skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's a very simple game. If it becomes popular, I could use it to direct traffic to my Study Stickies app:

http://apps.facebook.com/studystickies/
works for me thanks @dottertrotter for the quick turn around
Investors Know You're Not All Golden
"... if you sign up make sure you put contact info in your YC profile ..."

I added something like

- http://hackrtrackr.com/state.php?region=&country=AU

- <!-- location:latitude=-37.816,longitude=144.966 -->

the first is the hackrtrackr url for you area, the second is a microformat lat/lon.
Video interview with Twitter co-founder Biz Stone
The issue is that individuals are forced (by family, school or the system) to work at things they do not enjoy, therefore the value they produce is not proportional to the amount of energy spent THINKing or DOing. The main cause of all these problems is the system. 95% of people are brainwashed and asked to follow a path that someone else designed. It is not always a bad thing to follow another path, but at least know who the heck designed it. The consequences are people make money and are not happy, people go to work and count down the hours before they can live. To them work is going from 9 to 5 ( or any schedule) instead of accomplishing "step n today". Now most of those 95% won't get it. If they did, forums like this one would not exist. Sometimes the beauty of life lies in " some of us not getting IT" (where IT could be anything).
If you sit down at a randomly chosen web server and write two files, one ending in .php and one ending in .rhtml, which file do you think has the better chance of working correctly? Newbies would prefer not to know what CGI means, let alone how to edit an Apache setup file.

But, yeah, PHP is a scary language. In addition to what you've already mentioned, PHP's core "array" datatype appears to have been designed by a committee of drunken camels.
In the lower left, did you see the blue X? They have their own mousepads!
Nerds as Bad Connivers
IIRC there was a Supreme Court case involving a company that bid on one of the earlier spectrum auctions, won the auction, and went bankrupt before it paid. The government wanted to take back that piece of spectrum, but the courts said that the bankrupt company had title to the spectrum and the government would just have to get in line behind all the other creditors for a piece of its debt.

Presumably the FCC is trying to make sure this doesn't happen again.
Search without Google Tracking You (My 'pseudo' Startup)
There's been a lot in the news lately about search engine privacy, so I thought for a quick project it might be interesting to make a site that doesn't allow the search engines to track you. It's still alpha quality, but please take a look and give me some feedback. Thanks.
http://www.flyvault.com/safesearch
I guess I inferred that much. Unless there's something more to it, it sounds like he spent a little too much time trying to introduce new technologies. In real life, even managers have a hard time forcing tools on people--there are various good and bad reasons for this. For a co-worker to say--for instance--"We need to replace this Java code with Lisp", is definitely the short road to ridicule.

Throwing away working systems, processes, technologies, well...not usually wise.
Alright. I wouldn't have known whom to email since I didn't know if it was you or another admin doing the killing.
Yahoo and Altavista finished about 90% of Google, a couple years earlier.
you know what?

I feel sorry for employees who work their whole life for companies and then suddenly find themselves laid off.

The initial hardwork is nothing compared to the great life ahead once we make it!!!
I wonder if any smart people have ever tried to see how long they can get away with being meaninglessly oracular.
Why are we even talking about IQ, like it's even important?

I could be wrong, but in my opinion the only thing that IQ has really proven is its ability to predict how well a person will do in school. I doubt it really does much for predicting titans of industry (or some other area) and success in general.

I think its main flaw is that in general, life isn't constrained to a limited set of multiple choice answers; it's a lot more open ended and chaotic. Not to mention that some of the questions used to administer these tests are biased... and o yeah, there are also different types of intelligence...

(Yes I have a high IQ, and high scores of other major ancient traditional testing methods.)

