skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They have a paid advertising feature where ads are also "stumbles" with only a subtle indicator that the stumble is sponsored. So it's less likely that people will immediately dismiss the site because it is an ad.
I can't tell if I'm joking either. Phil Greenspun does advocate the "great programmers can use any language" way. My life situation is such that I can't really afford to take a more difficult route just to show off.
$4,824.14. The total cost of the legal fees was $4,824.14.

(???)

The only reason Truemors is getting so much coverage is that its Guys site.

Too bad it's worthless. If he actually made something new and/or innovative, his celebrity would actually be put to good use.
news.yc really needs the ability to add a descriptive sticky first comment along with a URL otherwise the RSS feed, and this page, has bugger all on it to know whether to click on the link or not. Yes, this is already on the Feature Requests page. I'm just letting off steam.
LLVM is outstanding, but little known. One example, a C program that uses a malloc-per-node linked list implementation might be compiled into an executable that uses an array, saving the space occupied by the pointers, and improving locality, because LLVM can analyse the whole program.

http://llvm.org/pubs/2005-06-12-MSP-PointerComp.html

http://llvm.org/pubs/2005-05-21-PLDI-PoolAlloc.html
tongue in cheek What you really mean is there are too many bad ones out there, and that I can agree with.

A to-do list is a basic list; a truly GTD centric system hasn't been created yet. Some people have added the words GTD to their ideas but in reality looking through commentary (and using them), most of those applications fall way short of the intended goals.

I've yet to see a funded, well built team, with UI, IA, and mobile experts assembled to do battle on the front. Thus far it's been very small part-time teams doing what they do to scratch their basic itch.

This will be an interesting project to see what fruits.
OK, interesting, buuuuut... How much shopping news will customers endure on their cell phones? Why not just sign up for the bargain feeds in your old and trusted RSS Reader? I am just not sure that there is a huge business opportunity lurking around the corner. Except for one thing: targeting Twitter users, they might be a special bunch who can't resist to buy everything that is pushed at them...
iPhone Release Date Is June 29
Perhaps it's worthless in its current implementation or intended domain. I wouldn't write off the idea so quickly though. A lot of how humans get their news is through gossip from their trusted network of informants. Truemors did away with the trusted network to rely on global voting. I'm not sure this is the way to go.

Well, just because you're a celebrity doesn't mean you can't fail. You just fail bigger.
I have nothing against GK but also can't understand this amount
One Contextual relevant advert per day might be ok though...
I think the problem is still that there isn't really a clear definition of general intelligence or how it should be embodied on a computer. I agree that putting a bunch of different algorithms for different tasks in a box won't create something people would be willing to call general intelligence, but what do you expect a general purpose intelligence algorithm to do exactly? That is, if I handed you one, how would you test it? What are the inputs and outputs?

Don't get me wrong, I'd love to create a general artificial intelligence. It's just not clear to me what that means. In the absence of a good definition of the general problem, I think it's perfectly reasonable to pick an extremely hard specific problem (like visual object recognition), and focus on that, under the assumption that in order to completely solve this specific problem you will end up solving the (undefined) general problem.

"A "true AI" would discover regularities [2], or patterns, in any search space, and exploit these patterns to incrementally improve its ability to navigate the search space." -- Actually this sounds like Eurisko, a heuristic search program that modifies it's own heuristics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurisko

Also, it's worth pointing out that the different techniques used in different subfields of AI are not always that different. There has been some work in creating very general powerful frameworks that explain a lot of specific algorithms, like Markov logic networks http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markov_logic_network which are sufficiently powerful that they subsume all of logic and statistical graphical models (which is to say maybe 90% of all recent machine learning algorithms). With these sorts of general frameworks new algorithms and approaches in one subfield get ported over to other subfields, and there is more interaction then you might think.
Scalability and Performance are the Least of your Worries
Thanks for posting this. I have to keep reminding myself that a "web 2.0" site isn't the only kind of viable web site. There are lots of sites that have lots of visitors that are still firmly rooted in web 1.0 style.
Mahalo Director gives an interesting glimpse into the startup life
Random question, when does one need to incorporate? I'm building an app slowly and only have a few $10s to spend every month. Clearly, I can not afford extra expenditures.

