skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I graduated last May from the University of Florida and am now working in Boston for a startup that makes a web-based sports MMO. Before I took the job I applied to YC with an idea for a tool that would make administering and refactoring databases less painful, but was rejected, probably because my cofounder was still in college and intended to go back after the summer. The idea has since morphed into a web-based RDBMS designed to run on AWS.

Although I like the people I'm working with and think the company has a decent chance, ASP is rotting my brain. I'd be much happier working on the database startup if I could find a new co-founder and seed funding. I'm not planning on applying to this YC funding round since I'd rather wait six months for the next one and stay in Boston, but anyone interested in applying with me could persuade me otherwise.
I'm curious to know why you think Atlas Shrugged is "the most important work of modern fiction". Rand's ideas weren't original and if someone needed to read her book to emulate Hank Rearden they will never be like Hank.

At the time that I read it I thought it was the greatest fiction book I've ever read but that's because I'm technical and don't care much for good literature. But after time it has faded and I noticed her philosphy was nothing new. Maybe if she wrote it before the 16th Century I would say it was great but the 1950s?

I still agree with most of her writings, but they are irrelevant. I thought those things before I read the book and so did the philosophers before her.
An idea
ok, so yeah I have this idea. And I don't mind telling people about it. If you want to do it, go ahead, but first let me know what you think.

I'm sure everyone has heard of this, and I'm pretty sure this has already been thought of (what hasn't, right?) but I haven't seen it in my feed pop up in the myriad facebook apps my friends have added. The pitch: facebook app/six degrees of separation game (find out how many steps to a random person (if possible)). Just had this idea like two minutes ago. Any thoughts??
I'd like to come, although I am not planning to apply for the next cycle.
Maybe 'in June' ?
TED Talks: Richard Dawkins: The universe is queerer than we can suppose
I never had the pleasure to use one, but one of my professors in college said that when the old Lisp Machines started garbage collection you just went home for the day. Of course, even that was still more productive than using the competing systems ;-)
Google Deletes Facebook Secrets Blog
Does Facebook really own the rights to code that shows up in someone's browser?
"... I think the arrangement where the founders are not currently developers would be equally effective as a team of developers as long as they are able to accurately capture and understand their customer's needs prior to the start of coding. ..."

I wish all or some customer needs could be fixed at the start of coding but it's not likely to happen. For a start, exactly "who is a startups customers?" You can ask them, but you need a demo first. If you build new products (stuff that by definition has not been built before) a constant dialog with users is required 'at' the time of coding and development not before.

"... If I'd asked people what they wanted, they would have asked for a better horse. ..." ~ http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Henry_Ford

There is one other problem I can think of. Sometimes the customer is not in the position to know what is possible. So it's up to the developer(s) to build something not specified directly by customers. Zenter is an example. In a talk with Crosby & Walker (http://www.grid7.com/podpress_trac/feed/178/0/vCast070807_Ze... Podcast #24 - Founders of Zenter, 46Mb ) it becomes apparent that in developing Zenter it was not merely just a copy of MS Powerpoint. It required knowledge of what existing users require. Then extend it to the Web. Exploiting the Webs unique properties.

The gap of knowing what customers need (upfront or close to upfront) and taking a guess where users need now and in the future is what makes startups "late binding" in needs requirements.
Oh...man...I'd love to. But Sunday is bad for me, have a concert after 7pm. How about Friday ?
May be easier than a whole facebook app:

http://icanhascheezburger.com/2007/07/23/i-cans-be-bracelet/
Seriously clever.
It seems like an interesting idea but what does it do other than add one more app to facebook. It seems like work that might not add much value. jmho but if you're going to put out the effort put it into something more beneficial.
Slightly OT: those who enjoyed Norvig's PAIP but wanted more AI content will enjoy Forbus and de Kleer's Building Problem Solvers. Starts out on the same subject matter as PAIP but spends a lot of time talking about truth maintenance system.

The code is in Common Lisp.

It's old-style symbolic AI which is fairly limited in its utility, but truth maintenance systems have interesting applications in natural language processing and and other domains, so, whatever.
Is this surprising to any reader here? The signal to noise ratio drops as more users join up. Also, when you have a number of balkanized sub-groups at a site who like different things, about the only content they can all agree on as 'great' is LOLcats and anti-Republican propaganda. These problems can be solved... at least if enough venture capital is thrown at the problem.
if you can get an app with a million users you can make money because facebook app advertisers are overpaying for now. i've heard $10 cpm which is almost as high as during the bubble.
Because none of the leading-edge engineering design tools will work on the mac.
probably not but who can afford to defend themselves from lawyers?
I was just thinking about the same thing a few hours ago. I think this would be useful because if I wanted e.g. someone to introduce me to a potential investor, I could look the investor up on FB and see if I am connected to that person, and ask the "connectors" to introduce me.
sure, come anyway
Play to the particular technology's strengths... flash for video or performance and javascript for flash-disabled clients or working closely with the DOM
I personally prefer lightweight javascript over the often slower flash equivalent. Rich UI functionality is generally easier to implement in flash though. But this can be a heated debate so watch out..

