skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Many large corporations are famous for keeping this type of tool under lock and key, but we think we stand to gain much more by collaborating with other smart companies and developers."

Is Facebook in some unique position to be releasing big parts of their infrastructure like that? Why don't companies do it more often?

Although this isn't the same thing as Ruby on Rails, and not to be overly cynical, but could this be a new form of community-building-based PR... in the sense that the goodwill/PR value of the FOSS community is worth more to Facebook than the value of keeping Thrift proprietary?
There is an issue if you paste from word ....
I thought that "discovered" was very ambiguous (was it intentional?)

I wanted to write something offbeat, like, "The Dawson City mayor stole cable TV for all its citizens in 1996" or "DNA-polymerase can synthesize 10000 nucleotides/second" (I can't find the actual number on the net, but it's crazy high)

I solved the problem by not applying at all.
There is great knowledge in the classics. Patterns of human nature always repeat. WhenI know the mind of the other person, I know who their allies are. I also know their team and the position they stand in. Now take this point of view and apply it in your software app. It is a paraphrase from Sunzi AoW Chapter 3.
Those who want to work for a startup (that has a great idea), has the aspiration to either make headlines or create history.
Team Collaborative Strategy that is above technology, distance and project culture.
Focus on the problem of a particular marketing niche
Explain the causes of it
Present your solution
(1) the origins of it
(2) the technical benefits
(3) general benefits in terms of global marketplace and how do you and your solution fit into the big picture.
Hey, props for being the only one trying to solve the usability problems inherent in today's computers.
http://www.jitterbug.com/

Jitterbug phones is a MVNO with a custom-made Samsung phone that is really just a phone.
maybe they are preparing us for the electronic paper
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_paper
The skill begins by defining the core points of the problem.
Then delineating the critical path to the core center of the problem.
Problem solving and trouble shooting are two skills many ppl lack.
Startup Meme: Topix Becomes a Socially Editable Online NewsPaper
Google Joins DoubleClick Bid
What project do you have in mind?
Will DRM die today?
If you read founders at work, sabeer bhatia of hotmail argues that DFJ claim they came up with the concept. I wonder if this is true :)
Startup Meme: The Empire of DRM is Falling, EMI First Soldier Down
hey i could use an invite too!.......
guyinblacktshirt@gmail.com

thanks in advance if you are reading this :)
Well - I took your advice aglarond and applied anyway. :)
Code generation...isn't that what macros are for?
"Groups that submit early have a slight advantage because we have more time to read their applications."

http://ycombinator.com/s2007.html
Startup Meme: Slashdot Tries to Clone Digg Once Again
One of my cofounders came up with our answer:

"In 2005, Matt discovered the best way to deal with Nigerian 413-scams on CraigsList: when someone offers thousands of dollars for your stereo via some phony money-wiring organization, just request a receiver-pays-shipping slip and FedEx them 40 pounds of bricks."
http://www.futuroscope.com/eng/attraction-cosmos.php

I had the chance while in France to visit Futuroscope by luck. When I found my self in this Cosmos attraction, a huge sphere room watching the universe as a spectator like you are among the stars, has caused me one of the most undescribable, fascinating feelings in my life.

I advice it highly, if you ever find your self in France, go to Futuroscope!
Most of the attractions are in AMAZING 3D!
Is there a common theme in the submitted YC apps? In other words, does YC get a good sense of what's brewing in the startup world?
I ask because I think it would be fascinating to just read through all the submissions!
Seth's Blog: Digital realities
Looking up at the nigkt sky has that effect on me too. What makes it worse is that whenever I mention it to anyone else they clearly don't understand why.
Isn't that a bad thing?
Not sure if it would ever appear among YC apps, but you could probably make a very appealing submission by devising a way to give eye massages from the computer monitor. :)
I am going fo RightCart. I argree that I can change later. Thanks for your feedback and ideas.
Venture Capital Deal Algebra
Roll your own MVNO
Startup Meme: April 2, The Day DRM Died and The King Rules On
Actually, I'm back to propose this very system. Takers welcomed! Or suggest your improvement.

