skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I dunno. I think it's really reminiscent of the startup in the garage of yesteryear (even before the web), but with the beds closer to the computers.
please see http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=9704
for San Francisco area.
I thought it'd be interesting to hear what project everyone wants to do next. Or just ideas for things they want to see happen in the future.
Right. So this experiment is to determine if online demos matter at all. Perhaps all Paul, Jessica, RTM and Trevor care about is a good idea (or not so good idea) with a solid team. In fact, they probably only care about a solid team. Reddit's idea was entirely changed after they applied.

I'll be interested to see if by tomorrow anyone's actually confirmed that they've looked. Then next cycle we can refocus our efforts on areas that matter more.
- revamp the music industry (big business is not invited)

- political social network (get people talking)

- revolutionize the structure of the internet (its a mess)

- introduce new airline software (I'd sell that myself)

If anyone wants to do any of these things feel free, because they need to be done. If you want to participate in my efforts to seem them happen in the future - maurice@revvu.com
Kosher for Passover food that tastes good. Big, hungry market for it.
Gaming the applications process already? ;-)

The big advantage to working on the online demo is it gets you working on the product. Ultimately, that's what'll make you succeed or fail, not whether you get YC funding. I can't imagine anything else in the application process that matters more.

My team isn't really focusing on the app demo for YC's sake. It actually looks kinda ugly, since layout and design is one of the last things we're working on. But we were planning to launch on the weekend of the 20-21st, and still probably will if we aren't invited to Mountain View. So in order to hit the launch date, we need to work on it anyway.
You've completely omitted the real reason people stay with Digg: network effects. The more people using a Digg-like site, the more valuable it is. Digg clones don't have the traffic, so of course they can't compete.

Switching from Windows to Mac is more of an issue of legacy. If all of the software you like using works only on Windows, and if all of the people in your organization only know Windows, it's going to be difficult (costly) for you to switch.

How are these related to 37signals products? Not very. There are no network effects involved, so that's out. And while you may have a legacy with 37signals, it's such a new product, your organization could probably afford to switch to a competitor without much cost.

The question posed in the article is a good one, then, since if you could match feature for feature and you could do it for cheaper, you'd beat 37signals at their own game.
Google Dials 411 for Free, Takes On Jingle Networks
Archiving the web in a decentralized way. The idea is to define a format for indexes that is both human and search-engine friendly, and coming up with ways to encourage people to share their archives. (dowser.sf.net; dowser-archive.org coming soon)
No. (It's not really a demo, just a fun, unrelated little thing. But it has an URL which hasn't been hit yet from Mountain View or Cambridge.)
Gaming the applications process already? ;-)

Nope. I didn't apply to YC because I feel it'll increase my chances of success. I know I'm going to succeed; how 'bout you? ;)

I applied because that's where I want to be. Out of all the places I could go in life, I can't imagine a better place than with a bunch of smart and motivated people working on businesses.

So let's assume we're all going to succeed, and we all want in. Knowing which things matter more than other things is invaluable.

Of course, they wouldn't tell us to focus on question X. If they did, it would skew the results. So the only way to determine what matters is to run experiments like this one.
Most Awesome Web Launch of a New Book of Short Stories
Yet another micropayments startup. Unfortunately, my current thoughts on that require several hundred thousand, minimum, so I'll need to get rich (relative to where I am) before I can really get that done.
If you have Lisp, you don't need the plethora of XML mini-languages you need in Java and many other languages. You can just keep everything Lisp, and give up nothing in flexibility and still succintly express ideas in your problem domain.

This is what is often referred to as "Domain Specific Languages". With Lisp, you can create a DSL and its still Lisp.

That is what the article is saying, but much more verbosely. In the article's defense, I think it takes something as long as that for people who don't know Lisp to really understand the point.
Free Database Of Open Source Projects
It might be interesting to build a "first impressions" service where people would give you their first impressions on all sorts of things including startups and ads.