Some things to consider: The iPhone supports javascript but not flash, Adobe does not have flash out for x86_64 Linux, Flash is a proprietary closed platform.
There can't be that many (edit - that many Email spam startups at least. Web spam, blog spam etc are another issue). It's a crowded and relatively mature market that just went through a round of acquisitions of mature private anti-spam companies (CipherTrust, IronPort and Postini)
I'm currently working on an app (primarily focused on photo sharing) which uses some advanced image processing techniques in a very main-stream general-consumer sort of way.

Don't know if I'll have a demo working by Sunday (need to stop reading News.YC) but I'd love to show off what I've got so far and get some feedback.
This article's justifications for why the feature is missing typifies everything I hate about macs and their apologists. It's the whole 'we know better than you' about what you should be allowed to do. Give me an environment that is alive with all sorts of applications, methods of use and even viruses/trojans any day over this sterile Mac-world
hmm? flash seems faster and more responsive than javascript manipulating browser DOM trees.
"slower flash equivalent" ?

The basic file size of an empty swf file is approximately 35 bytes.Apart from this 35 bytes, everything else is developer contribution. The file size depends on what kind of assets you want to embed in your flash widget. If you embed more images,mp3s etc., the file size will increase. One of the greatest strengths of flash is the speed at which the 'flash virtual machine' initializes. A swf file churned out by a good developer will perform well.

Having said that i would personally prefer to go with a javascript version, if the widget doesnt require video or hardcore visual effects.Why lock yourself in a closed piece of software unless its acutely necessary ?

A major disadvantage of using flash is that, flash by default will place itself on top of everything else in a webpage. A work around for this is to set wmode as "transparent". But this will drastically reduce performance of flash widget in Gecko browsers.And hence, as far as possible, use javascript.
"... How should we resubmit old links ..."

why resubmit old links, when you can simply search for different ones to add? Now if there was a decent search behind hack.yc you wouldn't even entertain the idea.
for anything that needs to push data frequently - javascript/ajax
for anything that needs to pull data frequently - flash

and dont worry about that javascript widgets slowing thing! the web as we know it ,is fragmented in data anyway.
As a young married guy with kids, dealing with medical records is a strange reminder of life before the advent of the personal computer. In a world with EVDO where we worry about disabling our passports it strangely anachronistic to put in a request for your medical records and wait patiently for real people to collect real papers and send them through the real mail so other real people can redistribute them through their organization so ultimately a guy with a medical doctorate can read <italics> text </italics>.

There must be some serious organizational frictions because first blush it seems this should have been solved with the invention of Kermit.
What other fictional book from the 1900s forward would you recommend? Personally, I considered myself quite liberal until I began reading this book. I just kept finding the themes resonating with me, and I realized that she was really describing my philosophy and half the reasons behind the messes in society today. It hasn't changed my morals so much as realigned my politics to agree with them. The book has been singlehandedly responsible for converting me from a liberal to a libertarian. Perhaps if more people read it, they would be less inclined to "ride the system" and would do some good for society. Or maybe that's just wishful thinking....
With the current primitives, it'd be pretty hard to do. You can get a list of your friends, but you can't do get a list of their friends - the best you can do is ask if two people are connected. you'd basically have to keep an offline list of the facebook web of connections.
Wonder if you'd have enough user data exposed through the API to actually map out the relevant network... computationally it'd be fairly trivial to verify the user's guess, but you'd have a hell of a time actually calculating minimum distance with a dataset as large as Facebook's. That's why for the most part you won't see a social network telling you how two users are connected beyond a distance of two hops.
It's always useful to change it up a little bit. It'll give it some new life.
The most interesting part is this sort politicking between execs and turf battles. Is this worse or better than other corporations or partnerships, like consulting firms?
Just for fun i calculated the worst-case state space for a network assuming that the average node has 150 peers -- out to 6 hops you have roughly 10^13 unique paths. Not impossible to work with, but you'd have to get pretty clever to reduce the computing time to something practical.
Did anyone not expect this to happen? They got caught, as they should have. But is it bad? At least we know that they care about their image on the Web. It shows Wikipedia's significance as a credible source for information and the Web as a host for that source. Wikipedia is almost meant to be an encyclopedia driven by anarchy.
I'm always a fan of the technology solution to any problem, but it's fundamentally a policy problem. Until, the health care system changes in this country for universal coverage, then the system will react in a positive way. Perhaps, this could occur in the next generation. At the same time, there's a market opportunity - more people to serve.
If I could license a hole digger, the first thing I would do is connect LA to New York the short way. If I'm really lucky they will have invented a room temperature superconductor by then so my now nearly frictionless train can fall across the country at break-neck speed with near zero energy expenditure.
Didn't we just see a post about a quantum computer designed to address the traveling salesman problem? Maybe that was reddit...
I was curious, so did some searching: http://oddhammer.com/actionscriptperformance/set4/

