skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hell yes and a half. I love it and people keep doing my work for me (i.e. releasing plugins).

I'm a recovering video game programmer who picked up Ruby ages ago as a Perl replacement. But coming from that background, it pained me to see Rails pages that took a third of a second, a half a second or even (gasp) longer to render, but you know, the problems are tractable. You don't have to create sophisticated data structures to address performance problems, for example. And Rails scalability is pretty well-understood and although it's complex, it gets easier all the time.
I wonder what the rationale is for not releasing stuff like BigTable and GFS? Yahoo or Microsoft wouldn't want to use it, just because it'd be embarrassing. Are they afraid of helping the startup that will eventually crush them?
Hrm.

I've been writing notes and thinking about my idea for this exact domain and application name for many months now. Guess I'll have to register and see what you've done.
I currently teach seventh graders in Japan. Many of my students are just starting to learn algebraic concepts and seeing word problems, I would definitely recommend trying to get their interesting from things they do know: video games.

Since you mention you are in the vfx industry I wonder if you might be planning a Maya/MEL presentation? I think that would knock their socks off, since you can see the real time changes to the running system without all the compiling, testing. Personally as an attention grabber I would start out with some of your "eye candy" stuff. "Hi, I'm _____ and my job is to make this [kick ass images] happen"

One request I have is don't talk as if this is something for those only naturally talented in math and logical thinking. Teachers want them to see potential in themselves to improve, even if they are behind, if they start hitting the books now they can do something like programming.

Lay out in no uncertain terms how one might progress if they are interested in the subject. When I was that age, maybe a bit older, there were some fields I was interested in but it was all just pie in the sky kind of stuff to me. Stuff you learned in college. Not connected with the drivel at junior high level.

I second the call to not use the word "hacker" RMS lost that battle to Hollywood a long time ago. The kids will find the true meaning to it later. Coder, Programmer, Technical Director (?) are some ideas.
Ask your startup questions to Ambient Orb creator
Disclosure: I work at the Internet Archive, but only speak for myself here.

I can understand the confusion given the news.yc context, but some of these comments miss the point. The Open Library is a library, not a startup, and is hosted at the nonprofit Internet Archive[1]. It is thus more of an analogue to Wikipedia -- which it complements in the books domain -- than Scribd.

Entrepreneurial hackers might be interested in the sweep of its mission: catalog every book ever made, using a combination of preexisting data sources and volunteer contributions, and offer free high-quality downloads of full book contents wherever possible. They might be interested in the detailed UI design doc[2], covering the vision for the project's functionality.

They might even be interested in the technology: a new loosely-structured dynamically extensible wiki, with integrated full-text search of both catalog entries and book text -- and all open source[3].

- Gordon

[1] http://www.archive.org

[2] http://demo.openlibrary.org/dev/docs/ui

[3] http://demo.openlibrary.org/about/tech
http://demo.openlibrary.org/about/architecture
once we get high quality speech recognition for videos where transcripts can be made and searched and when bandwidth in the US stops being pathetic and catches up with the rest of the world, then text will take a backseat to video and typical pages will start looking more and more like joost.
> ...eventually you need to know C++...

Why? I'd rather be the Python guy in that scenario :-)
The common setup is like this: 1) 1/3 equity for co-founders, 2) 1/3 equity for investors, 3) 1/3 equity for employees.

Early employees should get the highest bit, and it should drop off sharply after. Depending on the size of the company, you should look for 1-3% if you're under 10, vested over 1-2 years. That's assuming the company is small and plans to exit within a year or two.

A lot of people will probably say 1-3% is a huge amount of equity, even for an employee #10, but I've seen what happens when you don't give good equity to the earliest employees. I'm the type of person who would rather give more equity in order to keep people pretty focused. It probably depends on your opportunity costs, your experience, and how replaceable you are.

