skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
An example of Apple's latest Web2.0 app: Gallery viewer (best gallery so far?!)
As a former artist with a demo and a dream, Sir Paul, I concur.
Should I be concerned about putting my code on a 3rd party server?
PHP is just a rather nasty language. It's got a lot going for it, in terms of deploy-ability, scalability, existing libraries and code, and number of developers and designers who are familiar with it, but it's also got a horribly inconsistent standard library, poorly implemented seemingly Java-inspired objects, and a vast majority of the existing code is poorly written.

There are some impressive PHP projects out there, with pretty clean code (I've been pleased by the quality of code in Dokuwiki and Flyspray, for example), and you can't beat PHP with a stick for availability--you can deploy a PHP app on the cheapest Dreamhost account and expect it to work just fine. That cannot be said of RoR, Django, or Catalyst applications (and don't even think about Lisp or Haskell or Erlang in that context).
The Invisible Man
My first impression: it's a feature, not a product. But after a little digging, I like their concept. If they successfully build a cross-blog comments system with portable karma, they'll help Web conversations be smarter.
SmugBlog: Where's the Mac?
Cold calling, panhandling, door-to-door sales, and spam
During WFP07 it looked something like this on the backend:

45% Ruby (mostly RoR, but one might not have been using Rails)
30% PHP
15% Java
10% Perl

Almost all of the groups were heavily using JavaScript, as well. In fact, some of them were predominantly JavaScript with quite lightweight back-ends (Zenter and Weebly come to mind). Heysan were predominantly Flash at the time, but I believe they have a lot more PHP back-end code now.

I don't believe there were any Python projects.
Zenter founders and YC grads share their Google acquisition story (audio interview)
How would you approach this problem?
One of my extremely ambitious friends that is rather naive about software dev (but nonetheless wants to make tech money), asked me a question that tortures me to this day: can you build me [an application] that predicts what someones face will look like at 20...60,etc? And maybe its because I haven't had any AI classes yet, or just because I am not looking at this the right way...but it was very interesting to me. Wondering if anyone had an opinion?
Never Lose a Thought Again - Write it down!
Kaboodle Acquired by Hearst Magazines
The MacBookPro can feed a 30" display, and costs $2K. Businesses should be leaning towards mobility too, making the laptop a good solution.
Spock Officially Launches People Search Engine
StyleFeeder Launches Social Browsing Tool
That's not what Arrington is doing at all! Why, he's helping the little guy! Those startups that didn't make it obviously needed help with running their startups, and here he is - helping them by giving them the opportunity to learn a valuable lesson on how people will take their money if they aren't careful. This way, those startups that didn't make the top 20 will be better prepared for the future!

/sarcasm

This man has little in the way of ethical practices. Even if I were in the top 20 and didn't have to pay, I would be hesitant to work with this man in any type of situation.

If this is the way he treats the groups that tried to get into the top 20, how does he treat those actual top 20?
Is he presenting only his privileged investors to the startups who present, reducing real funding competition?
What about any agreements that the startups have signed in the program? Have they fully checked those out?

When an organizer of an event practices little ethical credibility, the entire event must come into question.
Don't worry, they probably couldn't understand the code anyway even if their ethics lapsed.
I actually have a PMP cert, but concluded a long time ago that I would rather watch grass grow, than do the work of a PMP.
Note that there is a difference between managing projects and working as a PMP.
Step 1: Can you predict what someone's face will morph into with age?

Step 2: Even if you can't, does the domain knowledge exist?

Step 3: ???

Step 4: Facebook app aka profit!
After reading the other responses I'd have to say it's Pretty Much Pointless.
Yes, but only a single display. It's interesting because this hole in the market has pushed businesses to do exactly what you say - laptops as the main dev machines.
very enlightening, and I'm not just saying that. yeah step 3, the implementation is probably all that matters, but in step 1, are you asking the user to do this?
PMP stands for Project Management Professional
What is that difference? In IT, I'd imagine that no person in his right mind would choose to implement s/w dev in the method defined in the PMP. There is scrum, agile, rup and dozens more processes.

