skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Right, make something YOU want.

Now, in every little thing I do in life, I experience really trivial daily struggles. These struggles are so common that to any ordinary person, they are hardly noticed. What I tend to do now is after everything I do, I just think about what I just did, and if I had any problems, or if there were aspects of what I did that could be made easier. This may not be the ideal approach, but I believe that soon I will land, or perhaps that I have already landed, on an issue that is not only exclusive to myself, but to many many others. This may not be an ideal method, but it keeps me on my toes and has made me extremely analytical of everyday situations.

Making something that YOU want, in my opinion, carries a connection with your idea and a drive to pursue it far greater than one made to please others. However selfish this may sound, but every time I brainstorm about new ideas, I come first, and that's my litmus test of approval. If it's something I don't want, won't help me, or won't find interesting in any way, however interesting or helpful it may be to others, I scrap the idea.

Brainstorm!
I fixed it.

(The period was getting incorporated into the url; if you turn urls into links, it's not straightforward to say where they end.)
Your interface rocks. Its instantly usable right when you visit the site. Took me just a few seconds and I had it figured out. Living in a very live music-oriented city I find this tool very useful.

I've just passed it on to a few friends here and their reactions are similar. Keep up the good work.

My only complaint is that I'm personally not a fan of tag clouds. May want to consider evolving the bands list into something more eye catching and readable. I also agree that you should consider modifying the name early so that you are better setup to expand into areas other than bands.
Finally, voting without refresh
Thanks kyro. You posted some good advice. I often try and be analytical too and I try and look at what problems companies are solving. For example, Facebook helps people stay in touch.
Don't worry, I'm not going to post a link about each releaselet. I just wanted to thank PB for helping us.
Yes when you are not logged in the tag cloud represents popularity.

When you sign up and add favorite artists the tag cloud then represents your personal musical tastes instead.

The reason for using labeling ourselves as "reject" in this forum, is because There seems to be a large interest in ycombinator companies. Even the ones who were rejected.

We do not label ourselves as this outside of this forum.
I also hope it inspires some of the other companies who may not have been accepted as well.
Check out the report -- http://www.scribd.com/doc/747/Friendship-Prediction-on-Facebook

Cliffs notes version:

It turns out that how many friends of friends you have in common is the best predictor. After that, it's the number of photos you appear together in, and how many photos your friends of friends appear in. Following that is the number of classes you have in common.

All of the traits (like religious views, what state you're from, guy/girl, etc) are secondary.

It worked pretty well.

(Coincidentally, the facebook friendship prediction was my answer to the last question on the YC app.)
Works great and very snappy. Thanks.
I just had a peek and found out that my favourite band is making a rare european tour and is soon playing just a mile from my front door. So rare, infact, that I don't even usually bother to check their tour dates. Anyway, I just spent $100 on a pair of tickets - shame that bandsintown didn't get a penny.
Yeah we do see the ability for expansion as well. Under another brand of course because you are right we do limit ourselves with our stratedgy.

The reason i do not use eventful and tools like that is because of the lack of focus. I know with bandsintown that I will be discovering new local shows and nothing else. This was our primary goal.
Wolves are a natural part of the ecosystem.
Is there no way to change your vote once you vote?
Prediction: this submission reaches the Top 10 after every visitor verifies the asynchronous voting.

Great stuff, Pauls (and Trevor).
We will improve the ability to edit the location, Especially for users who are signed up and just want to check out other areas, without changing their account settings.

And as far as the sizing, it is based on overall popularity when you are not logged in. When you sign up and add favorite artists it begins to personalize itself to your taste in music.

Hopefully this makes the site useful to everyone, but VERY VERY useful once you signup and begin to add your favorite artists.
FWIW, I like bandsintown a lot more at first glance. I didn't have to click anything, and I instantly found out a lot about what's going in my area.

