skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think this whole thing is just an excuse to use his favorite new phrase "ad hominem."
Guy Kawaski just invested in something similar to this didn't he?
Why is TextAmerican imploding? (hint: it's their pricing model)
UK Data Prices Start To Fall, Sort Of
What Happened at Digg?
What a great forum. I'm deciding b/w a Mac or a the Z. Looks like everyone really loves their MAC.

My T40 is dying.
What is the signal-to-noise ratio of this comment?
Work-for-hire model broken?
The white MacBook with 2G of RAM is great for programming unix applications. I run the webserver, the database, the search engine (Ferret) and all other desktop apps as well as Windows XP on parallels for IE debugging. I never have performance issues.
i don't think its similar. kinda like a papparazzi thing.
Ah, yes, that makes sense. Thanks!
can't post a picture
I've got a Quad Core 3Ghz MacPro... and yes it is REALLY fast!
PeepCode "Javascript with Prototype.js" screencast (free preview)
Any word on how they will deal with employee fears about being sent a signup verification link to their work email address?
None of the lisp programmers that I recruited was brave enough to try; thus I'm learning lisp and coding it myself. Yes I can code. Even Franz chickened out. At least I have the courage to try.
if they get an email w/ the verify link, they don't have to enter their email at all.
Coda not so hot?
How Do I determine the Valuation of My Startup?
Disneyland for Young Techie Entrepreneurs (YC.News)
Code Talkers (cartoon)
Good Angry Customers and The Death of Sucks Sites
Google Acquiring Simply Hired?
alarm:clock has broke the story:
http://www.thealarmclock.com/mt/archives/2007/05/google_negotiat.html

And everyone is reporting on it:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/05/04/google-in-talks-to-acquire-simplyhired/
http://mashable.com/2007/05/04/google-simplyhired/

However Joshua Jaffe at VC ratings think this is non-sense. Why would the search giant buy search.
http://vcratings.thedealblogs.com/2007/05/google_buying_a_vertical_searc.php

I wish I could take sides and call one thing reasonable over other. what you guys think Does it makes sense ?
Wow, someone should give Yahoo an award for "Most literal application of Greenspun's Tenth Rule."
SimplyHired has done a pretty great job in their space. It would make sense for Google to acquire them to get the SimplyHired team. Also, this would make sense given Google's history - particularly in their acquisition of YouTube. Google already had Google Video, but YouTube had outdone them by a long shot, so Google acquired the YouTubers. It's the same with the job-search market - have you ever searched for a job using Google Base (link below)? Probably not. SimplyHired has far outperformed Google in this vertical and so would be a very attractive acquisition.

http://www.google.com/base/search?a_n0=jobs&a_y0=9&hl=en&gl=US

VS

http://simplyhired.com
I wouldn't back down so much if I were you. I think its entirely possible the iphone wont sell quickly enough for prices to drop, at least in its current incarnation. For all the hype about the iPod's interface these days, I remember the thing that got it going was huge storage and slim design. It was and still is great at playing and storing music.

And while I'm ranting about it, I think the iPhone is a missed opportunity to put in a decent camera. I think about a 5 megapixel camera with flash is mostly good enough as a snap camera for people these days, and people would have justified the extra cost to merge those two devices.
Twitter mobile ui
lift/scala for web apps -- all of twitter's traffic on 2 machines?
eBay's new services chaotic, profitable?
bootstrapping becoming sexy again?
'... At least I have the courage to try ...'

it's not the courage bit that I'm skeptical about. Its the scope. It's fine to have a BHAG but try a smaller problem and solve it. This particular problem is someones academic career. Is it a a product someone would buy?
Or it's something new. It is a news site, after all.

I'm a commenter too. I figure once I learn enough and have something significant to contribute, I'll start a blog.
hey matt, thanks for finding this series it's a blast reading.
TechCrunch also has some interesting data on this:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/05/04/google-in-talks-to-acquire-simplyhired/
It's rather disingenuous to say "you all suffer from confirmation bias because you ignore my posts" and then claim ad hominem attacks when people point out that your posts are not that interesting. _You_ are the one who started the conversation focusing on you and your posts.
BBC NEWS | Business | YouTube facing football lawsuit
Well, imho, I engaged thoughtfully w/ the folks who did the same...

