skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Okay, but closures aren't Lisp-specific. Javascript and Lua have them, C# is about to get them, and the C++ standards board is considering them, plus probably dozens of other languages which I don't have experience with.

Closures can be used for OOP.. not that you'd want to, though.
They only do that if they can't sell the stock. The point of underwriting is to sell all of the shares as quickly as possible. If your argument is true, it's not just a reason to avoid cheap stocks -- it also obligates you to avoid deals of any sort, since exactly the same inefficiencies exist.
http://www.ilandinternet.com/ is the way to go. They are a reseller of Level3 for smaller businesses. You go right in the Level3 data center, and it's still relatively cheap. Note that iland colos in many Level3 data centers across the US and Europe.
Here's a solution that covers a bunch of charset bases if you want to move to UTF-8:

1) Add accept_charset="UTF-8" to your form tag.

2) Add the hidden variable _charset_ with no value.

3) Add <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8"> right after the head tag in the html.

4) Make sure apache is serving the file in UTF-8 by default, which is usually by accomplished by adding AddDefaultCharset UTF-8 to the relevant virtual host configuration.

Some of this stuff is redundant, but doing the above will usually ensure the page and form view and submit in UTF-8. To be extra sure, you can double check the value of the _charset_ variable that gets passed.

If you are using postgres and/or perl, I can give more details on what to do there as well.
I see. So an underpriced offering actually avoids the underwriters holding the stock- since there is obviously demand. I was under the impression that during the dot-com boom, a lot of the underwriter banking organizations were buying their own underwritten shares at IPO prices and benefiting from the early upswings (basically, arbitraging the lower offer prices).
How do you spoof an IP address?
Definitely - I put that in feature requests a couple times, but it vanished in the traffic there. It would be a huge value to all the users as you could focus on the topic your interested in, and hopefully some of the great comments would not get lost in time.

PG: If you're interested, we have an excellent model for classification developed for http://www.streamfocus.com that is simple and powerful that we could let you (but only you) have gratis (written in lisp of course with a mysql back end - cached with hash tables)
A Periodic Table of the Internet....
I'm not using Apache. I wrote the http server in Arc. Actually I think I know where the bug is: in my urldecode fn. Fix coming soon I hope. But not today: I have to cook dinner for the startups.
settle down there fast guy... i wouldnt exactly call the facebook platform the nail in the coffin for VCs.

this is also not desperation... they're testing the water, trying something new on the cheap. i think its a smart move.
This makes a lot of sense. I see around 1/3 the reason to pursue a startup with YCombinator is to receive harsh criticism.

The other reasons for me include the luxury of focus and the opportunity to meet a gaggle of smart people.
I'm periodically amazed how well MSN ranks, and then I remember it's the default homepage for IE. How sad.

Any ranking system that gets closer to measuring the number and intensity of users who love the site is good.
Is LinkedIn About to Be Sold?
This is the first I'd heard of startupweekend. They seem to be off on some basic ideas, as other comments here concur. Throwing more developers at a problem doesn't usually solve it. A weekend is barely enough time to think about an idea thoroughly.

But it does sound like fun though. A barcamp should take the idea to the illogical extreme and hold a startup-hour session. :)
Perhaps they want to test good programmers.
Yes, the its the feature of closures that is important, and so much not the particular language that it's implemented in. (As Mark Jason Dominus said, "In another thirty years people will laugh at anyone who tries to invent a language without closures, just as they'll laugh now at anyone who tries to invent a language without recursion.")

A hash table in a closure can do a lot of things that OOP does with very little work-- but I wouldn't necessarily do things that way except for the fun of it. There are certainly much more interesting/subtle/powerful things that can be done with closures.
Because students are idiots. I know. I am one.

Students don't know enough to know which languages are worth it. They've likely only heard about the LFMs, not the LFSPs.
OpenID on the iPhone- If you're building a mobile web app, please use OpenID
Thanks. Did you ever use their services? Would you know anything about their customer service quality?
How to get people to look at online ads carefully
It is pretty similar, but if you look at the other games he's made this was a pretty logical next step. I don't really think that his idea was influence by likebetter, they just both happened to reach the same point via different routes.
Those guys have built a business around an NP-hard problem. Is anyone here working on solving hard computational problems and thinking of building a business around it?
> trying something new on the cheap.

Indeed. There is little risk given the dollar value.
By selecting a language (or a couple of languges) they are trying to make it easier to focus on the concepts. Its hard to focus on the fundamentals when you have too keep looking up basic syntax. By limiting the number of languages they spend less time doing trivial projects, and more time focusing on new content. On the flip side letting students only use their favorite language (as they might if teachers select the language used without guidelines), then you get students who are far from language agnostic (i.e. inflexible).