Load YC apps into document reader. Put a timer in the page, and capture onclicks, onkeypresses, and onscrolls. Compute "stress level." When stress level high, dim screen, start swirling through various soft colors and natural scenery, and play embed sound file (in sexy voice of your choice):
"Close your eyes. Relax. You are happy. Your limbs, they feel deep, and tired. You're in a beach, the breez... zzz... zzz"
Detect snoring sound. Play sponsored embed sound file (in sexy voice of sponsors choice):
"You want to buy this. Now."
11 Page Report - Five Things Your Prospect Wants To Know Before They Will Purchase From You
By "others in this space" you're talking about Adobe Apollo and Microsoft WPF, right? Do you guys have an edge other than just having more apps at launch?
EMI, Apple To Sell DRM-Free Music for $1.29/song
I am fairly certain that telling me the test was going to compare me with Y Combinator startup founders affected what was going on in my brain when I decided what images to pick. I'd do the test differently under different conditions.
Startup Meme: Ballhype is a Digg Clone for Sports Fans
Python doesn't feel like a functional language (and Paul is blamed for making author want it to)
Vervet monkeys have three main predators, and can alert the rest of their group to the presence of each. The rest of the group responds appropriately to the type of call given. If, for example, a monkey gives a loud, barking call, signifying the approach of a leopard, the other monkeys run to the trees.
python_kiss wrote, "Images of galaxy clusters always sadden me. Our insignificance in the Universe is laughable".

Only if you do not know what the purpose of life is.
http://juwo.blogspot.com/2006/12/what-is-purpose-of-life.html
I'd have to say that currently Y is considered a "brand" now with Mike constantly mentioning the companies on his blog, Y with a strong community, and PG was the first to introduce this concept.

However,if an entrepreneur had the honor of being accepted into either Techstars or Y Combinator, I'm sure he/she would work their butt off not only for themselves but to represent the program he/she is in. Multiple players foster a very healthy competition.

We'll just have to wait and see which program selects the better "animal" entrepreneurs for this round. The success of a startup involves not only the people heading it, but a large part depends on the entrepreneur themselves and the ability to implement or create something useful. How very exciting!
Technically, this article does not conflict with Bhatia's account on p. 22 of Founders at Work. "It was actually Jack's idea to do that. We ran it by our VCs just to make sure it was OK. When you alter somebody's email, you've got to be very careful."

The article writes, "Tim Draper persuaded the company to include a promotional pitch for its Web-based email with a clickable URL in every outbound message sent by a Hotmail user."

According to Bhatia, Tim did persuade the founders that it was a good idea; it's just that the idea didn't originate with Tim.
I'm cringing inside because I wrote the most bland and uninteresting thing in the world.

I'm going to rewrite and resubmit by the deadline tonight, if that's alright.
RFC - Any good startup/tech video podcasts?
With my AppleTV only hours away from delivery I'm looking for some good tech or startup related video podcasts to enjoy in my living room. Anyone have any good ideas?
Project Agape = Friendster + Facebook?
Brett, I've seen participation and preference multiples in term sheets from Tier 1 investors. It all depends on the deal, the stage, and the environment. It's definitely not a bad sign for an entrepreneur, it's just all dependent on what kind of market you're in and what the demand for the deal is from other investors. Having said this, participation was classicly an "east coast" deal term so you'd probably still expect to see it more from new york/boston investors than from west coast investors. I think that's still accurate.
This guy is a senior lecturer at Sloan, called his point "the reality" and even underlined it. You gotta admit when you're beat, pg.

Next you'll be saying founders' primary concern is whether the startup will survive, when the reality is that equity allocation is their primary concern. It's right there in the article.
Luis von Ahn's PhD thesis on Human Computation (a must read!)
How is equity distributed in a startup?
Chris Okasaki's PhD thesis on purely functional data structures (pdf)
I'm not sure how equity works if I have a co-founder and I'm giving him "15%." Is this in stock? Or is this annual revenues? Or am I the one who decides? What's typical?

