skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Yes, but what you forget Paul backspace backspace backspace, Paul, is that Microsoft Vista has voice recognition. I don't think that google has voice recognition. At least in that respect, voice recognition will be very hard for all when based service to do. You'd really need a desktop application such as the built in each recognition in Microsoft Windows vista to catch up to the future of the Internet -- voice dictation. For example, this polls is written entirely in Microsoft backspace now delete that in speech recognition."

I honestly can't tell if you are just trying to be clever...

If your post really is written in MS voice recognition, it is hardly an endorsement.
My friends and I were all in agreement Project Aardvark was ruined by the horrible music. All in all, I wish they would have focused more on the tech stuff instead of their living environments and math behind jumping to a nearby building. Paul makes a guest appearance though cooking chili if I remember correctly. It's worth watching but warned of the music...
The right way to do such a thing would just be to have a very abstract language with "common sense" embodied in the right defaults.
Harj is totally wrong that we work hard to pitch YC startups to investors. They're so great they sell themselves! They fly off the shelves! So if you're interested in investing in one, better act fast...
I have lots of ideas. Then I choose the ones that keep coming up as trends, or correlate with things my friends say.

I would say about ninety nine percent of my ideas are really bad or crazy sounding. When I look back at my notebooks, most of my ideas are juvenile, ill-concieved, and smack of mental illness. But there are always a few golden ideas glinting amongst them.

I warn people against concentrating on good ideas because that prevents them from practicing the raw creation of ideas. Good ideas will be revealed as your collection of raw ideas interacts with the world.
Nerds 2.0.1 on Google Video, downloadable:
http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=nerds+2.0.1

Triumph of the Nerds was on there previously... meanwhile, just Google for torrents.
When is the best time to promote your startup (e.g., on what day of the week and at what time)?
Not for variants like Stud, where people folding changes who gets which card next.

For THE, the cards are predetermined from the start of the hand anyway, so the only difference ever is the betting.
Sundays at 2:27 PST. But you just missed it so you'll have to wait until next week.
Any Y Com folks at Web2.0 Expo today?
This is a serious question.

Consider for example making a submission to reddit or digg. When would be a good time to do so to maximize the expected number of people who will check it out?
Planning is 80% of the hard part in programming.
Cambridge YC Alums: How'd you spend your funding?
I'm curious if any past Cambridge alum would volunteer how roughly the finances worked out during the three months.

I realize it must vary by startup to startup but I'm hoping to get some general sense of the standard expenses most all startups would have.
Time is less important than the number of friends you have spamming it all at the same time.
Suppose you are not going to have any friends spamming in that way.
And what happens if the domain is only being parked with one of those shitty search pages? Do you buy it or skip on to another name?
At this point, Digg and Reddit are hard to use unless you game them. It's so random as to whether it gets dugg/buried or up'd/down'd at the beginning. I hope you have a lot of friends with the right accounts or a way of paying $1/Digg.
If you want to get your stuff on a social news site you'd better start making friends now. A disproportionate numbers of diggs on the front page come from a small percentage of users.
You can buy the soundtrack album :)
Mindful Marketing Newsletter
Scribd is one of the 10 most powerful sites on Digg
Has anyone ever heard of the "strategy by guidelines" and the "Tangible Vision" approach? Start by understanding what one wants in terms of the outcome and then develop a set of guidelines based on achieving the outcomes. Uses a mindmap software to draw out the scheme. Slowly start making connections between the outcome and the approach of completing the outcome (milestone by milestone). Without any project mgmt strategy, most developers are just guessing on their objectives and the approach.
I think there is something very wrong with the current state of conversation on the web. I don't know if there are a lot of ways to make money off solving the problem, but I also don't always think a for profit solution is the best way.

