skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Been generally happy with ATT (SBC (PacBell)) DSL over the years. Price keeps going down, speed up as long as you ask to be on an updated promotion (which sometimes requires a 1-year contract, not a big concern for me).

Another option not yet mentioned: Astound cable (was RCN; see astound.net). I was happy with RCN (very fast problem-free service) for about 2 years, then moved to an area RCN didn't yet service. Might be worth a look for completeness.
This makes sense.

It's called editing, and the author of the post shows a good way to make people do it: add constraints.

The kind of discussion he hopes will arise from getting the core of the document out in the open should probably be happening anyway. I suppose plenty is lost in day-to-day activities.

How about a corollary to writing the 10-page business plan: write an elevator pitch that you can post to twitter.
Give your product a Name, not a Number
:-) Piano and voice for me, but the latter not very well. One of the reasons I like Douglas Hofstadter is his intertwining of computers and music.
I gather JotSpot has some good features, but if I were using a wiki to manage mission-critical information (particularly if said mission had anything to do with the internet or computers), I'd be hesitant to have it hosted on somebody else's server (particularly Google's). If I need a structured wiki (not a Mediawiki-esque free-for-all), I go with TWiki, despite its clunkiness.

Here is a link to a comparison of sorts, if anyone is interested:

http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Codev/JotSpot
Jon Bentley's Beautiful Code Google Talk
I think what attracted me to the fiddle was a) the belief that the goal was to expend as little effort as possible, and b) it had very few parts.

I think these are same things I look for in programming languages. Maximum expressibility with a minimum of interference.

The violin is the Lisp of musical instruments.

(Or, Lisp is the violin of programming languages.)
Framework?

Not every Ruby app is a Web app. I've written dozens of Ruby apps, but only some of them run on the Web.
Inside Cryptome, the website the CIA doesn't want you to see
Someone please tell this to the Java (JSR xyz, nnn, yyy, etc.... ) folks.
Ugh, I use usemod, but am currently looking for a replacement. It's old, hasn't been touched since 2002, /doesn't/ have a plugin system, and its syntax has been superseded - its table support is primitive, for instance. Good points are, that it doesn't need a database, and, I dunno, it's useable, but the bar has been raised since then. I was looking at wikkawiki, but just now have found that what people have been saying about MoinMoin appeals to me.
Why does Google have to have all the right ideas? I've been wanting an online, personal wiki to use as a notepad / idea processor for everywhere, but I'm already leery of Google having all my precious bodily data (bloglines, gmail).
Sure, block Firefox. Guess what I predict will eventually happen? Adblock Plus will offer to install the User Agent Switcher plugin (https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/59) after it configures itself.

Blocking ads is completely ethical (IMHO). The advertising-based business model is not a contract to which the end user has agreed. People have always had the freedom to turn off the TV or radio during commercial breaks. Automating the process (a la TiVo) at the user's request does not somehow infringe upon some given right on the part of the advertiser to show the user its ads.

Just my two cents.

Edit: If you're going to downvote me, at least explain why. Kthx.
Pretentious prima donna (Rubin) swoops in to save the day so rich assholes whose idea of business model improvement is fucking over artists further (50% of touring revenues?!) can keep on being blind morons. Yawn.
Numbers work as names, and they're easier to generate. If your brand is strong enough, the numbers indicate exactly what they are: variations on a theme. If you only have a couple products, go ahead and name them all, but numbers really work better when you're doing a ton of iteration and minor differentiation in what you produce.
Google phone spotted / GOOG expanding in Cambridge
I'd vote with the 'not unethical' folks. If it turns into that big a problem, content producers will either swing back to charging for content, or find some other way to make money. Any sort of "remedy" is more likely to cause more problems than it solves. How many people are really going to install that kind of thing anyway? The people who do are most likely those who are able to block ads anyway - for example, on most of my own sites, the more geeky ones are the ones with the worst click through rates.
geobloggers A Viewing data on Spinning Globes.
geobloggers A Galvanic Skin Response, Heart Rates, GPS, Art and You (and TomTom)
Is CommonRoom Being Cheap or Being Stupid?
Public demo of social networking startup, CommonRoom, displays: "Created by an unlicensed copy of BB FlashBack"
i've been thinking about this issue for a long time, because some people are going to get rich from this. whenever an old industry is in decline, a new one is about to spring up in its place. ibm's downfall was microsoft's windfall.