I'm not studying finance at college right now, so keep that in mind. Any sites that might explain this would be helpful. Thanks
I suggest you read Paul's essay on this topic:

http://www.paulgraham.com/startupfunding.html
Blake and Joe are nice guys; I would recommend this job to anyone. And if you do end up employee #3 of Parakey, you'll be in a pretty enviable position.
Calacanis interviews Evan Williams about twitter (podcast)
I couldn't think of anything that didn't sound trite when I first filled out the form, so I left it blank and decided to come back to it later.

(As far as I'm concerned it's a long shot. I don't think my idea and my goals for my business line up that well with what YC is really looking for, based on what they've done in the past. So I filled out the form more for myself than for them.)

But then I thought of the best answer to that question -- the most personally meaningful thing I've discovered, something that I don't think anyone else has ever noticed -- over the weekend, and only realized this morning that the deadline had whooshed right by while I was sleeping.

Oops.
Oops. Teach me to post before reading all the threads.... I thought the deadline was last night, not tonight.
This is an awesome opportunity. Too bad I already have a job for the summer. I would love the chance to work with these guys.
go read kul's article, he beat me to this one :P
Thats a great idea!
My wife and I discussed my reasons for starting a startup and she is being very supportive from the outset, but sometimes gets frustrated that I don't "communicate my feelings" very well. She hardly sees me and doesn't have a clue about computers whereas I'm excited, stressed, anxious, and so focused on technical things for 12 hours a day, I sometimes struggle with the "How was your day darling?" type conversation in the evening.
Without sounding trite, communication is vital in a marriage so working on a startup shouldn't be different to any other important decision you make.
I'll take this involvment on board - thanks a lot...
The deadline is yet to arrive. is you mesage from the future?
Actually, I think the concept underlying Tisp is a good idea. Not for ISP which seems facile, but for a network alternative to WiFi/Telco and Cable.

I actually think it is futuristic. Those millions of miles of readily available "cables" in every country with plumbing. Actually I am REALLY EXCITED even though the idea flows with sh1t (yuck!).

Have people experimented with bots to crawl the sewers?

Just think of it. Suppose it turns out that the wireless router in my home, and the local cell phone tower is irradiating my DNA and harming it. Then an idea like this coupled with advances in nanotechnology will really take off.

You could even transport food through this pipeline!
:D

-
Anil Philip
David Sternberg writes in his book, "How to Complete and Survive a Doctoral Dissertation," that the right reason to pursue a doctorate is a deep interest in your discipline, along with the intention to work professionally in it upon completion. I recommend this book to anyone having first or second thoughts about pursuing a Ph.D.

Social isolation helps if your intention is to get work done. In the words of the poet:

"Startups must be pursued for their own sake

and never to impress potential mates."
The company will have to give up 6% of the new startup regardless of which idea it implements eventually; so how is it different?
Can't read the article but it sounds interesting
DHH: we're already overloaded with connectivity
Top Twenty Sites: Most Downtime
Is there really a market for MVNOs like this? It seems to me like a lot of overhead for getting essentially the same services as you would with a large carrier.
Whither professionalism in our profession?
I'll say.
Targeted real-time ads reach downloaded content
Wait wait, myspace alone was down for way more than an hour. Often at least one of its services is down. Same for many of the other top sites.

They must be more thorough with their measurements.
Angel Market Grows 10% in 2006
A HUGE chunk of motivation for a startup comes from working on YOUR thing knowing YOU own bulk of it. As soon as it is a corporation-powered thing you are an employee before anything and for me that is a huge turn-off.

What's wrong with the current model? If a company really likes smething after 3 months of YComb deveopment, it can grab that company for few mil and build on it however it wants.
I mentioned the discovery of a hypergeometric combinatorial enumeration formula with a useful decomposition that could be used to find a limit probability distribution for the objects I was enumerating. I edited out the following: Richard Stanley had previously derived a rational generating function for enumerating the almost-injective functions, however, I could find no obvious way to manipulate this to obtain the limit probability distribution, nor did it suggest the decomposition of a non-machine summable formula into machine summable, asymptotically significant and non-machine-summable, asymptotically insignificant parts. The two-term formula was obtained by classifying the almost-injective functions using a regular grammar; the closed term arose from a sub-language closed under concatenation. Computer experiments suggest that a class of enumeration problems arising from regular monoids have closed form hypergeometric enumeration formulas.