Many would respond that learning a new language is trivial. And it is trivial to learn most of the syntax of a new language, but it is not necessarily trivial to set up a good programming environment (setting up slime and SBCL the first time threw me for a loop, things kept not quite working and had to be tracked down), nor is learning syntax the hardest part of learning a language. I find that the longest and most difficult component of language learning is learning which libraries contain which functionality, and the language specific idioms.
Web 2.0 - Share Service For Professionals
I like this analysis. It articulates something I've believed for some time.

However, it makes a dangerous assumption, which is that the world makes choices easy.

The startups I've worked with usually don't sink away into obscurity, or explode into an IPO. There's in that big squishy middle where you have to decide, at every step, whether or not to push on.

It is at those moments where it becomes an issue of whether you invest more money (yours or someone else's).
The "Truly Open Broadband Network" is Coming... Good News for Mobile Startups
pg meant "save" not "lure" ;)
The problem with most CS courses (and any course in general) is that the class is taught to the lowest common denominator of students. Yes, a class can have pre-requisites, but the first required CS classes for freshmen cannot.

Some colleges don't require any previous computer experience to become a CS major, just as long as you can pay the tuition. In such cases, you can't assume any basic programming knowledge without turning the intro courses into programming language courses in some base language.

But I agree with you on the last part about not having one language for every course in the department.
thanks! we're getting a lot of iphone users and want as much feedback as we can get. please forward your feedback to
gustaf [at] heysan.com
How to design for the Facebook Platform (what works, what doesn't)
Kijiji and the Curse of Craigslist
If I were LinkedIn, I'd sell. Facebook is going to crush them.
They certainly do distribute it to favored clients if it's a hot IPO, but they have to balance the needs of clients and issuers: from what I've heard, that meant that you could only get in on a good IPO if you also bought into some less exciting ones. It's not like an investment bank can consistently screw one kind of customer without driving that kind of customer to another bank.
Secure Gmail Notifier using hidden preference setting
Thought everyone would like to know that Gmail passwords are transmitted in plain text with notifier. Kinda scary.
Can they move that fast? If they push for an offering now, they'll still have to wait another six months or so to actually sell any stock.
The 1st Year is the Hardest
I agree that it's silly to have a "programming language" degree. However, isn't it a basic requirement to be fluent in the language to think in? English literature major would require fluent English, math major would require fluent to read mathematic notations, etc. Teaching concepts to those who don't know the language well to describe them seems impossible to me.
Justin.tv suggestions
They did! Some rails guys tried to splinter out a prototype at the 11th hour but were convinced not to.

Now we'll never know whether rails would have helped
I think the bigger story is less about computationally hard problems, but about

1) finding a problem being solved the wrong way by the world and setting out to solve it the right way

2) the pains of dealing with all of the proprietary (and often annoying) deals and details in a well-established industry.

PS: It's easy to miss, but the interesting link here is http://www.demarcken.org/carl/papers/ITA-software-travel-com...
When did Facebook and LinkedIn become competitors?
If I were LinkedIn, I'd hold off until Facebook IPO's. Rising tide lifts all ships and whatnot.

Until Facebook makes some significant business-friendly changes to their site, I think LinkedIn still has plenty of room to exist and/or grow.
edit: I think there's a certain degree of hype involved.
Tagging would be an enormous improvement here, it's been a long standing request for reddit, too.
Yes, I have used them for many years. I found their customer service to be great. You get right through to their small and knowledgeable technical staff.
Are employees of YC companies allowed at YC events?
Is there a way to access the airfares data as an individual?
Am I alone in finding tags to be solving the wrong problem? The problem tags solve is, "How do I let contributors do extra work adding meta-data to their contributions?"

Making search that works is the right solution to the right problem, in every single case where tags have been used that I'm aware of. Oh, actually, that's not true...flickr tags are extremely useful (when used by large numbers of people to indicate a particular theme or event). But tags at News.YC or at Reddit would be a pointless complexification of the submission and browsing experience. Give me nicely working search (which Reddit didn't have last time I tried it, and News.YC doesn't even try), and I'll never want for tags.

In short, I'm very strongly in the camp (assuming I'm not actually alone) that believes tags would be bad for News.YC usability. Search, on the other hand, would be fantastic.
The Verizon guy who turned down the iPhone
Recruiting a Co-Founder For Your Startup
Attacking recommender systems
"If I were LinkedIn, I'd sell. Facebook is going to crush them."

Where's the intersection?
I like linkedin. I've had a few recruiters and business folks contact me through there. I'd be very reluctant to put my career stuff on fb. Perhaps some people mix business and pleasure?
The problem with text match search is that it misses on a step removed concept search. I'm advocating classification with hierarchy, so that if you were to click on Legal, it would give information on lawyers, on trade marks, on patenting, etc. I think the answer is to limit the hierarchy to startup related issues, and then users select from this list to classify posts if they want to. Then we can have a very helpful semantic tool for finding things that search just cant.
Yep, I know the reasons for tags. I still think they're a truly bad idea in this context.