Flash 9 is considerably faster than previous flash versions at most tasks, and is indeed faster than javascript for the most part too. Doesnt paint the whole picture, but at least gives an idea.
SwellJoe - To give the argument a different twist, it's hard for most people to hold different perspectives beyond their best core ability. For many hackers, they're so engrossed in it, and for good reason. As you say, they are smarter than average, and programming affords them the opportunity to execute their ideas easily. Once you get so good at anything, including hacking or, more specifically, software development, it becomes hard to think about usability, design, business development, etc. Then, there arises a need for systems thinking or other thinkers with different areas of expertise. Would you agree?
Why is it hard to startup a company outside of Silicon Valley?
This may sound like a dumb question to some, but I need to be edified. I'm in DC, and it seems more and more that you're probably working in something government or defense related. In other cities, like Dallas, it used to be telecom related (The Telecom Corrdior). How do these clusters start, thrive, and/or die? How does it continue to thrive in Silicon Valley after some 20 to 30 years of startup success stories?
...back in my day, we didn't try to improve on user interfaces or advance the state of the art. We had viruses and trojans and we liked it!
I've been out here (the Valley) for the summer. The crazy thing about the place is, every time I ride the BART or sit down at a coffee shop there's someone sitting next to me that's either works at Yahoo/ebay/google/etc or is also doing a startup.

Its really easy to start conversations with these people upon noticing a Django error page on their laptop or an ebay employee badge. The conversations are great.

Also there are lots of meetups, lectures and parties for startups. The place just breathes technology (can be frustrating as well if you additionally like other things such as frisbee or women).
I used to live up in the Valley for many years until I moved down to Los Angeles about 5 years ago. Doing a startup in Los Angeles has been difficult, mostly in trying to find and network with other like minded individuals but with a little effort we're finding its not all that hard. We use meetup.com and upcoming.org a lot to find or setup local tech meet ups.

It seems to be really starting to make a difference though, there's more of a sense of a growing tech community in LA now (a welcome relief from the entertainment buzz). Hopefully it'll keep growing.

So while I agree its definately harder than it is in the Silicon Valley, its not impossible. There are other people out there doing startups, you just have to proactively try and find them and bring them together if someone else isn't doing so already in your area.
Paul Graham has a good essay on this topic if you're interested: http://www.paulgraham.com/siliconvalley.html
I think one of the largest reasons why Silicon Valley has so many startups and other places have so few is Paul Graham's reason #15 for not starting a startup: "Parents want you to be a doctor".

Not literally, of course; but rather in the general sense of social pressure against creating a startup. In the Valley, you can say that you're thinking of creating your own business, and people will tell you that they think that's cool, will talk about startups they have been involved in, and generally support the idea. In most of the rest of the world, people will look at you as if you've announced that you're planning on getting a sex change: A small amount of admiration for making such a hard decision, mixed with a large amount of skepticism about your sanity. After all, everybody knows that 50%/80%/90%/99% of small businesses fail within X years, right?

I've been very lucky that, in spite of being surrounded by generally skeptical people, I've encountered a lot of support; as my girlfriend put it, "most small businesses fail, but if anyone can succeed, it will be you". If it weren't for how much my friends apparently believe in me personally, I'm sure I'd have been convinced to not even attempt this based on those same statistics about failure rates.
Here's one way to save your server AND your customer's website when digg/reddit effect hits
Well, if they've created the hardware and the environment and done a lot of brainstorming, experimenting, and researching how to make the design work, maybe they do know better than their users what they want. Most people probably don't spend all their time thinking of new ways to use a phone. If you decide Apple is wrong, just don't buy their products.

I do like open systems (linux/smalltalk/etc.), but then it seems like you still have a choice between using something someone else has designed for you, or doing it yourself. Developers can make systems configurable, but it doesn't seem like configuration options are always that creative, and they can get annoying after a while.