Finding an algorithm for computing closed forms of indefinite binomial coefficient sums was an open problem in Knuth's Art of Programming; it was solved by Wilf and Zeilberger. In the example I considered, there is no closed form solution; however there is a way of finding a decomposition of the sum with good properties. Finding the asymptotically significant term required an idea: the point is that the algorithms I used don't help you find this. One of those algorithms I used was due to R. W. Gosper, a legendary hacker.
You really don't want to "become" a programmer
Well, Paul might deserve a bit of the blame. He's written a code snippet or two of "Lisp in Python" -- unpythonic code that mimics the way Lisp does it, because he likes Lisp.

See: http://www.prescod.net/python/IsPythonLisp.html
Oh, yay, DHH. The same guy who insists that you never need a multiple-column primary key.

I currently work for a company (yeah, yeah; the startup is gonna be next year, once I graduate) that produces software for health care agencies. We're writing the next version of our app in Rails, but the problem is that a significant number of our customers need to be able to use the app out in the boonies. Out where if they're lucky, they have _analog_ cell phone service.

There is a real need for offline capability for webapps; you just don't see it when you keep your eyes on 37Signals-type apps.
He's wrong about he offline app, but he's bang on with the multiple column key. That has caused nothing but heartache for me.
Also available in extended dead-tree form: http://www.amazon.com/Purely-Functional-Structures-Chris-Okasaki/dp/0521663504

I highly recommend the book if you're implementing or using a functional programming language. There're lots of data structures that aren't mentioned at all in traditional imperative-language textbooks. Some of them even have decent performance.
What the author means, is that Python does not feel like Lisp. It's true, but it doesn't make Python any less able to support FP. I code strictly FP for my work (science does not have state), and Python suits me fine in that regard.
Video on the psychology of success, two mindsets
The "test case" of DRM-free stuff that I'm most familiar with is Baen Books, who are selling DRM-free e-book versions of (almost) all their titles and -- according to themselves and their authors who are also have books published by other publishers -- "[earn] more income as a publisher and [pay their] authors more in the way of royalty payments from [their e-book line] than any other outlet for electronic books." Based on this, it seems likely to me that the EMI/iTunes experiment is going to deliver on its promise of making more money for EMI.

http://preview.baens-universe.com/articles/auged
http://preview.baens-universe.com/articles/salvos6

Of course, it's a different medium, and Baen has also managed to create a community of users who like the company, not just its products. I don't see EMI replicating that, DRM-free music or no, which limits the applicability of the example. (The Baen people love telling the story of their users saying, "you should charge more for this." They created a premium version where you pay more to read an advance copy of the book before the official release date, and they're making money from that, too.)
Sounds like a great opportunity to work with some well known hackers.
Compete releases two new kinds of analytics
That's less useful for those of us who don't believe in a creator.
It looks like they've reimplemented CORBA.

Their implementation doesn't look all that bad - it's at least reasonably simple, unlike CORBA. But I think I'll stick with JSON-RPC, because it's transparent, open, simple, and available for just about every language imaginable.
Web 2.0 is vulnerable to attack (nasty AJAX/JSON exploit)
I disagree. See http://spyced.blogspot.com/2006/07/single-column-primary-keys-should-be.html

Particularly the three-part series.

Multiple-columns can be hard to deal with. But duplicate rows because you're using an autoincrement integer as your pk are also a pain in the ass. Measure twice, cut once.
It would be fun to take bets on which of the 12 toolkits will fix the vulnerability first.
I think if we had true multi-line anonymous functions we'd be in better shape. Better support for closures also I guess. Still learning Lisp as well as I knew it back in school so I'll have to decide later if macros would be a good thing to have in Python.
Legal Docs/Resources for setting up new company
There is a real need for offline capability for webapps; you just don't see it when you keep your eyes on 37Signals-type apps.

