumented API calls that appeared. This is nothing more than speculation.
VersionTracker joins the CNET family
Right, I've been told a number of times now that I can't get access to the image buffer in JavaScript. That's too bad.

I don't believe it can be made asynchronous and real-time. I suppose JavaScript could be used to control which resize scheme is used. While the bounds are changing, just scale and warp the image as a browser would today to make it fit a size. Once it stops changing, do an asych call to get a resized version of the image, with whatever fancy resize is needed.

I'd like to avoid .NET and Applets. Flash might be a reasonable solution.
How about this: If you are in the YC club, you and your cofounders, the idea, prototype, business model, user base have passed muster. Your team is in a startup hub like SFO/BOS. You will have the backing, connections and resources of YC.

Otherwise, the qualifiers that apply to any other startup in general, apply.
WiFi isnt the right technology. Wifi is for homes and offices. Wait for WiMax which is perfect for Towns and Cities.

If you cant wait for wimax get a 3G phone and use it as a modem.
I totally agree with your niche market strategy and writing about stuff people care about, stickability is vital too! Thanks for these great ideas, Its a shame my deep passion is gobbled with my (NONPROFIT) star trek sci fi blog! A source of income would help run it!!
I'm talking about starting with 1 small server and scaling it up with ram and cpu, then possibly needing to add a db server. That's about as far into the future as I'd like to look.
Agreed, this is the best one yet. Here's to determination.
A math nerd's perspective of the world - Here's a couple book recommendations
No, I just didnt know before I asked whether browsers let JavaScript have access to the low level image information.

I mention below the best options: server side or flash.
Argh! I just moved back to Minnesota....
I should also add that, given the conversations I've had with investors since being out here and the things I know now: I believe quite strongly that my previous company would have been a success had I started it (or brought it) here. Several companies with very similar implementation and business models started around the same time (and whom I actually had numerous personal interactions with--their products being deployed along-side my companies on a similar scale) here in the valley have gone on to quite nice success.
Trippy Apps - Every Psychedelic Computer Program on the Internet
Nice! I was thinking about making something like this for DevHouseBoston.
" It makes sense when you think about it. The yCombinator application weeds out people who are unintelligent; the interview weeds out people who are inflexible. So anyone who gets into the program is bound to be both intelligent and flexible. "

That statement is self-serving, so, whether it is true or not, it stands that there must be a better way to express what you're saying (and without speaking for YCombinator, as well.) Right now it runs the danger of scaring off a lot of applicants.

No specific college, degree, or major can define someone as a great, dedicated, productive, and fervent entrepreneur or hacker in the consumer application space.

Secondly, YCombinator isn't a one-hour Intelligence Quotient test, but a commitment far-and-above graduate school or work at any college or enterprise. The last thing Paul would want to do is 'weed out' the 'weed' who are not from great schools or 'intelligent.'

Thirdly, you're implying two things: that Paul interviews all intelligent people as of primary concern, and those who are not interviewed are therefore unintelligent.

Both of those deductions do not fit what Paul has said in the past.

It's true that every founder from YCombinator has been smart, and has at least been accepted, if not graduated from, a good, famous college. And yet, that's not what Paul states he looks for in any of his speeches, essays, or posts. In fact, he has said things in conflict to your ideas in all of those media.

I think the best way to put this is that YCombinator picks those applicants who offered a better 'package deal' than those who would be later rejected. It might be two MIT guys with experience. It could be two european guys from Cambridge with little programming experience but with a good background in a similar venture.

There are Olympians who win Gold medals in Olympic Games who have to match that performance along with others _just to qualify for the event only 4 or 8 years later._ I just watched a segment on TV about that two hours ago. I don't think it's wise to pretend there are only so many intelligent people (or good candidates) out there, that one should rest on one's laurels.
For a more broadly targeted, more nuanced version[1] of this I found The Dip, by Seth Godin, quite helpful.

Like this essay, the book gives much advice of the "don't give up" type. But the book also mentions some cases when you should quit: you should quit activities that are a cul-de-sac, those in which you are not committed to become the best, or that don't help you become the best at what you most want to do. The rationale is that current society rewards the very best, ignoring the rest, out of proportion with actual quality/merit. I'm oversimplifying of course.

Obviously, PG doesn't think any of the YC startups is in a cul-de-sac, so he can dispense with that exception and tell all of them to just push forward. If anything, he warns the folks not to 'unquit' school and other attention/commitment escape valves.