To encourage people to do this, you could build a game like this:

http://listengame.org

In a sense, this "first impressions" service would also provide a form of advertising targeted at people who are willing to see what you have just for fun.
Kudos for adding (useful) complexity to the application without requiring any extra user interaction. This is the way to implement features.
that's easy. use Indian spices.

perhaps we can cook up something!
my next invention?

-deaf people communicate without sign language.

I already have the ideas - but no prototype. would need funding.
yea i definitely want to see micro payments catch on. I've been ranting about this for months now. I think it is a much needed component of the new internet i want to see exist :-)
Did you get a response from them today? I got nothing. Not sure if that's a rejection or if they pushed back the decisions.
Cure HIV:
Start with some adult stem cells from the HIV patient to be treated, specifically the stem cells that produce T cells. We introduce the 32 base pair deletion in the CCR5 gene and grow the cells in culture. These can then be "transplanted" back into the patient. These transplanted stem cells will create HIV immune T cells. Once there are enough immune T cells, the patient will probably still have HIV, but it will not develop into AIDS. There will be no chance of rejection since they are the patient's own cells. Furthermore, since the body does produce antibodies to HIV, these modified T cells may even be able to fight off the HIV.

To test this, we would get a mouse line, which are genetically very similar to each other from inbreeding so we won't have to worry about rejection of the transplants, and introduce the human CCR5 receptor into them. This, in theory, will allow the mice to be infected with HIV since HIV attaches to the CCR 5 receptor to enter and infect the cell. If this works, we can then try the technique of taking some of their stem cells, introducing the mutation, transplanting them back in, and see if their T cell count increases or if the levels of HIV decrease. It could also be used as a preventative therapy, which we can also easily test on the mice.
Good luck going against "deaf culture." Deaf (with a capital D) people are extremely resistant to change or anything that threatens their community.
How a carpet merchant became a VC (never mind this title read my comment)
I worked for US Airways in maintenance/engineering and I think that most of their problems stem from trying to run an enterprise on 70's era mainframes and software. So much extra labor is required to do things that should be automated but instead require lots of human hours. But, they're incredibly resistant to change and spending money. So I think selling it would be impossible.
So how do you solve micropayments?
I had read somewhere that this guy's carpet shop was a hotspot for networking of high profile and wannabe tech leaders. So my query to YC and PG is Can a portion of website be kept for networking or matching of talents? A virtual space is sufficient to kick start something.
It's a bad idea for a typical Web 2.0 startup but it's a great idea if you have a clear path to profitability.
How would you make your software easier to use?
Atten.tv: a creepy version of Justin.tv
We've all changed - haven't we?

:)
I'm not sure what you mean. Certainly, if your invention is good enough, I'm sure you will be able to find some success, even if you don't change Deaf culture as a whole.
I'm still working on the details, but the direction I'm moving mostly consists of taking the best ideas of current payment systems and leaving the worst ones out. The trickiest one involves email addresses as the payment identifier. That seems like a good idea at first glance (and had me fooled for years; I'm from a payment systems background), but I think it turns out to have been a bust.

I'm also not particularly interested in P2P payments, as there are lots and lots of systems out there for that, and it never has really taken off. The dominant system is still merchant/customer, and I think it will continue to be for a number of reasons: each person receiving payments needs a lot of people paying to make any given activity worth doing, and people just don't seem to pay each other tiny sums -- and paycheck-size sums are already handled well by check/ACH, direct deposit, and so on.

But given the level of funding I'll need to get this started properly, it certainly isn't a YC app, so I have to succeed with some other interesting project first. :)
'This the funniest thing I've ever read on news.yc.'

(as you know ) if you poke fun at things you can get across messages in parallel.
Thanks for your input.

