skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think it is a good idea ! It would be a great opportunity for those who are looking for great hackers or great ideas. Why don't we form a "Boston/Cambridge Young Entrepreneurs Club"? We could have monthly meetings, reviews of our demo products and sharing knowledge/experiences. We could also discuss different successful start ups, fund raising issues...sort of our own small Start Up school - by Entrepreneurs for Entrepreneurs ! Those who are successful founders in the area can also tell their stories and share their experiences. We could extend this idea to the next level by having investors to give us talks if possible. Any suggestions/issues?
Future investors hate the idea of IP conflict like this.

If the accusation is public knowledge, she'll have a difficult time raising a second round.
"If only Paul Graham could have been writing 10 years ago instead of starting a company ;)"

Seriously... When I used Lisp in college I remember thinking that it felt like cheating. It felt like using a graphing calculator to solve polynomials in high school. The only other languages I'd used in class were C, C++, Java, and 68K assembler, and it was hard to shake the idea that serious programming was supposed to be painful and low-level.
There's already 10-15 people who have been visiting the EFnet channel. There's currently 10 people there, and it's been fairly active over the last couple days.
How is that a design firm? From their homepage: MonVia is a business and technology accelerator built by entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs.

And the "What we do" page only mentions design in passing:
http://monvia.com/whatwedo.html

Given what they claim to do, who frequents news.yc, the fact that this is your only comment (or post) and how out of context this recommendation seems to be, you're setting off some serious spam flags. Assuming you deserve the benefit of the doubt : Care to clarify or point us to their web design wing?
I'm in. I'll float the idea by my cofounder too and see if he wants to come.
(Funny) Java Programmers wanted
Yeah I like the idea of having an organized club to put on these events but I feel like every other month this exact idea is being proposed. And not only that but there are quite a few of these groups which exist already (google "site:ycombinator.com meet-up"). No point in creating an undifferentiated alternative. I think I prefer an ad-hoc group where YC'ers can just get together once in a while, drink coffee and hack. Sounds fun, doesn't it?
Killed stories should be a big karma hit excepting maybe dupes.
Oh, this should really email me when someone replies to my post ... so I have been thinking about it a lot ... and it seems like SF Bay is the preferred location ... I guess I should get out of Redmond and into Seattle ....
_That means they're less likely to stick you with a business guy as CEO, like VCs used to do in the 90s. If you seem smart and want to do it, they'll let you run the company_

"Let you run the company" ? Surely a single round of funding doesn't take majority ownership from the founders?
Wow, downvoted again. I guess nobody found this link funny.

In the future I'll try to stick to articles about Paul Graham ;)
A not-very-interesting study in percentages vs. absolute numbers.

Google is still one of the most remarkable growth stories of all time. It takes something special to grow a $1 Billion+ company at 66%!!!
32 gigs? Jesus H. Christ. Does it do my job for me?
Great idea for a site. My employer has a "Fat-off" contest every January for similar reasons: the peer pressure actually works! So why not use the social aspect of the web to replace the social aspect of a meatspace peer group?
While seeing News.YC grow is fantastic, it's a little disheartening to watch the community loose its "small town" feel. It seems that as things become bigger, the comments become more anonymous and users loose their sense of social restraint.

This is actually why I left reddit. As the site grew, I became increasingly frustrated that anything I said contrary to popular opinion was mercilessly downvoted & derided, regardless of the actual quality of the comment.

Reddit now cultivates one set of values & opinions. Anyone who disagrees is hounded & ridiculed until they leave.
Maybe there should be a Sunday morning off-topic thread or something for people to get it out of their systems. DailyKos has something like that and it seems to do a reasonably good job at allowing member-bonding while still maintaining the central site identity.
NeuroSky - Brain wave controlled toy startup
There are a number of ways that a VC who owns less that 50% of the company can still push through changes like this.

In some cases this will flat out be a condition of investment, so it is agreed on in advance. If you are really anxious to close the deal it is easy to see why you might agree.

