skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The meme that ideas are worthless is generally a good remedy to founder paranoia, but I don't think a lot has been said about why founders feel so protective over ideas.

To me good ideas are what I use to convince myself that I have insight into a problem. Its the truth of those ideas (often manifested in particular features) that makes founding a startup seem like a quest for something good. So the idea of someone taking your idea and doing it first, even though they may not have your insight, totally destroys the vision of your company. Its probably a good thing if you release and are copied, they'll always be playing catchup, but to be trumped before releasing...

I think startups who fear investors do so because of the 3 person startup they are imagining the investor shopping their idea to. Its probably not reality, but no one wants someone else telling their story before they can.
It probably doesn't matter whether someone hears about your ideas, actually. It's tremendous hubris and a non sequitur to think that someone will overhear your idea, immediately think it's fantastic, and go and start a successful company based on that, leaving you totally unable to act.

"Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats."

Ideas aren't "worthless" but there's tons to building a successful company besides building the right product for the right audience at the right time.
Your Ad Here, on My S.U.V.? And You'll Pay?
"A sizable fraction of the world's crops" are from mutations induced via radiation
It would be hard to make a startup from the idea. The video everyone linked had enough information for me to make a free version. Open ideas that are features rather than products make bad startups, right?

The question is how much else he could do on his own vs. at adobe.
Dot-com names get dottier: X is the new Z
Slight correction, we'd have to introduce other human receptors that HIV binds to, not just the human CCR5 receptor. It's still not that difficult though, we can put them all on the same plasmid. New techniques, such as magnetofection (http://www.chemicell.com/products/Magnetofection/Magnetofect...) should allow almost 100% transfection (inserting a plasmid, or circular piece of DNA, into a cell) rate. Granted, this is all still theoretical and there may be something I am overlooking, but I still feel it's worth pursuing.
You really think you could have duplicated his work from that video? He didn't get into the math and I assume that was the hard part.
Are you an expert in image recognition? If not, I think this would be considerably more difficult to implement than it looks.

He might have a patent pending on the idea too, which could make his intellectual property valuable.
Thanks - that was a very nice and thorough response. And I quite agree with much of what you said. You don't have to use "viewstate" and flow layout is the sensible thing to do. But in actual practice .Net projects often do use viewstate and POST even when GET is appropriate and .Net projects frequently use absolute positioning even when flow is clearly approprate. As I said, it IS possible to do good web projects with .Net but in practice it doesn't usually work out that way.

Orkut is a great example of this. In its earliest incarnations it used postbacks and viewstates rather wildly but I notice every so often they seem to have rewritten it to use less and less of that stuff.

One thing I will disagree with you on - dividing your system up into input .aspx pages and reporting pages using reporting services - isn't good design. You shouldn't force a user to go to some other page to print the same data he sees on the screen. The data IS the report - if you can see it on the screen you should be able to print it on the paper without having to navigate to some other page. Think of the URL as the Dewey Decimal number for a piece of information. If you want to see the sales data for June, for instance, you might find it at http://mycompany.com/sales?fromdate=2007-06-01&todate=20...
Why should you have to navigate to a different URL to print that? Tim Berners-Lee's original ideas of the URL as the starting point for the semantic web seem rather good to me but I don't think there are many implementations which come close to recognizing the potential of this idea. Breaking a system into separate sections for reporting and viewing just seems a bit daft. But again, that's the sort of behavior .Net encourages - not requires, but encourages.
I think I misunderstood you there. You are right, from a "User Experience" perspective dividing up the web application's pages into sections for viewing and other sections for printing is probably not very good.

For some reason I thought you were talking about "Reports" and "Reporting" in general, as offered by the Report Viewer Controls in ASP.NET (using rdlc / rdl).