And why wouldn't (aspiring) entrepreneurs be interested in learning more about a proven source of competitive advantage?

Please be specific about my failings on this count.
Google to acquire SimplyHired?
What are your criteria to join an existing team (of non-technical members)? (I presume that most YCers are hackers.)
I've been using it for a week and a half, now, and I have exactly the same reaction as this reviewer. It's so great not to have to switch back and forth between different windows (different desktops, for me; I use Desktop Manager), but there are little things that keep bugging me, like the "open in same tab" thing with the terminal.

Another problem I have with it is overeager completion, but I suppose I'll just get used to this -- I was never a fan of Dreamweaver, which also does this.
edit nm... didn't see the FAQ at first.
Vote this up [see screenshot] if you want back and forward buttons to skip through days on YC
I look at it this way:

Intelligence is nothing more or less than a certain set of behaviors. Things like curiosity, experimentation, analysis & reflection, precision of thought, voracious reading, etc. It's genetic because behavior is genetic. But genetic != immutable: it's possible to change your intelligence by changing your behavior.

It's really habits that matter. Somebody could be born predisposed towards learning lots of things, and then gradually become unintelligent because they believe it just doesn't matter. Or they could be born frighteningly intelligent and then gradually go crackpot by falling victim to confirmation bias and only seeking out information that fits their pre-existing mental models (Noam Chomsky and Stephen Wolfram fit this description, and IMNSHO a prominent YC founder is in danger of going down this road). Or they could be born normal, but have parents that encourage them to try things out and explore the world around them. Or they could be born dumb, but choose to adopt habits that involve taking in prodigious amounts of information.
This is especially useful for the New page which changes more frequently than startup news. One can then see what the New page looked like 1 hour ago, two hours ago, etc. Kind of like Justin.TV.

All one has to do is limit the output on the new page to just the stories that existed before the date/time. The actual links and dates would not change, so even if one wants to see the news page of 3 days ago, the age of the submission would still show correctly for each link.

And, it's easier and faster than scrolling down and clicking Next like on Digg or Reddit. You simply click back one hour and the previous view loads, without changing the location of the back link, so you can keep clicking it to go back three hours. Much more intuitive.

I think this would work great for the new page, but I'm not sure how well it would work for Startup News.
That depends strongly on the company, doesn't it? A list of companies represented here after they get some usage would read like a "don't apply to" list.
One criteria could be: A majority of existing team members have to be hackers. Otherwise, who will be doing all the work which is primarily technical in the beginning?
From http://www.paulgraham.com/guidetoinvestors.html:

9. Investors look for founders like the current stars.

...Historically investors thought it was important for a founder to be an expert in business...Now most VCs know they should be funding technical guys.

---

This is what I'm getting at. My research leads me to conclude that investors should seek out tech/marketing hybrids.

The $ being generated by diggnation is a good harbinger of the utility of the hybrid approach.

But pg tells us that, today, smart money "knows" Brin/Page-like teams are who to look for...

Now, is pg's assertion objectively true, or does it bespeak confirmation bias on the part of someone heavily invested in YC's investment thesis?

What about diggnation? Trump's yield from The Apprentice? Disney's yield from the Disney World program of the 1950's?
The ease of producing/distributing branded entertainment today? The utility of creating media that 1) increases awareness of the company, 2) showcases the company's customers, complementors, etc., and 3) generates profits?
Dude, I'm just about to go on vacation and you're cooking up new features I have to implement?

