skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sure, that's (arguably) true within our observation. But I don't think you can claim to know what's going on outside the observable universe -- or even in the galaxy next door. Your statement is also not self-consistent because of this... we don't know what all the products resulting from the Big Bang are. Sure, we do know that our consciousness is a part of that. But even if you were to union together the observations and insights of every human consciousness that's ever existed, it's still only observed one thin slice of the products of the Big Bang (well, existence really). Don't fall prey to an anthropocentric view of the universe! And if we are going to rank the "interestingness" of events, I'd put the happy accident that started this evolutionary process that stumbled upon a fitness gradient giving human consciousness as higher than human consciousness itself. After all, at that point it's "just" a matter of using the fitness metric to wander through the state space.

Anyway, thanks for the explanation! I'm not going to respond to this thread further since this isn't the proper forum for philosophical flamewars. :)
CBS Finally Launches Its Distribution Network, Guns Youtube
Not sure what this says, but I'm 20 and I read Rolling Stone. I didn't like that the author made a dig at Rolling Stone readers but says she loves Maxim and Us.

It's a logical move on Rolling Stones part, but it's not going to suddenly make their website relevant. Facebook is perfect. There are no other social networks.
There are many ways to train and access the subconscious. Musical performance training is one example. I have used alchohol to get some creative brainstorming done. Yoga and Bhuddism have centuries of tradition centered around exploring the subconscious.

People can learn to meditate. Brain scans of people who just learned "fixed point meditation" (where you stare at a dot and tune out your environment) showed up nearly identical to experienced practitioners. The only difference was that the inexperienced people couldn't hold the meditation for very long. But they appeared to be doing it right. [1]

[1] Restak, Richard. "The Naked Brain: How the Emerging Neurosociety is Changing How We Live, Work, and Love." http://www.amazon.com/Naked-Brain-Emerging-Neurosociety-Changing/dp/1400098084
What do you find lame about North Beach? I kinda like that part of town myself.
I am disappointed that you came up with The Cliff Notes. John Dvorak has been saying that for a while. Thanks for the link to http://live.com. I typed in "microsoft is dead" and got a whole lot of irrevelant articles. Google had yours at the top along with Dvorak's. Gave me a good laugh.
Who should be CEO?
How did you guys decide about this? A very important and sensitive question, but if you guys can give some insight on this, that would be great!!
Thanks for the recommendation!! I wish more people could explore within rather than look outside for answers.
me five. but you guys were great. so it doesnt figure.
authorize.net - its not that hard. I was actually surprised at how easy it was to set up. If you are doing a consumer site paypal looks sort of amateur - remember the people who are coming to your site don't necessarily need to kmow that its 2 guys in a spare bedroom.
Usually the guy who is handling the business side of things--such as incorporation, running the marketing etc.
Twitter trouble - handling 11,000 requests per second w/ Rails!
Bloglines shows the comments links fine, so not all feed readers ignore them.

What I'd like to see in the feed is some indication that the link points to an external site. We get that locally, but not in the feed.

Edit -- that looks unclear upon rereading. When we see an article in the list on news.ycombinator.com, it looks like this:

Y Combinator a new twist on finding hot companies (mercurynews.com)

The same article in the RSS feed doesn't show the (mercurynews.com) part. It would be convenient to have that in the feed as well, so we know that we need to pop two new tabs for that article, rather than just one.
Has anyone ever been slightly anxious with regards to the city, and then gotten over it? I grew up in a small town and whenever I go into sf, I just don't like it all that much. (I suspect this has something to do with the area of town around the Warfield, Fillmore, GAMS, etc). Is there anywhere that its easy to keep (and work on) a car while still being fairly connected to the rest of the city?
I suggest outsourcing CEOs: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/09/opinion/09orlow.html?ex=1307505600&en=8926f03224ff1d65&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss
The problem isn't when you have an idea and get rejected it's when you have a really good idea and still get rejected.