so, let's see who's made a dent so far. the original napster, which brought the contours of the new era into sharp focus. too bad their "business model" was based on cold-blooded straight-up theivery. mp3.com was an interesting player for awhile; a bunch of artists made a good living just from being popular on that site. itunes of course, but apple is having a tough time of it because the dinosaur label execs won't get the hell out of the way.

what's next? small boutique "record labels" that distribute their artists' records online for little or no money, and expect the bands to make money through touring and t-shirts? i wish i could see the future more clearly on this.
Techcrunch is covering it too:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/09/03/google-wiki-prepares-to...
Sorry, but how does that involve me?
You know, if that were true, I'd hate myself even more than I do already!
Wait until you hear who the Reddit mascot has been sleeping with!
Launch a startup derivative to take advantage of popularity: DigPicz
FWIW, this wasn't an actual beta. I'd mapped *.jottit.com to the test server so we could test picking particular domains and forgot to password-protect it.
Why does software management have to be so painful? [Pic]
thanks Aaron, don't let the naysayers get you down, news.yc really loves you.
MySpace. MySpace got popular largely through small independent bands that used it to stay in close touch with their fans. It's still one of the best places to go if you're a struggling artist with a small but devoted fanbase.
how do we ignore certain files during a GIT merge operation?
Git merge botches binaries and other files and some files that conflict

is there a .gitmergeignore file or some simple way to ignore files during a merge
Git merges cant ignore files - Creator of IO language laments the bugs in git
how to make sure git merges ignore certain files
How to ensure GIT merge ignore certain files?
The iPhone crack was cracked?!
How to phone a webpage with Ryan Gallagher of ConnectMeAnywhere
This is good. I have noticed that most of the best material submitted to news.yc comes is written by the participants here.
It doesn't have to.
But most software people tend to design solutions starting from "best practices" and address every imaginable problem ("what if X and Y happen while Z is going on?") so they often end up with complicated stuff. Whereas, if you start from scratch and focus on the most efficient way to address only the main problems, it can be brutally simple.
10 pages is too long.

Isolate the key variables and focus on them, the rest will come organically as a result.

Plans and rigidity are tough on startups. If you can't fit a summary of your idea and plan in the space that one of PG's essay takes up, you've wasted too much time on the plan.
Awesome. Didn't somebody call Feedjit the equivalent of a lemonade stand?

Once again, I stand by my claim that it's amazing someone can launch something like this in less than 11 hours.
Merge Wufoo and Weebly
I think it makes a lot of sense to merge / combine wufoo and weebly (both Y Combinator funded) into a single company -

1. Both address the same pain of creating online pages without having to write code.

2. Most people creating websites inevitably have to create some kind of form on their website.

3. The combined company's services is probably much more appealing to a buyer (maybe some online store manager) than two individual form and web page creation companies.

Any thoughts ?

Thanks
Observations from 10 Months Working at a Small Startup
Observations about startup life and manager after working for 10 months at a small venture-capital funded startup.
This reminds me of a game with the Boston Celtics down by a point with 2 seconds left. K.C. Jones, the coach, drew up a play that looked something like this white board. Larry Bird erased the board with his hand and said, "Get me the ball." They got him the ball. He shot. They won.

Sometimes you just gotta code like Larry Bird.
Is it a bad idea for an online merchant to only accept Google checkout?
We're setting up payment processing on our site. We don't need anything fancy. Google has anti-competitively good pricing; it's free for the seller through 2008.