My friends will see a private beta, and then I'd like to start looking for some funding. Will I need to be incorporated before that point?
From what I understand, you don't necessarily have to be incorporated to seek funding. That would happen as a matter of course if you got a deal.

The main reason to incorporate or LLC is to protect yourself from legal liability. If someone sues you, you want to protect your personal assets from being part of that lawsuit. If you're not even going to be live, then you may not have anything to worry about.
Yeah, everyone please go contribute code to LLVM! LLVM is very pleasant to hack on with a genuinely clean design, unlike GCC, which is just a big nasty mess. Hacking on LLVM is fun, hacking on GCC is a chore.

"Reload is the GCC equivalent of Satan." http://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/reload

GCC's internal garbage collector. Yes, they really wrote a garbage collector for a C app, and dealing with it is just as pleasant as you'd imagine. http://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/Memory_management
$4,824.14. The total cost of the legal fees was $4,824.14. I could have used my uncle the divorce lawyer and saved a few bucks, but that would have been short sighted if Truemors ever becomes worth something.

Why?? I have yet to completely understand this. PG, in one of his essays, also says that you should go and pay an expensive lawyer rather than use an incoporating service. Why?

Is there something The Company Corporation is doing wrong that a high-price lawyer would do right? Maybe I don't understand something, but all you're doing is filing some standard legal documents, right?

What is there to do so wrong? $4,824.14? Really?

IANAL obviously. I wish lawyers hung out here. Does anyone have any insight?
$1,115.05. I spent $1,115.05 registering domains. I could have used GoDaddy and done it a lot cheaper, but I was too stupid and lazy.

I don't understand this part (either). First of all, 55 domains is way overkill. Maybe some of the country-coded TLDs are worth it if you're really going to do, say, a German-language Truemors.

Ok, so even then, 55 x $6.95 =~ $385. (GoDaddy does $6.95 domains with discount codes. There are scores of discount codes out there. Use CHILL3, for instance.) I can understand being a little lazy, but $700 lazy? Even if you're rich, 700 bucks is 700 bucks.

If it was me: F the country codes. Register .com, .org, .net, .us, .info, .biz. And you're done -- in fact, you're beyond done. You don't really need that crap at all. You need some SEO instead, perhaps.
Removing the Login Barrier
Shane Legg and Marcus Hutter of IDSIA did some recent work on a metric for machine intelligence. ( http://www.vetta.org/documents/ui_benelearn.pdf ) Marcus Hutter's PhD thesis produced a theory of "Universal Artificial Intelligence" called "AIXI" based on Solomonoff induction. Sadly, AIXI is incomputable, and the time and space bounded version "AIXItl" is still impractical. http://www.hutter1.net/ai/aixigentle.htm

But you're right: we don't know much about intelligence nor how it should be embodied on a computer. This is why we should encourage some really smart people to focus on the problem! I sincerely think this is an area that would yield to research. Might take a long time and a lot of brainpower though...

Lenat's Eurisko is pretty cool, and I don't know much about it, but it doesn't sound like Eurisko is as general as is needed.
Interesting but Mandelbrot is a specific math process. I'd be more impressed if a large application with network I/O, disk I/O, threading, etc was proven to be faster in Java than in C.
Five Reasons More Women Should Start Web 2.0 Startups
I'm interested, what bearing does our use of Rails have on whether the product is useful? If we had used Java, PHP, or Python would it really be different?