IQ or the way it's currently administered is just too archaic, limited, and just outdated. It needs to change.
The Supreme Court has sent a clear message to "patent trolls": your paydays are numbered
The reason I left my previous start-up, the "camel-back-breaking" factor, was a lack of transparency among co-founders. I think a policy of intra-company transparency, or a policy to openly discuss everything, as you put it, is instrumental to avoiding co-founder problems.
Metacafe Raises $30 Million in Series C Financing
It may be worth noting that the iframe you see when you search is not google, but google's results served from our site. Of course, if we just showed google in an iframe, it wouldn't do anything for privacy.
Why is this legal? I thought Google no longer has a search api.
Wasn't one of the main reasons as to why most of us are joining a startup or starting our own, because our schools sucked so bad? this may be strange to say, but why fix it (besides saving costs)? look at places where education is good (Japan, Europe,...) and look at their entrepreneurial environment... I don't know about you, but most of mine were just mind numbingly boring. When I got to work for the big companies, it felt more of the same.... that's why I'm trying to stay out of those sterile places forever (while simultaneous trying to keep enough financial power)
Isn't that against their terms of service or something?

How's this different/better from some kind of anonymizing proxy like tor?
[SF] MeetYou seeks additional cofounder to take live video to the next level
MeetYou is a stealth mode Y Combinator funded startup from SFP07 that will be launching its product in mid-September. We are building something unique and exciting in the live video space, a sort of "social hack". We are looking for a rockstar visionary guru to join us at the cofounder level to drive adoption and further develop the product. Our ideal candidate will have the following characteristics:

- self-starting, self-motivating leader

- interest and background in guerrilla/viral marketing and community building

- understands how ordinary people (non-geeks) interact socially

- demonstrated ability to rapidly develop high-quality webapps

- familiarity with or willingness to learn Ruby on Rails and Adobe Flex

- can take large amount of equity, little/no immediate funds

Email Jey & Russ at newsyc@meetyu.com if you are interested.
I used to like Python, but now Scala is may favorite:

http://www.scala-lang.org/
Awesome! It's better, faster, nicer looking than Scroogle.org
I guess. but would doing half the work for google be even close to half as good?
The thing is, we're not making money from it in any way (which is why I call it a pseudo' startup), and because of that fair use can apply. Also, think about google. They scrape the entire web and profit by serving that as content...
With things like tor, it can be a little slower, especially if you just want to do a single search. With this, we've added in the feature so you can add it to your Firefox/IE7 search box and then easily use it right from the browser. So it's the same idea, we're just focusing on this one feature for the good of the community.

The other feature we have is endless scrolling, so if you search and can't find it in the first few results, you can just keep scrolling and we'll continue to populate it. That's something not many others have.
I would not expect someone trying to learn to program to select a web server to test projects on randomly. Installing mod_ruby is as easy as installing mod_php. Finding web hosts that support it isn't hard either.
devHouse in Cambridge, Sept 16th
We had a lot of fun last time, so join us and help make this into a fun, monthly event. Test out ideas, work on a fun side project, meet other like-minded people.

If you're interested in helping out, contact me, johnyu2@gmail.com
We need help with spreading the word, and finding sponsors to get free food.
How to work your lawyer - Found+READ
Nearly all software is this world is written in C. Web is 95% powered by C (Linux, Apache, MySQL, Windows, IIS).

Everything else is just configuration :-)
We had a lot of fun at the last devHouse, so join us and help make this into a fun, monthly event. Hack out your next idea, work on a cool side project, meet like minded people.

We need help spreading the word to college campuses, and getting sponsors for food/drinks.

If you're interested in helping out, let me know, johnyu2@gmail.com
Name it Jargn.com and buy the domain name from me.
it's slow... it's unstable... it's... [reddit] beta!
Source Vs. Sauce
The contest between reddit and pg heats up...
The highschoolers on #haskell have some unusual activity going on upstairs. I knew ihope from userfriendly.org before I came to #haskell, and always assumed he was a grad student somewhere. I literally fell out of my chair when I found out that he was 13 years old.
SharedBook Launches API Contest; iPhone to Winners
Thanks man, gonna take this approach
Metacafe Collects $30 Million In Funding
Coming to America? 
Hello again guys.
I see alot of posts by persons wanting info about move to San Francisco , and stuff.
But I was wondering for the international persons among us, ( I am from Jamaica) on what bias do international persons come to properly develop their startup.
I mean like, will I need work permit?
Can I come on a Visitor's visa? etc.

