skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Was immediately put off by the awful design of the website. Why does someone put irrelevant links on the left half of a web page forcing a visitor to scroll to the right? Very annoying.

The reason why PG's essays rock is not just that they are insightful but also that the content is well placed to the left of the page with minimal and unobtrusive links on the left border.

The title of this article should read "How not to design a website"
Startup brings free wifi to SF
A California startup is relying on civic-minded volunteers in San Francisco to accomplish a goal that so far has eluded the city's government leaders: provide residents with wireless internet access that's free and dependable.
Apple Co-Founder Backs Internet Video Venture
An Internet video brainchild of three twentysomething former University of California grad students has won big backers, including Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and Red McCombs, co-founder of Clear Channel Communications.
Ruling in eBay tech patent case
Give me that problem. :)
I think you should secure your future and that of your future family. So invest the money. You can use some of it to pursue or fund projects that you like.
http://www.virgingalactic.com/
The room for growth in IT in health is absolutely astounding. I have a friend working on a kiosk style device. If you're interested, email me.

One problem is regulation. To get "in the loop" at offices, some things need to be clarified. A simple example: when an insurance company pays for a specialist to give you an x-ray, which of the three parties owns the data? Another problem is secure access to private information. Another friend was working in IT at a hospital, and they almost got sued because they didn't follow proper procedures when copying data -- between servers for regular/transparent backups!

It's a mess.
It says "To view the flash version of this website you must have Macromedia Flash Player 8.0 installed." And thats all there is on the screen.

I translate that to "We dont know what Javascript is, probably something that has to do with HTML which probably is some weird programming language or something."

I dont think I will let these guys take my ass to the moon :-)
What would you do then?
So you are having Fun doing YC?
A very comfortable yearly income is $100K-$200K. Immediately put the necessary base in an interest bearing account (~5%) to earn your comfy yearly income off the interest. $200K/0.05 = $4M.

Then you'd really never need to work again, and you can focus on making interesting things.

There is plenty of life automation that you can do. Laundry, grocery delivery, maid services, restaurants, financial planner.

You can easily spend $1M on travel for months, building a dream house, etc.
Can you say over-valuation? AAPL is trading at >40x earnings. iPhone or not that is a high multiple!
try http://zyb.com - easy sync for any phone
I love that blog. Arnold Kling is spot on when he writes about entrepreneurship. Bryan Caplan is as close to a sane anarcho-capitalist as you can come.

At CMU's Robotics Institute a few years ago, a friend made a poker bot that was pretty good. It was for a machine learning class -- but it used a lot of standard techniques like constraints and search. Another guy made a parser to take the screen from a popular online poker system, and input the state into any software you want. The final step -- to automatically make moves and plug-in a simple chat-bot to counter accusations of non-humanity, was not done by them.

I am 100% certain it has been done many, many times. Of course, why would you hear about it in the news?
If I remember correctly you once hinted you had more to say about the benefits of having a decent supply of capital, but the generally hostile attitude people had to talk of success made you reluctant to share. I'm sure plenty of news.YCer's who'd like to know a bit more about life post liquidity event.

Is it hard to be motivated when you know that low risk investments could keep you comfortable? Though I'm sure the pleasure of a fancy car wears off, what about a beautiful home or travel etc? Is there life long satisfaction from the achievement (ie not the money but the job well done)?
ahh. You're right then. Though I'm not sure how recent regulations have changed things.
Crawl the Web with Wales' open-source search tool
Apple co-founder backs Internet video venture
"Building a Better Search Engine." How many times have you heard that technology 30 years in the works is about to change everything?
Ok, I spent time thinking.

I want plenty of Girls.
If they can achieve 100 suborbital flights without an accident, would you go then?
When your rent is 2000/month, is 20/month for DSL really such a stretch? Just asking.

If the goal is to provide internet access to people traveling in between their wifi-activated homes to their wifi-activated coffeeshops to their wifi-activated offices, well...
No, because having done something 100 times without failure is not a proof of a low failure-rate.

Say your failure rate is 1%. Then the chance that you get away without failure in 100 tries is 37%. (0.99^100).
Here's the link to the actual project: http://sf.meraki.net/
I don't think I really buy into their politics (and this isn't really the forum to use to get into that - write me if you're curious), but they're certainly smart guys and worth reading from time to time.
My rent (because I have a roommate and a studio) is $600 in SF. I also quit my job to do my startup so, personally, I am looking to penny-pinch here and there.