I'm sure it would be nearly impossible to sell. ;-) Hence i volunteer to sell it myself. I'm sure it would be a huge undertaking because of things the hardware limitations & time it would take to update things... but once in place, it'd be well worth it for everyone involved.
Once I have some money in the bank, I want to escape to an island, assemble a small team of medical researchers and find a cure for a genetic condition I suffer from.

Each time I get an episode of it I can't help but wonder why it is that much harder to find a cure for it than fixing a broken computer:) May be I can use this innocence and get somewhere. Medicine is the last thing of my natural interest but in this context I really hope to take on this fun challenge at some point.
With enough money in the bank, I'm sure you can make a serious impact on a specific area of medical technology. The hard part is finding qualified people that are brilliant enough to think outside of the box.
Hello, I would definitely be interested on getting some space
in SF but not so much if you are thinking of a South Bay location.
I'm currently based in Petaluma so I would also need to get setup living wise in SF but this is in process now, so not a roadblock.
This is exciting, let me know what I can do to assist.
Cleaning Messy Message Boards
SnipShot and MyDataBus collaborating
True. That is the prime reason my business partner brother is going to med school. His tech entrepreneurial background with a med school education should at least give us a good base to start from whenever we do this.
Google Voice Local Search
Build a Time machine
SICP lectures - For people who want to learn lisp
The 10 Real Reasons Why Geeks Make Better Lovers
If your company goes south for any of a million reasons, who gets stuck with the bill? If you've sold equity, you've spread out the risk according to who's willing to take it. It's likely the founders opted to risk time more than money, so they're not out anything huge. If you get a loan, somebody's gotta pay it back at the end of the day.
Debt is only reasonable if you already have enough positive cash flow (not positive revenues.. more money in than money out) to finance that debt.

But even if you have positive cashflow, it generally makes sense for young companies to reinvest those earnings instead of taking debt investment.

If your business fails, then you still need to pay off the loan. So that's what you get for not giving up your equity.
what fields should I grep for, that will tell me they were pleased with my demo?
Reminded me of the supposed quote by Trump to his daughter upon seeing a homeless guy...it went something like "Technically, he is richer than I am."
The article is too long and not that well written. The biggest problem is that, however good the writer they are never going to be able to communicate the power of lisp in prose. It's upto the audience to see it. For those who know lisp, they already know. For those who don't it's like coming in contact with something alien and you can't tell if it solves any problem at all. It's almost as if ones' come in contact with a cult.

Though lisp provides a lot of syntactic flexibility. The beauty of lisp is in giving the programmer confidence that you can create a prototype extremely quickly and then optimize it when needed.

I find the hardest thing in the world is getting started. Once I start its never as hard as I thought it was going to be. In a nutshell, Lisp helps me get started and then lets me get the code ready for prime time.

If you are a web developer, I'd say spend a weekend trying out UCW, write a reddit clone in it. Then try to write it in python. It'll be obvious what lisp has to offer.

I'd start by reading SICP by Sussman and Abelson. Their lectures are available in video. I had a profound experience at the end of lecture 2b where they explain how car, cdr and cons are defined, thus explaining that in lisp, code is data.

The above comes with a warning... Lisp is truely the red pill. Once you've figured it out, you'll find it physically impossible to code in any other language.
I think it is more suited to a research project in a University. There are still a few things to be figured out.

But to your point, I meant that cultures do change; willingly or unwillingly, when faced with disruptive and effective technology. The strange thing is; they sometimes willingly change for the worse.
That's precisely my point and why, I think the article was written.
Scheme is cleaner than common lisp. I think Gambit-C has an implementation of Erlang's message passing and mailbox idea for each process and in addition to that it doesn't use OS threads for individual processes it uses first class continuations. In one test it performed similar to Erlang running as many as 900K processes on a 1GB ram P4.

http://people.csail.mit.edu/gregs/ll1-discuss-archive-html/msg03309.html

Having said this. I'm really interested in Erlang because of
mnesia. I'm not sure if I want to spend a bit of my life writing a database in Gambit.