In other cases the composition of the board might be such that a majority might vote for a CEO change. This can be the case when, in addition to the founders and the VCs on the board, there are "independent" directors who might vote with the VCs. If the independents+VCs is greater than 50% of the board, they can usually make a change of CEO.

If the VC does not have 50%, but no individual founder does either, it is possible for the VCs to convince some of the non-CEO founders that it would make sense to bring on "professional" management to increase the possibility of success. Particularly if the founders have some disagreements, this can be tempting.

One other thing that can happen is that as a company goes out to pursue additional rounds of financing, the existing VCs can use that process as leverage to force a change. For example, if they say that they won't invest their pro-rata share in a new round, that can often be a warning sign to other investors. So, the VC might threaten to withhold that investment to convince the CEO to step down.

Majority ownership means a lot, but it is not everything.
how to upvote without losing your place on the page
This seems kind of simple, but has helped me a lot - so I thought I would share it:

When browsing through pages of comments - open the "upvote" links in a new tab or window (i.e., Apple + click, Ctl + click, or whatever). Then hit Apple+W or Alt+F4 to close the new window.

This way, you won't have to scroll through pages of comments to find where you left off.
BTW, you can see my Groovy notes here:

http://studystickies.com/#groovy
From this thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=8830 it looks like there are other things like this going on. Anybody go to either of these and can comment on the quality of the people or how things went?

I don't want to duplicate efforts, but I'm still game for some informal chill/hack time on Sunday at ERC.
I'll be there. Thanks for taking the initiative to set this up.
Paul just how much impact do you think that Reddit being initially implemented in Lisp had?

I mean, sure, relative numbers of Lisp users might have been pretty small, but the very fact that it was written in Lisp may have gotten fans and detractors to at least hear about the site (probably the hardest thing to do), and then once they checked it out start using it.

So how important do you think that was to initial popularity? Is implementing a site in an obscure yet much-discussed language worth it just for publicity reasons?
The general idea is interesting and possibly even right, but bloggers tend to overvalue and exaggerate blogging's reach.
Howdy. My name is Jeremy, and I'm a software developer for a startup in Charlotte, NC. My company uses the .NET platform, but, personally, I'm a python guy.
The essay says "You should not start a startup which requires a lot of money". But some startups genuinely require much more money than webapps do. What should a person do in that case, other than being at the mercy of the investors?
Dude, don't say you're "trying to learn how to program," that undervalues what I'm certain you already know. ;-)
You proved my point - for me - better than I could have done so myself :)

If I have to google for it and come up with a 3rd party tool, then it isnt part of the language!

And FYI, I wasnt writing my comment in complete ignorance nor laziness. I did go to the ror site when I first heard of it here on YC. When I realized it seemed to be a scripting language with a web server, I lost interest. Offline is very important for me/juwo.
Web Discovery Engine
cool. i'm in; i'll hopefully drag some of team dropbox along with me :)
there's a group like this that does monthly dinners (open invitation):

http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/boston-startup-meetup

next meeting may 9th:

http://www.mypunchbowl.com/publicparty/05c98908a9a3e84e593d

see you there!
Anyone knows who the y-comb startups use? Most of them have decent designs and they're on a small budget. What's their secret?
I saw that thread when researching YC Meet-ups. I signed up for the Yahoo! group, which says it's targeted at "Founders and those interested in becoming founders of software and Internet businesses in and around Boston. No consultants please."

I was hoping to start something which would better cater to our age bracket and, if possible, involve the YC. I love the values and core ideas of PG's essays -- I think at its heart YC is more about hacking and discussing/developing interesting ideas than it is about VC networks and structured business plan presentations.

In essence I want to meet people who operate with a similar philosophy. The existing groups just don't provide that.
Modafinil (brand name Provigil). It keeps you awake and makes you smarter without any of the nasty addictive side effects of stimulant medications like amphetamine.