Here are some of my thoughts on the topic:
http://www.digitalkarate.net/?p=20
Define your desired outcome. Then determine your strategy based on the goal. An endeavor that fails to prepare is an endeavor prepare to fail.
For any companies with a specific, difficult technical CS challenge to be solved, sponsoring a contest seems to be a really cheap way to get great results.
I'm not sure if this is what you mean, but for example:

"Give me a list of search engines sorted from best to worst" (an ambiguious english expression - http://www.tallstreet.com/view/Search_Engine/ )

Then people nominate answers (by investing in them), which get weighted by how many people nominated, how they weighted different answers compared to each other, and also takes into account the persons "judgement history" (net worth - i.e. if they have been previously good at making good nominations they have more authority)

An then when people run the "algorithm" they rate the output which is fed back to the nominators who are rewarded or punished based on the quailty of their answers - so over time the system improves.
Your largest monthly expense will be rent and food.

I did a startup in another college town, and this is how it worked out:

- Rent - $1,000 / mo

- Food(3 guys) - $400 / mo

- Electricty (12 PCs/servers) - $150 / month

- Business internet access (hosted our own servers) - $150 / mo

Another big expense will be the incorporation costs, which can run as much as $500 (varies per state).

In the end, it ended up being $1,800 / person for the entire summer. We already had all the equipment, so none of that was included in the expenses.
Well, you used to be able to cheat your way to the top of Reddit - http://reddit.com/info/1e7za/comments - but spez fixed that little hole.

You probably can still do it on Digg - I went after Reddit because I figured it'd be harder, but I bet Digg is full of XSS and XSRF vulnerabilities.
You would need to have precisely defined concepts from standard English in genera/differentia format in such a way that the system could determine contextually which concepts are being used in the user's query, and with that you could execute whatever you wanted. The differentia would have to be framed in a logical format, preferably using Fred Sommer's Term Functor Logic (dramatically superior to First Order Predicate Logic. This is the problem our startup was first working on last September (we started research for this in 1997 - we are deploying a very "lite" version of this in our new application).

The biggest barrier to solving this problem is the difficulty of formally defining English words. It took us several years to figure that out (with the Epistemolgy Aesthetics Study group and heavy reading of Aristotle's Organon) and we ultimately found that definition through an inductive approach was key to success. There will come a time in the not too distant future that people who can correctly define concepts will make serious money.
You can explore such a human computer along multiple dimensions.

On one level, you can have someone specify a spec in English so that human workers would execute an algorithm of their choosing on the supplied input.

On another level, you can have someone specify an implementation in English so that human workers would execute that algorithm on the supplied input.

Such a human computer would be extremely slow, but..

- it would have common sense.

- it's a way to give everyone a feeling of what programming is all about

- it's a way to prototype ideas without getting down to specifics

Moreover, you can have an error correction mechanism by making sure that enough human workers have validated each other's work for you to trust the results.
For that matter, use something small and fun like 2prong.com to pump out fake accounts. Digg yourself 30 times or so and you'll be headed up
In the PR business, tuesday is considered the best day to make announcements. At least, positive ones.
I realize that the middle of the week has the highest internet traffic. But high traffic might result in your submission being swamped by other people's submissions.
Read the rules for both... For Netflix, it's a million bucks, and you grant them a non-exclusive license (meaning you let them do whatever they want with it, but you can, too).

For Spock, it's $50k and you give them all the rights, solely and exclusively (meaning you can't use your own work anymore), PLUS permission to "use the winner's name, photograph, voice, biographical information, and likeness for promotional purposes in television, radio, Internet, and print advertising without further compensation or notice, except where prohibited by law."

This is so open-ended, they could conceivably sell your likeness to Valtrex for billboards.
I'm going to guess that Monday is the worst, because people are miserable they just got into work, as well as swamped with additional work that came about over the weekend. Friday sucks because people want to go home and be done with that week. Few people work on the weekend. Tuesday is best because it must give a person four business days for followup. Any reporter/businessperson/client who wants to reach the company has time to do so over the next few days. That would be my guess.
i'd say ASAP, if you have a product worth shouting about
Agreed for sites like reddit, digg, maybe even closer to 330 or 4am on Sunday. None of the usual, intelligent users are on at that time to be critical of your site or discredit the comments you leave. Everyone is just blindly voting.