I guess, does a PMP say that you have managed s/w projects and you know the process. In the same way that a graduate in IT can prove that he has studied the field.
gibsonf1, i took a shot at one of your previous posts because i thought it was a little off but your site looks alot better. nice job on the improvements... it's coming together.
Thanks for the comment.

I think though that it's important to pay attention to what I'm actually saying and not react purely on emotion. Having an emotional response might get me labeled as a troll, but it also shows from the fact that pg, and now you, are insinuating a point and then arguing that, instead of actually countering what I'm directly saying.

For example:

>The author describes three traits of businesses that will fail during a downturn

Actually, I don't say that anywhere. What I do say is: "When you're adjusting to survive, be sure to stay well clear of the following traps below". All three of those items are risky positions to place oneself in, and they become doubly so when money isn't flowing as fast as it is now.

I don't see how pointing out risks is contradicts the fact that you can be successful in mitigating those risks.

>Google, anyone?

Google is an anomaly. It's very bad strategy to formulate expectations based on the performance of an exception to the rule. Unless you are that one company, odds are you'll end up in the heap of has beens.

Besides, I point out in the article that Google did in fact innovate right through a recession to great effect.
As cool as that might sound (and technical hurdles aside), you have to ask yourself, do users really want it? Maybe its just me but I dont think seeing what you look like as an old person is a burning desire that users need satisfied..
Encrypt it. There are lots of open source programs that can do that for you. Even if they get a hold of the files they will be meaningless without your private key.
Eric Schmidt Defines Web 3.0
How a small winery found Internet fame
If you can't tell me how many pints are in a cubic acre, then you can't tell me anything:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=pints+per++cubic+ac...
Your answer doesn't match Google's, so I think your reformulation is wrong.
Seeing what your girlfriend looks like as an old person, however, could be a fruitful market. I'd imagine the girls would hate it, but one would probably come up with a competitor where you put in your boyfriend's picture, food intake, and exercise habits and it shows you how much of a beer gut he'll have in 30 years.
Cool.

1) You need more units! Especially physical units, erg, joule, etc.

2) The interface is too slow on my mac camino browser.

3) Play a little with Frink. In terms of calculations, frink is awesome. However, the plotting and the shared aspect of instacalc is very cool... perhaps you can merge the two?
I think it comes down to passion, no matter the age.
New Live.com Look & Feel, More Information On Windows Live SkyDrive
I'd like to see how this study was done.,, methodology sucks. Did they even ask a single Canadain?! There's PLENTY of Canadian brands out there and for some reason they didn't make a list. I'll just say one: RIM. Why isn't it on the list?

Let's take a look at this list for just one example...

#22: Merrill Lynch

it's ahead Pepsi and Sony and Nike. Huh?! That MAKES NO SENSE WHATSOEVER! Just safely ignore this list... their methodology is CRAP.
Wouldn't law enforcement be interested in something like this?

IIRC, the FBI started a pilot program along these lines a few years ago.
Search for "Facial Image Morphing Algorithm" and check out some of the intro papers.
Tandem Entrepreneurs -- seed investors
Raising Money, Some Data and Tactical Advice, Letters to Graduating YC Companies, Letter 2
I'd never heard of them, but their site looks interesting. I'm curious what the news.yc company thinks about them. I've submitted

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40615

to facilitate the discussion.

blored, did you guys "cold submit" or did you have a personal intro?
make it an image, use other encryption methods ...
"At 100 million visitors, $25M translates to $4 a month per user in ad funds. $4, per user, per month, sustained for 24 months."

Unless I'm misunderstanding what you are trying to say, you're off by an order of magnitude:

$25M/100M = $0.25

Maybe it's not so insane after all.
Such a technique is used to add a few years to photos of missing children.
It would be nice to know more about their portfolio, such as the companies that have gotten funding from them and achieved a liquidity event.
The New York Times to Acquire Freakanomics Blog, and More
I like to think of programming like building a house of cards. A great card house builder would necessarily have ot take care building the foundation of his card house. In fact, he may require more time early on than an inferior builder.