Perhaps there is something more professional seeming about an authorize.net style merchant account, but it's easier for us if we don't have to handle any credit card information. How much does using Google Checkout hurt us?
Building Your Two Sentence Elevator Pitch
You should have a two sentance pitch that can sum up your company. Compacting that down to a twitter/text message makes sense. Heres a guide on how to write one: http://www.npdbd.umn.edu/deliver/elevator.html
Yeah, I was surprised that the article didn't even mention intonation. That deserves some lip service at least.
The whiteboard photo is scribbly, but doesn't suggest more complexity than most small projects. Actual software projects (I'm not talking about Flickr clone #60,255) are incredibly complicated.
Facebook seems to have entered the Google/Microsoft/Apple pantheon - write an article about it and you get guaranteed blog traffic.
Phoja looks like a nifty startup. Any one got stats or info on them?
CNN's title is a bit off...but a bunch of hackers found a way to set the iPhone free from the AT&T sim
Put it this way. You are not going to see an increase in sales by exclusively going with Google Checkout. Given that managing credit card information isn't that difficult (I am setting it up again for the umpteenth time tonight), why not just bite the bullet and manage it all yourself. That way, you can run experiments to converge on an optimal checkout process.

Beyond that, it is hard to say exactly how much you will be hurt. A few years ago a site I was working on moved from exclusively PayPal to an on-site form, and sales increased instantly about 20% and then over 100% after tweaking of checkout process. That was back when PayPal forced you to create a PayPal account, which I believe Google does now.
How does adblock work at a technical level?

I would think that if it ever took off, the ad networks would just find workarounds. For example, they already seem to use interstitials and in-page css popups to get around pop-up blockers.

In fact, maybe a great startup could be to create technologies that let ad networks get around ad block software.
Software via the Internet: Microsoft in 'Cloud' Computing
I don't expect to see an increase in sales from the Google Checkout, but I had hoped it wouldn't hurt. It's a big incentive to me that they don't charge merchants anything, but the 20% increase in sales you saw is huge, so I guess I'll bite the bullet and get a real merchant account. I know that this has come up before on news.yc, but who are you using for payment processing?
Return Of Startup Schwag
>All good if you're single, but what if you've got a wife >and family and just need the cash?

This is doable, you need to be able to at least get your application developed and maintain hosting for it, but work also for others so you can have an income. This is what I have done at least.

I thought my system would develop revenue right away, but the number of sign ups it took to create a paying customer cost more then what I could afford and natural search traffic was just not coming fast enough.

So I gave it away free so I could figure out the money part later. Not to mention the system wasn't very mature, it needed a revision to bring the quality up and then what seemed like months of bug fixing.

Out of my biding my time, putting out incremental improvements, and building good repore with the users I have discovered instead of putting out a generic product, success will come from taloring very specific products out of my generic product. Using my application as sort of a platform of generic parts to build a system for a particular market.

Having kids, wife, things have still worked out fine.
Indeed, the first lesson of marketing: no one wants to write about all of our little startups, but they are starving for material about Facebook/Google/American Idol/etc.

The same thing happened with our "email me instead" facebook app. Writers needed a contrarian voice for their stories about the facebook love-fest; we represented discontent with facebook messaging and this put Xobni in stories from Australia and Germany as well as Venture Beat, CNet, and Gigaom.

Today's example from Techcrunch:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/09/03/powerset-parses-miss-so...
I didn't mean to suggest you thought you might get an increase in sales. I was just trying to frame the point. So sorry about that.

In the past I have used CyberSource and VeriSign, and have recommended CyberSource in the news.yc discussions. (The PayFlow division of Verisign has been acquired by PayPal.) CyberSource has a small business option that has worked well for my businesses. They have an easy to use API, etc.