A limited selection of tags solves one problem, but then creates new agonizing moments for contributors where they try to figure out whether they ought to select one option or twelve. And a few users, the very ones I probably least want to pay attention to, will assume that their latest blog post about their new GTD web application crosses boundaries in unique ways and would be relevant for all fifty-eight tags. It takes a strikingly small number of bad results to make tags worthless...and I've seen very few occasions where the tag features of a website are not just that.

I could be wrong...but I'd like to see an example of a site in the vein of News.YC that uses tags effectively, before I'd even think about admitting it.
Thats a good point. If you remember the good old days, Yahoo was a hierarchy of classified links administered/edited very carefully by humans after user submissions. You would need to have that layer of edit control by the system admins to prevent abuse, and I'm guessing the resources for that are not here.

(I sure wouldn't post my GTD web app in non-relevant classes though! :)
You mention the necessity to have 2-3 cofounders, as does Paul in his "why to not not start a startup." In a 2-person startup, do you think both people need to be software developers? I'm an interaction designer, and so although I do the HTML and CSS, my real contribution to the team is my focus on the personas, the design, and the user experience, while my partner focuses on the implementation. So far, things have been moving along at a nice clip, but I'd like to hear your take on this issue. (Note I didn't use the term 'hackers' because although I don't code, I would consider myself someone who works to "design beautiful software.")
It's not actually clear to me that AT&T's actually got a net win on their hands. I also wouldn't be so quick to call the iPhone a game changer.

This is the kind of article you write 10 years down the road, when all of the dust has cleared. It just came out two weeks ago...

Shouldn't there be a similar story about what eventually became a Danger/T-Mobile deal (on the Hiptop/Sidekick)?
It is not a question of database dogma, more (for me) that clients depend on my recommendations.

Since it never occurs to them that a database could lose their data, they are not familiar with all the dangers to your data that are "out there".

Foreign key constraints and subselects that work properly, readers never waiting for writers, etc. are all things that most clients don't understand but expect you to.

Do you have clients that hold you responsible for multiple years' worth of content or other data?

Concerning languages, both MySQL and Postgres try to adhere to the same language - SQL.
You're basically repeating the standard line in every respect about how Postgres is a "real" database and no one could ever do anything serious with MySQL. That's dogmatic thinking.

I was speaking of using multiple programming languages, when it makes sense. You probably also insist on one "serious" programming language above all, right?
Elastic circuit connectors designed for rubber-band-like circuits
I'd also like to point out that we had nothing to do with this...
You're probably correct that Facebook will have difficultly expanding their focus. So what. LinkedIn is still a broken product, and Facebook will continue gaining users just by doing their thing. If I were LinkedIn I'd be selling in a hurry.
completely understandable, of course!
I'm in a very similar situation, I'd like to think we complement the hardcore hacker pretty well (especially since I also love the business side of things).

If I recall correctly, PG did say that every team should ideally have a developer, a designer, and someone good at both to be a "sweeper."
Applying to Y Combinator as an undergrad
I'm seriously considering applying for Winter '08 as a rising junior.
Has anyone else applied as an undergrad (other than the guys at Loopt)?
How did they (you) fare?

Thanks in advance.
Yes, at least for most values of "event", and at least for early employees.

What sorts of events are you asking about?
Eeh, I don't really agree on the whole "graphical vs. textual" part, one of the apps that I find is used a lot is the "anonymous message" app, and that's purely text-based.
I was an 08' at MIT and I'm a current summer founder. I dropped out, and it's going well. There are a few other undergrads in this session -- but no one who plans on going back to school.

Really, everyone fares really well, and whether you were an undergrad/grad/35 years old never comes unto play -- unless it's while joking around over dinner.

It's a great time and you should definitely apply!
Seems like...Apple wanted a sweetheart deal that threatened to change to overall relationship between Verizon and its other partners.
Why does it bother you that I recommend Postgres over MySQL?

All else being equal, for new development, Postgres is the better answer - that is not dogma, it is based on experience gained over 8 years and not without a few late nights of fixing something. My clients with an existing code base run whatever they are currently running.

I don't have an opinion on the use of multiple programming languages, the purpose of a database is to reliably store data that (usually) some other programming language uses or produces. It's the reliable storage part that matters.

If you want a cartoon caricature of me, replace "Unix" and "computer" with "Postgres" : http://static.tabo.aureal.com.pe/pub/img/dilbert-unix.png
Do Pragmatic Tools For Learning to Speak a New Language Exist Already?
I'm studying Japanese and have started hacking up various tools to assist. I'm seriously considering turning my stuff into a more polished project and releasing it, but not if someone has done something great already. I am concentrating on very pragmatic conversational speaking and not anything remotely academic. I really like image-association and vocabulary-building tools. Anyone know of some super smart (web-based?) tools for this that support Japanese?
The dinners mostly. I'm mainly asking about equality.. My current employment's management has a bad habit of looking down on the implementors. It seems like if employees are segregated in YC companies (These guys are eligible to attend, but they are not) then it would naturally lead to some problems.