I've been in startups where the equity was really low, and the employees will figure out they're being exploited. The rest is history.
No. Kahle co-founded Alexa in 1996, which was sold to Amazon in 1999. Now, he leads the independent non-profit Internet Archive.

- Gordon (who works at the Internet Archive but is speaking only for himself here)
man that sounds dull. 5 am? who the heck drags themselves out of bed at 5am for the glory of being productive? i used to leap out of bed early to go skiing so maybe if my work was pulling me out of bed i'd consider it but man, this post drains my will to live.
"bus stops that broadcast the wait time for the next bus"

We already have that in the UK, though admitedly its not too reliable!
ask them if they want to change the world. i knew i wanted to try and do something 'big' when i was a kid (not that i had any idea what that was ;-). i went into the physical sciences not programming but even at that age i would have heard if someone had said 'software is changing the world - you can be part of something amazing'. that, combined with access to other people, would have been enough for me to plug into a hacking culture. as it is, i was pretty lonely until i got into post-grad and found other people out there with the same attitudes.
Well, here in Barcelona we have something similar too. On some stops a display shows the expected time and on the rest you can send an SMS.
Try to find something in their experience that matches the point you're making. Maybe, get them to remember their most favorite class project, or project outside of school. Point out how the best parts of such work might be the freedom, the complete engrossment, the creativity, and the results. Let them in on the secret that this is the way it was meant to be; work is supposed to engage all of your abilities.

However, I personally do not believe that every child is born to be a hacker, nor is this the only way to contribute. Your goal might be to reach the 10% of the audience for whom this message makes any sense, and, perhaps to explain that 10% to the other 90%.
Great. I don't know much about Haskell, but Scheme is a great language for startups. Start your own and apply to YC!

What are you using for learning Scheme? I recommend this one: http://herdrick.blogspot.com/2006/03/what-all-books-ought-to...

After that, take a look at the Scheme Cookbook for specific tasks. http://schemecookbook.org/Cookbook/
If you are so interested, you may consider talking to them about joining them?
Scott Adams does (I think it was 5:00am). Make of that what you like.
Amazing - he went from utlra-evil to ultra-saint?
Do you have a plan for making books that are currently copyrighted available for download? Will it be limited to public domain/CC licensed books?

Is there any way that I would ever be able to borrow one of the Harry Potter books from your library? Are you focusing on cataloging the information about books or are you focusing on making books available to people?
I would also recommend the Nolo Press books on the topic.
Yes I would. Probably any smallish consulting gigs I do will be in Rails now, as will any sort of internal quick admin-type app we do for our startup. Rails + ActiveScaffold gets you going very quickly for your standard LOB/CRUD app.

For my startup we've chosen Pylons and we're happy so far. It's definitely not as polished as Rails but it gives us a lot more flexibility. We're using SQLAlchemy as well and there's no better way to talk to a database.
Google Plans Search Service for Mobile Content
FlickIM, a better chat for iPhone
Dumpster Diving
This may be true, but the guy who applies to YC with $25k already in the bank and the experience of having sold a 'startup' after less than 2 weeks of launching, will surely have some kind of advantage over other applicants; No?
Completely off topic...I wonder why I think of Vitamins every time I see your name :)
New Feature: Ask Marc "Pmarca" Andreesen
Kozmo was great while it lasted in Boston. Movie & candy delivery right to Bexley on the cheap! The demand was there at their original low prices--not sure what it would be farther up the demand curve, i.e. if the price was significantly higher. I don't think the $10 minimum would hurt much (students can pool), but the $5 delivery charge might.
Yeah, I occasionally use it too. have you seen the new buses that announce which stop you're arriving at (like in the metro)?
Working From Home and the GTD
Here is a method that works for me. What methods do you use when your contexts within the GTD are largely the same?
How to Easily Monitor your Website Uptime for Free
This is a very simple and effective way to make sure you know when your site or blog is down.
Parenting Advice from History's Greatest Entrepreneur
I was thinking about the book How to Think like Leonardo da Vinci last night as I watched my 3 month old daughter sleep. In the book Michael Gelb shows you how to experience and observe things more richly. Gelb writes that Leonardo encouraged his pupils to look so closely at something familiar like the very ground beneath their feet; the grass, twigs and puddles. If they looked at it long enough they could see the most incredible foreign landscapes.
A Domain Name Worth $100 Million
Case Study: 50% Productivity Increase with Better Quality?
We've been using StreamFocus at my architectural firm for the past 6 months, and we are having a dramatic experience: 50% increase in productivity, a large increase in quality, and happier clients and staff with a growing business. This sounds impossible, but it's a fact....
Alexa's the app that grabbed pages for the Internet Archive. So he was saintly all along.
I am going through SICP. I planned to look at the Little Schemer afterwards. The cookbook link will be very helpful- thanks.
"We've been using StreamFocus at my architectural firm for the past 6 months, and we are having a dramatic experience: 50% increase in productivity, a large increase in quality, and happier clients and staff with a growing business. This sounds impossible, but it's a fact....."