Of course, press releases are probably the most reliable and effective way.
is anything closer to a layman's pseudo-code than python?
Great read, thanks for sharing it. I'm really surprised that your original team weren't hackers. I'm curious about Patrick -- was he independently accepted to YC, and you guys just happened to have matching projects so you naturally ended up working together?
Are 3 month leases easy to get in the Cambridge area? Is the rent higher for such a short lease?
They can`t hear you
Tues/Weds.

Monday theres too much going on. Friday nobody cares because it's the start of the weekend. Tues/Weds gives you time to deal with bugs and problems that crop up after millions of users flood your site after the announcement.
Resource-Oriented Architecture Maturity Model
There are lots of sublets available because of all the college students going home for the summer. Check Craigslist.
Oh, right. Good thinking.
In memory of Kurt Vonnegut Jr
Cool new technology - Fotowoosh Will Turn Any Picture Into A 3D Image
What's the best thing you could be working on, and why aren't you?
I added this question [0], [1] after reading the 'How do you come up with your ideas for startups?' [2] and 'What is your idea filter? How can you tell if one of your ideas is worth pursuing?' [3] posts. So you now have some suggestions on how to get your ideas and how to filter them, so what is your hard, best problem?

Example:

A previous problem I was working on was to reduce the cognitive overload of everyday tasks on desktop users [4] by capturing user input and only displaying information that is important now or in the immediate future. Using combinations of NLP, integration with desktop tools and novel user interaction taking cues from Adventure games. [5]

Reference

[0] I was going to title it 'what's the hard problem you're currently working on?' but this title from pg's article 'good & bad procrastination' is better.

[1] pg, 'Good and bad procrastination'

http://www.paulgraham.com/procrastination.html

[2] arasakik, 'How do you come up with your ideas for startups?'

http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=12995

[3] amichail, 'What is your idea filter? How can you tell if one of your ideas is worth pursuing?'

http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=13035

[4] Using word processor, email, hand written notes, calendar, phone. It's based on the idea that if you capture lots of small bits of important information, work out what they contain, phone numbers, peoples names,
you can get the machine to do the hardwork & spit out the necessary information just in time as it's needed.

[5] But things have changed since then and I've moved on to some different hard problems after the bloke I was working with decided to take the safe route and do his PhD on the same topic.
How Fedex Came to Be [PDF]
Winning games on iilwy and who says I'm not?
The best time is the present. Right now.

Overthinking generally leads to underperforming.
Friday after the market closes is when all the dirt comes out, at least that's what it seems from reading footnoted.org.
I'll be perfectly honest: what is popular on Digg is in no way something to be proud of.

Digg is a complete waste of time. The community is one of the most immature you can find online, the content is very poor, and I am disgusted when I see the little 'lynch mobs' that they form up every once in awhile when they feel like vigilante justice is appropriate.

Digg is junk, and I have absolutely no respect for it. Scribd might want to worry if they are becoming popular on Digg...do they really want that audience to be using their site?
very bad advice. you must write down every idea dated, witnessed and signed. for i.p. issues. And they say, the witnesses must not be related to you. (!)
juwo!

I am working to release the beta (soon!) after all your comments one month ago.

Unfortunately, I work on it only weekends and some weeknights - I now have a day job.
scribd works well for people who are too lazy to start their own blog but want to say something publicly.

Do you want lazy people as primary customers? I don't know, but there will always be lazy people.
I've noticed weekends are nice because few folks are launching--and bloggers are more chill and likely to review your submission. Just a general thing I've noticed.

With that said, we launched Monday afternoon. Made to digg frontpage Tuesday evening; TechCrunch on Thursday 4-5am EST.