Look up the symptons of ADHD. Go to your friendly neighborhood doctor or psychiatrist and tell him you have said symptons. Also, look around continuously, don't make eye contact, and fidget a lot. Then indicate that you've done some research and heard that off-label prescriptions of Modafanil have shown promising results for ADHD and that you're not interested in addictive stimulant medication. If the doctor tries to give you Stratera, tell him that you've heard it makes some people anxious and that you think Modafanil would be a much better fit for you.

If it doesn't work, try another doctor.

Then, enjoy a lifetime of enhanced cognition, at least as long as you've got prescription drug coverage. You will also have gained the ability to go without sleep whenever you so desire.
It's not just investors. This is a good practice anytime you're trying to sell a big ticket item to a potential customer. It gives them permission to believe the price is worth it.
To build on this, coding also should be a pleasurable experience in itself. Another powerful motivator is your love to learn how to code.
Yahoo! to Acquire Right Media
So are you saying a master programmer copies and pastes code on the internet instead of cranking it out from his head?
Avoid milk and cereal, avoid foods with corn syrup, eat more meats and fish (with water), avoid manufactured (versus baked) goods like PopTarts, avoid microwaved foods, and replace those fluids by drinking water from the faucet instead of the soda and coffee (remember, your tap water meets higher standards than bottled water does), and eat small meals 4 times per day or more, and you will be alert and not need prescription drugs.

There are so many good things that will happen by doing the above, as well as by avoiding certain foods, that when you put it all together, you will feel great. Removing caffeine will stop the withdrawal symptoms and addiction after you're done with the initial withdrawal. Removing corn-syrup will make you feel much better and food without it tastes much cleaner. Avoiding manufactured foods will point you to baked goods, which are much, much healthier. Water is incredibly necessary and will help clean you out, as well as help flush any excess protein away from your kidneys after you eat the meat, as well as flouridate your teeth. Often when your body feels "hungry," it is actually thirsty for water.
Bebo gets former VP of MTV
Just to be clear, the title was tongue-in-cheek. I'm not actually advocating prescription drug abuse.
Why not treat your body right AND improve yourself with prescription drugs? Surely both will have more effect than one alone.
I didn't find out about Reddit being written in LISP until it wasn't anymore.

My vote's that it was popular because it was good.
Cool. I'll be there. And I'll bring a friend!
Henceforward any further spam submissions about quintura will be killed.
I don't think it made that much difference. There are probably 100 people who are such hardcore Lisp fans that they'd become users of any web app written in it, but not 1000.
They're all designed by different people. Though in a sense they all use me, since I nag them to fix the more egregious design mistakes.
I think their secret is that YC deliberately tries to choose founders with a certain design sensibility.
Cool ! Probably I will see you guys there.
You just can't do it until you're old enough to either have a lot of money or you have enough connections to get a lot of money.
Can Microsoft visualise the future of search?
Is it time for incubator 2.0?
PHP Online CRUD Scaffold File Maker (Paste Export Table SQL)
I wanted something that just makes all the basic CRUD pages for me without having to installing anything, so I made this. Basically, you create your table in phpMyAdmin and paste your table export SQL into it, and it makes all the pages for you. Hopefully it'll be a time saver you for guys using PHP.
speaking of how to, how can I create a discussion page like this that is on the homepage?
Wow awesome! although I don't use PHP, any CRUD scaffold maker is a big plus in my book.
"Think of it this way, how many people get rich anymore by writing say, IDE's? None, because we all use what Microsoft, Adobe, or Eclipse gives us, for FREE"

So how do you explain Dreamweaver's success over Frontpage?
Cool. I'll go for less active so that I don't get distracted;-) (And because I' lazy).
They're lucky, and you're doing a great nagging job.
Yahoo answers Google/DoubleClick, buys Right Media for $680M
More info on Yahoo's acquisition of Right Media
Ah, it looks like tuscans posted about this first. See http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=18031 for yahoo's press release.
Also see tuscan's submission: http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=18031 and mashable: http://mashable.com/2007/04/29/yahoo-rightmedia/
With all due respect, but how trivial can business advice become?

