skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
yes and i think theyve migrated to Pylons (with Myghty). Pylons before version 0.9 used myghty as its interpretive backend as well (i.e. the framework part of myghty) before they reworked it to be its own thing. Pylons 0.9.5 will also feature Mako as the default template language.

- mike, interested to see links from ycombinator in his referrer logs
What down arrow? (came from reddit)
Look at the prices for S3:

$0.15 per GB-Month of storage used.
$0.20 per GB of data transferred.

So, that means Dropbox is going to have to resell S3 at a premium for the added value of these nice Coda-like features. Would you pay a premium for these Dropbox features? Maybe, I don't know.

Also, what's the typical use case? How much bandwidth/storage are people going to consume? Because, if I store 100 megabytes... my bill will pennies every month (going on S3 prices). You cannot transact pennies per user per month. If you could, then you've cracked the micropayments problem wide open. Maybe there would be a base fee? Like $5/month or something. Would people pay that much for online storage?

I don't know how other revenue generation models can be applied. Advertising? Selling a user's data to other businesses? (What's the privacy policy?)
You know what's cool about this is that they didn't just hand it off to the designer and say, "go manually pick some colors". They actually thought about a programmatic approach they could take. It seems like they had some good knowledge of colors and the way computer draw colors, but they still weren't graphic designers themselves.
These guys are at least providing entertainment.
danw - just wanted to let you know that video has been passed up the ladder :-)

I think Tiny Pictures is really happy with the UI of the mobile application for Radar. Its pretty slick... if you haven't seen it yet, you can see the CEO give a demo to Robert Scoble @ http://www.podtech.net/home/technology/2622/demo-of-photo-conversations-on-radarnet

This photoriver concept is definitely a cool of viewing pictures on the phone though.

(disclaimer: if u view my LinkedIn you'll see I currently work for radar)
You know, your app is something that I've been wishing someone would make for some time now. Congrats!

Here's a suggestion for a future revision: give the ability for office documents to open with online office apps when clicked on in the public folder.
How about making up to X GB free, and come up with a tiered charging plan for more than X?
Drew, this is awesome! All of the features you mentioned are exactly what people need.
I saw an incredible banner ad the other day:

"Click on these features to upgrade this Honda Civic" (picture of honda + some words to click on)

Each time you clicked a feature the Civic was being upgraded & transformed into a VW Rabbit.

It was GREAT!
It's hard to categorically state whether data should be free or not. A great book to read about this is Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything (http://www.amazon.com/dp/1591841380/), which describes many cases of data being made free in order to elicit insight from the masses.

I think an interesting space, in particular, is those companies that distill large amounts of data into small relevant sets. Google is the first example that comes to mind, but search is not the only approach to this. Another example is YC's own LikeBetter, who sneakily collected lots of training data before launching this PAT thing. You can now figure exactly how your individuality personality compares to thousands of others, based on these millions of clicks they've receieved.

Are Google and LikeBetter making data free, or the opposite? There are trade secrets involved there, but we might not consider that "data". You can see interesting views and presentations derived from the data (search results, or personality tests), but you can never see all the data at once... nor would you want to.
Fair enough. I probably took your comment a bit too literally. $1000 is not enough to move cross-country, but it probably is enough to relocate for three months. :)
Second Life needs their "Neo".
Down is new
The ML family... you get a type-safe language and all the benefits of functional programming... and both OCaml and SML are only between 1-2 times slower than C.

And you get the benefit of the static type checker, which catches 90% of bugs.

I know pg doesn't like static type checking, but I respectfully disagree.
New Technologies "That Actually Work"
Thought: Arrington has been touting SSE for over a year, and still, no one has built anything compelling with it:

http://www.crunchnotes.com/?p=54

certainly, the first thing one could do with this is create blog software that allows you to submit comments via SSE. There are a lot of great ideas surrounding bi-directional RSS, I'm surprised no one has done anything with them.
It would depend on the job I was trying to hire them for. But if I had to choose, I would choose ability to implement over having high-level ideas. That's my job anyway, and honestly I believe execution is more difficult than having high-level ideas.

In practice, I try and hire people that have blogs wherein they showed knowledge as well as serious and deep thinking about the type of problems I want to hire them to solve.

The only person I've ever truly thought did an excellent job I hired this way. I didn't know him. I didn't look at a resume. I had one conversation with him. I just read his blog, and I could tell from his writing that he would do a good job. Actually, his blog was just his fiction writing and he was a UI designer and coder but I could still tell from his thinking. He was so smart--a structured, logical, deep and creative thinker. It was clear to me that he would do a good job. He did. I tend to be a perfectionist, and he was the only person I've ever hired that did a perfect job. I had absolutely no criticisms about him. He always exceeded my expectations. It was amazing. I love working with the best people--nothing is more fun.