That's when it hurts.
GigaOM -- HOW TO: Deal with a MySpace Ban
Good way to lose money: Believe free advice from Goldman Sachs (or any financial corp).
I've never tried meditation, but I do notice myself sometimes just staring out the window for a few minutes (especially when those good looking women egress from cnet.com - oops digressed). In those moments, I'm not really seeing anything (exception noted above) but my mind is just cranking on something. After a few of these sessions (the quantity varies on how complex the problem is I'm currently working on) I get the Aha! moment.

So I guess the skill is to be able to reduce conscious focus to free up access to your subconscious at opportune times. In my college days, I used to do this at inopportune moments, such as driving home. On several occasions, I would drive right by my apartment and basically start getting lost before realizing I had been in "subconscious" mode and had no idea where I was going.

An excellent way to access your subconscious is hard-core exercise. I've had the experience when swimming many laps, biking up a mountain, or cross-country skiing where I hit "the zone", the moment when your body is taking you with very little mental effort. That is when the subconscious flys and you can really solve some of the hardest problems.

I think sleep-deprivation is also a way to reduce conscious focus. I've hatched many integrations when running on too little sleep. There is the "sleeper's high" period which is especially good for subconscious work. Beware, however, of the big low you can get afterward. Push it too far, and you can get downright depressed. My record to date is 72 hours of focused work with very few breaks. I would have made it even longer if I hadn't bent over to tie my shoes after a shower - I woke up several hours later. (The good old college days.) The key to surviving the sleep deprivation lows is to work on really exciting and inspirational problems.
The CEO is the business guy. As a CEO, you don't get to code. Instead, you'll get to do the paperwork, answering phones, making cold calls, a lot of meetings, and a lot of traveling. It's fun at first, but gets boring quickly for technical people. You have to be comfortable with that role and must be a good communicator and marketer.

It's a fancy title, but don't let that tempt you against your good judgement. The founders of a lot of technology startups go out and hire an outsider to be the CEO. Google is a good example. Even Steve Jobs hired a CEO in the early days of Apple.

If you're in the very early days, then just put Founder as a title for all founders. You don't need to get into conflicts too early.
Oh, that's a great book. Listen to a lecture he gave here:

http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail135.html
I have used both for different purposes and I can honestly say conceptually C is a very clean, fast assembly language substitute. If some dumb programmer pulls together 20 C libraries with different semantics and does not properly abstract over them and unify things it's the programmer that's the problem. PHP is fundamentally messy because of just that reason PLUS other significant problems at the language, not library level.
How much of a role do investors have in deciding the CEO?
"You can nest function declarations, but with limited effect. Nested declarations do not limit the visibility of the inner-defined function, which may be called from anywhere in your program. The inner function does not automatically get the outer function's arguments. And, finally, the inner function cannot be called until the outer function has been called."

That's from "Programming PHP" by Rasmus Lerdorf et al.

This sort of messiness, repeated dozens of times in various ways is why I try my best to avoid PHP.
What are the cheapest ways to live in the Valley?
It seems like it'd have to be around that just for time constraints, though. If they give each interview an hour, 30 teams means 15 hour days all through the weekend.
Looks like reddit also adds a description tag with a couple escaped anchor tag inside of it

google reader and their home page thing both show these links along with the main link.

edit: there was an example but it's getting destroyed. can I wrap code in something so it gets put in a pre? just go look at reddit's rss:

http://reddit.com/.rss

edit 2: while your making rss changes you could at a link tag to the head so browsers know the rss is there (replacing the "-lt-" and "-gt-"): -lt-link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS" href="/rss" /-gt-
"I'm debating whether it means there was something fundamentally wrong with my app or if it's something fixable."

The only way to know, for real, is to build it and see if people come. No investor, nor even an entrepreneur, can tell whether an idea will work just by looking at an application. They can only judge which ones are likely to work.
For us, giving the ceo title actually helps. I think even for startup you need that one guy who gives constant thought to the big picture. At the same time, you don't want your chief coder to be day dreaming too much about all the non-technical issues.