(YC Comments on the link greatly appreciated)
here's a question: where does the "p" in "pmarca" come from?
Never Use a Warning When You Mean Undo
it's his nickname, thats what his boys call him... you know like pdiddy.

he's pmarca...

[credit: migpwr http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34509]

Really though, great question.
This is clearly the most important question.
I've seen streamfocus pushed through this site several times already... maybe find a different place to 'market' the product? I don't think we're your target and it starting to read back a little like spam. Congrats on the 50% though...
Git is worth a look....yet again I don't know why this guy got down modded.
Asking some folks who know about such things in detail, they said this about Git:
- Designed specifically to deal with managing the Linux kernel
- Not suited for large projects
- Reliability of the database is way below acceptable levels.

Svn works pretty well.
I'm hoping to get feedback here as opposed to trying to sell the service to YCers (which is not yet publicly available). This article actually goes into some of the technology of our (Lisp based) system which is a whole new approach to project management, which I think makes it relevant for YC. We are a startup trying to find some private beta testers here as well.

Another example, we would really appreciate feedback on our new logo at http://www.streamfocus.com which has been difficult to finalize.
I thought it is the Amazon Spyware, sorry for the confusion.
Thanks, I'd like to check it out more when I have time... I mean hey if Linus Torvalds swears by it then its gotta be cool right?

Not surprised I got down modded, revision control is apparently a very passionate subject for some people.
Get an advantage over your competition by sleeping only 2 hours a day
> Point taken, but mine still stands.

Correlation is not causation. These software companies just happen to use C++ and Java. It's not because they use C++ and Java that they have market caps north of a billion dollars. They're making a product or selling a service that people want and if they used a different language, they would still be making a lot of money.
Punch-cards..or flat/XML-files loaded into memory.
You should join the 10-person company to figure out why a 10-person company behaves a particular way. I wouldn't be surprised if a number of aspects aligned between companies big and small with regard to choice of language.
Loopt offers its service to Sprint users
Unfortunately you need to be signed in the read the rest of the article.
Easier said than done. Consider version control, which is, in a sense, one big system for allowing "undos". Just today, I spent an hour struggling with subversion which seems to have a different error for every seeming non-error situation. "Obstructed update", "Item is out-of-date", "Error bumping revisions post-commit (details follow):" [And they DO]

Okay, so version control deals with TEXT, but applications deal with internal states that have innumerable interactions. For every one of those crazy subversion errors there are lots of data corruptions that could occur--and once they do, you've stuck your user with something potentially unsolvable through manual intervention.

A simple example would be: User deletes event at 3:00 - 3:30. User adds event at 3:00 - 3:30. User undeletes event at 3:00 - 3:30. Fairly easy to resolve, seemingly:

1. Undelete selected.
2. Check conflict.
3. [possible actions]:
a) Announce conflict.
b) Override new event.
c) Allow multiple events at same time. (Hmm...was this allowed through normal interractions.)
d) Prevent undelete, but allow the user to delete new event.