I have used CSS in the past to allow users to print pages (as they see it on the page) and it has worked well for me. Although Report Viewer Controls in ASP.NET have their own magical hold on the business users (Probably because they are made to look and feel similar to other Reporting Packages, which Business Users are comfortable with). So, I still think thats a good way to go, if that is your audience. :)

But, I do understand what you are saying and agree that there is the possibility of people using this technology where it shouldnt be used.
Magnify.net launches adshare network - share the revenue
Set up a Web Server Cluster in 5 Easy Steps A
Searchradar bumps google ads to show useful results.
The first stage in the acceptance of a new idea...
I don't think this is appropriate for hacker news. reddit.com is a better place for stuff like this.
Because if a "business" like hers work, imagine what us can do! :)
Oh, thank you.
Why do you think this?

The intention of Hacker News was not to combine Startup News and programming.reddit.com. I don't think there is any controversy about the relevance of pure science on this site.
The photo, with the awesome title of "Coder" is better than the story itself:

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-names29aug29_jng4hwkn,...
Maybe I'm just being extremely naive, but I think I could implement it based on the description given in the video and some experimentation. The elegance and simplicity of their algorithm as they described it in the video is pretty damn impressive.

My real question is how carefully they had to select the source images for that demo. How well does that algorithm work on any random image?
Pricing domain name?
Hi there,

I was wondering if anyone had a clue on how to put a price tag on a domain name.

I am not really doing anything anymore with ieforge.com and wonder it is worth anything. I realize it is a question of offer and demand i.e. someone willing to do something with it but is there an empirical way to assess such a value to have an idea (selling bellow that price would be stupid, reserve price, ...).

PR: 6

Google Analytics gives ...
Visits (last 30 days): 7500
Pageviews ( " ): 12 750

Inline Search downloads (since beginning of August): 5 500

Thanks,

EuGeNe
New gmail video (passing the gmail icon among people)
This post is in Spanish but you can see the video.
Looking good...

Update:
I found it in techcrunch also:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/08/28/what-do-you-get-when-yo...
I found it also in TechCrunch
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/08/28/what-do-you-get-when-yo...
I am a little frustrated by the ability to not vote things down (hence the need to make a negative comment).

Also, I have no idea why I commented on this story. I must have had mouse parallax error and clicked on the wrong one. I was outside in the sun (at a cafe) and there was a bit of glare, but it definitely was NOT this story that I intended to comment on.
When I realized that it's difficult to find places to work where you're not working for a fking moron. I want to make cool things and work with people who don't suck. I don't really care if that means a startup, but things certainly seem to point in that direction.
i believe the etiquette is a discreet click of the up arrow, perhaps a wry smirk at your screen, then move along, nothing to see here...
I would say Viaweb and/or Vermeer purely because there is so much information about them.
a case can be made that advertising at the correct moment in time for a particular individual is information. you want a new mattress, open the pipe, mattresses galore, buy, close pipe.
the key is to figure out the when and the personalisation, search is the first to get close to it (and it's still not perfect - the next thing i'd like to see is trimming but i assume that'll take that semantic web thing i keep hearing about)
success is being able to do what you want: if he's an image-geek, working with the premier image software company might be a real plus for him/her. i don't see many people hassling norvig for be 'hired' by google...
Apple now sells more than one in six laptops in U.S.
GWT 1.4 release and out of beta
An oldie but a goodie. Has a bit of open source myth in it though. He kind of believes that it magically congeals out of the ether, rather then by frequent (and paid for) hard work of hackers and engineers in a deliberate fashion.
You might want to try this guy. He has no shortage of capital and seems to be moving his company in that direction:

http://www.stanford.edu/class/ee380/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D._E._Shaw_%26_Co.
Sorry, click on the 'new architectures for a new biology' on that Stanford link. It only gave me the root url.
R6RS Ratified (Let the complaining begin)
HackrTrackr now has area based forums for Y Combinator Readers
Phanthoms in the Brain
I also recommend the book of the same title as this lecture. Very good read.
I posted a bug to brad. Anyone having the same trouble? ~ http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/1264094177/
We're using .net, which has worked out good for us. Yes, the default settings are designed to lower the bar for IT shops to build apps easily. If you know what you're doing, you can avoid the muck and get right to the extensive and powerful features.