If the argument is just that there are too many web services for managing your to-do list, I might agree--we analyzed them all when writing our business plan. But, the reality is that none of them scratch our itch. And it's not that we're perfectionists; I've never met anyone who's passionately in love with their online to-do list. We intend to change that.
9 Great Ways to Make Mind Maps and Flow Charts Online
Promote Your Company With Australian Business News
I'm kind of amazed, as are other people in the naysayer category have been, that Twitter had taken off as it has. At its basic form, it's just passing back and forth messages, a problem seemingly solved by email decades ago. However, twitter obvious is not a question of the underlying technology, but rather, how it is presented to and used by people. It's gotten people use to the idea of instant self-expression, no matter how inane--for better or worse. I would have chalked it up for sensors to monitor and log ourselves, but twitter demonstrated that people will report or say anything if there's an audience. Perhaps trolls have already paved the way in this regard.

That said, I think it's easy to write Twitter off as a fad, since the world's largest collection of quips doesn't quite seem to make the world a better place. My guess is that there's probably value in Twitter, but only when it's married with other sorts of data or text processing. Just off the top of my head, geospatial data and emotion detection algorithm on twitter data could generate a heat map of how people are feeling place to place, or time to time. I imagine advertisers would find this information valuable, since they can set up targeted advertising when people are statistically most vulnerable to impulse buying at a certain time or place.

If twitter can manage an API or platform to support this sort of thing, they'll be around for a while, I think. If not, well, at least we'd have the largest collection of quips for the archaeologists of the 22nd century.
Stock options means you have the option to buy the stock at a discount rate. Whether you're fired or not the only way to act on your options if you have to buy them first.
New startup uses referring urls from google searches (click first result)
Well, maybe you'll succeed where others have failed, I sincerely wish you good fortune.

However, it just seems to be a space that a lot of people have tried. A lot of the apps aren't very good, true, but others are, and it shows signs that it's heading towards being a commodity, along the lines of web mail. To do something people will pay for, it's got to be head and shoulders above the competition, and be seriously useful to companies.

http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=17662

And there's nothing wrong with Rails at all - quite the contrary - I use it extensively myself, and absolutely love it. Just that a lot of people, myself included, seem to end up making a todo list app with it.
It is my observation that many of the young people who boast about age are gleefully unaware of the horrible failure rate of young, (under 30), entrepreneurs. Many point out the brilliant successes, without mentioning the 100 other young entrepreneurs that failed in the same space. The numbers bare out the indisputable fact that older entrepreneurs will fail less often than younger entrepreneurs. In fact the statistical variance in the success rate is so large that wise VCs and angels actually use age in their models.

For instance, if we are advising angels who are want to dabble, but are at heart risk averse, we do swing them over to that 38 year old guy with the new molecular imaging startup. On the other hand when we are advising VCs and angels that are more than just old ladies' investment clubs, we do steer them to the kids. This should not come as a surprise to people.

It would be a mistake for young people to think that they are better suited to creating successful startups. They are not. They are better suited to creating MORE startups, of a decidedly lower quality. The older entrepreneur in my illustration will show better judgment at every step of the game when compared to a younger entrepreneur.

That includes the first step . . . choosing to create a molecular imaging startup instead of a web 2.0 startup that anyone can copy.
Particletree - Pitching Ideas Roundup
Yipes, it gets worse. Go here afterward, and it's still telling you about that search:

http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2007/06/03/shut_up_about_t.html
How to design your website with style - by Kurt Vonnegut :)
Interesting juxtaposition of this post (at #4 on news.yc currently) versus the In Silicon Valley, the Crash Seems Like Just Yesterday post (at #3 on news.yc currently), because of this quote from the crash article:

"A lot of froth, especially if you mix in a lot of inexperienced people, that's a bad thing."
I'd love to get some insight on this as well. I've started (and sold) two companies that were incorporated with a cheap-o incorporating service... Did I just get lucky?
I'm surprised he's proud of any one of those points, let alone all of them. But I think the true reason behind writing the article is to convince his readers, as well as himself, that he's doing this just to see what happens.
The New Rules of Public Speaking
I have tried to address (a) and (b) with more info in the yellow box.