So having a ceo as the guy who brings together everything is a good way to establish responsibility and SOME structure in the startup.

I will say that while most ceos of big companies don't spend much time coding, for 2-3 person startups it is very common to find the ceo doing coding and/or designing IN ADDITION to business work.
A sleeping bag on the beach. (Beware of high tide)
Makes perfect sense for a 2-3 member startup, where all the founders wear multiple hats and structuring the different efforts seems like an important undertaking.
Google as Evil Empire? Never - Apr. 12, 2007
To me this reads as relatively diplomatic for DHH. The interview in question is pretty critical and while DHH seems to suggest that scaling like this is going to suck rails or otherwise he does not address all the criticisms head on and his tone is slightly conciliatory. I guess there's not a lot he can say; arguing performance in the abstract is one thing, but if twitter is saying ruby and rails are slow(er) there's something to that.

It still seems like a good trade off if rails makes you more productive and you've got to get to twitter's size to feel it.
Young Scientists Design Open-Source Program at NASA -
If you are not a snob Oakland has some great places to live on the bleeding edge of gentrification. I stayed at a friend's place near 17th st, a kind of brownstony place, 800 bucks/month, beautiful kitchen, right on the BART.
Being CEO has its downsides like any other job. It means you are the one that shields everyone else from verbal beatings if customers are unhappy.

You're the guy that takes the heat if something is not going well. Especially at a small company, if someone is going to get chewed out by the customer, its going to be you. It often means you have to stay later and work harder than everyone else.

So. With power (the final say) comes alot of responsibility.

So who should it be? It probably depends alot on the business but lots of styles could work.
i think DHH's opinion is fair. without profiling, one really doesn't know what the hell is happening. and by being "slower", i just don't know what the comparison point is. sure, ruby is slower as a language - but for the complete application stack you'd need to compare the performance of django or cake to rails _for the same_ or relatively similar apps. only then, meaningful numbers will emerge regarding where the real difficulty lies.
is there free wireless?
Robert Putnam is a brilliant political scientist, so there must be more to this concept than the article reveals.

I believe the marginal increase of happiness by using this method is less than doing more fundamental things like exercising daily, developing good friendships, having a girlfriend, etc..
I want to hear PG's thoughts on this site ... and why he thinks it will last long ... definitely not with one person ... how about a university professor wearing a cam or a coach??
"This is what VC's care about:
A) traffic
B) what other VC's think of you
C) the quality of your team"

I had to stop reading. What about uuhmm...revenue?
Is fund provided by Y Combinator only for US Citizen? what about ideas coming from outside of US, is Y combinator interested?
I am certain that ideas from non-US citizens are considered too.
Rails, Resources and permalinks
A conductor of history / The former Shockley Labs site now is simply a boarded-up fruit stand, awaiting renovation
If you're in an early stage and seeking seed funding, then you should have everything thought out before talking to investors. Don't ask investors to help you decide which of the founders should be CEO because they'll take it as a sign that your partners and you can't work things out on your own. Investors want confident people who know what they're doing and go for it; they can smell fear and they'll disappear before you finish asking the question. Remember, it's YOUR company and it's YOUR responsibility. Investors help you with funding, introductions, and, maybe, some advice; but don't let them run your company for you. On the other hand, if you're in a later stage and seeking big VC funding then it's a whole different story. Talk to experienced entrepreneurs or close investors about the specific details of your situation; theyll give you great insight. Although the key princeples are the same: it's your responsibility and you're expected to have strong leadership.
Seth's Godin "Loosen up those worldviews"
Tim O'Reilly: Web 2.0 Is About Controlling Data -
The point he was making there was that while VC's claim team quality is the highest priority, it's not (and most VC's are unable to accurately evaluate team quality anyways).