It looked like I had 5 or 10 more clicks at least to get anything good out of sonicliving. I'll probably never go there again unless someone I trust strongly recommends it. I'm sure I'll idly pop into bandsintown a few more times over the next few months.
I've had bad experiences with MediaTemple (gridserver) - avoid.
What are your thoughts on integrating your app into Facebook?
Yesterday Facebook accepted my application ScienceHack into the applications directory. So far, its been a huge success, I am getting great exposure to my target audience and every time someone adds my application, many more come through the friends feed feature. If you have a start up dont hesitate to integrate it into Facebook.

What are your thoughts?
Collaborative computing&#8230; geeks and non-geeks meet thanks to this startup&#8230;
Nice move!
But one thing...
The server should get updated first. Only after that should the UI value change.
[Right now, its the reverse here.Is there any particular reason for such an implementation?]
Not quite actually.

Take 37signals app. I can't use it for work related because that would resulted in me storing the confidential work related items under their server. Work also takes much of your time.

Another example would be to store Word docs in Google. One slip-up and your word docs is searchable by Google.

So no, the desktop isn't dead yet.

In fact, I only use websites to read news and forums.
Okay, one last suggestion. The domain zintown.com is available. Thus:

band.zintown.com
movie.zintown.com

(intown.com and other better variations were already taken.)
A good rule of thumb is to look for things that save time and/or energy. The more saving, the more valuable your idea is to the users.

The idea value, in the eye of the user, is the saving multiplied by its occurence. Big savings are eye catching and most probably covered by zillion startups. Small savings are more frequent but also often less obvious and eye catching. This is the heuristic I would use to find where to start searching for an idea.

google search algorithm is in fact saving search time. This is where the value comes from. The advertisement is a smart way to leverage the value without restraining access.

To detect these tasks with potential savings you have to scrutinize what you, or people around you, do on a daily basis.

One example I am currently thinking of is typing on these cumbersome keyboards. There is something to do there, especially if pressure sensitive screens become available.

Look at what it takes to type a message with a mobile phone. Painfull. Look at how big a keyboard has to be. Look at the blackberry success and the high value of an interface that would not require these littles keys wasting space you could use for viewing things (cf. iPhone).

You won't wake up one morning shouting "eureka". This is something to experiment and explore as the people at Xerox did with smalltalk and their brilliant mouse and graphic interface.

The keybord thing is is just to give an example of something people do every day without thinking of it and imagine that there might be a better way. This is where you can find gems and gold mines.
Ask News.YC: Are you getting an iPhone?
I'm curious why you're averse to learning and using javascript, Paul. It's really close to Lisp (no compile-time macros, but functions are first class objects, has lexical closures, so on). It's really a powerful language, much more so than C.

(Not criticizing, just curious)
I just started a blog called "Bad Idea a Day" (it's at that .com, but I'm not trying to advertise it). I force myself to think of a product, story, lifehack, or any idea each morning.

It's just for fun and mental practice. But so far I like my ideas, and I'm already talking to a designer about possibly turning one idea into a product.

You could do the same with a blog, Tumblr, or Twitter account named "What people want." Every morning, think of something people want. Do it again at lunch. Do it again at dinner.

Make the account private if you want, but I recommend putting ideas up in public. You're more likely to find a partner and willing free advice than to get your idea stolen.
Eh, lack of 3g and GPS really stings. Also, I am very curious as to typing ability. I've read from several sources that typing is really cumbersome.

However, I'm a huge sucker for Apple and Apple marketing. And, the touchscreen/OS/UI look brilliant. But, for $500 with a 2 year and the required data plans, I'm not sure. I am a dirt poor college student, after all.

Palm is coming out with a new one later this year with wifi, 3g, and GPS.
please delete this post.
please delete this post. It was a stupid joke from a friend of mine.
I kinda like having announcements tagged as "Rejected YC company", because it gives people considering YC funding a baseline to measure the actual benefits of the program itself, as opposed to the quality of the applicants.

