skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, you can't really think of PayFloPro as PayPal. It is an actual merchant account. You obtain full credit card authorizations and can run reports to reconcile things through the API. The only thing to be mindful of is that the libraries they provide for using the APIs are pretty much either C or Java (I want to say PHP also, but I am not 100%). If you do not use the libraries I am pretty sure you can use URL strings to pass data back and forth.
Sorry, By 'Yes' I meant that the API was very clear. I have not seen any quirks dealing with the PayFlowPro system, it is all server side.
Very nice. I'm excited about this because I've sponsored some open source development and never had an easy way to do it.

Here what I've done: I use a piece of open source software. I want the developers to implement a feature that will be very useful to me. I offer to pay a considerable amount of money. They agree. I send them half. They complete it. I send them the other half.

A system that would let me share the financial burden and handle the whole process would be very useful. I said before that I think you should expect to see much bigger pledges than you're thinking right now. As a business, pledging $10k for a feature that saves me having to buy an extra $50k in servers is a no-brainer.

If you're going to be actually holding the money you will need to be extremely credible and your reputation spotless. A picture of who you are, your office (if you have one), street address, phone number, and that kind of stuff goes a long way. I want to make sure the authorities can find you if you do anything evil.
I'll add one more... Don't get stressed in the interview if they criticize your idea! They may seem a bit negative towards you but its their job to take a critical angle.

In other words, be cool and dont take stabs at your idea personal. Chances are, the comments they're making turn out true anyway so heed the advice.
New Video Ad-Platform LiveRail promotes ads based on user response
Agreed. I was planning on putting that in tips for interviewees since you don't get any feedback until then.
Bringing the Browser to the Server
Design Patterns in Dynamic Programming (Norvig)
Sweet. microPledge solves two problems of these problems:

1) The pay-half-now-half-later thing is solved by our staged releases. The developer can say "I'm 50% done, can I please have half my pledge money?" And he'll get half his money if the pledgers are okay with his progress (if they're not, he might only get a portion of his money till they are happy).

2) The share-the-burden thing -- especially if you're talking big pledges. You could have your $10,000 split across 5 people/companies (or more, of course).

The Credibility Thing is a good point, and something we're very conscious of. We're going to be very open about who we are and where we live. And (very soon) we're also going to look into getting our money flow audited annually by a company like Grant Thornton.

P.S. Just wondering if you have a contact email/website somewhere? Didn't see one on your profile page.
congrats on the wedding!
Yeah, it's totally deserved. Weebly's got a bright future. There's pretty much no better way for your grandma to make a website about her cat.
I think this is why all TRUE wizards write in Assembly Language.
I guess, then, making money at all is unethical too. This is a ridiculous argument.
44 million isn't too ridiculous in terms of operations and hardware if they expect to scale up to something massive. What's truly ridiculous is the rumored 170 million pre money valuation, for a consumer service that's hovering at an Alexa ranking of around 3000.

To put it into perspective, Veoh, a top 100 video sharing site, was rumored to be valued at $50-70 million ... but they have their own unique problems.
AppFactory: fast-tracked seed funding for facebook apps
I'd like to know more about Bay Partners, the VC firm behind this. They don't appear on pg's Top VCs list (http://ycombinator.com/topvcs.html), and there aren't any names that jump out at me in their portfolio, but neither of those mean much. Any info?

Also, if anyone has a personal contact there that they want to introduce me to, I would love that. My email is in my profile. Thanks.
I'd like to know more about Bay Partners, the VC firm behind this. They don't appear on pg's Top VCs list (http://ycombinator.com/topvcs.html), and there aren't any names that jump out at me in their portfolio, but neither of those mean much. Any info?