I also just checked my bill and I pay $45.95 for Comcast cable internet. I've had bad experiences with DSL in the past (both my own, and setting up other people's). But cable, I've found, always "just works".
When will billboards be facing the sky?
Enough that I have a suspicion that trawling for stuff that didn't quite work out and was more or less abandoned 20/30 years ago might yield some interesting nuggets.
i m sorry but what is your startup
If your failure rate is 5%, then the chance that you get away without failure in 100 tries is 5.9%.
0.59%
So what sort of failure rate are you looking for? Everyone wants to go into space, no?
This rant pretty much sums it up:

http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/061005-095006
It does make sense to build inside Facebook's platform, so long as you also have an outside service available to the "wide open internet". Limiting yourself to Facebook-only is stupid, unless it's an app that will only function in that environment.
I like the rant (on searchenginewatch) and I think he summed up a lot of valid points.

I can still imagine a useful natural-language search engine, though.

This morning, for example, I was trying to remember the name of a podcast. One of the hosts' first name is Jeanette, and I know she has a Spanish last name. Now, if I could've typed in something like:

podcast with host Jeanette who has a spanish last name

and it actually were able to figure it out, then I think the search engine could cause a paradigm shift.

What I'm really talking about is closer to pure AI, not just natural language concepts. Apple == a company and a fruit, depending on context -- that's natural language. What a Spanish last name is -- that's AI in my book.

So maybe we need to be pursuing an AI search engine rather than a natural-language search engine.
Not sure if I want to.
You have done those things?
I'm not even sure we're in desperate need of AI. I wanted to read an article about how Robert Scoble reads 1000 RSS feeds a day, and how he does it. (Something like that, anyway.) I couldn't remember the blog I noticed it on, and didn't remember anything specific about what it said.

Google:
+how scoble reads rss feeds

and it returned exactly the article I wanted (www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2007/05/16/how-scoble-reads-622-rss-feeds-each-morning/) as the #1 choice.

I have my complaints about Google's search and the others as well. But it's still pretty darn good, and any advancement to this is going to have to be a big leap to get any traction.
Buy a Ferrari F430! Actually I'd probably invest in another business first if I had the money. Donating to charities is also a good call, or perhaps helping out your local (young) entrepreneurs who are in need of some financial support.

Don't forget the Ferrari though. ;)
"I like forums and blogs here, it's really an informative to non-medico, and you can get lots of information in forum in different categories. This gives more traffic to website. Also blogs are very much informative in s similar capacity. Even I got lots of information cancer and pregnancy."
To say that I'm highly skeptical is an understatement. Problem with all these new search engines is that they are trying to change the way people input queries into that search box. For 10 years, we've been taught to type in a term or two and get what we want. Now Powerset is trying to change that by forcing us to type in sentences and long queries. I don't think their success will happen overnight.
Remember that 'rate your lawyer' site and the flurry of lawsuits that followed? This is another one of those risky startups. Good luck to you but beware negativity...
The Dilbert Blog: The Secret - Is success socially contagious?
True, but all other things are rarely equal. I recently talked to a client about building a simple online project tracking app. I think it would be a mistake to use anything but Rails, as the application is already more than half done as soon as Rails is installed.
You make software?

If yes, build/help to make open source (and free) software better and more "commercial" looking so open source+free software can be used widely.

Basically be a disruptor.

Make the next Perforce (either support git or make a new one).

Make the next IDE (a complete one like Visual Studio) for Python so that Python can become the main language for enterprise.

One example of disruptor in this area that is starting to rise is Ubuntu.
Will it stay? That's a better question.
It's harder than it sounds. Charity often harms more than it helps. For example the donated used clothing from Europe/US completely destroyed a starting textile industry in Africa.
One of the things I like about this attitude is that in some way, it shows that you can make a lot of money even if you are not one of those people who are always after more more more, which is good news for me.
a roommate and a studio

Ouch. Sorry.
I love this sort of thing. While Google and the city govt are mired in negotiations about how to give SF free wifi, a little startup just goes around them and does it.
From what I've seen, getting rich doesn't seem to change most people's level of motivation much. The people who were driven before tend to stay driven.

Getting rich can be a danger to people who aren't very driven. But you don't have to worry about that problem if you're starting a startup. If you're not driven, it's unlikely your startup will make you rich.
Dilbert on Agile Programming
I think you should be investing in having more time. Unless your company is what you want to be doing constantly, in which case you should invest all of your money in your company, so your company can do exactly what you want and doesn't have to take crap from anyone.
Yes. There is an almost palpable buzz of energy at YC. I think it may turn out to be one of those hotspots like Parc was.
It is rather interesting to look at Paul's list of
implementations of an accmulator in different languages:

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

In my very biased and unlearned view the simplest readable
versions are Javascript and Lua. And Lua has server side
libraries for CGI and SQL and other goodies (search for
Xavante on the net). Just a tip for those poking around
for readable and clean language alternatives. And Lua just
got up to position 18 on the Tiobe index this month.

http://www.tiobe.com/tpci.htm

Hackers and Paiter page 161, The hundred years language:

"How far will this flattening of data structures go? I can
think of possibilities that shock even me, with my
consiously broadened mind. Will we get rid of arrays for
example? After all, they're just a subset of hash tables
where the keys are vectors of integers."