[1] Edit: I was focusing on the "don't give up, don't lose focus" part. This essay has other big theme, shame as a motivator, which is not touched in The Dip.
Those guys are cheap. Kinda scares me a bit that they say they've built everything themselves. How is the control panel? Is there any way to view the real time statistics (cpu, database connections, etc) on your server?
I decided to host one of my applications, a live chat service for 'replicated' websites on GoDaddy.com of all places, before you laugh it has really worked out better then I would have imagined. I already had the code working well under load with stored procedures and everything else optimized. It is not under active development so the terrible mssql interface didn't bother me too much. I have 2000 paying customers and no problems. I pay $5 a month for the best shared hosting ever.
If this talk didn't apply to people not accepted by YC, Paul wouldn't have bothered publishing it.
A big part of why The Woz was so eager to hack up a PC was to show it off to his peers at The Homebrew Computer Club. Once he got a reputation for being smart it must have been a lot of motivation to maintain and improve that reputation.
You can blame this guy for any of my comments: http://twitter.com/account/profile_image/ikirigin
Now did i not say this. This is one startup product I can honestly say I am jealous of. Boy why did I not think of it? I am gonna start being a hater (lol). Just kidding. Love it. Keep up the good work.
These guys aren't the finalists, they are invited for a one week interview only 5 get the cash.
It might be a way to work out which idea is the most promising. I don't get the point of announcing the names let alone what their initial plans are.
10 hits/sec? what about 10 uploaded songs/sec?
I am sorry. I am like Anywhere.fm groupie. This sucks man. I am a CEO i should act like one.
SocialMedia Opens Self-Serve Facebook Advertising For All
You have just earned yourself a lifetime's worth of upvotes. http://twitter.com/account/profile_image/blored
Top 5000 companies in the US
A space elevator is the only reasonable way to power human exploration and colonization.

Everything else is learning how to fly by strapping big springs to your boots: it just doesn't scale.

Luckily a lunar elevator is much easier and more managable. It is achievable with today's materials. The main benefits of building a lunar elevator are two-fold:

1) the system engineering learning in the process would be invaluable.

2) Lunar material could be used to make an earth elevator.

This is why I'm so excited about the recent developments in lunar vehicles. It's actually much more important than anything else NASA does.
There's a difference between "Everyone who gets into yCombinator is smart" and "Everyone who doesn't get into yCombinator is not". The former is true as far as I've observed; I don't have a whole lot to go on, but I've met a couple YC applicants at startup gatherings and frequent the sites of a few more, and they all seem like sharp cookies. I never claimed the latter. There are bound to be smart people that don't get into YC. (At least, I hope so, since I've been rejected twice and have no affiliation wit yCombinator besides posting on news.YC.)
I'm also very happy with SliceHost. But you have to understand the limitations of their offering. They're offering you a blank canvas -- an empty box with a standard Linux distribution installed. It does not have any user-friendly administration tools installed, beyond what comes with the distribution. Instead, they assume that their customers know how to manage servers themselves. If you want more of a GUI, you can install any control panel you want, but you have to install it yourself.

As such, the SliceHost control panel is very minimal. It will display some instantaneous statistics about CPU time, memory usage and network traffic. It also lets you reboot your server and restore from backups or from a standard distribution template. That's about all that it does.

That said, the control panel is very nicely done -- just minimal.

This isn't for everyone, but my personal feeling is that if you're in the market for a VPS, you should be familiar with how to configure it yourself. If you're not already comfortable with Linux system administration and the Unix command line, then I think you're better off with fully managed hosting. I wouldn't want to try and keep a VPS alive and secure without being a proficient Linux sysadmin.
These predictions are spot on mostly

But... I have to disagree with your artflock prediction, I think there is a market for this. A few weeks ago I was trying to buy art from local artists on craigslist for my new apartment, it was a pain though, because I had to click on each link to see the painting, I couldn't search very easily on genre or artist, and I had to wade through a bunch of postings for van gogh posters people bought from posters.com etc

Not sure if this is where they are going with that service, but a craigslist for art would be helpful to both artists and buyers.
Cool. Could you shoot me an email with the part number? Just curious. (sam <at> octopart.com)
The explanation leads me to believe they're trying to say that the music you're listening to was fed in to the oscilloscope, and that produced the pretty images and text, which is clearly not what happened.

Thinking about it some more, I suppose they wrote a program to manipulate the soundcard output, but I'm still interested in the specifics.
I've been analyzing slicehost and they look great, but it looks like I'll have to do too much of the server admin myself, including security. Plus, they are currently back ordered unless you prepay. Says alot for them though that they refuse customers due to server loads.

MediaTemple's dv offering seems to be 'dedicated light' in that apache, php, mysql etc are preinstalled. Also MT has a security update option where they updated tested versions of apps as they come out.

Looks like that could take alot of server admin work off my hands, which is what I'm looking for.

Anyone else have an easier option?
(It says you already replied 12 mins ago but I just finished editing my response, so you might want to get the update.)
Y Combinator in Python
The Graphical Keyboard User Interface
Octopart has a social news site
this is really OT

im from austin, live in dallas short term now

but where did you find all the hot startup action in austin?

are there any groups or communities that you frequented? any websites that you conncected with other hackers on? is austinventures really the only game in town?