Looking at YC-funded companies, I know that they've created pretty impressive stuff. But I have no way of knowing whether they are just kickass hackers who would've created great companies anyway, or whether they became great hackers because of the mentorship of PG et al. There's a selection-bias: the fact that they beat out 400 or so other applicants indicates they were pretty cream-of-the-crop anyway.

By seeing the outcomes of rejected YC companies, we can say "Okay, these folks are drawn from the same pool of applicants, and at least in YCombinator's estimation, they were less promising. Let's see what their success rate is compared to the ones that YC eventually did invest in."

There's still a survivorship bias, because people who were rejected, tried anyway, and then crashed and burned are unlikely to post on news.YC with their postmortems (though I'd absolutely love to see some). But at least it'd give a control group of people who were just as motivated and came from the same applicant population, to compare with the outcomes of those selected for the program itself. Right now, we just have PG's assurance that they roughly double the expected outcome for a startup, with little data to back it up.
Say what you will about Guy, he's a hell of a speaker. His "Art of the Start" video should be required viewing for everyone everywhere with even a passing interest in startups or public speaking. It's very compelling stuff.
Interesting idea, Jonathan Harris has already done something like this for the web.

See:

http://www.wefeelfine.org/methodology.html
TeamSnap makes it easy to manage your team - (37signals)
Thats awesome. Thanks, We own a few more ___intown domains as well, but i like this idea a lot.
I am waiting for the reviews. Also the first iPod was not that great, but by the time G2, G3 and the Mini was out it bacame an awesome product.

I will get one if I can have an all you can eat Internet plan to go with it and if the web is not too slow on it.
I don't think forcing yourself to come up with an idea is particularly the best way of going about it. Some of my best ideas have spawned out of pure stream of consciousness. I think by doing what you do, you turn coming up with ideas into a task that you limit yourself to doing only several times a day. Morning or lunch shouldn't just be 'idea time.' Your whole life, your experiences, your interactions should be 'idea time.'
Avi Bryant asks: "How do we Facebookize the open web?"
Giveness: when charity and business come together: Businesshackers, Web 2.0 startups
Sure, you don't know it's dead yet, either. ;-)

Privacy awareness and assurance will come to these services. Most small businesses already outsource email...that's as "confidential" as most businesses get.

I already know dozens of people that use gmail for everything (business and personal). It's not a large gap between that and presentations, spreadsheets, etc.

And, of course, "web" doesn't just mean "running at Google". There are numerous installable products that aren't desktop apps, but keep data within an organization.

"In fact, I only use websites to read news and forums."

This merely exhibits your own bias, not the coming reality. Sure, it'll be years, as I mentioned. But it's definitely coming. The convenience, higher efficiency (both for the provider and the consumer), and faster pace of innovation will win in the end. Someone else mentioned that desktop software is harder and that web apps can be developed by hacks...while that isn't entirely true (the apps we're generally willing to rely on were developed by seriously good developers regardless of whether it's desktop or web-based), it's another reason for web apps to win. More developers equals more apps for more specialized needs. Just like DSLs are the best way to solve many programming problems, custom apps are the best way to solve many software problems...with more developers more custom apps can flourish. And if you have a choice between a poorly fitting desktop app, or an ideally fitting web app designed exactly for your business and industry, you'll choose the web app. Again, I don't know that it's really true--all software is hard, when it comes to making it ready for the masses.

Anyway, denial is a part of the seven stages of grief. For those grieving the death of the desktop, you've probably got a couple of stages to go, and that's alright. ;-)
Be analytical of what you do daily.

And if anything, you should be looking at problems that companies are NOT solving.
Most people don't build their apps to work with an infrastructure like EC2. Or. Their apps can't easily fit into the EC2 model.

In essence, how is EC2 different?

1- Each EC2 instance is essentially 1/4th of a typical server (w/ 4 cores, 16GB ram, 1GB net, ~500G local disk).