Though to be honest I told the Reddits they should implement a slider for this, so it's only fair I should be told to. Ok, I'll think about it. You don't have to all upvote it. It makes the site boring when the top story is a feature request.
By asking investors/acquirers for a termsheet...
This isn't related to startups at all. If you want to submit general stuff, why not do that on reddit?
What the best Language to learn for stater?
Internet Startup co-founder asking. I have no coding experience (except for sql queries) what is a language I can start to learn so I can better understand my business/
Possibility of running single-system-image clusters for web farms
I noticed that there are plenty of ways to setup single-system-image clusters for high performance computing, and I'm wondering if it's practical for web farms. It seems to be rarely used in the latter context, though I can see several advantages off the top of my head:

- You can write your web app as if it only runs on one machine, so you don't have to worry about distributed session storage. For some continuation-based web frameworks, serializing continuations seems pretty messy.

- You can use your RDBMS's own cache buffer instead of memcached, since it can be transparently distributed by the OS. So your app can simply talk to the database directly.

- From the propagandas, most SSI systems promise to automatically detect new nodes and add it to its pool of resources. So this saves you some time deploying your software as you scale up.

I was wondering if anyone here has any theoretical knowledge or experience in running SSI clusters, and how it compares to the classic load-balancer/web-servers/memcached/database-server configuration in serving multiuser web apps.

Thanks!
Should this have become the dominant language at Apple?
you can invite yourself to your workplace from home. along with your coworkers.
Guys, watch out for lawsuits and subpoenas! Some employers are gonna go nuts over this... trade secrets, harassment charges etc. Make sure you remove logs, IPs, etc.
I have been following dylan for a while and I really appreciate its aesthetics.

I never really understood why Apple ceased development, other than a baby with the bath water mistake; it seems a far more appopriate and elegant language than objective-c for application development.

I'd appreciate all your comments and I would especially like to know how Paul G feels about Dylan as a blubbified lisp / scheme.
Google Docs & Spreadsheets rolls out new features
Python

(edit: late, but I should add why in case you visit again. I find Python to be quite a good cross between the C/C++ based dialects and, say, the newer, and ref a pg article, languages "closer to lisp." Also the syntax reads pretty close to English, and is beautifully formatted. The documentation is plenty too. I'm pretty much all PHP, but I'd recommend Python :) )
Have any of you started a succuessful company because of Mr. Graham's writing or the early reddit entrepreneurial community?
I am too embarrassed to even mention why I read pg's essays before he got into writing on entrepreneurship. Rest assured, it was still to achieve an entrepreneurial end.

Perhaps someday I'll share with him:)
find a partner who can. then take a quick peek at eric raymonds guide to hacking ~ http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html
'... Your login status says "Active"... ...'

think I made the comment on/around the same time. Login is OK.
But didn't S3 go down some time ago? How does that say for reliability?
I'd say Ruby(which I'm currently using) but I started out with Perl. And hacking with Perl provided me with a firm foundation. So use Perl :-) cuz it's awesome.
'... This isn't related to startups at all ...'

funny but in a way it is. It's got to do with brain structure, patterns and ideas ~ http://www.edwdebono.com/debono/berry.htm

The idea is important to startups where imagination and ideas are paramount. The theory is developed by Edward De Bono who's hardly an intellectual flake ~ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_de_Bono

'... unless you learn to escape from the obvious way of looking at things, you will not develop new ideas ...'

So the play on words, puns, cartoons and jokes are just a function of thinking. Beware of humourless hackers. It's a bad sign.
If you're afraid to share something that you considered interesting enough to write, how are you going to promote your company?

I'm not saying spam us every time a few stray neurons fire, but I think this "don't promote your own stuff" idea is some kind of lame artifact from reddit.
Day Zero - ready to become 'that guy' who 'did it'.
I applied saying that I was an entrepreneur and was interested in hiring a member. They let me in and immediately instated a rule that you needed 15 posts before you could post in the "Help Wanted" forum.
I always get one karma point per comment point above 1. What's the basis for the 0.5 factor?
bootstrapping sounds much too kinky to be sexy
And this assumes that your submissions provide valuable information about some key piece of that. It appears YC'ers disagree with your assessment.

Your premise here may very well be valid, but that doesn't mean the voted down posts were good.
They didn't have the courage to make it a real Lisp, but they didn't dumb it down enough to appeal to mainstream programmers, so they ended up producing something that no one really loved, except possibly its parents.