Also, if anyone has a personal contact there that they want to introduce me to, I would love that. My email is in my profile. Thanks.
Packaging Matters: How Seagate Learned to Package Like Apple
Beautiful, Apple-esque packaging from the last place you'd expect to see it: Seagate.
I think it's a good idea for the developer to get some money upfront. A developer might take time off their day job to complete the project. They're more likely to do that with some cash in hand. Perhaps that's solvable by them saying "I'm 1% done, please send half the pledge".

I'm just a developer/sysadmin guy who frequently has the task of spending money on behalf of the companies I work for, usually on contract. Occasionally the best available option is to sponsor development. In my case I've basically dealt with the open source developer as a private sub-contractor.

Which actually brings up an interesting point. For various reasons some companies won't want others to know they're sponsoring outside development. You should consider giving sponsors the option of having their pledge remain non-public. Maybe even anonymous to the developer, which is an interesting thought.
I actively encourage my clients not to engage in database dogma. I recommend MySQL for high-replication and high-connection work and Postgres for reporting systems and financial data. I always offer to buy them copies of both out of my own pocket.

I also recommend using more than one language when it makes sense. In my experience the damage of choosing one technology over all others always seems to be worse than the overhead incurred in using more than one.
The typical approach of Microsoft is misdirection. If they say they are not interested in it, do not believe them. They are in it!
this is the first sign of desperation from the VC world. the historical trends of the capital requirements of developing an "application" are becoming so low that venture capitalists will soon become obsolete. the launch of the facebook platform was the nail in the coffin for VCs. power to the hackers.
I didn't look at the date, but when I saw the price listings, I was like, "What!?" I just bought a 22" widescreen for $200. I certainly appreciate all the extra real estate, and yet I can't deny that I could find a use for more. I'm considering plugging my old CRT into my integrated video card, but it produces so much heat compared to a flat panel.
I totally understand people's complaints about C++. However I am never sure if they are aware of some libraries that may concerns:

boost::function allows you to easily interchange function pointers, memeber function pointers and function objects.

boost::lamda allows you to define transient functions at the call site. This makes the old STL way more useful. To be sure the syntax can be a bit funky...

boost::bind pulls all the fun of boost::lamda and boost::function together.

With only the tiniest bit of discipline boost::shared_ptr's mean you never have to worry about memory management again.

boost::any and QVariants (from the Qt Libraries) help you manage dynamic typing. So an array of boost::any's can hold int's, char's, string's and AnyTypeYouWant's all at the same time.

Everything I've mentioned is either in the standard or will be soon. Really undergrad C++ is only the beginning. The STL and boost are almost a language unto themseleves. I never use raw arrays or naked pointers anymore and it's made development WAY faster while maintaining performance.

PG asked, why use a language where adaptors have to be built to get the functionality of lisp rather than lisp itself (or something like that.) I see his point but if the effort of getting lisp to work with C/C++ based code is greater than the pain of using an LFM, why not make the best of an LFM?

Has anyone had the same experience? Or am I putting the "ass" in masses?
Should you always solve for the highest valuation?
It's old, but I bookmarked it, so I felt the need to vote it up :).
Text Compressor 1% Away From AI Threshold
Good thing it's impossible to spoof an IP address. Then again, as long as you're only relying on this for customer service and not for security, I suppose you're fine.
I don't think there's been a Facebook app exit of more than $100,000, yet they're willing to provide up to $250,000 worth of funding. So why are they doing this?
Facebook apps have only existed for about two months. Do you think they will continue to be (for the most part) valueless playthings? I don't. It looks like Bay Partners doesn't.
try fundable.org
Irrational exuberance.
Well, that too :)
It wasn't feedback on the idea, but I got a call from Jessica and an email from Paul trying to estimate if we were truly prepared to do this as undergraduates.
What kind of valued app do you think will emerge from facebook?
I don't understand: if you are sure that it is an ArrayList, why don't you use ArrayList instead of List to begin with? If you are not sure that it is an ArrayList, then you shouldn't use the for(int i = 0...) loop, because accessing each list element in a LinkedList by index would be extremely slow.