Regardless:
Are you claiming that all VC funded companies have revenue at the time of funding? To my knowledge VCs fund many pre-revenue companies. That would indicate that at least for those deals revenue was not an important factor. A lot of laundromats have more revenue than many early stage startups and VCs aren't knocking on their doors.
There's only so much to that productivity argument. I suspect the time it takes to make big changes to the Rails stack for performance sake far exceeds the relatively small savings in initial development time. According to Compete, Twitter's not that big [0].

[0]http://snapshot.compete.com/twitter.com+techcrunch.com?metric=uv
IMHO the article in the PDF is highly biased, like for example when it takes the "Sixteen Decisions" completely out of context. The article also makes a number of claims without mentioning any sources at all. The only piece of reference provided is the infamous 2001 WSJ article, which was already extensively debunked way before the Nobel Prize.

There is no feminist agenda. Grameen lands mostly to women based on their own experience showing that: 1) Women are more likely to pay the loan back; and 2) Women tend to invest the loan in long-term basis (ex: buying a cow to sell milk). The fact is that women are highly marginalized in developing countries, and men magically starts to listen to them when they somehow are able to make decisions without the men's approval. Women have a vested interest in the loan, and therefore they tend to be better payers.

Don't believe on such "experts" -- If their theories were right, developing countries would be prosper by now :)
Yeah. It's a give and take to be sure. I'd take Twitter's current position any day. But you're right they're still in a position to stay ahead of competition and net productivity of development and scaling has to be considered.

Worth noting Twitter's audience is using it a lot differently than Techcrunch's is, so relative audience size is not totally meaningful.
My Web 2.0 stack
Gotta agree. Best thing MT & 6Apart did hiring this guy. I can't help think that if some of these tools intelligently applied with twitter (or MySpace) they might be doing better than '11,000 s' ~ http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=12441

The reason I added this was I was looking for topics on scaling. Google (lots of reads), Livejournal (lots of writes & reads) must be doing something right in scaling to have a look at. One point Paul Buchheit [0] made in Startup School 2007 was the difference b/w types of data. Big data & small data. The later you should use DRAM for. Wonder if Twitter uses 'memcached'?

Reference

[0] Startup School 2007 Wiki, 'Paul Buchheit creator of GMAIL at YCombinator Startup School'

http://wiki.startupschool.org/doku.php?id=notes
I totally agree with the concept that speed does not really matter because hardware is cheaper than programmers. And I never understood the criticism towards Ruby being slow... If it improves my productivity, who cares?

However, the REAL problem I see here is that apparently the very features that make Rails productive must be thrown away for the application to scale. If that's the case, then that's a huge issue and even a show-stopper if you ask me.

I think the problem lies on how clustering is usually implemented in Rails. I'm not an expert, but my understanding is that Mongrel distributes the load across multiple web servers, right? If that's the case, then the bottleneck becomes the database, and that's the key issue IMHO (and the hardest one to solve).

In Java (more specifically JBoss), clustering is implemented at the application logic level: The app server manages the state of the application and then it caches and replicates the state whenever necessary.

I really don't see how Rails will solve this problem unless with some kind of application-level communication across the servers... And that's a tough one. Suffice to say that the Java community took like 10 years to come up with something effective!

Note: Please don't take me wrong: I'm not trying to start a Rails vs. Java war here! I'm just sharing my experience on how Java solved this issue...
What cold calls is a CEO making?
All are welcomed, but you've gotta get the visa by yourself.
Do all VC funded startups have traffic? Do all VC funded Startups have a reputation among VCs? I was obviously not making a statement about "all" VC funded companies. If we're talking about what is important to venture capitalists when evaluating startups seeking early stage financing, I think revenue should have been a good candidate for that short list of qualities. If you can show in a small test market that your model is capable of generating revenue, and your model is scalable, this is going to look pretty appealing to your prospective financier. Not every startup involves some abstract technical concept, it is possible to build a company with revenues from the start.
No night-life in MV? C'mon, how about Molly McGee?? :)
'... I really don't see how Rails will solve this problem unless with some kind of application-level communication across the servers ...'