Java is the only case I can think of where a company managed to force its programmers to start using a new language created for them. In 1995 you had to at least make the syntax look like C. That's probably less true now that so many programmers are used to Python and Ruby. But most ordinary programmers would probably still panic at the idea of writing code in s-expressions.
Another merger?? Reuters rumored to be considering $15 billion buyout
What do you have to offer to the team of hackers?

Are you somewhat technical savvy? Do you know every single competitor out there and now how to make your product better to slaughter them?

I've heard a lot of entrepreneurs say "I can help with marketing"...um well at the beginning there's no marketing because there's no product. So you need to think of a way to help your team out before the "marketing" phase.
Tell that the programers in eastern Europe.
The interesting thing for me is that the K programs are fewer lines...a lot fewer. 9 in K vs. 96 in Perl in one example. When one remembers that perl is historically the king of one-liners, this is pretty impressive. I'd probably be willing to learn how to interpret line noise if I only have to parse 9 lines for every 96 I'm parsing now (I'm primarily a Perl programmer). I, obviously, don't believe this is representative--a large number of programming tasks aren't reduce-able beyond a certain level. But for a 50% LoC reduction, I might consider it.

There's a lot of other considerations, and right now Haskell and Erlang are leading my "what'll my next back end projects use" list (after Perl 6...which I'm getting excited about after seeing Audrey Tang's talk about it from a few days ago, as it appears it will fix every single major problem with Perl, by my reckoning)...but I'm not going to rule out a language merely because my first glance at it makes me uncomfortable or confused (if that were the case, I would have never used Perl, Python, Ruby, and I would be avoiding messing with Erlang and Haskell...I might have even continued trying to figure out Java, since it seemed comfortably familiar based on my C experience, but I believe that would have been a very bad instinct).
Now that RH is gone, is News.YC the next source for the latest startup news?
Looks like the phones at Red Herring went dead today: http://valleywag.com/tech/death-of-print/phones-dead-at-red-herring-257953.php

What do you think, outdated business model? Will news aggregators (possibly News.YC) be taking over this space?
Latest AACS crack 'beyond revocation'
There also seem to be other limitations, such as not being able to vote down replies to your comments or stories.
Simple answer - Submissions are more important than Comments for News.YC ;-).

If comments were given more weight tending towards that of submissions, people would have trouble moving onto the next submission, in the process of accumulating karma. I am sure YC wants people to add value through new/novel submissions.
1. Technical yes but you will need someone who can find out every single competitor out there and find a way to make your product better.

2.In addition, you need to be able to find and talk to users who are using your competitor's product to find out what they're complaining about so that you can make it better.

You're probably thinking "a hacker" can do that. Ummmm..hackers have no problem talking to other hackers but how about talking to non-hackers? In addition, you need to make sure that your user interface is idiot proof to someone who isn't a programmer.

Another example of why you need people who understand the industry or your users -

Example: Awhile back there was a debate I had with somoene, can't remember his name so I will call him Mr.Citrus. Anyways, I stopped responding because he was too stubborn. Mr. C and his team are building a site that is a women-related site. Mr.C says that he is going to take on Monopoly X by building site Y. However, after looking at site Y, I noticed that it offers nothing better than Monopoly X. In addition, if Mr.C had people on his team who understood this industry or knew where to look or who to ask, he would have known some juicy gossip related to his competitor that would have assisted him to get acquired quicker or beat out his competitor. What kind of gossip can a non-hacker give him? Well things like:

1. Monopoly X has a partnership with several women magazines in which the editor of that magazine would never do an article who is a competitor of Monopoly X. So that cuts out an avenue of obtaining users.