Our configuration....

- Lots of JS, homegrown ajax framework that extends YUI

- asp.net but with custom controls that we wrote

- custom http handlers take care of the call backs

- deployed on apache with mod_mono. mysql db
Idea: if we've already specified our location, give us a link to our "home area" forum on the homepage, rather than making us browse the map (which is starting to get crowded!).

Also, is it possible to enable mousewheel zoom on the google map? I find that a really convenient way to zero in on an area of the map.

also, byrneseyeview and I are both listed twice in NY..
Gradients from 2D images are easy. The surprise was that this was the only transform needed to get the information content.

Dynamic programming over a 2D array is a pretty standard optimization -- here used to find the seams.

Extracting a seam is trivial.

The hard part for me would be doing this in JavaScript to make it a nice addition to page layout, and that's only because I haven't learned enough yet.

I suppose he might have a patent. I hate the patent system.
For Web2.0, this issue is quickly becoming unimportant. It only takes 1 or 2 people and a couple of computers to build something earth shattering. By the time you need capital, you should be at least 6 months ahead of any potential competition. If not, go back and code some more.
If You Can't Beat Em, Join Digg
What Makes Twitter Twitter?
Here's a work in progress of mine that uses long polling and keep-alives.

http://www.zchatter.com

It works quite well.. pretty much like having a conventional tcp/ip connection for receives, (interlaced with HTTP traffic), and using a separate series of POST requests to send data to the server.
That was quick.. RC2 just came out last week! Google never ceases to amaze me..
Yes, I work in image processing, but there are many of people with the requisite level of knowledge.
All spoken here do not understand .Net enough. I worked for tagworld.com and this web project is "quite" big. Viewstate and drag'n'drops and the like are nowhere used.

.Net is NOT for web sites, it is for web projects, really big and heterogeneous, with lots of services behind.

For other please use php and the like, with "quick submit to db" approach.
Firebug's Javascript Debugging Can Cause Sites To Seem Unusually Slow
I just read about the 17 year old founder of whateverlife.com yesterday. That is a great story.
How Mubs launches a new project, "Every 5 Weeks"
Simple little websites like Facebook and Wikipedia seem to get by quite nicely with the quick and dirty PHP approach :-)
Why did your group even decide to use .Net at all? You seem to have avoided a lot of the traps of .Net by avoiding a lot of what actually comprises .Net. Are you running on Windows servers?
Seriously?

It's funny how hating myspace has become as popular as hating microsoft...

I'd like to see you make something "run" with that many users.
"The New New Thing" by Michael Lewis
This is my first ever compulsory blog post. I am taking a 'psychology of the internet' class at college that compels us to write a blog post about something Internet related each week.

The class policy is such that if you say anything offensive or untoward you automatically fail the class without warning or chance for appeal. This is a bit upsetting since the way things work, if I fail the class and drop below 12 credits (a full-time student) I am no longer covered by my family's health insurance. So if I, say, link to that JWZ post about sex or the Wikipedia article about DeCSS then potentially I don't have healthcare anymore.

For historical comparison, last semester at Cornell there were two classes with about 50-75 students total who were forced into compulsory blogging. This semester it is somewhere between 300-500. So this seems to be a trend that is taking off. Now instead of people writing about their cats out of love, they'll write about their cats out of fear :-)

But anyway, this is the reason why the post contains a slight non-sequitur toward the end. I ran up against the hard word limit and there was really no way around it. If I were blogging for myself then I would have simply finished up the post the next day. As it were, it was 3am so I really had no choice but to post. Hopefully it kind of makes sense though. heh.

For reference, you can see what everyone else wrote here: http://comm245blue.blogspot.com/
Mark Cuban in next "Dancing with the Stars"
What language are you using? How many lines of code did this take? How long? Who are you hosting with and what plan? Just curious...
There are a number of reasons.

- The server, db, and xml APIs are great

- We really love the c# language

- We're already experts with the technology

.net is more than just the default settings for asp.net. Using any platform "as-is" will get you into problems.