I guess the best thing a designer can do is make systems easy for hackers to extend, but someone is going to have to create a design somewhere, or else the end product isn't going to be very good.
While we're talking about location, avoid San Diego if you don't want to live in a sprawling automobile-metropolis where the only decent jobs involve making toys for the Pentagon. The restaurants, almost all fast food or chain, with their generic soaked-cardboard food, are copied and pasted around endlessly. Jesus christ.
Well, the name change at least totally ruins the effect of my animating the site title: http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=crapface

Also the rest of the menu did not disappear before. And you've already closed the hole so I can't fix it.
Think Lisp machines/J2EE/etc have too many manuals? Look at this
This is a picture of a fighter jet and its accompanying technical documentation.
> The crazy thing about the place is, every time I ride the BART or sit down at a coffee shop there's someone sitting next to me that's either works at Yahoo/ebay/google/etc or is also doing a startup.

A friend just moved from LA to SF and said the exact same thing. That's one of the most exciting parts of moving to the area for me (which I will be doing). The least exciting part is how crappy a lot of the city of SF is.

The Valley is where you go to be a successful technology entrepreneur. It's that global perception that gives it the hard-to-identify edge over everywhere else. Hollywood has the same advantage.

As a competitor I'd fear a startup in The Valley a lot more than an otherwise equal one that's located anywhere else.
I would, but it grows deep underground...
I seem to remember Max Levchin talking about this exact problem at Startup School. He was talking about how Friendster shot themselves in the foot by calculating all the hops between you and whomever's profile you were viewing, slowing page load significantly. He pointed out that Myspace provided similar user experience by simply slapping "Is in your extended network" on all pages.
Feature Creep
Fair comment.

Frankly, I wasn't sure if it was on-topic either; let the collective decide. :)
"LOL I CAN HAS" is the new "is the new".
What is Two Dot Ooh?
What's the hacker perspective on 'Web 2.0'? Is it just a crossroads of technologies that have matured? Is it about the community aspects? How would you defined Web 2.0?
Prototype 1.6.0 release candidate
This might be an opportune moment to mention the (not very active) IRC channel: #news.yc on Freenode.
DC? Try doing a startup in Europe. Now there's a challenge...
He looks like Kim Jong Il:

http://www.foxnews.com/images/229818/0_63_kim_jongil.jpg
The title is misleading. A somewhat more precise title would be

"How & why [lots of] (poorly written) widgets slow down blogs".

As Paul Graham once said:
"...the closer you get to the truth, the messier your sentence gets."
Lazy JS Function Definition Pattern
> Give me an environment that is alive with all sorts of applications, methods of use...

Yeah, Linux is great for people like us!

> ...and even viruses/trojans any day...

Oh, Windows. Yuck.
A Nifty Hack: Bluetooth People Presence Detector
A Portrait of J. Random Hacker
Higher-Order Perl -- Free Online Version
Keep hearing the same 'closed software' regarding flash and I don't understand why. There are quite a few open source platforms that produce swfs (open laszlo, aptana, even flex is open source now). Regarding the flash player, it is not any more closed software than IE is.

Also isn't it nice not to have to write javascript code for each browser that exists out there?
I haven't missed copy and paste. I'm glad that they left it out, because it's another chance to introduce even more bugs into the iPhone (the thing crashes around once every other day).
Wolfram 2,3 Turing Machine Research Prize
The biggest reason -- the elephant in the room reason -- is the money. Angel capital won't touch you if you live farther than a two hour drive. VC's are similar. And so it's just a self-referential loop that spirals upwards.

The only problem is that 90% of Silicon Valley startups are that kind of meringue and marshmallow that VC love. The record companies love Britney Spears and VC's love Twitter. It's all a big get-rich-quick scheme and a waste of time. Sadly, as a native of Silicon Valley, it means that true innovation, when it is happening, is occurring everywhere.
Do I really own the rights to the camera I lost in Sweden? The police seemed to think so.
Try doing a startup in Eastern Europe. That is really painful, believe me :)
If you want more AI, there is always AIMA.
There aren't a lot of consumer-facing web/software startups like in the Valley but there are startups working on pure technology problems in fields such as microelectronics, transportation, aeronautics, etc.
i was skim reading after a while but i never caught my personal favorite - 'have something "GBP$"GBP$ interesting to say', no amount of eye candy can polish a god awful boring conclusion.
Is your name "Strange Loop", or "Douglas Hofstadter", by any chance? ;-)
Profitable with $0 seed funding?
Google WTF!?!
"...With all those smart PhDs in-house you would think they would be able to prevent the following from happening..."
What happens in reddit stays in reddit. Please.
Functional unit testing for web applications: Selenium Remote Control
In certain startup areas like Web apps it is changing, albeit slowly. A Web app company can be created by a few people (even one) successfully on very little (if no significant amount) of money. And it is becoming easier to find local co-founders because there are so many programmers who know or can learn the technologies at play and don't want to move to California.