However, for this project I am trying out PayPal Pro. Not that I love PayPal or anything, but I thought I would give it a shot. (Last time I evaluated PayPal, they didn't have a merchant option.) Two things I like about them so far: 1) they don't seem to require an explicit personal guarantee, although I am not live yet and it might be implicit in the terms; and 2) they seem to have American Express integration from the get-go, as opposed to all the others where you have to sign up with them directly. I could be wrong on both of those, though.

Another thing. In your case, the difference from off-site/on-site checkout might be substantial because I imagine trust matters a lot in the medical arena. It is one thing if you are buying a T-shirt and the merchant has you leave the site to pay, but on a professional site for a serious product, you expect the site to just have that checkout process as part of their site. That is not to say you can't additionally offer Google Checkout and/or PayPal for those customers who prefer it.
Uh Oh. The dreaded [Pic] virus is spreading from the front page of reddit.
Amazon EC2 Basics For Python Programmers
Mergers & acquisitions are really complicated, and often are unsuccessful by a variety of metrics even when they look good on paper. This is especially true of M&A between two very small companies. And I would imagine YC doesn't own much of either company, so beyond a mere suggestion, it would be up to those companies to individually choose that path among the universe of their possible options.

That being said, the idea of a merger here doesn't even make much sense to me. Wufoo seems more targeted at business and Weebly at personal. But I don't know too much about either having never used either for real, so I'll stop here.
Apple likely to introduce new iPod with large touch screen
I don't understand this common notion that if you don't like the way someone runs their business, you get to change their business model for them. Here's a quote from a pro-blocking blog post that nickb linked to in another comment:

"Frankly, as far as I'm concerned, if a webmaster runs a site that's popular enough that the costs become at all significant, the onus is on him (or her) to find ways to cash in on that popularity to keep the site going. The visitors have no duty at all, and they certainly aren't obliged to go out of their way to make money for somebody else."

My response is that they did come up with a way to monetize their content (ads), but you don't like it. Too bad. Don't go to the site if you don't like the way they've chosen to make money. This goes along the same lines that if music is too expensive, or has DRM, that you therefore get to download it for free via filesharing, bittorrent, etc.... You don't. You're only ethical option is to not buy the content. That's the only ethical way you send a message (in this trivial context, obviously if were talking about human rights, etc..., the ethics of protest methodologies become more complicated). If I think something in a brick and mortar store is too expensive, would anyone think it was ok for me to just steal it? I don't think so.

A lot of the complaints about bad advertising practices, obtrusive adds, DRM, overpriced content are in fact valid complaints. But, you don't get to overrule the content provider's methods just because you feel like it.
That startup: http://adpinion.com
Microsoft really is shifting the entire focus of the company and anyone who doesn't take Microsoft seriously will end up like Stacker or as popular as Realplayer.

The google web apps, they look horrible. I know they are all standards based and that will be there undoing. Microsoft is making people download some "extras" which I am certain will make whatever they create look like a desktop application, feel like a desktop application, but will be on the web.
Instant feedback is bad in games if you would like users to play daily?
I've built a Facebook game that makes use of rounds where you can only make a single move in a round. You then need to wait until the round ends to see the result (which can take up to 24 hours).

So far, it seems that a significant fraction of users keeps coming back to see the result -- and while they are visiting, make another move.

This seems like a better way to go than instant feedback if you would like a significant fraction of users to play the game every day. Of course, there should be a good reason for the wait -- and in my game, there is.

BTW, I actually have several games in progress so you may be able to make multiple moves in a single visit. This allows players to have more to do per visit.
"	foo()

is equivalent to

foo "

Man, I hate that 'feature' of Ruby. In Python, foo is the function, foo() the result of calling it. So much cleaner.
Interesting article but a quick look at wikipedia shows a lack of consensus among historians and archeologists as to whether water levels in the Black Sea radically affected ancient civilizations.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sea_deluge_theory
good stuff - no RSS feed on the site :-(
10 PRINT "LARRY RULES"
20 GOTO 10

RUN

Acquisition offers will be entertained: (288) 555-0153
After a bit of thought: this seems pessimistic.