It seems like austin has the free spirit startup culture, but I dont feel near the amount of startup community there as I do when I read about the valley on here and other startup oriented blogs/sites. maybe im just out of the loop tho. got any tips for an aspiring austin starterupper?
The MS Office/Open Office control panel is also a terrible example of GUI. To the uninitiated, it looks like an airplane control panel.
It's all about the aviators :-P
S.F. citywide Wi-Fi plan fizzles as provider backs off
Its a great post. Very reassuring to hear someone confirm and re-confirm that startups bring a lot of bad shit :) .
Web 2.0 in 1999.

I love how they talk about how fast and easy it is to create a web company "nowadays".
I was lucky enough to end up sharing an office with another startup, further along than mine (they had 5 million in revenues and 20 or so employees), because I did some consulting work for them and they had some spare space for a while as they grew (Austin real estate was depressed in 03 when they were negotiating and so they got a good deal on a 3/4 of a floor in the Bank of America building at the corner of 6th and Congress).

Perl mongers was also pretty interesting, though not startup-y enough. PUG (Python Users Group) also met a few times, and they were a bit more dynamic.

There's also some money in Austin. Austin Ventures is well-known and well-regarded, and they do a lot of deals. A few angels exist there, and if you're doing anything related to oil and gas or telecommunications you can find investors, if you beat the bushes. Other areas are not as well served.

But, the valley is in a class by itself. I wouldn't recommend starting up in Austin to anyone, now that I know how big the difference is between the #1 startup hub and the #5 startup hub...as pg pointed out in his article about startup hubs, the drop-off is steep. Boston is barely half as good as Silicon Valley, and everything else is likewise half as good as the next step up (I believe the list goes SV, Boston, New York, Seattle, Austin, but I might be misremembering). Might as well be in Dubuque as anywhere other than the Valley.
If I was a rapper, I would say "PG you the Truth, man". I wanted to say "you the shit, man", but that sounds bad although that means a good thing in music language.
Pipes are terribly comfortable. I think everyone will be smoking them in the future. (I'll upvote if you can name the reference)

http://www.tonywright.com

(I refuse to link to Twitter)
Can't name the reference, love the website though.
Thanks for the great reply. I'm comfortable setting up cron jobs and some minor aspects of server management. I am looking to take the next step so I have more flexibility but I want to avoid all the work it'll take to customize a 'blank canvas'.
Looking for recommendations on proven web 2.0 Developers in the Bay Area
My first instinct was "no", but then I remembered this:

http://www.abrahamjoffe.com.au/ben/canvascape/

I don't know what kind of image processing you want to do, but the demo above definitely pushes the boundaries of what I thought JavaScript can do. I haven't had the time to dig in and learn how it works.

Really simple stuff - moving, resizing, cropping - is trivial to do with JavaScript and server-side with something like ImageMagick.

No matter what, beware of IE6. I've only recently come to truly appreciate how slow and buggy it really is. No idea if IE7 is better. So I'll change my answer to "Maybe, but not in IE".
Price Delivered - "The place for consumers to discover and share genuine bargains".

That one could work if they allowed SMS..but even then, it's a long-shot.
I have a concept that I want to develop a pilot website for. I have worked with offshore designers/developers in the past but am looking for recommendations for a proven bay area dev/designer. Any suggestions?
Website ideas that are "X subset of Y service" seem to fail a lot judging by how few of them exist. In this case, that would be the "art subset of Ebay".

However, it all hinges on the execution. They may find success in catering to artists better than Ebay or Craigslist can, but that seems much riskier than if they built a new kind of service.
I have one of those, it's not bad. I use its older version though, everyday.

http://www.cir.com/pc/msnaturl/msnaturl.htm

Which reminds me, I should try to buy a couple more on eBay or somewhere, before they disappear completely.
Swede publishes email logins of 100 embassies
A Swedish security expert has found and published user names and passwords to email accounts of 100 embassies across the world.
There is also http://www.etsy.com which is for anything handmade, which includes art.

I browsed Artflock and saw an artist saying "Email me at x@y.com so we don't have to pay the Artflock fees." That's a bad sign.
Though not religious, I would compare him to Paul the Apostle, wiping the scales from his eyes after that talk to the Harvard kids to spread the startup gospel from city to city...
Any plans on selling Ycombo hats/t-shirts?
I like the logo.
I would like to see support for windows sound formats.
Tell that big company, with that cool project, you changed your mind X commit your life to startups X and move back to SF. If you don't you are going to lose that unusable VIP pass to her pants ; )

http://thingsilearned.wordpress.com/2007/07/09/the-dangers-o...
Correction: JavaScript embedded in web pages cannot process images. Mozilla Rhino most certainly can, and I'm pretty sure Mozilla SpiderMonkey can as well if given XPConnect (or similar).
Inspiring (as always).
Interesting stats on tech startups &ndash; only 16% fail?
We have them; we just don't sell them.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/80819445@N00/1166586940/in/set-...