This is something that appears to popping up again and again in Web2 [0]. Is Twitter utilising 'memcached' & 'MogileFS' [1] in their optimisations trying to reduce the load on MySql?

Reference

[0] Myspace thread ~ http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=1015

[1] Distributed file storage: MogileFS ~ http://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=12345
Six Apart didn't hire Brad -- they acquired LiveJournal from him and named him "Chief Architect" or something. He's an amazing hacker and a reluctantly-badass entrepreneur.

I'm sure Twitter will use memcached, like Facebook/Digg both do. Dealing with 11k rps doesn't really tell us much though -- how many are dynamic and how many are cachable/static?

From the "5 questions" interview their developer does not seem to be amazingly qualified to do what he's doing -- definitely no Fitzpatrick.
Thats awesome that he mentions Amazon & ebay as giants of Web 1.0 :-) http://revvu.com is gearing up for that scene.
Y Combinator: A new twist on finding hot companies
YC App: What was your answer to the last question?
Since this came up recently, I thought I'd share my answer and also ask other applicants to share theirs. I'm sure there were some great ones!

Also, non-applicants - what would you have answered? :)

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

### Question:

Please tell us something surprising or amusing that one of you has discovered. (The answer need not be related to your project.)

### Answer:

Personal discovery: To get your bottom really clean after a BM:

1. Wipe

2. Put a dab of lotion or soft-soap (lotion works better) on some doubled-up toilet paper

3. Wipe again and repeat until you are squeeky clean

I know this is random - but man it works great!

Bonus: Those air-freshener sprays don't work. You end up with a bathroom smelling like air-freshener and poo vapors. What works fantastic is the squirt body sprays from the Body Shop - for some reason if you just squirt those in the air after the BM, it totally kills the BM smell and all you can smell is the body spray (disclaimer: I learned that from a girlfriend).
youth hostel on 23rd and Bryant in SF

friend's couch

shack up with an older gay man
He he, nope - it's under GPL ;)

I created a new thread so others could add their answers. My answer is here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=12495
Mozilla moves to next generation version control system (and it's not SVN)
Kevin has discovered the universe's greatest civilization: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Attractor

And before anyone else gets upset, this is a dupe, but I'm curious to hear responses from those who missed the first thread.
In Manhattan terms, it is a "bridge and tunnel" part of town.
That is, nothing happens until the weekends - when all the tourists and people coming in from Pinole or Fremont show up to party. The locals are pretty sketchy - lots of tweaker cab driver or bartender types. The tourist party animal types are kind of gross also - many 2nd tier businessmen coming into town to get wasted and go to all the strip clubs.

I much prefer the mission for nightlife and neighborhoods like Cole Valley for living.
Every time I have to type a '$' in front of a variable name I have BASIC flashbacks from my prepubescent years.

That did me in. Really.
Yeah, the ass-wiping algorithm might be more memorable because it's simple, concrete, and there is nothing 'abstract' about it.

For more on the 'stickiness' of ideas, check out this book:

http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2007/01/the_stickiness_.html
That's a pretty good point. Some VC funded startups (namely ones that have not launched) probably have less traffic than some laundromats and that clearly does not mean traffic is not important. My guess is that buzz amongst VC firms is more of a uniform prerequisite, but point well taken.

Ultimately this list is entirely empirical. Paul's list seems to jive with other sources I've read/heard but, admittedly, I know relatively little about VC deals. If you've got examples where revenue was a big factor early on I would be curious to hear about them.
I messed around with getting this setup a couple of weeks ago. It was a long process, and I moved on to something else before I ever finished.

Does anyone else have this up and running? Could you share your thoughts and experience with MogileFS? Thanks!
Quintura and Blinkx partner on visual video search
WriteWith : Everybody point and laugh