Thanks much..
I recommend to learn object-oriented programming with c++
I agree with the transparency part, but I don't think the the "equal shares" concept is necessarily sound. It assumes that all founders are contributing equally which is not always the case.

What you are looking to do is make things equitable -- not equal.
Jason Calacanis: Fast Company profile raises more questions than it asks
Fair use certainly doesn't apply. You're using Google search technology (which btw, involves a bit more than 'scraping' the web) and stripping out the ads (their source of revenue). Expect a cease and desist letter soon.
I've gone to two of the past ones. I highly recommend going if you're in Boston!
Instead of giving our private information to Google to use for 18 months, we are giving it to you to use indefinitely?

Where is your privacy policy?

And, what is your hosting provider's policy? I found out recently that my hosting provider refused to make any guarantees; that means that I cannot make any guarantees either, since my hosting provider has full access to my server.
Interest rate cuts generally encourage business investment for two reasons.

1. Interest rate cuts make equity investment more attractive. Equity investment is riskier than making loans (buying bonds) or cash (money markets, CDs). Investors do it anyway because equity pays a risk premium: equity returns tend to be higher than the return on cash or bonds.

Example: Today, a hypothetical venture fund might offer a 10% expected return, and a hypothetical money market might offer 6%. So, you could make 4% more by investing in a VC fund. That's nice, but not necessarily worth the risk.

But if interest rates are cut and everything else stays equal, the money market APR might drop to 4%. Now you can make 6% more by investing in the venture fund, which makes it more attractive to investors.

2. Reduced interest rates encourage businesses to spend money. Lower rates make it cheaper for them to borrow money, which means they can justify spending money on projects which would be unattractive when interest rates are high. If your revenue comes from other businesses, such as through B2B sales or through advertising, this may make them more likely to spend money with your company.

Obviously, lower interest rates aren't going to bring customers to your door -- you'll still need to fill your own sales pipeline. But it may make it more likely that your customer will pull the trigger and close the deal.
Look at my link there. IQ correlates with lots more than taking a test. How do you explain it?

Titans of industry, if honest, will attribute lots of luck.
It's not a contest. We don't want News.YC to be popular. We don't want to deal with heavy server loads or spam or any of the other schleps that come with popularity. The ideal thing for us would be to have the 10,000 best hackers and no one else.
A privacy policy is very high on my list of things to do, along with an explanation of how it works so that people can feel confident in their privacy. Right now, the only thing I record is a SHA1 has of everyone's IP address and a timestamp so that I can track how many unique people have used it. With the SHA1 hash, there's no (very difficult) way to trace that back to the user. I'm also talking to my host about the web server logs and how quickly those can be purged.
Skype's Back; Now With More Ads
Anyone know what language it was made in?
Interesting. I admit I hadn't heard it from you directly, but my impression was that news.yc was shooting to bring the old school reddit back to the world. I assumed the reddits are trying to do the same. If they're shooting for popularity and you're shooting for goodness, I guess there's no competition, but I think a lot of people see the sites at odds with each other.
Bravadosoft's Trial Sun Server
So at Bravadosoft we're trying a new Sun Fire X4200M2 for a bit. I'll keep folks updated on it.

BTW, this is my first post of original content to the group. Please massacre as needed. Taking all the help I can get. :)
What makes this better than hacking in solitude? I'm not against social events, but I don't think of hacking as a social activity.
Ryan is right. Cutting interest rates is great for startups. But, that is not what people are scared. The problem is the economy might tank as a result of all the money being lost in the equity, and debt markets right now. If that happens we are in for some pain.
Creativity Spark From Masters Of Graphic Design
So at Bravadosoft we're trying a new Sun Fire X4200M2 for a bit. I'll keep folks updated on it.