...that sort of thing can balloon uncontrollably. Suddenly, for every "undo" you have a tree of options for every possible conflict that may have arrisen from system state changes.

No, a better way would be:

1) Generic undo selected.
2) New event undone.
3) Generic Undo selected.
4) Old event restored.

...but then you have a system-wide "version control" system to deal with.
Those dudes need to be all over Apple and AT&T to be able to run on the iPhone.
The iPhone still does not allow on-deck applications and there isn't a public SDK. So feature rich applications like Loopt are still not possible which is unfortunate.

I really dislike Apple right now for this very reason. Maintaining a closed policy for the iPhone is greedy in my opinion and has nothing to do with the "program stability" excuse Apple keeps giving. Lame.
for pete's sake, man, post some screenshots! I am having a really hard time understanding what your product is.
I think Lamarckian evolution would be a better model here.
I do recall there being a study about how internal prediction markets were really good at forecasting software release dates...
I've been reluctant to check out Facebook as me and millions of others have already gone through the trouble of getting a MySpace page up...that being said, private networks are very popular. File-sharing is no exception, and Shalsoft's GigaTribe, http://www.gigatribe.com , is a rapidly growing model for the swapping of large files between a private, encrypted environment of friends...
Google Preparing Mobile Focused Search Site
You should really read the Open Library site for the best idea of what its ambitions include. (Just as I'm not speaking for the Internet Archive, where my project is web archiving, I'm not speaking for the Open Library, either.)
Bicycle messengers are pedaling uphill against the Internet
I got a nickname for graham: P Giddy. He strikes me as a happy guy.
VentureBeat: SchemaLogic offers tagging to media and corporations
For some applications, it's not a big deal if only the latest action can be undone. This already beats warning dialogs, which is the point in the article.

Next step (I'll call this B, below) is keeping a linear undo history, which you can navigate one step at a time, like most text editors today. This doesn't bring any of the complications you mention here.

One way to get more sophisticated is exposing a linear undo history a la Photoshop, from which you can remove intermediate old steps. This seems to work for Photoshop, but in general it sounds like a can of worms, for the reasons you mention.

Another path up from B is to keep an undo history tree, with the following properties:

- You can display the tree explicitly somehow, and navigate it. So, e.g., selecting a node shows you the state of your content at that time.

- You never delete nodes or branches. To undo a bad decision, you go back to the last good node and start a new branch from there.

- You can still move data between nodes. For example, in a text editor I would be able to cut text in a discarded branch to incorporate it to my current one.

Does this make sense to you?

I don't understand the problems you mention with subversion, but aren't those implementation issues? Or do you mean that these are inherent limitations in the undo concept?
I am reminded of similar hyping and grandiose claims that Aaron made when he announced both Infogami and web.py. He eventually abandoned Infogami and the main user of web.py - Reddit, has switched to something else.

I really hope he sticks with this. Aaron is a smart guy and it is a shame to see him just leaving behind all these half-finished projects.
Nope. It is a nice package, but there's too many good frameworks in Python that can give me similar productivity without the performance hit.
The implementation and user interface presentation of linear undo histories (even if you can only push and pop with no random access) are way more complicated than you're giving them credit for.
A VC: Streamripping?
1. Increased bandwidth ... enough bandwidth to make it no longer a factor

2. Increased wi-fi coverage ... a free planet-wide wi-fi service?

3. Better mobile hardware ... a mobile device that is smaller than a laptop, larger than an iphone, and more useful than either.
New feature for up-and-coming p2p app
Shalsoft's much publicized encrypted file-sharing service for private networks of friends, GigaTribe, just improved dramatically, increasing the odds that it will be a household name before the summer's over.