-Zaid
Microsoft resorts to lawyers to stop doubleclick deal
I didn't realize a company with only $150 million in revenue could justify an antitrust lawsuit. Don't publishers get to choose who to their ad space to?

""Google's purchase of DoubleClick combines the two largest providers of online advertising delivery and is going to reduce substantially the market competition on which Web sites rely on to provide advertising," The Journal quoted Brad Smith, Microsoft's general counsel, as saying. Smith said that, taken together, Google and DoubleClick would handle more than 80% of the advertisements served up to third-party Web sites when a user pulls up a page, the Journal reported."

I see this as only being beneficial to publishers. Competitors will likely offer more transparency as to the size of their commission fee and google's margins should shrink to the benefit of publishers.
So, are you his cofounder?!
"all things" == Universe
The best thing I could be working on is curing HIV. I'm not because I don't have $25 million to get myself a top-notch team of Biochem PhDs.

So I'm starting small, by doing a genetic test for HIV immunity so I can raise enough money to make a serious attempt at actually curing HIV.
Microsoft would be stupid to not even try to prevent the deal. They didn't get this far by not exerting legal bully power when they have the chance.
Advancing JavaScript with Libraries
can I get an invite?

kfischer at gmail dot com
Yes, this very much confirms my theory that startups must do unorthidox methods to gain traffic, especially when the users of the site impact other users.

spock is worthless without other users on spock. What is a phone book/directory without people? If they can break through the chicken or egg problem that many others have faced in the past, they'll be very successful because that same problem will arise as a barrier of entry to competitors.

Having competitions, paying users, or even sending spam are all viable methods to getting initial traffic for a site.
jim ( a t ) runfatboy.net
Is this a free-411 service for euroland/oceana? Is that why the name is strange/hard to pronounce-to-type? That might be a viable startup.

How do I reach your website through my cell phone? Maufait.com?
Re: your comment about Steve Jobs, I don't think Apple would be the company it is today unless Steve was pushed out. I think he learned a lot in the wilderness and came back a prodigal son with something to prove. As such he was a lot more motivated and had more backing than he would have had if he hadn't left.
Is this the same group of people that I met at startup school, who were showing their stuff to Mitch Kapor, or a whole other group of people working on the same thing?
Unicode and Character Sets
Exploring Programming Language Architecture in Perl
Movable walls
If their being lazy fuels your business, and there's enough of them to support your business, then, yes! :)

Aren't most successful businesses fueled by laziness?
this is why I like popping over to JOS every once in a while. Inane detail on things related to startups that you never think you need to read. Of course until you are faced with the problem.
How to Avoid Table Scans in MySQL
Did anyone mention when someone's cell phone started to ring in the middle of Paul's talk? After 3 or 4 rings he realized that it was his own, in a bag, across the room.
How to Have a Business Conversation - Ben Stein
Sounds a lot like a cliffsnotes of Dale Carnegie's Win Friends & Influence People.
Jacob dxt lyles a t gee male dxt cxn

replace x with o, and n with m

Thanks!
Great reasoning. Here's a quote from the Joel discussion board.

http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?biz.5.470472.11
"This is from a P.R. pro. Monday is the day that most announcements go out. You still want it to be early in the week but to avoid the crowd, it makes sense to do it on Tuesday."

The odd thing is everybody followed this advice it wouldn't work. So the sluggish Monday idea is pretty compelling :)
Very inspiring Leader.
yep. check out some coverage at http://www.afroginthevalley.com and http://www.afroginthevalley.com/fr (in french).
How is that different from a normal day?
I designed an office for Crabel Capital in Milwaukee - a whole floor mainly for the programmers. We started with prefabricated modular movable walls, but they ended up costing 4x + more than framed walls with gyp board. We ended up using framed walls. (The tax advantage couldn't come close to closing that big of a gap.)
You and Your (Great) Research
Getting acquired by Google isn't always that great
"The depleted cash position will likely put a large dent in Google's investment income in 2007."