What I am really envious about is how with ebay it actually benefits the users to be charged, because it keeps the spammers away.
try python. well supported windowing toolkits. and it doesn't suck.
Australian Press Prank On Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales
| Often when your body feels "hungry," it is actually thirsty for water.

Complete bullshit. Penn and Teller killed this one pretty convincingly.

Basically, if you eat a 'normal' diet (which most people don't, ironically) including enough veggies and fruits, there's no real need for outside water sources.

For most people, enough water that you don't feel thirsty is sufficient. There's no need to force yourself to drink water. And hungry very, very rarely means thirsty.
I really have to challenge point 2. The way you write it completely downplays the hard work digg & co put into their product. It was innovative and successfully branded. Not so simple IMHO. Neither do I think digg was intentionally marketed to 15 year old gamers. Of course, correct me if I'm wrong; I well may be. If kevinrose here is kevinrose, he'd have a better story to tell.
It's actually not too expensive, and pretty easy to find online from overseas (which is legal, I understand, so long as you're importing personal-use quantities i.e. 3 mo supply or less)

Doesn't really make you smarter, that's pretty hyperbolic, but will definitely stave off some of that 'brain fog' that comes about after lunch / towards the end of the day. And being able to be productive an extra eight hours or so a week is pretty priceless.
Hot New YC.News Hangout!
Big Money in Little Screens - New York Times
The reason why I don't like drugs: if they are so beneficial, why doesn't the body produce them by itself? It seems to me evolution would have figured out a way to do that by now. If it hasn't, maybe there are some side effects that diminish fitness. Same goes for genetic engineering, I remember the story about the memory gene for mice - if all it takes for a better memory is to flip one gene, surely evolution would have managed to do that a long time ago.

Of course evolution might have another "idea" of what is good for us than we do (evolution doesn't really care about us).
The thing is, they don't just have the model sitting there looking pretty, they are using it to make sense of the world. It's like trying to detect a rootkit after it's been installed -- potentially very difficult because it can alter your whole view of things.

Here's another example, imagine that you are a creationist faced with fossil evidence for evolution. How do you deal with that? Maybe you think, "God must be testing my faith", after all, isn't that exactly what a meddling god would do? Now the fossils are proof of your meddling god! (who else could have staged such a clever test?)
In the USA, I'm almost positive it is only legal to import if you already have a valid prescription for it. Even then, customs can seize it if they want.

A study showed that "Modafinil significantly reduced error rates in the long delay condition of the visuo-spatial task and in the manipulation conditions." http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=15221200&dopt=Abstract

Maybe it doesn't make you smarter, but it makes your brain function better for some very specific memory tasks. I think that such a benefit would be broader than the number recall tasks from the study.
The body doesn't produce certain drugs because they have nothing to with our survival. Even if we don't need them, certain drugs can give you a decided competitive advantage over your peers. Of course, you have to be willing to put something in your brain that alters it in a way that no one truly understands. I'm sure it is prudent to err on the side of caution when it comes to messing with your body, but I'm very comfortable with risk.

Evolution is pretty random (or is it chaotic?). There are so many permutations that we have a DNA sequence that is very, very good for surviving in our world. It could be better though, and at this point in our civilization natural selection will not get us there.

Genetic engineering is inevitable. It will happen. In 10 or 20 or 100 years when it becomes practical there will be "conservatives" who are against it and "liberals" who are for it. They will fight for a while but in the end science will win, because science always wins in the long run.
The body also produces some drugs that are outright bizarre. DMT occurs naturally in the brain and is one of the most potent naturally occurring psychedelics. I would be extremely interested when and why the brains of humans or our predecessors started producing DMT.
I am not against genetic engineering, it is just that when something seems too easy I get suspicious. Obviously medicine is helping in a lot of ways, the body is not able to fix every problem by itself.