Lua does exactly this. And is quite efficient anyway.

Anders Holtsberg
In a Highly Complex World, Innovation From the Top Down
Poker bots are far from a problem yet. They excel at heads up limit hold'em, but as more players enter the table they get progressively worse. Even the best of them can't yet beat a low limit full table.

Eventually they will though. And there will be no real way to stop them. We've got some time, and how much depends on who you ask.

Also, the human vs computer match cited doesn't really mean much, for reasons I'll leave for a poker blog entry.
Sorry, I was just being silly. For me money means mainly time. In your situation, where most of your time goes to your business anyway, I think I'd only 'outsource' time consuming tasks that I don't enjoy doing (e.g., cleaning, laundry) so I can do more of what I enjoy (e.g., reading).
HA!

I don't have $4M to put in the bank. But I do have a comfortable income. My goal would be to work on interesting problems without needing a paycheck.

Things like financial planners, grocery delivery, and cleaning services are all excellent value for the amount of time they save.
well, roommate is also a girlfriend. and it's "pushing one bedroom" ... but yeah, it's a studio. :)
So, how'd it go?
Sam Altman of Loopt is #4 on Inc.com's Top 30 Entrepreneurs Under 30
Al Gore Has Gotten to Me
A while ago I wrote a post about why I don't use compact fluorescent bulbs. A few others posted that they, too, had trouble adapting to the new style bulbs because of the off color and the slow warm up times. But then I went and watched An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore's movie about the dangers of climate change - and it scared the crap out of me.
btw, meraki injects their own search box at the top of all html pages when you use their wifi. didn't see that mentioned anywhere in the article...
Money is overrated. If you aren't happy without it, you won't be happy with it. Just imo.
Funny, I noticed that a week or two ago after reading iCon.
> From what I've seen, getting rich doesn't seem to change most people's level of motivation much.

Didn't you write two Lisp books and start Viaweb before you got rich? Would you say you and your co-founders were just as motivated afterward?

As I understand it, the Zenter people darn near killed themselves leading up to the Google acquisition. Realistically, I wouldn't see them continuing at that breakneck pace afterward.

After the Apple II disk drive, Woz took it easy -- really easy. He doesn't even walk anymore, he Segways!

Taking it easy seems to be the norm. The exceptions to this get mega-rich, like Jobs and Gates. I used to wonder why Gates didn't just take his billions and retire somewhere; reading a biography makes it clear that his life IS Microsoft, including his social circle. It's his whole identity; it's not a job. He didn't do it so he could get rich and do something else; he did it because it's the thing he wanted to do the most anyway! And of course Jobs has always been on a transcendental mission to change humanity via consumer technology.
Usually the problem is the other way around. You have an interesting scenario :). My suggestions:

Start another.

or

Spend a year in Argentina reading and building a boat. This is my plan upon retiring (2.5 years to go!)
So I submitted this with the title "Three Facebook advertising experiments" and it sat at one point for a while.

Now it's at five points with a different title. Was this resubmitted by someone else/multiple people and the software changed the title? Or PG, did you manually switch it?
I'm really looking forward to living a location-based lifestyle in about five years or so, and at this point, Sam Altman seems to be the primary enabler of such a lifestyle.

But seriously, this list invalidates itself by not even including Mark Zuckerburg, let alone not giving him number one.
Wikipedia's founder builds an open-source search engine
When I heard about poker bots, I thought "oh, I should get one." So I cruised the seedier side of the internet and downloaded one.

Then, I discovered that you had to program the AI yourself!

Matt, if a well-programmed pokerbot is excellent at heads up limit hold'em, what percentage of online limit heads up players do you think are bots or bot-assisted? Can a bot win an average 2/4 game? What about an average 30/60 game?
That would be a good thing.

The only issue I see is that YC seems to be entirely focused on success in the Web 2.0 and software arenas. PARC had a much broader remit.

It appears to me that nobody is doing blue sky research in the computing field. Rather, it has all become a case of building a better mouse trap.
There's no requirement that you have to immediately spend lots of money just because you have it. It's a very normal reaction to not know what to do with a large amount of extra dough. You want to avoid the consumerist trap of retail therapy -- buying things to make you happy, which wears off 5 minutes later. Go ahead and hold on to what you've got and keep on doing what you're doing to make more -- you'll figure out good applications for money over time.

This TED talk says that the key to fulfillment is to grow, so you have more to contribute to others:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5625548517080716077
> In my very biased and unlearned view the simplest readable versions are Javascript and Lua.

The Python version listed there doesn't actually meet the requirement (it doesn't return a function, it returns a class instance, and it keeps modifying n every time it's called).