GigaTribe now includes the innovative "Web-2-Peer" option, which allows premium users to access their computers from any web browser...anywhere. Users of the free and highly functional free version still benefit from many great features, such as exchanging large files and even entire folders with each other (all exchanges are encrypted).

-----------------------------------

About GigaTribe:

GigaTribe is great new software that allows you to share specific folders on your computer with friends & family located anywhere there is an internet connection. Only the users you have invited will see the folders (and files) you share. All exchanges are strongly encrypted, so your privacy is guaranteed! Interrupted exchanges automatically resume with no data loss. Define users groups to share distinct folders with distinct groups. Multi-source download is also available to increase your download speed. It's 100% safe (256-bit blowfish encryption), huge files can be transferred (no-limit!) and it's easy to set up. Can also be used to access one's PC from a remote location. No spyware or adware!
A VC: Facebook Will Sit Tight, As It Should
I followed the same route and I kinda regret it. The Little Schemer is best read with a Lisp-virgin mind. If you intend to read it at all, do it before SICP.

Then again, if you don't want to wait for SICP I fully understand you too.
I think they'll open it up at some point. They've been beat up pretty good over it.
Less Gratuitous Flash, more Information Appliance.
I like the new logo a lot better than the old one. That said, I have a suggestion: get rid of the dot in the "o" in the word focus, and make the letters on either side of the "o" progressively more blurry (sorry if that makes no sense, I'm not sure how else to describe it).
The iPhone is a piece of shit, and so is your face.
User interface for undo/redo is Ctrl+Z, Ctrl+Y on Windows systems (or equivalent menu entries or icons). What's complicated about that?

Re: implementation, it of course depends on the application. The key difficulty is having an inverse (undo) for every mutating operation you have. This may get tricky to do efficiently for some applications (video editing comes to mind). An additional complication may come from, e.g., undoing every word rather than every keystroke. So you need some provision for gathering 'small' actions that you don't care for saving separately in history.

The history itself is nothing more than a list.

Now, I understand how it can be very hard to retrofit this functionality in an app that was made without this in mind. I'm redoing a hobby project from scratch because of this.

Anyway, care to give details on the complications you've found? I'm not trying to convince anyone it's easy; I'm trying to help, and maybe gain a better understanding of the problems in the process.
Web 2.0 Company Name Generator (actually not bad)
3 Tips To Startup Success
When starting a business, you're going to make mistakes. Even if you've done it a handful of times (successfully or not), mistakes are common. Of course, you will learn a ton from the mistakes you make; but there are plenty of new mistakes left to make.
My partner was not too happy about the red dot either. Thats a great suggestion on the blur - to give the sense of a dynamic focusing happening on that letter. I was actually trying to get that a little with the contrast between stream and focus, with the whole word focus being in focus and the word stream not so much so. Thanks :)
You can get a hint from the vocabulary in the article. I bet they are doing a web app based on David Allen's Getting Things Done.

Edit: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/mac/2005/03/08/productivity.... ; it has a link to a Python implementation based on plain text files, which is something I once did too for myself, but regrettably I didn't follow up with it.
34 Internet Marketing and Home Business How To's
Business, Dad Entrepreneurship, Blogging, Social Media and SEO How To's
I think a 12" laptop is small enough. Smaller than that and you can't type comfortably.
Sounds like an author just picked up the book "The Inmates Are Running The Asylum."

-- Alex
I'm not sure if you're still following this thread, but I just wanted to tell you (and I didn't see any contact information in your profile, otherwise I'd have just contacted you directly) that you can now upload an OPML file when adding feed sources.

Other changes are in the works, too; send me an email or reply to this thread if you'd like to be kept un-to-date on those as they happen.
I'd still use C++ over C... virtual functions, inheritance, RAII, and standard containers are too useful. The important thing is to not get caught up in C++ voodoo magic land, and spend 2 weeks trying to get a template with Alexandrescu typelists working correctly when nobody is going to even going to reuse the code, nor wants to learn your fancy interface, nor wants to maintain your fancy code.