Perhaps I am missing out big time by not using drugs. Some famous works of art are probably the result of drug use (how much of it, I don't know). I also remember a recent anecdote about a rock musician meeting Tony Blair and asking him how he manages his workload. Answer: "Certainly using different drugs than you" - of course it could just be "enthusiasm" being the drug, I don't know.

If you could become a world famous artist in exchange for living 10 years less, would you do it? Or whatever is your ambition (invent the Google killer, whatever).
My ambition is to develop or help develop a serious medical breakthrough, like curing HIV. So yes, I would take 10 years, 50 years, maybe even instant death for making such a profound positive impact on humanity.

I'd also like to take over Equatorial Guinea, but the current regime may fall before I get the chance.
Why not set it up as an opencoffee event? http://www.opencoffeeclub.org/
Kiva is one of the best services for entreprenuers on the web - OpenCoffee Club
I still don't understand startup finance; would MBA help?
No. In fact, it'd probably hurt.
I've been involved with a few startups that crashed and burned - I haven't made any money beyond my salary or hourly rate. I'm acquainted with a lot of Valley guys who are more loaded than me ($200-$500K per year) simply because they are buddied up with VCs and know how to work financial deals in their own favor.

These guys have MBAs. My question is, will getting an MBA help me out? I'm worried at the moment... it seems as an engineer, that my options are to sell my company for $12M or more, or else wallow around at a max of about $90K per year for the rest of my working life.

Since the average 2 bedroom condo goes for $800K out here, I'd like to hedge so that if my startup doesn't work out, I'd at least be able to draw a $200K salary somewhere. Is an MBA going to help me out in this regard?
What is 'fuck-you money'?
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=fuck+you+money

http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=680458

http://www.google.com/search?q=jfgi
I don't know these online email readers very well, but wasn't there another post recently that said that GMail has only a very small percentage of users? So I am surprised that GMail integration killed Kiko. Isn't there an email service out there where you could plug in things? That used to be the trend among web applications, to provide a Web Service/API so that it could be extended?
"I would like, for once, for three kids to come up to me and say that they have World of Warcraft or Second Life running with full 3D hardware acceleration inside of the browser."

That's impossible, period. The most you could perhaps hope for is to donate some plugin to Mozilla and hope they'll bundle it with future versions of their browser. I think they always ship an SVG plugin (not sure if that would allow for hardware accelerated graphics), but does Internet Explorer support SVG?
Having thought about this a little more, doesn't this approach lay you open to an easy denial of service attack? I may not have the resources of CPU or bandwidth to hammer a site using this technique, but it seems that the fnids are unique to the page they're generated for, perhaps because the time is part of the key, so by requesting a page enough times I can soon use up the 20,000 closures. This would cause "unknown fnid" errors for other users despite them having only recently generated the page.

Here's why I think this. Apologies for the formatting.

$ fnid() { wget -qO - "http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=${1?}" | tr '?"' '\n\n' | sed -n 's/^fnid=//p'; }

$ fnid ralph | sort 1

$ fnid ralph | sort 2

$ wc -l 1 2 | tr \\n ,

177 1, 177 2, 354 total,

$ comm 1 2 | sed 's/[^\t].//; s/./x/g; s/^/x/' | sort | uniq -c | tr \\n ,

177 x, 177 xx,

comm(1) is showing the two fnid lists are disjoint. 177 occur only in file 1. 177 occur only in file 2. 0 occur in both (xxx). 20,000 / 177 = 112.99, so 113 "fnid ralph" would flush the hash table.

I'm not trying to pick holes, just interested in the techniques that can be used and would welcome opinions.
A post by Shanti Braford, news.yc user sbraford, saying niche network news sites are on the rise and giving "entrepreneur, Lisp hacker, and best-selling author/essayist, Paul Graham"'s news.yc as an example.
More stats on the leaders page please. Karma breakdown by submissions and comments. Number of submissions and comments. Mean, mode, median? A means of entering a username and seeing the table +/- 15 around it.
Now its a billion times better. Although you need to refine things a little bit more, now the site is usable. Well done!