Corrected version:

def foo(n): return lambda (i): n+i

Which is essentially identical to the Common Lisp version.
What can you do with freedom?
You should probably use some kind of versioning so that when you receive version 123 and the version in the database is 121, you won't commit 123 until you receive #122.

If the user deletes the note and the server receives the delete request before other modification deltas, simply ignore the deltas that arrive after the delete command.

In my opinion it's a lot more simple to solve this kind of problems on the server side of a web application.
The barrier to entry as far as a bot goes is certainly the AI. Programming the rest is far more doable. The most notable team that has been publishing poker-related AI research is headed by Darse Billings at the University of Alberta. Their bots can be purchased online as a training tool called Poker Academy.

From what I've seen first hand and heard from poker players I respect, the only bot worthwhile is the heads up limit hold'em one. I don't know how far they've come since the Poki I played against, but I doubt that one could have beaten a full $1/$2 game. I'd guess it would break even at $0.50/$1 online.

The short handed bot didn't seem much better. The heads up one, however, could probably trounce anyone who would typically play below $15/$30, and it might even be higher up the scale than that.

To put it in perspective, many very notable winners at the biggest games online used to fear a player who went by Neverlose since they thought he was that bot. You can google for "Neverlose bot" and read all about it.

So at heads up limit I would intuitively suspect there are bots, though to be honest I've played a decent amount of it in the $3/$6 all the way up to $100/$200 range and the vast majority of players at low/mid limits are atrocious. So if there are bots in heads up, they are either poorly designed ones or they are in the higher limits exclusively (which really wouldn't make sense, since there is probably much more money to be made for someone who can play all day every day in the lower limits).

As far as other games go, I suspect bots reside largely in low level sit and goes. I once had a bot breaking even around the $22 level using Winholdem, which at the time only supported min-raise or shove as the bet amounts (no idea what it can do now, I haven't used it in years) and my AI used nothing more than if/then statements. Someone capable of any sort of AI programming more advanced than that could probably beat them handily. Due to some other terrible limitations of WinHold'ems software I never pursued it much further.
RSS Mixer could be Twitter without the Social Network
Actually, those comments were related to all of the legal concerns in Guy's "startup," including incorporation, trademarks, discussion of copyright and liability issues, and drafting a Terms of Use agreement.
Mentor other startups. I have been actively seeking a personal mentor and guidance developing my startup.
RockYou Launches Super Wall API, Facebook Ad Network
Make 5, 10, 20 year plans anyways.
There is something to that, but for most people the curve of happiness to money is not simply flat. For most there are sharp steps at have-enough-to-eat and don't-have-to-work-anymore, among others.
Yes, I'd say in all three of our cases we're just as motivated as before we got rich.

The Zenters worked super hard more because they had a deadline than because they had no money. I'm just as frazzled before deadlines. I worked 16 hour days for about a month straight to get Hackers & Painters in by the deadline.
If you are asking for things to do,then it is clear that you are now unchallenged by your company. By some land near the city and staret building a house. I personaly like prefabs that you can put together.Then stuff that bad boy with books from the earliest centuries to the latest "the world is flat". Read about topics other than "javascript". Subscribe to newspapers. I like FT,NYT,WSJ,USAtoday and some magazines like DWELL.
I didn't mean we'd literally do the same things as Parc. I meant more that YC might be one of those cases where, in retrospect, people were surprised that so many different things came from one place. The phenomenon isn't limited to technology. The New Yorker in the mid 20th century was another.
Philly Mayor and Guards help out at fire scene - TvByDemand | Forums | Whats New Philadelphia
How I Did It: Philip Rosedale, CEO, Linden Lab
I'm a little bit shocked that after 53 comments only one person mentioned philanthropy (and he was shot down in the first reply). Just because picking the right charities and projects is not "easy" does not mean it's not worth doing. Jeez people.
The Entrepreneurial Generation
New technologies, a proliferation of resources, and a disenchantment with the corporate world are making Generation Y the most entrepreneurial in history. From magazine publishing to delivering fresh-baked cookies, the rising business stars named to our annual 30 Under 30 list are transforming existing industries and blazing trails with new ones.
Reading, Writing, Running a Company
When Opportunity Knocks with a Pink Slip in Hand
We're entrepreneurial because we don't have much of a choice. Without self-starting, most of us are doomed to a lifetime of pumping coffee while society collapses around us.
Wow, a Salon article you don't have to watch an ad to read. Finally.
Re: Facebook, Relax.
Well, some of us want to emigrate to space, but taking a several hour ride and coming right back isn't nearly so interesting. :)
With enough money, you could stage a coup and take over Equatorial Guinea. It's ripe for the takeover, just take care not to fuck it up like Margaret Thatcher's son did.
You could start with the basics, helping people get water. I can't think of an investment with a better human-return than building a well for a community that needs it.