2. The recent acquisitions Monopoly X had acquired as well as the new venture Monopoly X had recently branched out too would provide a glimpse of where the competitor is heading and who/what he just bought. It would have helped Mr. Citrus predict his competitor's next move

3. Understanding what Monopoly x is missing, and fill in that gap or void because currently, there is a HUGE chunk monopoly X is missing but because Mr. Citrus and his team compose of only hackers who are attempting to penetrate a women related industry, he doesn't see it. And unfortunately, asking your sister or wife for their opinion isn't always helpful b/c if they're not into the whole web 2.0, kill your competitor attitude, they won't offer much opinion.

And that is why you would need a non-hacker...on your team...

Disclaimer: This does not apply to dimwitted, moronic non-hackers who have an idea but don't know the competitors or offer programmers suggestions, opinions, or even know how they can make it better or why something is better
Should Your Startup Be a Corp or LLC?
That shouldn't be a problem. You have to already have a company email to view that company's comments.
Unless I figured out how it would work. I realize that I need to work on it in stages and get each puzzle piece working. At the same time with funding what would take me 20 years working alone could be accomplished in 2 years with say at least 20 programmers and some office space.
In regards to whether it would be a product someone would buy it would be for companies that have programmers. The whole point is speeding up software development. It would make it possible to develop software in months rather than in years.
I think that the empitus for the idea first occurred to me when I had to make a symbolic link at Schwab and no one at Schwab knew how Schwab wrote symoblic links except for one guy and he was in vacation in Lousiana. I decided that there needed to be a better way of 'talking to the machine" with a smarter programming language. It would definitely make money. You could do a month's worth or programming in a day. What's not to like?
You're right about that, but at the same time, this is also exactly the problem. If you aren't going to be able to take up the Luxembourg market without paying particular attention to the cultural and linguistic peculiarities of Luxembourg (hint: 3 languages), then the conclusion for many companies is going to be that it's not worth worrying about Luxembourg at all. Then again, if nobody worries about Luxembourg, that opens up a decent opportunity for somebody to just copy a bunch of existing ideas for the Luxembourg market. And that's why people are looking for ways to overcome the problem of cultural fragmentation and make it profitable, even for a small company, to target the European market.
Data point: IBM is hiring graduate engineers like crazy in Melbourne, Australia.
As nearly as I can tell, nobody went as far as to engage the content linked to by my submissions.

To my mind, this begs the question: why are YCers not interested in learning (more) about marketing profitably through branded entertainment, given that it is a proven source of competitive advantage?

I think confirmation bias has to be considered as an explanation, but I don't pretend to know whether this hypothesis is valid...
Is it worse to write relevant content on your own blog and post it, or to troll the rss feeds and jump on content that someone else wrote and post it all the time? The latter one seems even more fishy to me. If you create bad/irrelevant content wouldn't the constant down votes solve the problem?
Importance of 'Spare Cycles' for Web 2.0 startups
I'm a big fan of bootstrapping, and I highly recommend the following books:

http://www.amazon.com/Bootstrapping-Your-Business-Successful-Company/dp/1593373872/

http://www.amazon.com/Bootstrap-Lessons-Learned-Building-Successful/dp/0971187304/

And here's a good intro article to bootstrapping:

http://www.inc.com/magazine/20020201/23855.html
I first read pg for spam filtering stuff. I already had a company that I'd founded (not particularly successful, though it did pay my bills for seven years and buy me a nice car).

His entrepreneurial writing did inspire my current company, however, and I expect very good results. His essays, along with a few good bits from other sources, provided a clarity of focus, and a depth of understanding, that I lacked before.
Actually, many YC wizards disagree with that article in its entirety. In many cases, not only do binaries not belong in the database, nothing else does.

In short: It depends on your application, and probably only you can know for sure (and then probably only with experimentation).
I don't like the Javariness of the syntax, but it still looks nice. I also question the performance claims, though RoR is really slow, so maybe being X times faster isn't all that hard.
Are you serious? This is the idea? That you had 10 slides or whatever to present it to investors? Wholy cow. The end is near...

Soon dressed up "hello world" implementations will pass by as "startup ideas".

Why bother going to college and paying for CS degree if after 10 days with a RoR book you can start your company!
A Tour of the Scala
Skittr - scala & lift implementation of twitter