As for typing, in Eclipse you just type "for"+CTRL+Space and it completes the for loop for you.
i think we were asked 3 or 4 times in a row if we were really going to go with it, as undergrads...
How did you pick your LFSP of choice? 
I've noticed that many news.yc contributors use exotic languages, at least as a hobby. I wonder how you arrived at using the particular language. Not wanting to start a language war, it's just the LFM vs LFSP post made me think.

Perhaps we all should create our own programming languages? I've seen a lot of articles on how to create a domain specific language in Ruby - perhaps it would be a good criterion to consider how easy it is to create a DSL with a given language?
Regarding the number of founders, YouOS springs to mind as a 4-person team. I thought I read PG say he funded a few individual founders this last round?
Also known as the iPhone shuffle: this will revolutionize social networking and singlehandedly eliminate some of the worlds biggest problems: loneliness won't exist anymore - the innovative random call mechanism of the iPhone will make sure everybody gets a call regularly. The pain of complex organizer applications also goes away, as there simply will be no need to organize your contacts anymore.
I could be alone, but I think that version B looks terrible compared to the others. What's the reason that it sells better than A?
heysan! has 4 founders and a couple other people working on it, as far as i last remember
Interesting. My philosophy is that you can always go back to college, but then maybe that's why I'm 26 and still haven't graduated.
Nielsen: Write Articles, Not Blog Postings
Hey, Ben pointed to my comment in his comment on your site, and you gave him the prize? :)

Here are some more mistakes I found: Give the bonus only to people that [WHO] respond to the offer in your main piece.

Here's one I found that same day, in the PDF article: (www.pdfonline.com). PRF Online is an easy to use service to create PDFs.
"For instance Zenter, which is obviously much more suited for integration with an online office suite like Google's than as a standalone business"

If there's no potential for a business based around presentations, somebody'd better get on the horn with WebEx and let them know. (Then again, they're probably still too busy counting the $3.2bn from their Cisco acquisition to notice.) PowerPoint is huge in medium/large companies, and the tools available for delivering PPT presentations remotely still suck. And aside from providing awesome presentation design functionality, Zenter would've absolutely given WebEx a run for its money on the presentation delivery side.
The best spam filters (like CRM114) have better than human performance, but I'd hardly call what they're doing AI.
We've funded a few startups with 4 founders. I think there's one in the current batch (though only 3 came to Cambridge). Heysan was not one though; they only had 3 people when we funded them.

There's one single-founder startup in the current batch. He just posted an ad for another person:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33472
MySpace API preview
This is probably as much as they have done so far...
Kara Visits Sequoia's Roelof Botha
Spending Time With Your Family To Improve Business Skills
There was no post yesterday because the TrackSuit Family was on a road trip. We play a game with our 3 year old called Going On a Picnic and as we were playing it this time I realized how similar it is to a memorization technique I just read about on Lifehack.org called the Stacking Method.
Hackers and Fighters
There are only two things a rational entrepreneur does in a hot market: sell or raise money
Be sure to read comment #5 from Marc Andreesen.
The minor copy changes made the pitch more persuasive, leading to more sales. Looks matter, but words matter more.
Oracle Upgrade Is Giving Pause (Similar in response to MS Vista? Any Startups here using Oracle?)
I must have asked 3 out of 4 times - I didn't want you to miss getting your degree when you were so close!
Unless they're really generating tons of revenue, going public might be a rough road.

Sure the founders and investors get to cash out, but Wall Street checks in every three months, and can be unforgiving if you fail to meet expectations.

Remember that the Google guys didn't want to go public.
He's wrong. The danger of a high valuation is not just that it will make you spend more. The danger is that it precludes small exits, and thus most exits.

I'm with Liew and Kopelman on this one. And YC can't be accused of taking the VCs' side, because in series A rounds we're in the same position as founders. I would rather get diluted by a low valuation than have a company take money at such a high one that there's no room for error.
[Boston] Company in current YC batch seeking cofounder for business development role
The role, in essence, is the business development analogue of a badass software hacker to join the company as a partner.