Could you be more specific about (c)?
If Amazon required every new customer to login before they could view their selection of products starting tomorrow, the anger expressed by the blogger would be understandable. However, in this case, it is entirely the intensity level of the blogger that is outrageous, not the incompetence he perceives with facebook.com.
wake up...part 2 is up
http://www.gobignetwork.com/wil/2007/6/1/you-only-need-to-build-a-3-million-company-part-2/10162/view.aspx
How to pitch an idea
Salesforce Is Acquisition Bait
400 dollars, for that logo?!

If anything, he could've saved an extra $1000 at least, giving me a bit more hope as I start my venture.
Am I missing something? I'm confused.
Fred is a really cool guy. Talked to him about my company 2 months ago.
I've started (and sold) two companies that were incorporated with a cheap-o incorporating service

Wow! That's good to know, thx. The buyers didn't have a problem with the incorporation details? Did the issue come up at all?
A discerning feature of startups is that you don't have someone else telling you what to do. Where else would women be on a more equal footing with men?

More interesting would be a (non-charged) list of reasons as to what prevents women from entering startups.
Ah, I see. Maybe TC underplayed this feature because no such systems have been effective before(?)
If you click on the first link in the Google search results, which leads you to D Cowan's blog, and wait for the page to load fully, you'll see a box from a co called lijit at the top of the page that uses the search terms from the referring url.
When is it time to give up on your web startup?
Assuming you just can't get any traction (more than 10,000 users) after a year, would you give up?
so what's new?
I assume you're referring to your own startup, and if so, I'd like to know the url.
7 Tips to Kick Ass at Technical Outsourcing
TechCrunch Database and Startup Search
Not enough axes to make such a decision. What was your break even number, what was your monetization strategy, what was not working with your marketing strategy, what things did you implement around mid-year that didn't work...

Death of a startup is due to cumulative losses, not one factor. If you'd like to build a better scenario I'll throw some change in. ;)
I wouldn't give up until you've tried everything you possibly can to make it a success.
How does ebay fit into it? I see the CL part on OLX
You hit my biggest problem with the idea: Gossip already spreads better among networks of people who care. It's not some concept I can just go to a page for. So the topic of the content is not a value add.

As for the technology, we've seen how cheap and reproducible that is. News.yc, Reddit, Digg, Netscape, and dozens of other sites have technology that probably beats that of Truemors. So the company isn't worth buying for that.

Some companies get bought for their employees. Well, Guy's "1.5" employees, if he's talking about a full-timer and part-timer other than himself, aren't visionaries, they're just people who can turn around one of Guy's ideas. Come to think of it, that makes them better potential hires for a big company than most headstrong, visionary startuppers.

So Guy just spent $12k making himself feel good. By doing so, he demonstrated how detached he is from the real world -- which, psychologically speaking, is a fine way to live. If you're like Guy and you can afford to blow $12,000 doing it.
I don't know much about online advertising, but I would've thought this technique would be more common.

What would be neat is if it came back with ads for say, kool-aid.

...fund me?
Don't give up. Morph it and make it simpler...IE. Implement a subset of what you want to do.
Startups are an ideal environment for merit based working relationships.

any ideas on the suggested topic: what prevents women from entering startups?
Interview with Craigslist
This is a very important question, and I'm glad to see it discussed. Any idiot can run something into the ground, but the tricky thing is to know when to give up and try something new. Do it too soon, and maybe you didn't really do all you could. Too late, and you look "bull-headed", rather than the more flattering label "persistent" that gets applied to successful startups.
Viable Threat to Google Adwords Emerges
Need more data. What type of service? What type of users? Having 9,000 enterprise customers is HUGE. Having 9,000 small biz owners is GOOD. Having 9,000 12 year old gamer-kids is not all that good. How indispensable is your service to your users? How fierce is your competition? How much do you still love your idea? How improvable is it?

Might want the check out "The Dip: Knowing when to Quit and When to Stick" by Seth Godin...
All the companies rage about developers and third party development, but it looks like Yahoo might actually step up and open up their system when Google is keep a closed shop.
Oh, and for all the people who say "never give up", that's terrible advice. :-)
nothing as usually. you can post 10 announcements a day here. nobody wants to join :) it is as I said, cofounder is needle in haystack.
Don't give up before the end of second year!
I don't understand why everyone is so critical of what Guy has done and the steps he has taken to accomplish it.