2- once an EC2 instance fails, it's gone forever - there is no way to recover local data, you'll never get the same IP addr, etc.

Given these two constraints, EC2 isn't really a viable platform for running services backed by an typical RDBMS (though, I'm sure it can be pulled off, it would be quite a bit of work).

EC2 is _really_ good for apps that "pull" work from a queue - i.e. operate asynchronously.

There are several companies using EC2 with this asnyc idiom, Powerset being the most notable.
Only if you're going to send me one.
It cost me $55 to set up an LLC in Oregon. I am not seeking investors at the moment, and when/if I do, they can cover the costs of moving to a C corporation.

I still want to understand the breakdown of what all that money goes for.
Not anymore.

At least not until Apple opens the iPhone as a development platform. IMHO, the exciting possibilities would come from 3rd party software, which they apparently plan to keep out. I think market pressures will eventually force them to open the doors for developers but until then no thanks.
Does it make the request, then update the number? Or does it update the number and make the request at its leisure?
eBay thinks outside with eBox
Not unless I can install 3rd-party, native applications.
Yahoo shareholders reject censorship, executive pay proposals
The non-friend vs anti-friend distinction didn't even occur to me, but it's clearly an important part of the experiment. I like all the discussion of data. Fun problem.

I did not realize squaring an adj matrix tells you what it does. Thanks for edjumacating me.

Did you go past f2hops? Seems like 3 would be reasonable and predictive. Since 1/2 of your tree is so small, and there were 12k nodes in the tree, that suggests to me a pretty easy task. Do you agree? It would be interesting to see if PCA or LDA pick the same features as the decision trees did. Just a click away in Weka, after all.

(An aside, and neat hack: Buddy of mine just walked in and saw the document on my screen. He saw the decision tree and said, "I remember those. In grad school I printed out decision trees as C if/else statements. Part of running my decision tree was a call to gcc.")
Depends on what the monthly plan is like.

$100 is more than I've spent on my current cell phone in the year I've had it. The iPhone would have to be really sweet to justify spending that much each month on top of its purchase price.
Yes, I agree. I'll be waiting until the first batch is tested by the Apple enthusiasts. However I will be getting one!
Well, look at the code :) I did, it was educational. Node.href contains the values that are linked on the up/down arrows.

// ping server

var ping = new Image();

ping.src = node.href;

return false; // cancel browser nav

}

The clever part is in using the image object as an ajax-like connection, response isn't check, and I'm not sure if it's async. Question: is this a common javascript idiom? Is it browser portable?

Mynameishere: The answer to your question is it updates the number and makes an immediate request to the server.
Er.. So that means it's a GET request, and GET requests which modify state on a website are bad. Things like Google Web Accelerator silently visit all the links on the page and cache the result in case you decide to visit that link. So there might be some problems for people using those (For example, their accelerator might accidentally upvote all the comments in every comment page they visit)
Is there any particular reason for such an implementation?

I think the answer boils down to this: http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2007/06/wasting-time-on-things-that-really-dont.html

(This is not meant to be a nasty sounding response.)
Yep, I just confirmed this by viewing the source code, then visiting http://news.ycombinator.com/a?fnid=oO6e74w9Mq manually. It upvoted the "bandsintown" article. A misbehaved web accelerator could upvote every single article on the front page, and every comment in each comment page that they visit.
Okay, so I just downloaded Google Web Accelerator and it doesn't upvote the links.. It must be smart enough not to. I'm worried about other ones that people may be using though. (Doesn't fasterfox do some kind of prefetching?)
palish, interesting. Something I've never thought about. Do web accelerators typically not follow POST requests?
They can't reliably, because POST requests usually get data from forms when you click 'submit'. The other way to initiate a POST is using xmlhttprequest, setting the method to 'POST', and then sending your data.
Not until they offer it in Canada ;) The contract on my current phone is up in December. The iPhone apparently starts being sold up here in January.
Web 2.0: Create Your Own Software Profile
I picked up his book, Art of the Start, a few weeks ago and was somewhat disappointed. I love Guy, except that Garage invested in Gator/Claira, and read his blog and watch his speeches. After that there really was nothing new in the book.
No iPhone SDK Means No Killer iPhone Apps
It's so that if the server update fails, the user isn't mislead into thinking it succeeded. They can then take whatever action needed to correct it, like clicking the arrow again.