We essentially have our own framework, with .net as the foundation.

ps - We're deploying on linux with apache and mod_mono
How many users does MySpace "run" with, again?
Could you elaborate on what makes the tagworld.com project so "big"?

Edit: Also, I find it interesting that on a site so big (I mean MySpace, and thusly, on a site that should have a fair number of smart developers working on it), they have not changed the default IIS error message for something a little more site-specific and user friendly. To see what I mean, click the story's URL. :) Or is doing something like that deep voodoo on a robust web platform like .NET+IIS?
I feel kinda alone in my forum, do you think you could maybe fold Mississippi, Arkansas, Utah, Idaho, and South Dakota into the Wisconsin forum so I can have someone to talk to?
I get silent failure when I try to create a forum in MA.
Rumor: Google Phone Confirmed By HTC Insider
more than all yc projects combined ever(ballpark anyone?), 3x facebook etc etc but yeah it limps along...
Functional Fever
It seems like it would work a lot better for a picture of a beach than one of my living room. The resized image of the woman and the baby has screwed up anatomy (even after the face is fixed).
Actually, if you're reading this, you probably have better odds than that. A good fraction of the people who apply clearly have no idea how YC works or what we look for. If you're reading this comment you're probably over that threshold, at least.
Maybe there should be "virtual" forums, so you can define an area with all the selected state forums combined. Seems like it would be easy to do that, actually.
The Classic Typewriter Page
I'm guessing your estimates are correct enough. I doubt the user count for all YC projects exceeds 500,000, and according to http://forevergeek.com/articles/debunking_the_myspace_myth_o..., MySpace has at least 43 million, which by your math would mean that Facebook has around 14 million users. Having been a frequent MySpace user myself in the not-too-distant past (I'm 22, and I used it from age 18-20), I concur that there have been times in which MySpace "limped along". It was not uncommon to get multiple "application error" (for lack of a better term -- I don't know/remember what it's called under .NET) during a surfing session, or to encounter a page or profile that just would not load. I've since switched to Facebook, and in comparison, I've never had Facebook barf on me. This, to me, evidences either the dim-wittedness of MySpace's developers, or superiority of Facebook's web solution (http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.web.cache.memcached/3224) over what MySpace has chosen.

Note that I am not saying that PHP > .NET -- obviously on sites of this large scale, as has already been noted in the post's comments, using any technology "out of the box" is looking for trouble. What I mean to imply, however, is that perhaps for sites this big, .NET is the wrong thing. And, as the parent comment points, out, IIS certainly isn't helping things, though I don't think Apache would necessarily be a magic bullet. Craigslist, which does many megabytes of data transfer per minute, is considering switching to Lighttpd because Apache too heavyweight.

P.S. Sorry about the links -- I couldn't figure out how to link a text string to a URL. Can someone enlighten me?
Building a HouseTruck
| Obviously C#'s not en vogue

Eh, depends on who you talk to. I'd guess it's very much en vogue with web developers who are not so thrilled with the LAMP/OSS stack.
Either we have better odds, or we know exactly the reasons why we're unlikely to be accepted.
According to this (http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070820/media_nm/myspace_dc_2) MySpace is at about 61 million active, unique users while Facebook is at about 19 million. Also MySpace users spend more time on the site than Facebook uses, which I'm sure translates to more traffic per user.

As a very unscientific test, I just logged on to my Facebook account and my Myspace account and noted the following about my home pages:

Myspace
html size: 16.38kb
count of external .js files: 10
count of external .css files: 4
render mode: quirks
load time (time to reload, thus assuming most requests cached, average of 3): 3191ms
Facebook
html size: 5.35kb
count of external .js files: 27
count of external .css files: 25
render mode: standards
load time (time to reload, thus assuming most requests cached, average of 3): 3207ms

I was surprised the load times were so close. MySpace feels slower but that may be because pages frequently include external images and sound files.