Here are thoughts from someone who choose Erlang over Scheme. http://theschemeway.blogspot.com/

I don't really agree with his point of view. I think if your
problem doesn't really have a strong concurrency element in
it which you would solve by using shared data then it probably doesn't make sense to use the message passing model. Having said that if you are writing for the web one day it definitely will have a strong need for concurrency.
I've never been afraid of the red pill. If it'll improve my ability to be effective, I'll gladly take it. :)

Without knowing much about Lisp, it seems that trying to describe it is like to trying to tell someone about Buddhism, or Jazz. Talking about it is just not the same thing as "getting it".

Thanks for your thoughts vikram, If I do become a convert I'll be sure to make a special post to news.yc :)
Microsoft is Dead
Unlikely, unless you have some idea that makes sense to a business loan manager. You're relying on a non-tech person to see that your idea is a really solid idea, which may or may not fly.

The other thing is that even if your credit isn't in the toilet, banks might also want to take a lien on something valuable of yours, e.g., your car or your house, since you essentially have no assets in your company when you start. This is not always in your best interest, especially if your company goes belly up. Liquidating a house or a car that might normally be protected by bankruptcy is probably not going to be fun for you.
Great, finally got a response!
It's good to know at least someone is as excited as I am about this :)

Well, I am not thinking about south bay either since I'm in SF, so Menlo Park is pretty much as south as I will go. So are you saying you were planning to move to SF regardless?

As for helping, see my edited original post (so every msg stays focused).
I agree, the shadow is gone - but for how long?

As much as I am frustrated with having to use XP (My Autodesk BIM cad system only runs on it), I wouldn't underestimate MS's ability to bounce back from bad directions/decisions like they have in the past.

If Gates radically changes his vision and business model to the new web world and gets Balmer to agree, they could dominate again. But can a company that has written extensively buggy software in the least lean way transform at this late date?

If it were anyone else other than Gates at the top of the company, I would say no. But does Gates have the energy this late in his career to make such a dramatic change in his business? Maybe not.
I guess I must be old now, because I find it hard to believe that a company that still has their software running on 95% of the world's computers is "dead". I just don't get this argument.

I totally agree that there's this very small, very insular part of the world that thinks it's dead, but that part of the world is apparently not working in large companies, or trading files with professionals in any profession other than design (e.g., try to find an Architect using Mac-based software -- they can't, because they couldn't trade files with each other or clients).

I'll believe MS is dead when they have, say, less than 70% of the world's computers running their operating system and when my corporate clients stop asking for files in Word format. Until then, they're just a monopoly that has massive amounts of power but that the cool kids aren't interested in.

It's like saying POTS telephones are dead -- they might not be interesting, but that's a big difference from being dead.
I can't decide whether etiquette requires you to allow the author of an article to post it if they are members (founders) of the site.

Then again, etiquette doesn't help entrepreneurs much.
Well what hurts me is the thing they have forced people like me to stick to MSFT. Atleast in our univ, they have exclusive tie up with MSFT and they install 99.99% windows only. Its rather 0.01% apple. But some who have admin access put on linux. Most of standard mech engg softwares run on windows. MSFT gives their products at dead cheap prices ... as low as $5 a CD. These dirty tactics are seeing them ahead, but it may not continue as people start seeing the reality. For MSFT to die, these loops must be plugged and nailed to accelerate its death.
I agree Paul, but Microsoft is still running that boring Enterprise Software that you always talk about. Also Microsoft's shitty software pays for my lunch,dinner, beer and women.
I think the situation is somewhat unpredictable since Microsoft could try to break AJAX apps by introducing all sorts of problems in IE.

Unreliable AJAX apps under IE would discourage users from using web apps. Most users are generally clueless and will not try to switch to another browser.