BTW, this is my first post of original content to the group. Please massacre as needed. Taking all the help I can get. :)
I hope that's SHA1 plus a secret salt.

Otherwise, I can just build a reverse map of SHA1'd ips.

for ip = 0 to 2^32: unhash[SHA1(ip)] = ip.
Steve Yegge on Branding at OSCON
We're trying to hit a point reddit passed through on the way to becoming more popular, but then stay there.

I don't know what the reddits' goals are for this new version, but I assume it's not to make the site less popular. And if they have a big, mainstream audience, that will inevitably affect both the stories and the comments.
Jessica promised to do keg stands if any of her flock IPOed. I'm hoping we'll be the ones to do it, but if another Y C startup beats us there we're definitely still holding her to her word (and a keg).
Looks like foliage is the thing that will make people in 2030 say "that looks so 2007."
Yes it is. But first you'd have to get all of the results from my database, which is cleared every 24 hours (this is not a challenge!).
Yahoo Acquires Actionality : Mobile Advertising Company
Does it even matter? Build something people want, and customers will come to you. When customers come to you, VCs won't be far behind.
I had the pit-bull conflict, where 1 of the the 5 would instigate a dog fight by building doubt about two of original founders. He would call up the other two guys only to talk about how the original founders didn't do it right. The other two guys became so weak and confused, GAWD, it was a nightmare relationship. The project died, the money drained, what a great lesson in regards to making sure the team works well together, has the same intention re the project, and feels fairly rewarded.
pg, would you recommend js?
Yahoo Challenge to Google Has Roots in Open Source
From the article:

If you want to get your hands on an open source version of some of Google's core technologies, maybe you should ask Yahoo.

Yahoo has emerged as one of a major sponsor of Hadoop, an open source project that aims to replicate Google's techniques for storing and processing large amounts of data distributed across hundreds or thousands of commodity PCs.
I don't know enough about non-Lisp languages to recommend one.

If I knew them well enough to choose one, my pick would be whatever makes it easiest to write simple programs. Building confidence is the most important thing, not conceptual elegance. I wrote most of my first programs in old fashioned Basic. It was a kludge of a language, but it was good for writing the dumb little programs I started with. The worry that people will form bad habits from using ugly languages is overblown.
I'd assume Python.
Urgent need for venture philanthropy for tech-related project
Hi. My name is Vinay Gupta, of the Hexayurt project, a FOSS-style organization aimed at radically improving the lot of refugees and the poor.

We've had some luck, recently, and we need help coping.

Here's the technology - we call it "Disastr" - a simple approach to using the network to reinforce efforts to evacuate and rehouse American refugees in the event of a natural disaster like the potential Bay Quake, or events of a more man-made nature.

http://www.appropedia.org/Hexayurt_Mass_Evacuation

We just won the Treehugger Participate! context, to go and showcase the shelter technology (the hexayurt itself) at Burning Man.

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2007/08/participate_win.php

We also have an event in Washington DC, involving the DoD, the American Red Cross, and a variety of other groups, where we are hoping to present some of our work (the "Expedient Infrastructure for Transitory Populations" project.)

Here's the issue: we're unfunded. It's been paid for mainly out of our own pockets, although we've had a little funding from the DoD for some parts of it. Now we have the classical problem of success: taking it the next step of the way takes funding, and funding we do not have. We're flying all over the country to show this stuff to people.

The existing funding cycles are vastly too slow and unresponsive to help us. We travel light and move fast.

So here's the question: can the "micro-cap" model, like Y-Combinator, work for venture philanthropy too?

Who's willing to throw, say, $10,000 at this project, to see what we can do? Everything you see so far was done on less than $5k.