However, once the house of cards gets large enough, the great builder can build much faster than the inferior builder, not because the great builder is building any less carefully, but because the inferior builder must take more and more time to place each new card, perhaps even being forced to rebuild portions of the structure.

At some point, the inferior builder can no longer extend his structure for fear of breaking large portions of his creation.

As a result, the superior builder not only builds the higher levels faster, but he is able to reach levels that inferior builders can only aspire to reach.
Lots of great stuff in this thread.

Elephant in the room no one's talking about: almost everyone reading news.YC wants the market to remain as healthy (and bubbly, if you call it that) for as long as possible.

In 1998, the voices of the naysayers were drowned out by the shouts of irrational exuberance. Still don't agree with the article's assessment -- but who wouldn't love to pull a Mark Cuban this go 'round?
Looks nice, clean and simple. Its slow as hell though...
If you're a startup founder -- RUN, don't walk, from PMPs or any other type of overly-complex project management process.

As a small team of 2-5, if you can't figure out how to ship code on your own, you're already in deep, deep trouble.

Maybe when your team is 10-20 strong, bring in the project management gurus.
Their FAQ (http://www.tandementrepreneurs.com/html/how_we_work.html) says, "We typically invest $850,000 in a company over three stages."
According to this post

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40412

the news.yc user "blored" got funding from them. And blored's profile (http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=blored) suggests that their site is

http://clutterme.com/

Edit: oh, you said "AND achieved a liquidity event". Yeah, don't know.
"If you want to increase your success rate, double your rate of failure."
- Thomas Watson (thought I heard it attributed to Edison as well)
What I wanted to express in the form of this tasteless humour was that AI isn't going to be your first problem, even though it could be part of some potential solutions. Modelling the task is the first step. Perhaps I'm wrong but my understanding of the field of AI is that it's trying to get the effects of human intelligence via computation. That is, you'd need to find a way human intelligence could solve the task.

What comes to my mind is some kind of physiological modelling and simulation of the facial tissues. But perhaps it would be enough to do something more superficial such as extract features and their statistics from a lot of young-old pairs of photos and apply the same changes to given photos.
Web 2.0 a Bubble? I don't think so.
Acquisition for Clipmarks
New York based Clipmarks, a del.icio.us-like social bookmarking service, may have been acquired by Forbes. We have no information on the size of the transaction, but my guess is that it was on the very low side.
No. There are basically two parts to your code that you want to protect: the algorithms and the copyright. If your hosting provider's terms of service are anything resembling sane, then keeping your code on their site isn't doing anything to compromise the copyright, and anyone willing to steal your code outright in manner that violates the copyright isn't your competition.

Most applications don't use or require any algorithms sufficiently innovative to be worth protecting. If you're in the minority, then you should be a lot more concerned about your former employees than your hosting provider. It might be worth getting a patent, but really the odds of having your ideas stolen by your hosting provider and then sold to competition and having this result in a meaningful loss to your company are probably orders of magnitude smaller than your odds of getting struck by lightning.
So you're saying there should be a lot of Canadian brands on their list? Should they change the criteria for "global", sort by something else than "brand value", or have they miscalculated the value of all those Canadian brands? Here's the target of the "Methodology" link above the table: http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_32/b4045421....

As far as RIM goes, I can only ask if it isn't more of a single product than a brand worth billions? I can't comment much as Blackberries aren't used in this corner of the world if they're even available. The local alternative (ie what people in the management want) must be the Nokia Communicator line of devices.
The Cranky Product Manager: Seeking Gems in a Sea of Manure
The Future Does Not Need Us: Web 3.0, the first step towards computer takeover
Tandem is relatively new, it is about two months old.