I think this may be their big purchase for the year but it won't stop them from spending $5-$50m on a few startups.
The transcript of the talk is not by pg, but Richard Hamming. [0], [1] I found this particular talk poking through the links on 'Good & Bad Procrastination'. [2] Does anyone have a definitive list of pg articles on the site? It never ceases to amaze how many I find going through the links.

Reference

[0] Richard Hamming Obit., 'Richard Wesley Hamming, mathematician, pioneer computer scientist, and professor'

http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/alumni/hamming/index.html

[1] Wikipedia, Richard Hamming, 'Hamming code, the Hamming window , Hamming numbers, Sphere-packing, Hamming distance'

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Hamming

[2] pg, ''Good & Bad Procrastination'

http://www.paulgraham.com/procrastination.html
It is written using MS Voice Recognition; hence the sarcasm. ;).
There's an index at http://paulgraham.com/ind.html
This seems to be a follow on to http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=13177.

After reading this essay several years ago, I started asking all visiting professors, "What are the important problems in your field?" (I'm a PhD student in Astrophysics.)

I realized something. Contrary to the article, most great scientists don't really care what the answer to that question is. Most great scientists love a topic, and through the greatness of their research, make the topic important.

The universe is wonderful in that way. You can study something as lowly as a comet, and it can help you understand how the universe began. Scientists who can tie these subjects together are great scientists.

To tie this thread into startups. Ideas are a dime a dozen. It's implementation that matters.
Actually, it's mostly just other people's content copied to the site without their permission. For instance, the #3 and #4 items on Scribd right now are taken straight from craigslist's best of section. A lot of the other items are from email forwards, but that's a use that I think Scribd is actually good for.

With that said, it seems like the whole point of scribd is to be digg fodder in the first place. It's difficult to build a community around text, because any user who gets that serious will probably outgrow Scribd and start their own blog. Youtube succeeded in creating a community because there's no way for most users to go off and create their own video sites. When YouTube first launched, if you wanted to post video online, using YouTube was pretty much your only option. People have plenty of options for text, most of which are more featureful for publishers than Scribd.

Without a real community, Scribd is basically just a glorified email forward hosting site for digg users. If you look at the issues all the Myspace-based companies are having, you'll probably agree that Scribd could have a difficult future. If digg decides to let users upload content directly using digg itself, Scribd is dead.
So why do you think Google more or less abandoned Dodgeball, especially as competitors like Loopt took off?
Google can frustrate me with a few million dollars any time they want.
My guess is it just got lost in the noise of Googleplex and these guys weren't able to navigate the bureaucracy well enough to cope.
In a startup, you can't afford to be choosy about which users you want. If you have a lot of users, you run with it.
I briefly tried Dodgeball. Wow, what a buggy mess. I don't know if that is their fault or google's, but I quickly switched to something that would actually work and made sense. Anyone else have a good or bad experience with Dodgeball?
'... I designed an office for Crabel Capital in Milwaukee - a whole floor mainly for the programmers ... We ended up using framed walls ...'

Glad someone takes these things into account. Not enough thought goes into developer workspaces apart from the fact that Demarco [0], Spolsky [1] and Graham [2] talk about relationship between superior workspaces and improved product.

The evidence is there but as soon as it comes to forking out the dollars there are excuses everywhere why it costs so much.

Reference

[0] Demarco, Lister, 'Peopleware, Part 2, The Office Environment, 0-932633-43-9'

http://www.amazon.com/Peopleware-Productive-Projects-Tom-DeMarco/dp/0932633439

[1] Joel Spolsky, "google search on 'the office'"

http://www.google.com/search?q=joel+spolsky+the+office

[2] Paul Graham, "Great Hackers, The Final Frontier"

http://www.paulgraham.com/gh.html
What if you were to run under inetd or djb's tcpserver?