If they didn't have a blog, I'd tell them to write down their thoughts every day for a few weeks and then I'd read it. I believe that you can't tell anything about anyone except how they behave over time. People lie and misrepresent themselves. But it's pretty much impossible to misrepresent yourself over a period of time.

I might try and give them a few of my problems to work on as well. But, if someone isn't the quickest thinker and can't answer a problem I give them in an hour-long interview I really don't care. What if they're amazing problem solvers but they just take overnight? One of the smartest people I know is like this.

With a blog, or writing over time, you also get a sense of how well they can articulate their ideas--if they have amazing ideas but they can't articulate them well, then the quality of their ideas doesn't matter. If for some reason they're terrible writers but still smart, you can just have them create a podcast. If they can't do either, then they can't articulate themselves enough to be useful to a company.

Watching their thinking over time, you can see how many ideas they generate, since you don't just want people that will only solve the problems you have. You want people that see things you can't and generate ideas themselves.

I don't care about how well people fit in. A start-up isn't a clique of best friends, although you certainly need people that you can be bluntly honest with and can be bluntly honest with you. It's better if you like them, of course, but I'm never trying to build any kind of culture except a culture of excellence--well, excellence on deadline.

Another thing I've always wanted to try is just to hire someone for two weeks and give them non-critical tasks to do. I could see if they met deadlines and how they actually worked. The best way of finding out if someone can do something is to watch her do it.
You say "our data", but whose data is it? Remember the big furor there was over AOL releasing search queries for some of their users, even after they attempted to remove identifying marks? Many users of your site will think it's "their" data, and depending on the legal/PR climate, they may be right.
I don't think ISPs are very happy right now.
If your speaking about Facebook's API then that the decision on whether to use it is highly dependent on the purpose of your site. Personally, I would think very carefully before branding your site as a Facebook addon.

You might be referring to Thrift. In that case, it's only useful if you want to do cross-language services. I don't think an early-stage startup needs this sort of architecture but I guess designing for scale never hurts.
Getting a sort of ranking or statistics helps in appreciating things
It's all fake except for the part where you say "Cobol and Fortran are useless." That, of course, is real.
Well if one has heard of this "I was born Intelligent but Education made me Dumb" ... then PG is right in advising "dropping out of school" :D
So i agree with the first part...
No idea about quitting the job part as i dont have a job :D
You might want to check out FUSE for Linux. There are various programs built on top of it which allow remote filesystems to look exactly like local ones. Two that I use are curlftpfs and sshfs. It's really nice to be able to perform any of my computer's programs on these remote files, and it looks very similar to what Dropbox accomplishes. Of course, you would need to have an FTP or SSH login somewhere, but you can get free FTP access from e.g. Lycos, so that shouldn't be an issue.

In short, I guess I'm curious what separates Dropbox from using a free FTP service which is connected either through Windows' built-in Network Places or Linux's curlftpfs. There are obvious differences, but are they enough to warrant fees?
I am not sure if there are enough people that care/realize the importance of this. I personally do.

Fortunately for me I had great English teachers in high school that designed their classes around effective communication rather than fancy writing. I still drop them an email every now and then to get their advice on how I could communicate a given idea more effectively.

Other than that I love Orwell's paper on English(http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm) He makes great points that every blogger can learn from.

-Zaid
They made a pretty good deal, on the financial side. No participation!

Board structure is awful! I'd shop around for a better deal.
YC/TS Results coming out soon. How about a backup plan?
So the results are coming out soon. For those of us who don't get into either program, is anybody interested in renting out an apartment in Boston/SF and spending the summer coding away? It's not our original hopes, but I think that if we're dedicated enough, we'll be able to get our projects done.
Well there doesn't seem to be a GDrive at the moment... but there are many other similar online storage solutions.

Techcrunch had an article with 13 of them...
http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/01/31/the-online-storage-gang/

It's a pretty crowded space. And XDrive gets you 5 GB for free, 50 GB for $9.95 a month. I can't expect Dropbox to charge those prices, given S3 as a backend. The margin just isn't really there, especially given the number of uses that will want free storage. And I think competitors can duplicate Dropbox's nice front end. In fact, here's an open source front end to SVN which is similar to Dropbox's:

http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org/

Sorry for all the negativity, I guess I'm trying to play devil's advocate here. It's a wonderful product you got going there, but I think you will have to work really hard.
I'm curious what names the FBI agents took. I believe SL still uses a list of pre-selected sirnames that users may choose from, i.e. my SL name is "Bonaventure Tackleberry."