Any startup I work with will get my deepest trust and hardest work. My life will revolve around the company succeeding. So - sorry if I sound a bit.. um.. arrogant - I expect nothing less than complete trust and equality in return.

I'm totally bored with life in the midwest. Where I work there are about ten programmers. We all work on this long row of tables stacked end-to-end, in one room - no walls between us. Everyone's talking and yelling all the time. It's so noisy that I can hardly focus at any given time. One of them has this great habit of yelling "FUCK!" at least once a day when something he's doing doesn't work out. And he yells really loudly.

So I need a change and I'm ready to devote myself to something brilliant, not to churn out mediocre crap day after day, working on a product that crashes every other day. But I couldn't totally devote myself if I wasn't trusted and equal.. could you?

Sorry that this turned into a personal account.. I just needed to vent and hope that maybe somewhere, finally, a company can treat its employees as equals to the management.
People like Craig always seem (seem, since I don't have a wormhole into his brain) to have this moralistic I-am-not-for-profit attitude. Does it ever occur to his, seriously, that every single entity posting on his site is ravenously trying to make the greatest/easiest/cheapest possible buck? ...and that he is facilitating that immoral attitude?
It helps to be able to honestly say "We are putting our educational on hold for the company, whether or not we are accepted into YC."
Improving usability
In a talk at the University of Waterloo, Professor Michael Terry discusses the use of data mining, in a customized version of the Gimp, in order to discover and analyze real-world usability data. He touches on encouraging users to participate, privacy concerns, as well as common user categories that the software is currently able to sift out.
First, everyone in a startup is an implementor. We can't afford anything else.

The only place the "employee" designation means anything at Xobni is on our worker's comp policy. Our whole team helps evaluate new hires, attends investor parties, and has input on business decisions. We happen to be looking for the best to join us: http://www.xobni.com/jobs.php
I added a footnote to this article, because I think some people have become misguided by the purpose of the article.

I'll include it for reference:

Important note: In an earlier version, I made reference to a venture firm, and I think some people were under the impression that the venture firm was at fault. On the contrary, the venture firm I was at in this startup was extremely helpful, hospitable, and encouraging, as were all investors involved in the project. I didnt create this article as a way to point fingers at anyone, and if you take anything away from this, please just see it as helpful advice given freely.
Some unusual subreddit suggestions
Very nice post, keep 'em coming.

I think your list is basically a description of the things people who are good at sales do. I'm not sure it can actually help the Wozniaks of the world be more like Jobs.

One of my brothers was raised in a different part of the country by my father's first wife. My other brother was raised by my father. My brothers and father have something very obvious in common to anyone who meets them. They can effortlessly and genuinely connect with strangers and make them feel at total ease. They've all worked in sales at some point and were remarkably good at it. I'm fairly certain the main trait they share is their deep empathetic dispositions.

This had lead me to believe there's a huge genetic component in being great at sales. I'm pretty skeptical it can be taught effectively, anymore than you can teach someone to be a funny person.

BTW, I think Freakonomics is a great book about incentives and a definite must-read for any startup founder.
If you feel strongly about something, you have to strike while the iron is hot. You'll do better with enthusiasm but no experience than with experience but no enthusiasm. Most of the big success stories have junky back-ends anyway (Flickr is PHP; YouTube's player can't skip forward; MySpace is a pile o' tinker toys and duct tape). A tin can that does something beats a perfect blueprint that just sits there.

Oh, and the point of college, actually, is tagging co-eds. Comp. Sci majors tend not to realize this at the time.

And human biological feedback loops ensure that stays interesting. Hacking doesn't, so do it while you still find it novel and exciting!
we applied as seniors with 1 semester left each, and got accepted in w2007. i've since graduated, and chris and dan will be graduating very soon.
I think that's actually great. That was more or less Reddit's situation as I understand it. There's so much non-hacking stuff to do that I honestly think each group should have someone who feels no compulsion to write code, freeing the hacker(s) from distraction.

My ideal candidate, were I doing the funding, would be a group consisting of two hackers and one non-hacker. Maybe I'm biased though because that's what we have.
There's no rule one way or the other. So far there hasn't had to be, because none of them have that many employees. I doubt it will ever be enough of an issue that we have to think about it.
If you join while the startup is in the YC Founders Program [1], you're pretty much a cofounder, even if you have less equity than other employees. In that case, yes, you get to go to the dinners.

1. The Founders Program is the 3 month program that YC runs.