Microsoft could also undermine the business model of many web services by providing free advertising. The ads could even appear on users' desktops so improving their search engine may not even be necessary.
I think PG's point isn't that MS will vanish or is vanishing from the current installed user base point of view (mainly their OS), but that they no longer control the direction of software development. This is a major opening for us Entrepreneurs that, as PG pointed out, has never happened before.

MS Office is clearly under serious attack now, and I'm sure the OS will follow in a few years unless MS takes a major tack in their business, which seems unlikely but is possible. If you are a top-notch programmer brimming with big ideas, do you want to work for MS? Probably not, and I think that is the biggest barrier they have to succeeding in the new web world. You can buy programming mercenaries with enough cash, but the genius paradigm-shifters will be hard to find over at MS.
Microsoft is still an enormously profitable and powerful company in the real world, and you should be more careful about drawing conclusions based on what a few people think in your insular little "Web 2.0" bubble.

More seriously, I mostly do business right now with small businesses (2-8 people), and some stupidly high proportion of these businesses run totally on Windows. When they go to buy the computer(s) they need, it never even occurs to them that there is any choice about whether to buy Windows, because Windows is just what programs run in. This kind of customer laughs ruefully along with the Apple commercials they see on TV, but I don't think it ever crosses their mind that they could actually buy a Mac for their business, much less a Linux box.

Word, Excel, Internet Explorer, Outlook, and Exchange are the core software apps of 90+% of small businesses.
Paul, I think you're being an ignorant a little bit in this case. Have you seen how Microsoft become the second major player in the game industry behind Sony PS brand? I think right now more people own XBOX 360 compare to Sony PS3. Of course there's Wii, the Apple of Console machine.

Google is popular because people like Michael Arrington, Walleywag, and those biased non-professional bloggers-turned-online-reporters sing praises toward Google. How many Google apps dying? How many Google apps that people use these days? AdSense, GMail, GMap, and of course, their search engine.

I think you read online hi-tech newspaper or surf reddit.com too much where of course the content is full of new startup that does pretty much nothing astonishing.. "Scribd, the YouTube of document..." or.. the X-programming language and how X is cool but C# isn't.

Apple is sort of the "new trend" these days because it looks good. Most of the computer science students in my university now are switching to Apple of course because they saw the cool/smart kids are using it.. for browsing reddit.com and talk how cool ruby on rails and DHH are.

I bought Apple 2 weeks ago and by the 3rd day, I installed Parallel Desktop with Windows XP loaded with MS Office and Visual (C# and Web Developer) Express Studio 2005. By the way, I'm a long time FreeBSD users and I have a machine with XP dual boot + Ubuntu (now Ubuntu on the other hand is one piece of distribution... respect..!)

Microsoft is not dead. They're still up and running. They're just not visible in your path Paul. They're doing other things that do not interfere with your Web 2.0 posse. One IPTV company gave a talk in my e-Business course a month ago, she sang praise for Microsoft because they have the most complete strategy in IPTV world. FYI, IPTV is better than YouTube.

Let's admit it, people need to hear new information, new gossips, new products and new toys. But only time will tell if these new stuffs can replace Microsoft.

The other thing is, if Desktop is dead, why am I keep hearing news about Slingshots, Apollo and WPF/E ?

Maybe Microsoft knows how broken the WWW is and they prefer not to build their interest around it (other than just to be another big player next to Yahoo! and Google because they have pride and they want to be acknowledged that they still can be a big player in any field..)

MS isn't dead yet, not until they stop creating software/hardware and move to the business/consulting field. It's true that they lost the "touch" and that they lost in understanding their customer, but they're not as bad as you envisioned.

Of course you're writing this essay to fire up these hotshots or web 2.0 wannabes to quit their jobs and to forget applying for big companies and make a web2.0 thing for YCombinator (^_^)
Jeff Skoll - Stanford GSB
Richard Fairbanks - Stanford GSB
Steve Ballmer [this one isn't going to get me love] - Stanford GSB
Vinod Khosla - Stanford GSB
Scott McNealy - Stanford GSB
...