What kind of apps do you think are more suited for this? Just curious.
I think people in general are missing the point about rich-client web-apps. It is NOT about offline access, but about leveraging web-app skills (HTML, Javascript) to access hardware resources that otherwise would be blocked by the browser.

Web-based apps and RIA are here to stay, but there's still space for client-side apps. Example: Skype and iTunes.
I think its always dangerous to make overarching statements that are meant encompass a whole category of applications. (this goes for multi-column keys too..)

I have found myself many times with my laptop in my car but unable to check my work's webmail to double check my calender because I'm offline.

Just to expand a bit I think its necessary for anyone building a webapp to look at how and why people need to access their app and develop accordingly.
What does this even mean? It sounds like something for the Enterprise Market.
Well, as I said, my company's app needs it. And if you follow the link to DHH's site, you see many people in the comments talking about their apps that need offline support; companies working with Australian ag businesses, for example.

Another thing might be 30Boxes or whatever favorite calendar app you have. Sure, you can sync the feed to iCal, but you can't do everything off a feed.
Ooooh, unfortunate name. My wife deals with a lot of pharmaceutical names, so we've come up with the 13-year-old boy test for product names. If your product / service / company name would make a 13 year old boy snicker, then find another name.
A primary key is really just the combination of the unique and not-null constraints. My preferred way of handling this is to have a surrogate key as the primary key (for performance and general ease-of-use), but also apply multi-column unique constraints on the natural key to enforce data integrity. The main place where I don't use a surrogate key is for many-to-many join tables (which I think is the common practice).
I got rejected by Google - woe is me
A Non-Blocking Hash Table
Innovative search engine, recently launched
Highrise public contact cards: From idea to launch in 48 hours
Does YouTube Really Have Legal Problems?  How the Bell lobby helped midwife YouTube.
How much of my company should I give away?
I have a startup (A) that is about to launch a product. I am the only founder. I have 2 friends that have a brilliant idea for a startup (B) and they are going to start working on it soon. They think my startup is an ok idea. They want 20% each of my startup (A) [I have to give up 40%] and they will give me 20% of their new startup(B)

Is this a fair deal?
One of my student assistants got a Google internship this summer. They asked him how to clean a coffee maker.
Lefsetz Letter - Apple/EMI/DRM - "Why the fuck should they cost more?"
New Web 2.0 Links For The New Week
Company unindexed by Google, responds by releasing product into public domain
Honestly I don't think anyone can give you good advice not knowing much about startup A and B.

In most innocent sense it doesn't make sense why you would give up 40% for their 20%. Not that this means much without knowing any detail about what level each startup is in.

Ask yourself if their company is worth twice yours right now. You would know better.
How to Hack Venture Capital
Vator.tv - It's YouTube for Start-Ups
I am going to have to give up some. I think their idea is a brillaint one. Also I really need some co-founders. I have been going at it by myself and we all know what PG things of that...
I especially like their "since persian calendar 1386" tagline.
That's great. I've been waiting for a good application of timelines to make it on the net. There was some crummy one a year ago, I think. This is pretty cool.

But... I wouldn't quite call it a search engine.
A good source on the economic harm of intellectual property law is the Against Monopoly blog http://www.againstmonopoly.org. Today's lead article mentions the EMI/Apple deal. Economist David K. Levine writes, "It will be interesting to see how many people buy the DRM version and remove it themselves."
Tips to prepare yourself for Bust 2.0
Hmm.. Why not just post your business pitch on YouTube and reach a wider audience? Just curious how this site can bring anything unique to the already full YouTube table. There seems to be a lot of video posting/hosting sites that think success can be had by claiming support for a niche market when there is really little new functionality there to truly differentiate.

Best of luck to them though. The basic idea is great for the group here.
Facebook Diaries goes live
I love this site; it's about the only one I check daily. But I usually just lurk :)
i-Lighter: a new competitor for Clipmarks and Google Notebook
"Do you have any ideas you consider patentable?"