When you say goodbye to someone with the expectation that you'll never see them in the same way, it's sad. Parents will never have their kids back when the kids go off to college. They'll trade the kids in for adults. The empty nest feels empty in part because parents know it will never again be filled with children.

But business isn't like that. People that fail can and should continue to go off and try to do other great things. It's cyclic.

Even if all the companies in the current batch die, all the founders can continue to go and do good things.

They might be a bit less wide-eyed and optimistic, but that is probably a good thing. You only really die off when you stop working.

The mathematician Paul Erdos took this a bit too literally, and would lament the death of colleagues who retired. He also called children epsilons.
Noted. I'll make one next time I post something.
I'm not sure that off-site checkout inherently makes a customer feel less trust. Our competitor uses Yahoo Stores for their checkout. I think the alternative is just as true, that many people would prefer a trusted third party. So then my question becomes "will using Yahoo Stores lower sales?" and I don't see why it would.

Ebay's Yahoo Stores competitor ProStores seems like a reasonable alternative to Yahoo Stores, it has really cheap pricing for those with a small catalog of items. And while I don't have a problem integrating a payment processing API into my own shopping cart, it seems like it is outright cheaper to use a prepackaged off-site solution so I'd rather not do it myself.
So what is next, it becomes compulsory to actually buy the stuff that is advertised, or else it is stealing? What is the point of pushing ads at people who don't want to see them?

The people who go the advertising route know beforehand that not everybody is going to react to the ads and buy something. You are not stealing anything by ignoring the ads.
Using different services/accounts to narrowcast specific segments of your life to specific groups of people is a traditional use of social networking tools.

But this story is not about using social networking tools in traditional ways. The author is positing an emergence of new uses of social networking tools based on the reputations of the individuals within the network. If FB or some other service manages to be both big and a true business ecosystem new forms of business will emerge based on the reputations of the individuals within the network. These forms of business have the potential to attract a much larger segment of society to the social networks.

My point is that within the context of such a reputation-based, socially-oriented, business-friendly ecosystem people will prefer to have a single identity/reputation to manage. Simplicity will win over complexity when "typical people" are involved. And the ultimate winner will cater well to typical people rather than technical people or the users of the first N generations of social networking tools.
If they can get around adblockers, then that's definitely their killer feature, and they need to advertise that on the front page. I had no idea, and was considering trying their service.

*

Anyway, people need to quit talking "ethics". Who cares? As the title of the nytimes article suggests, the question is one of money.

9/10ths of the computer programmers I know are using ad blockers, and I suspect this is the norm. But how many of them now (and in the future) will depend upon web advertisements for their salaries?

The early adopters in this case are adopting a technology that could steal their bread and butter. It's best to quietly bury the whole notion, before the general public adopts it.
Piano and voice. I played saxaphone in high school and studied theory in college.
They don't get around adblockers by hacking their way around them. They solve the problem by not showing people ads that annoy them.
You might find this book interesting:

http://www.amazon.com/Equal-Temperament-Ruined-Harmony-Shoul...

Conversationally written and accurate (so far as I was able to tell, I only had time to read a few chapters)
For now, they get around a default install of AdBlock Plus through obscurity. They didn't make the blacklist yet.
That's not at all what he said. I think his point was reasonable and fair.
The Muller Formula (or: Predictable Color Preferences)
Wow, someone posted that here? Wild. So that's me/my project - if any startups want to talk about licensing schwag (I would love to include some YC companies), let me know (roddy at startupschwag dot com). If anyone wants to discuss the model I'd be happy to - it seems simple enough, but I'm always open to devil's advocate perspectives / refinements / flames.
It took me a while to realize this.
Rob Pike on Concurrency and Message passing in Newsqueak