(That's Xobni founder Adam Smith I think.)
You know the Boston area VCs insist on replacing the founding CEOs. Are they nuts?
Wikirage: What's hot now on Wikipedia
It looks like there is some more info about their news site here:
http://news.octopart.com/faq
Making Ubuntu boot in 19 seconds
... of the 769 companies in his study.
I have two kids, my wife works, I used to work at a high tech company and we had to save up for a couple of years before going the startup route. Now it is all startup -- so that is good.

We gave up a lot financially to be here. If you have kids and a family it does take a lot more work, but it is not impossible. Just work it out with your wife.
Google's Orkut Revamped.
The idea behind the site was to be more oriented towards forums than news stories. Basically, we wanted to provide a way for somebody to ask design questions to a community of smart hardware hackers. Of course, cool hardware stories are hard to come by so they make great submissions as well.
Cool. So the hardware nuts go there and talk about building stuff, then they look for the parts on the site before buying it from the site.
Three words: "Working for Families"
I'm an undergraduate in college, studying industrial engineering. I ask myself regularly what the point is, because I have absolutely no desire to work as an industrial engineer. You may remember industrial engineers as the efficiency experts from films such as Office Space and American Beauty.

So I know the thing to do is to drop out and move to the Valley. But the only socially acceptable way I had to do that was acceptance into Y Combinator, or angel funding from someone else.

So for now, my company is in Pittsburgh. It's going to be really easy to "not die" because there is absolutely no way for my company to fail because we have no expenses. Unless we get sued and can't afford to defend ourselves. While we're not dying, we should start making money. So if we have enough revenue to support a Bay Area or NYC lifestyle, we would happily move the company there, regardless of college education.
Looks like it's built on the same codebase as news.yc...
Will do. And BTW, Octopart is now in my bookmarks toolbar at work, so please follow this essay's advice and don't die. :)
Silicon Valley aside, why are Americans more willing to risk a startup?
I'm based in the UK and am hoping to apply to YC in Oct. We are currently looking for strong hackers to co-found with us, if they like the idea. We cannot, however, find anyone in the UK even remotely interested. The concept of 'it's not what you do but when you do it' simply does not exist here. What does the US have that we don't?
http://www.paulgraham.com/america.html

"I think what holds back European hackers is simply that they don't meet so many people who've done it. You see that variation even within the US. Stanford students are more entrepreneurial than Yale students, but not because of some difference in their characters; the Yale students just have fewer examples.

I admit there seem to be different attitudes toward ambition in Europe and the US. In the US it's ok to be overtly ambitious, and in most of Europe it's not. But this can't be an intrinsically European quality; previous generations of Europeans were as ambitious as Americans. What happened? My hypothesis is that ambition was discredited by the terrible things ambitious people did in the first half of the twentieth century. Now swagger is out. (Even now the image of a very ambitious German presses a button or two, doesn't it?)

It would be surprising if European attitudes weren't affected by the disasters of the twentieth century. It takes a while to be optimistic after events like that. But ambition is human nature. Gradually it will re-emerge."
I asked Paul if we could use his code but it was too much work to integrate it into Octopart so we wrote it from scratch in python.
Still around since 1999, but it still sucks seriously does anyone even use epinions. I have never found it useful while searching and comparing products online.

I guess that is a good thing since we are working on a competitor of sorts.
That's nice, but I would prefer an all orange with just a huge white 'Y'. Just my preference.
Like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Y_Combinator_Logo_400.gif
Or, in the words of the immortal bard 50 Cent, 'Get Rich or Die Tryin'.
On a quick note...I would have to say that the laws of the US provide a unique and time-tested opportunity for startups. This has driven the US to become a destination for many of the world's immigrants, leaving their own countries less populated with potential risk takers.

The notion of a free market is what distinguished the US from its European counterparts at its inception and has since demonstrated the ability to learn and grow. The benefit of the US at that time was a clean slate economy without all of the potential 'baggage' that the European countries possessed in the monarchical systems. What's more, for the most part it didn't matter where you came from or who your family was in the US. All that mattered was market potential.

Though European countries have moved their economies in much the same direction they still have to contend with the history of their governments. Culture and history are slow to let go of a people group. New ideas take time to be successfully introduced on an indigenous level if they are to become part of the cultural paradigm and identified history.
Google's Massive NY Expansion
I think that sometimes off-the cuff speeches/essays are more influential because they aren't heavily edited and flow more like how a normal person would speak. I thought this was a great essay.
Drawing Graphics with Canvas, in JavaScript
http://www.threadless.com/
One Species' Entire Genome Discovered Inside Another's