This should be fun.
I'm going to respond to my own post, and add that... for the initial phase where you don't expect to make money... you have chosen a great setup. S3 is a robust , reliable, and easy way to handle the intial ramp up should hoards of users sign up, a concern I raised in another post. You probably have plans to get onto your own backend in the long-run.
If this took them a short amount of time then it's clearly worth the effort. If they spent a lot of time then it seems frivolous and makes me think they may be avoiding working on the mundane issues that clients would find truly useful.

Making boring work more interesting can produce amazing results but it can also be a huge distraction. Either way this is definitely clever and the concept is probably applicable to all sorts of other features.

P.S.

I still think DabbleDB needs to seriously consider Joe Kraus's reasoning for why he "positioned JotSpot as a Wiki company". Because I think this "web database" concept is suicidal.
Huh? WTF? These are mobile application startups -- NOT wireless.
cool demo !!! But I must agree that this is coda stuff.
Hmm...that's actually kinda neat. I think I'd be interested in something like that in Boston.

Gotta love being young and foolish :-)
Yeah !!! Such statistics would really be cool and interesting. Also, how the apps are picked up (e.g., rankings by experts, debate on the table for close- ties) would be interesting reads.
Control + minus a dozen times makes reading the online version so much easier/faster.
In general although creativity and school dropouts might have a non-linear correlation, it is wrong to say that formal education limits creativity and vice versa for that matter. Do you think that Google PageRank would have come from a ragamuffin?
If you read the TS FAQ it says 4/5 for final results. If you read the TS blog it says "no later than 4/10." I doubt that is a coincidence.
Honestly, I knew right away. I'm not sure why, because I've never used Reddit or Digg.
How Yahoo Blew It
Interview with Scott MacGregor, lead engineer of Thunderbird
"He is before all things, and in him all things hold together."
http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Colossians%201:17&version=31;
If VCs become Angels, i mean real angels with halo on the top then i would really appreciate that but being an angel investor, i would still be skeptic about them :p
Clever.

A logo could also be made the basis for a fun color-picker: display the logo as a palette on which to click an eye-dropper to select each of the theme colors. Hell, animate the page look in real time as the user hovers (psychedelic!), lock-in their choice on click.

It might also be helpful to provide a version of the logo with pixels regrouped to make all like-pixels contiguous -- easier targetting of disperse colors. Order groups by brightness, saturation, frequency (a congruent histogram?), whatever's most pretty in practice.

(If you use this idea in your startup, invite me over for lunch someday.)
Being one step behind gives an advantage of following the leader's footsteps and learning things pretty easy. But what microsoft does is more than that, they try to kill the leader by copying things (rather shabbily)
See it this way, Google rejected you and in doing so, its allowing you to grow and who knows you may start something and become its competitor :)
This is what i say when i get booted out in interviews :D
Do you have a backup plan if you don't get Y Combinator funding?
It's an interesting read. One note: you linked to the 2nd page of the article instead of the first.
Although blogs are a good way to see if someone is a good fit, you're probably excluding a lot of sharp people if you use that as your first filter.

I'd also argue that how people fit in is important. If you don't care about fit when you hire, you end up with a company of individuals instead of a team.

I do agree that the best interview is one where the candidate actually does the type of work that is to be expected of him/her.
merge here: http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=9027
I need to pay closer attention...
Two reservations come to mind:

1. How many people would want this? It seems like the number of people who take their blogs seriously enough to be willing to pay for this is maybe a thousand.

2. I don't see how this can scale. Unless you're thinking of AI, or some sort of peer-to-peer network, then you're selling a skilled-labor-intensive service, not a product. You might be able to form a profitable small business, but I wouldn't call it a startup.
Nice Application...the question I have is on the marketing side- how are you going to attract users? and how are you going to differentiate yourself from the hordes of other online storage vendors, esp. to the newbie users who can't tell them apart easy? (so you have to have a simple, compelling story for them)
Startup school 2007 videos?
It would be nice to have access to the videos for the event.
Depends.

For co-founders, you shouldn't even have to interview. Find the best people that you have worked with before in school, or on the job. You can then be assured of their creative and intellectual abilities, as well understanding how you'll work together as a team.

For other positions, you're obviously going to want to look for smart people, but a key thing for a small startup is to look for smart people who can do many different things well. For example, I'd be more inclined to choose a s/w eng who has done well designing a web app, and has designed embedded software for a consumer electronics device than an eng who has worked only on web apps for their entire career.