I don't mean these comparisions to either trash or promote MySpace or Facebook; instead I think it's instructive to consider which benchmarks translate to the best user experience and what techniques contribute to the better set of numbers.
mousewheel zoom works for me but maybe he added in because of your suggestion...
How about forums by language?
I think a formatting cheatsheet would be quite useful. I was just commenting a few minutes ago, and I wanted to put some rather large URLs in my comment, but I couldn't figure out the markup to link a text string to the URL. (It's just occured to me that perhaps I should have just tried HTML. If that's the case, I'm stupid.)
Note that .net is essentially just a VM and set of APIs. There is nothing stopping someone from building site to service massive loads. The bottlenecks occur when .net is paired up with IIS, and various asp.net controls and ViewState.

For example, we use apache with mod_mono and write our own custom controls.
Sounds like a meta-forum. Or a virtual-virtual-forum.
So they are being conservative because they can only cash in on their momentum due to being so conservative...?
Cool project. Do you maintain a blocking server thread for each connected user (like TCP)? Any issues scaling when many users are simultaneously logged in?
Tutorial FTP: It's Easy as 1-2-3
Dealing with VCs: Negotiating the Option Pool
Plain old marketing -- Give the consumer something flattering to identify with. Like the car commercial I saw last night: "It takes a special kind of person to appreciate the <insert car name>. We call them 'Type A People'..." And of course, you want to consider yourself a Type A person (whatever that really means), and before you know it your brain has formulated the near-unconscious idea that if you get the car, you'll be (or move closer to being) a Type A person.
Does any ruby/rails IDE have breakpoints?
Breakpoints are HUGE for me, the ability to stop your program in mid stride and view, traverse, and manipulate data and variables ala keanu reeves in the matrix.
I haven't heard of compulsory blogging before. The link to your class page is kind of funny because there's so many "Hi!" and "First assignment" posts. It's an interesting alternative to normal essays because usually no one reads the assignment besides the TA. Now everyone can read your homework. Thanks for the context.
Couldn't the same argument ("just a VM and a set of APIs") be made for many programming languages, Web or otherwise? I'm not criticizing what you wrote, just trying to make sure I understand what you're saying.
Gary Dahl, "inventor" of the pet rock.

http://www.petsdo.com/blog/pet-rock-made-man-multi-millionai...
Paying Yourself During the Startup Phase
I just wanted to point out that ".net doesn't scale" is completely incorrect.
netbeans claims to. not played with them much.
This is awesome. Thanks. I wish there are more comments here though, especially from people who can offer a contrasting perspective.
Gotcha. I'm just arguing (mildly, 'cause the most .NET experience I have is a two-week project a couple years ago) that possibly .NET and friends is not the best choice for a massive site such as MySpace, at least if you are not prepared/qualified to completely reinvent the wheel (as you seem to have done). Then again, Facebook's solution seems pretty ad-hoc as well. Perhaps such wheel invention is inevitable.
RC2 = Release Candidate 2. GWT RC2 came out last Monday, and a just week later the 1.4.60 build becomes GA and GWT comes out of beta status. I was just commenting on how impressive the GWT team is at Google... Sorry for the confusion with my post.
I actually find reading your stuff more interesting because you're not what I think of/have a stereotype of as an "entrepreneur" - or at least you don't come across that way in your writing. I get more of a "hacker done good" impression, which is something I can relate to a lot more than "business guy".
McKinsey's new 'Exit Matrix' (when to leave your startup)
I understood what you said but don't see how that is impressive.
Gateway's trajectory from startup to PC giant to also-ran
In the 1980s, the small South Dakota business selling computers through catalogs was called Gateway 2000. In 1998, the "2000" no longer sounded as futuristic and the now gigantic company was renamed Gateway Inc.
I like this idea. For the purposes of a forum, you might want it to be more iconic (read: smaller), so maybe a really rough bar graph of like one bar per week over the past month or so. At that rough of a level, you can also easily push the generation to a weekly cron job (rather than trying to keep up with every new post).