Vinay Gupta, hexayurt@gmail.com
looks like the rock album cover art of the 1970's
Meeting future co-founders.
I wonder if the reddits take kindly to hacker news tapping into and possibly taking away one of their key demographic audience.
How To Tactfully Gain Approval For Changes
Metacafe Raises $30 Million Third Round For Global Content Expansion
Hacker School
It seemed best that this had its own discussion so we could really refine this. The original discussion is at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44627

The idea is to create a YCombinator-like process that starts at the K-12 level. Perhaps not as far back as kindergarten, but definitely before 6th grade. Students would be trained in programming, art, writing, and other methods of creation. When the students graduate, some number of them will be given the opportunity to start a company. In return, the school will get 2-10% of the company.

But what about the students who won't start companies, though? Clearly not everyone will have what it takes to think of a viable business. Well, the wonderful attribute of this system is that everyone's a winner. Anyone who doesn't start a company could be a cofounder or go to work for previous companies produced by this program, or go to college if they'd like.

Why would children be motivated in such an environment? My theory is simple: If you don't treat them like idiots, they won't become idiots. Show them the joys of creating something cool. They'll like it.

The reason children aren't motivated in a public school environment is because most public schools are prisons for children. It was for me. This system is the polar opposite of that. Everything revolves around project creation and development, not rigid, unbreakable structure that beats compliance out of the children, which is how public high school is.

The teachers would need to be extremely high quality. They need to want to be a part of the process of training the next generation of hackers, not hired because there's a shortage of teachers.

Hacker School would focus on programming, but there's no reason why it couldn't train children to become excellent journalists, novelists, or any other creative activity the students like.

One property that this system needs from the beginning is a way for advanced children to be placed right where they're mentally stretched. If it makes sense for an extremely bright child to skip three grades, so be it. There are social implications, but another theory of mine is this: If you give children an environment where you respect them and treat them like adults, they will respect and treat each other like adults. Sure, there will be social conflicts, but there always are in life. Yes, they will lack maturity to deal with those. Yes, there will be outlying cases where it's really bad. But the system can be flexible in dealing with things like that. There won't be childish punishments. There won't be detention. I don't know what the appropriate system of punishments is, but it doesn't seem like we need to even worry about that until it becomes a problem. Adults have a way of sorting things out, and I believe children can behave like adults.

Please be harsh in constructively criticizing this. The system needs to be the best, and for it to be the best, I ask that you guys please tear apart anything about it that seems like it won't work.
I find that I can get good recommendations by asking intelligent questions. Also, it never hurts to visit a professor in office hours to discuss an aspect of the class. It doesn't have to be a question of understanding, but if you show interest in the class, the professor will notice. At least this has been my experience.
While I agree with your points, I don't this the running metaphor is appropriate. If you run with someone, you have a natural tendency to compete, thus you are less likely to slack off.
Venezuela overclocked
If the audience of this site is 10k like pg says, they can't be worried at all. They probably wouldn't even care if it were 100k, ultimately, since they're shooting for the millions.
GMI Says MySpace Can Tilt the Vote for President
Lisp web frameworks: which one should I use?
I'm about to start development of a 'web 2.0' site. I've learnt some lisp and now I need to get to grips with a web framework. Any recommendations? Scalability is obviously important. Cheers.
Fair use doesn't apply, but if you can get your hands on an old API key it will still work. I built something similar (here: http://www.paulbutler.org/archives/endless-google-search/) and I just used an old Google API key, so I don't violate their TOS.

It makes me wonder though, since you can't make any money with it, how do you plan to pay for hosting fees? Surely you eventually intend to profit, what will you do then?
You've got many choices.

This thread on c.l.l. discusses most of them: http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/browse_thread/...
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the API is limited to 1000 searches per day correct?

No, I don't plan on profiting from this. This is a very low impact system and I don't mind footing the bill for the hosting costs as long as it's of value to the community.