The best thing about Tandem is that they are made up of good people. The venture raising part was very painless, directly a result of Sunil's professionalism.
We are not funded by YC.
offered funding, we have yet to decide if we want to accept
Make sure to obfuscate your Javascript/CSS files.
Conjecture: the fields with late peaks are those where success requires insightful planning and consideration, whereas the fields with early peaks are those which require discrete strokes of inspiration. The distinction between the two skills is similar to PG's description of the distinction between intelligence and wisdom.
ooh, that's a good one. Perhaps an off-shoot on a top tier dating site then?
not a reality TV show but i've put several of the ideas I don't have time to pursue up on Cambrian House->

http://www.cambrianhouse.com/member/scrollinondubs/

I've taken 2nd in a couple of their Ideawarz tournaments but have not won yet. They had the Dragons' Den guy (Sean Wise) join their board not long ago.

sean
I bet Terry Gilliam wished this was invented years ago...
"I'm in like with you, but only when you're young and sexy"? ;-)
I graduated seven years ago and my writing still suffers from bad habits I learned writing college papers.
Looks like they offer a lot of value. What percentage of the company do they take and what's the valuation they typically expect? Do they offer more money than YC?
If only they did biotech...
I read an absolutely fascinating paper that suggested a further connection with crime: http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/MES/pdf/JRP2003.pdf. Basically, the paper's thesis was that males are biologically driven to do extraordinary things when young in order to impress females. For people who have the ability, this can take the form of scientific achievement, or entrepreneurship, or arts or music. For people who don't have the ability to succeed in "socially acceptable" fields, it usually takes the form of crime. The age curves themselves look very similar, and they don't see similar distributions with females.

After a man has children, the odds are significantly lower that he'll contribute some world-changing discovery. This is not because his ability level has decreased - Marc's article suggests that quality of work remains constant. Rather, it's because he has no reason to. He's already reproduced, and likely found a lifetime mate. His children's genetic legacy is set in stone. There's no reason for him to expend the extra energy needed to perform at the top of his game.

Curiously, men that continue to produce at top-of-the-field levels also seem to have multiple successive wives/lovers. Look at Rudy Giuliani, Richard Feynman, Albert Einstein, Benjamin Graham, etc. Perhaps they remain geniuses because they see the reproductive game as not over yet, and hope to continue to impress younger, more beautiful women.
If a company doesn't already have a blog to have an informal conversation with users, they probably won't use this. But I love the idea. Anonymity online is powerful, but the persistent presence of individuals and groups hasn't been leveraged well enough.

Dare I use facebook as an example that worked because group identity meant something?

Disqus is a good development along these lines.

The identity of a user on news.yc has done good things for the level of discourse. A user's interest in a YC application or even just reputation havs improved comments and submissions.
What artificial stimulants do you use?
A lot of us are caffeine and nicotine junkies. What else do you guys use? What do you use for creative stimulation? A glass of wine?
So you're essentially suggesting deferred philanthropy. I totally agree with that philosophy. This is why I'm also doing a startup and not joining the peace corp. But, once you've "made it" and have more money than you know what to do with (the question at hand), I think it's reasonable to consider Philantropy and not just "fun" stuff.
There's a huge amount of innovation in the airplane business.

If it isn't the plane itself, it's the business model (westjet/southwest?). The problem with the industry - like others such as insurance, banking etc. - is the huge startup costs.

When you have larger start-up barriers, you get less incentive to innovate. If you're being bankrolled, you'll innovate, which is why the USAF had a new fighter every ten years when the cold war was on.
You can't overemphasize the age issue though to the point that business success becomes a matter of how much you're not distracted by other commitments.
Seeking partner for game development
Another conjecture: fields with late peaks define success in terms of "convincing people of what they already know", while fields with early peaks define success in terms of "convincing people that everything they know is wrong."

I'm thinking in terms of authors vs. physicists: you absolutely cannot write a novel until you have the life experience needed to write a story that resonates with readers. However, performing an experiment that resonates with other physicists isn't a paradigm shift; it's normal science. Valuable, but not world-changing.