Ideally:

- You have the charm to convince a lumber yard to adopt termites.

- You'll know that the 'Steve Wozniak - Steve Jobs' cliche will apply.

- You can design. Failing that, you'll ideally have a sense of aesthetic in relation to design both as an interface and as art.

- Your idea of retirement doesn't involve Social Security.

In return you'll get a sizable chunk of equity and plankowner status within the company.

Here's a handy form to fill out. Note that the company you are applying for is NOT Wufoo, but also note that Wufoo is amazing.

http://dbrushinski.wufoo.com/forms/business-development/
Web Application Form Design
Nielsen Replaces Page View Ranking With Time Spent, Swaps One Problematic Metric For Another
A variation on likebetter.com to detect cheating in online chess
10 Most Beautiful Social Networks
Be sure to catch Marc Andreesen's comment (#5) (tried to add that to text field post-submission)

I love this topic because smart and experienced people seem disagree. My feeling is that the situation is simply different for Marc and Jason. Both of them are already rich, so they're comfortable aiming for IPOs/billion-dollar exits or bust -- just like VCs.
Investors Digg Kevin Rose
This is pretty much exactly the same idea as likebetter
Web 2.0 Goes to Work
Dealing With Conflict of Interest
Hi everyone - I would appreciate any advice you might have about dealing with a conflict of interest. Here's the situation: I and one of my coworkers have been working on a prototype for a startup that could easily be described as a conflict of interest. The startup is in the same industry as the company we work for. The idea involves referring business to companies like the one we work for. In one sense, we'd be driving business to the one we work for, but would also be driving business to direct competitors (hence the conflict of interest).

At some point, we will have to have a conversation with our boss. I'm trying to come up with a way to spin the conversation so that it could be a mutually beneficial arrangement. Ideally, it would be great if the company would seed fund us, although that is a very long shot.

As I stated above, in one sense it could be beneficial because our startup would be driving business to the company, but on the other hand, it would also be driving business to its competitors.

We aren't comfortable with flying under the radar as long as we can - so we either need to get out now or work on a prototype and when it's further along, have a sit-down with our boss.

Has anyone been in this situation?
congrats guys, that's pretty astounding!
2 screens seems a little passe, doncha think? 3 screens is ala mode.
http://brl.codesimply.net/brl_7.html#SEC74
I must admit I don't consider learning a programming language something a university is supposed to teach you. They should teach you about concepts, and perhaps offer some optional seminars or workshops interested students could use for learning a programming language of choice.

Frankly, a "programming language" degree from a university would devaluate the value of the degree in my opinion (ie if a student would get points for knowing a programming language). Might as well just go for Microsoft Certification.

I also don't see why they have to agree on a standard programming language for the whole CS department. Why not let each teacher do their own thing, and let the students decide (teacher insists on Pascal -> students won't attend the lecture).
I haven't used it, but they seem to have a Recurring Billing service: http://www.cybersource.com/resources/collateral/Resource_Cen...

I always figured that you want to maintain your own transaction records anyway for internal accounting and metrics. If you do that then you really have 90% of the work already done for a basic recurring billing system.
'If they underprice the offering, the price will go up a LOT during public trading on the first day, hence, high actual price for everyday investors and a big payout for the IBankers."

False. Investment Bankers get paid a percentage of the offering price. If the price is lower, they make less money.
I think Matt was just making a point using Zenter as an example. For zenter to go the webex route they would have had to add a lot more functionality, but it was obviously possible.
Yeah, not only does it prevent most exits, but it also realistically prevents you from passing through all the income to the founders. Investors aren't going to sit around and let you do that; usually they are going to basically insist you put most of the profits back into the business, probably by hiring more people.