I am not a big fan of Truemors, but I really enjoyed reading about what he spent and the things he did to get it off of the ground.
About damn time. It's not like adwords has some of the attributes that certain markets exhibit, making competition very difficult:

- Vendor lock-in - it's easy to swap out one set of ads for another.

- Positive network externalities - there aren't (big) network effects involved in ads.

Sure, there are some scaling issues, and some issues with regards to determining what the page is 'about', but those don't seem like insurmountable problems for reasonably large companies to deal with.
BBC NEWS | Business | Fakes are 'worth at least $200bn'
Skimming the article, I don't see how it's feasible to ethically engineer a "human equivalent intelligence".

The author talks about engineering a toddler level intelligence, the reasoning being that the toddler program would not be capable of figuring out a way to "escape" its box and getting into mischief that humans would be unable to control or prevent.

But the thought of "turning off" a toddler equivalent makes me queasy. Will the toddler think it is a person? What an awful, worse-than-Truman's-World-nightmare it would be for that "toddler" to find out the truth. Could we ethically "turn off" such a program?

Even if it knows that it is not human, if it is truly equivalent to a toddler it is almost certain to introduce some kind of ethical quandries we cannot possibly predict before the program actually exists. I do not see any safe way to pursue this project and successfully avoid ethical landmines.

I am also troubled by the vaguely utopian hopes this man has for his personal project. Attempts by people to implement any kind of utopian vision tend to end badly.
I would rephrase giving up as: move on to a more compelling startup.
I wrote a blog post ( http://illicittech.blogspot.com/2007/05/sunk-cost-fallacy-and-dilemma.html ) about this, but basically, people are irrationally attached to things they've invested in. If it's (objectively) not working, put it aside and try something else.
Ask The VC - What are typical compensation numbers?
Tips for outsourcing like Guy did:
http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=26310
I'd love to see a follow up in 90 days to this story, maybe with how much money the site made, etc.
On balancing life and startups
Microsoft Announce Windows Live OneCare
I've tested this under LispWorks, and it's pretty fast, although you I had to add this:

(defun mandelbrot (x y)
(declare (optimize (speed 3) (safety 0) (space 0) (compilation-speed 0) (float 0)))

Also the benchmark is flawed somehow, as some of the examples are using double, other float.

Also the lisp (SBCL) example the printing of the stream was also in the equation. You should compute the result in array, then print it.
I found more "bugs" in the LISP version:

+BAILOUT+ constant needs to be 16.0, not 16, as it's used in floating-point comparison:

(defconstant +BAILOUT+ 16.0)

The "i" variable was declared fixnum in the incorrect place, it should be right after the "do" block:

(do ((i 0 (incf i)))
(nil)
(declare (type fixnum i))

Also I've commented the printing, printing is slow, especially doing format for each character:

(declaim (optimize (speed 3)))
(defconstant +BAILOUT+ 16.0)

(defconstant +MAX-ITERATIONS+ 1000)

(defun mandelbrot (x y)

(declare (optimize (speed 3) (safety 0) (space 0) (compilation-speed 0)

#+lispworks (float 0)))

(declare (type single-float x y))

(let ((cr (- y 0.5))

(ci x)

(zi 0.0)

(zr 0.0))

(declare (type single-float cr ci zi zr))

(do ((i 0 (incf i)))

(nil)

(declare (type fixnum i))

(let ((temp (the single-float ( zr zi)))

(zr2 (the single-float ( zr zr)))

(zi2 (the single-float ( zi zi))))

(declare (type single-float temp zr2 zi2))

(setq zr (the single-float (+ (- zr2 zi2) cr)))

(setq zi (the single-float (+ temp temp ci)))

(when ( (the single-float (+ zi2 zr2)) +BAILOUT+)

(return-from mandelbrot i))

(when ( i +MAX-ITERATIONS+)

(return-from mandelbrot 0))))))