As for the second part of your question, I'd agree with e1ven - neither type of question is key, although they do help establish technical ability & creativity.

But my experience diverges from e1vens' in at least one respect - you don't need to choose between problem solvers and cogs (at least as he has defined them). I have worked with people who can give you tons of detail on specific technical areas, but can also come up with great solutions outside of their technical domains or pick up language X really quickly. It's rare, but people that have both qualities certainly exist.
My Karma stopped moving? Not that it matters
Don't have a COW, man? What Haskell teaches us about writing Enterprise-scale software
Getting Clients to Come to You by Being a Thought Leader
I'd love to tell you what I'm trying to do: But I'm not really sure yet.

Clearly, it's hard to ask for advice on an issue that's not fully fleshed out.

It's just that so many webapps today need to have user authentication/profile management, it seems a shame to have to build your own for two reasons:
1) You're wasting your time building something.
2) People trust you with their personal information, I think people are more willing to trust, say, a facebook, then they are joestartup.com. I say this based on my intuition.
I definitely noticed that too.
If you read past the blog article itself, the comments are pretty insightful (Marc Hedlund's comment is a good example).
It doesn't need to be as purpose-specific as the title suggests. Blogs are a medium of communication; there are many possible media.

Consider this interaction. A: this rose is green. B: roses are not green. C: (so the rose is not green!). C: actually, it's not a rose, it's a leaf.

This can occur in a blog, in a chatroom, and more importantly, it occurs in everyday life. Proofreading, fact-checking and such is a streamlined application of this self-correction process (e.g., of the ABC system above), applied to written material.

While we are a far way off from AI that can do this on the fly, the processes certainly is extendible, and should be extended. It's how ideas evolve.
We got 421 applications. That's more than past cycles, maybe because we're getting better known. This will be the last time we disclose application numbers though. Now that we have competitors (or at least imitators), we don't want to get into a number-of-applicants contest. It's easy to inflate that number, by encouraging undergrads and single founders to apply, but we don't want to go there.

The big difference this time is the increase in the number of applicants from overseas. Otherwise the people and the ideas are like previous years.

We're always trying to push the limits. Probably not the youth limit, because we started out pushing that, and know pretty well where the edge is. But we may, for example, accept a large number of groups this time. We'll see how many are good.
It looks great man. I know you'll be accepted. The writing is on the wall. Posting your video here just seals the deal, and puts yourself out there. I didn't apply to YC, but if I did, I'd be putting my stuff up here as well. I'm surprized nobody else has posted like you did. That takes some balls and self-belief.

I didn't agree with some of the things you've said before, like IP rules, etc. but you've earned my respect. Best of luck to you. :)

-Zak Kinion
I just upmodded this post and your karma went up by a point. But I did just release a new version, so if anyone notices a bug, let me know.
And, as I've heard it, the reason that Delaware has very favorable business laws/legal system is that the DuPont company has been there since about 1800 (not too long after 1776 =). DuPont has been a huge company in a very small state for a very long time. Early on, they were able to set up a very favorable climate for themselves and thusly other corporations, and then things have snowballed from there.
Somehow I don't see YSN devolving into 'check out this r0x0r pic that will change your life' type of submissions. Thats probably because it appeals to a comparitively narrow demographic.
Upper bound on age of YC founders
YC and PG have been effectively convincing young hackers it's not too early to start a startup. Startup is the new NBA - flooded with young talents, putting school aside for a shot at the big league.

While I still believe it's never too late to start a start up, is there an upper bound on the age of YCombinator? Would love to know the statistics on the age of mature founders from YC.
All written in Python? I'd love to know a bit more about what you're doing if you can share. I put together a similar tool last year for myself (Windows-only) using NTFS' USN journal, but it sounds like you're doing something different.

The app looks great.
In most batches the oldest founder is around 33 or 34. We don't have a rule about this; it just works out that way.
"good content can be expressed without strict adherence to guidelines. Rap, for example."

Apparently, "good content" is one of those phrases subject to multiple interpretations.
Maybe this sounds harsh, but I feel like I can tell just from their logo that they're doomed.
Verizon Admits that their Unlimited Data Plan is Limited to 5GB Per Month
You should focus on one company, not two concurrently. If you have to ask if it makes sense, then you probably have some doubts yourself. :)
Bug: not all comments by pg is shown

Thanks for answering my question, I noticed your comment
http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=9074 did not show in pg's comments page
http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=pg

I assumed that comments displayed on the page are sorted by time