By the article's logic you should have a CEO that spends all their time trying raise money, thus living up to the raise as much as you can mantra. That is just ridiculous advice for an Internet startup that can (a) be run to tens of millions of users by a handful of people on little money and (b) is often in a situation where having more capital won't help acquire users. Additionally, raising money is usually a huge distraction, significantly dilutes your equity, and generally makes the dynamics of your business more complicated (dealing with the new investors who are probably now on your board). You really should only go through this process is you have a very specific need and plan for the money.
Their cronies (and often the bankers themselves) take large amounts of the IPO shares.
want to report a minor bug in the application form

when typing the symbol ' (as in pg's) and then pressing update, a bunch of letter looking like "ÃÂ" appear in front of the symbol ' in the updated version.
iPhone Hackers: "we have owned the filesystem"
Tyranny of the Page View Nearly Over?
Bay Partners Launches Facebook-Apps-Only Fund
Del.icio.us: usability lab
Five Ways to Move your Startup Forward without Cash
Apple debuts iPhone Developer Connection site
Still no SDK, but this is at least a useful resource for developing web-based iPhone content.
Still no SDK, but at least there is good info here for developing rich web-based apps.
It's not just the application form. If you type utf-8 encoded chars into any form, you get crap out. We're actually trying to debug this right now. For the time being use plain ascii.

(That thing that looked like ' wasn't. It was probably something you copied and pasted, e.g. from MS Word.)
I did a re-reading of it the when I submitted it, and some things made more sense than it did before. With all the blogs that frequent the ycombo front page about how to talk to VCs, I figured some tech stuff would give some variety.
Ning is the only online service where you can create, customize, and share your own Social Network for free in seconds.

Snore. A quick change to the data model of myspace or facebook and you'd have the same thing. Just default a subset of users to a given skin, tack on their own domain, myclub.facebook/myname, and you're done.
Recommendations for a Colo Datacenter in Boston area
Please share your reviews, experiences about how you chose your datacenter colo.
So when you refer to 'ibankers' as a group, you mean 'ibankers who steal from their employers'? Isn't this a distinction you ought to make? And doesn't your previous statement make sense if you were merely uninformed?
Thanks for the explanation, I will retype them and update.
Advice on web-app credit card processing and invoicing?
I am developing a niche business web-application targeted at machine shops with fewer than 10 employees.
I am charging a flat-rate of $5/day for the web application with an unlimited number of users.
Customers pay up front for however many days they want. They can purchase additional days whenever they want. There is no automatic recurring billing -- the web app is simply 'paused' when it runs out of days.

What is the best way to go about handling credit/debit card processing and invoicing for this?

I'm playing around with using Paypal Website Payments Standard with encrypted 'buy it now' buttons and Instant Payment Notification (IPN).
However, the user-experience for credit-card payments with PayPal is lacking. Specifically, Paypal does not auto-redirect users back to my website if they use a credit card (auto-redirect works only with PayPal payments).
What other payment processing solutions should I be looking at?

Unforunately, Google Checkout seems to be behind PayPal in terms of multiple-currency support.

Thanks in advance!
Maybe I'm missing something, but I can't find a list of all Javascript objects to use to interact with the iPhone. For example, you might be able to do something like:

document.onDoubleTap = function(event) { alert("double tapped at [" + event.x + ", " + event.y + "]"); }

But I haven't found documentation anywhere. Does anyone know where it's at, or if it exists yet?
Here are some news.yc discussions about this topic:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5303

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12010

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33322

Perhaps we need the ability to tag discussions?
The site looks great, and I think the idea is a good one. Just a thought though - I noticed SourceForge is testing a new marketplace ("SourceForge.net is introducing a new feature that will let you buy or sell services for Open Source projects right from the site.") So you might have a bit of competition if they are doing something similar to what you are.

Good luck with the business, I can't wait to see it when it launches.
I might be uninformed here, but don't the underwriters of public share offerings often also hold on to blocks of shares after the offering (completely legally)?