It seems like it applies to many other fields though. CEOs peak in their 60s; their job consists of internalizing the culture of their organization and making wise decisions based on that experience. Lawyers peak in their 40s and 50s; their job consists of internalizing court precedents so they can predict how a judge or jury will rule. Musicians peak in their late 20s and early 30s; their job consists of internalizing the conventions of existing musical forms and turning that into something new and fresh. Entrepreneurs peak in their 20s; their job consists of recognizing ideas that others have overlooked and convincing the world that those are good ideas.
In the way that caffeine is the socially accepted stimulant of the USA and coca leaf is the socially accepted stimulant in South America, Kratom is the stimulant of choice for workers in Southeast Asia. It is the leaf of a tree native to Thailand and is unfortunately illegal in Thailand.

In small doses, it is stimulating in a very clean way that measurably increases focus. If you take too much caffeine, you get a headache and become anxious and jittery. If you take too much Kratom, it crosses over and hits the mu-opiate receptors which makes you happy in a very primal way and can also serve for creative stimulation, if so desired.

It's 100% not illegal in the USA, not drug testable, and cheap. I import it from Indonesia and sell it at http://www.getkratom.com. Please don't order from me today because I'm out of stock but I expect a fresh shipment from Indonesia next week. Email me if you have any more questions about kratom or want me to tell you when I'm in stock and you can have the news.yc discount.
Steroids, nothing but pure unadulterated 'roid.
Does anyone else think that he's starting to look like Bill Gates, literally.
Power naps and sleep that's longer than 6 hours.
I've worked with the facegen library in a past life to create faces of various races and ages. They use a statistical model to create faces. There is also a Russian company whose name escapes me atm that also use a statistical model to generate faces. You could approach them to license their data.
I dont think the question was intended to be phrased in regards to 'physical' needs, but I understand and agree with your intent. I would also have to second the vote for soy protein.
I used to be a caffeine junkie. Weirdly, however, after hitting a rough patch this year and deciding that I couldn't afford 4 2L bottles a day any more, I found that I was no less productive without it, and I'm far less anxious. I have an occasional caffeinated soft drink or green tea, still, but the non-stop highly-caffeinated Randall days are no more.
Congrats for kicking the habit, but to anyone that likes being addicted to caffeine and wants to save money, you can buy natural sources of caffeine such as kola, guarana, and yerba mate very cheaply online.
But your website suggests that it cannot be consumed, how effective is it otherwise?
Adam, why is it bad to raise more than 10x your last round.
Redbull ;)
Without saying it on their website, Tandem is just another incubator. I would be skeptical of this type of setup.

A friend of mine has dealt with a similar company in Mountain View that shall remain nameless. At first things were going well, then they wanted to outsource the development to India, then they wanted to take 50% of the company. Needless to say he didn't sign with them.

Not all incubators are bad (YC, obviously, isn't), but the bottom line is don't get caught up when numbers with a bunch of zeros on the end get tossed around.

Think hard about their value proposition. If they even mention outsourcing the development, just walk away.
Yet most corporations only give laptops to employees whose jobs involve travel - everyone else gets a sub-$1k Dell desktop, with a hand-me-down display. This is the segment he's suggesting Apple address.

Laptops for everyone would be awesome, but hard to justify if they'll never leave the office.

By including the display on the iMac, Apple ensures that they sell a display with each unit shipped, they maintain their volume discounts in the supply chain, etc. This is just conjecture on my part, but it wouldn't be surprising.
Sk*rt Launches Digg for Women
dude, please change the color scheme on your site, i got a headache trying to read it. white on black doesn't work. try #F6F6F6 on #333 if you must have a dark background.

good luck with finding a partner. have you heard of kongregate? might want to check them out if you haven't...
There's plenty of information on the internet, email me if you have any questions about consumption.
Cool name, Fuzzwich. Where is it from? I'll buy a beer for the guy who invented it, if I ever meet him I like it so much. FUZZWICH.