It probably doesn't matter much for a site like this, but it's one of those things that's just a good habit to get into. Perform validations first, then actions, then UI updates. And do the actions that are most reversible or most likely to fail first. If you have a POST that updates a DB table and sends an e-mail, update the database first, because there's no way to unsend that e-mail.

It's like comparing constants from the left in C or doing "literal".equals(var) in Java - each individual occurrence is trivial, but taken together, it can save you a lot of grief.

Edit: though looking at the source, it's done through an Image update. I don't think there's any way to trap failure with that implementation, so here, it really doesn't matter.
Sorry, I botched this one up. See:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27615
The Margin Manifesto, Part I
I Hacked News.YC
What I did was grab the ID of this article, then embed an iframe on the next page with a link pointing to it.
nope...i didnt
Okay, good. The ID's appear to rotate, so it seems pretty secure.
Not multiple times, though.
It's just an adaptation of the old, non-js html, in which the arrows were just links, and it's written such that it will work in the old way if the js doesn't work for some reason (like I never bothered to test it with all the browsers).

Anything that assumes that GET links can be arbitrarily followed will break stuff all over the web. GWA needs all kinds of heuristics to avoid that kind of thing. (maybe they avoid sending cookies or session ids?)
What about health insurance?
Sorry.. I probably seem like I'm doing this for the karma. I'm not; I just wanted to see if a flaw existed. It does.. The upvote needs to be a POST, not a GET.

Shawn Presser
Except it's vulnerable to an iframe exploit. See: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27615
Soon I will be out of school and won't be able to get health insurance from sources like parents or school. Does anyone have a suggestions for how they got health insurance, or what is a good method for finding a good provider? Also, how much did it cost?
Yeah, it seems to work ok for reddit (try "work offline" then click the arrows on reddit).

For things that are really important (sending an email or something) I'd check the reply, but for arrow clicking it's probably not worth the effort and delay.
Nope, POST does not prevent this kind of thing -- it's just as easy to forge a POST as a GET. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-site_request_forgery

To protect a site, you must include an unguessable parameter in all side-effecting requests.
GET operations should be safe:

"If you use GET for interactions with side-effects, your make your system insecure."

(from http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/whenToUseGet.html#safe)
Right, like the session ID. Except I'm not sure arc has session ids.. Just ids embedded into all links in the site.

And if you're going to be putting the session id somewhere, it should be in a POST request, not a GET request, otherwise it can be hijacked.
False (that GET causes the problem), see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27629
GET and POST have nothing to do with it. You could have written this hack just as easily (or nearly as easily) if POST were required.

To fix the problem, PG needs to check that the userid that clicked the fnid is the same as the userid for which it was created.

BTW, browser bugs actually make the problem even more complex than this because it is sometimes possible to steal content off of other pages.
hrm. I recently left one of Eric B's teams, and no more than 7 months ago he held a meeting where he said (essentially) that hardware cost more than people's time.

I'm not sure what has changed since then. I still work there (for the next 3 days anyway), and I know the cost structure of people vs. hardware hasn't changed dramatically. Guess it must be the burning desire to catch some of the Facebook "platform" love.
[SF] Distributed Systems company looking for developers
You're right :) But I don't see how that can be done if the front page is cached, so therefore the same ID is assigned to many people. I haven't researched session cookies yet to know if that can solve the problem.
Anyone else a Shoemoney fan? Great reading for startups
I love these online marketing sites - you really learn a lot about SEO, monetising users and so on. It's a great change from reading techcrunch reviews and that kind of thing.