skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This site is designed for a touch screen system that lacks a keyboard. That is why it is pre-populated with a default set of items. On a device with a full keyboard, it would be faster to just type your list in.

I think it is pretty smart. I think I will try something similar in my mobile applications.
Neat idea.

I'd add my voice to the chorus - get a designer. I'd caution AGAINST the elance route. Design is an iterative process-- very few designers hit the nail on the head the first time. Design, test/get feedback, rinse, repeat. And, of course, design isn't just slinging pixels around-- it's designing the user experience (which might require changing your code).

Of course, a cheap "coat of paint" wouldn't be a terrible thing, if you can't afford a more gold-plated solution (or attract a designer-cofounder).
We'll he's basically doing this with http://www.squidoo.com/ right?

Although that site seems so spammy to me - I can't believe it's #628 on Alexa.
They're ranked by sales, so the more popular ones show up first. Usually the first one is the best. I should put some instructions to that effect. Go ahead and use the first one if you want to have a crack at it.
There are a number of other sites that do business book summaries:

- getabstract.com

- bizsum.com

- summaries.com

What I'm attempting to do is change the model a little bit. They all have professional reviews, and charge a lot of money for a number of summaries every year. For people who are willing to pay, they may even offer better summaries, although the standard format might be a bit limiting.

But what they don't have is any sort of discussion/feedback or anything else beyond getting the summary itself. My reasoning is that people will be interested in the summary, but get more out of being able to discuss the ideas presented.
Designer: You're right, of course. I'd like to have someone to work with, but I can't pay right now, so it'd have to be someone coming on board to work on this and other sites for equity. I'd like that, but even then the person needs to be a good fit. Anyone here is welcome to get in touch with me and talk. Beyond that, thank you for the specific discussion points. That helps my "engineer-visual-design" brain target concrete things that I can improve.

- Moving the ratings/voting up is probably a good idea.

- A separate page for the discussion might risk making it invisible - the scenario I envisage is someone coming to the site, seeing a comment and feeling a need to respond to it because it makes sense, or is wrong, or needs responding too in some way. But if that's all burried under a 'discussion' link, it might not be so easy to find. Of course you're right that it doesn't (can't really) jump out at you right now because it's at the bottom of the page...

- book marketplace: I'm not convinced - that's Amazon's business, and I have no hope of competing with them. I do have a shot, I think, at creating a place for people to come and discuss the books, because their review/comment system doesn't really foster that kind of interaction, and I'm targeting a niche that is small/concentrated enough that I have a chance at prevailing.
How many mobile phone web browsers support javascript?

If most mobile browsers' support for javascript is limited or nonexistent, then it makes sense to optimize for Safari, since iPhone users will be the only ones able to use it anyway.
Sounds like you need a better IDE. Or grep...
it is a different domain ;-)
They should be optimizing for Safari but making it work in all other web browsers. The whole point of using/making web apps is that they work on more than one platform and in more than one browser. I can't see a damned thing because I use Firefox.
Paul's essay sounds like a case against commercial OOP-"languages for the masses" like Java/C# more than it's against OOP. Ruby, JavaScript and Python are perfect examples of powerful languages he seems to have no issues with.

I can't stand Java for the very same reason: it was created with a very specific commercial purpose in mind: to have enterprise software projects done cheaply. This implies that language should be simple enough (inexpensive training, armies of dispensable coders) and restrictive enough (cheap QA) to cheaply build systems that transfer data from one database to another. Sun, do not forget, is a hardware company. And what many hardware companies want, is to turn software into irrelevant commodity.
What is average equity offered to first employee? (14 hours per day working)
The position is mostly integration (Flash and Web), marketing, design, and usability. I'm pretty good at all of them.

No venture-backing (only angel funded).
The great problem with startups isn't a "problem", because it isn't typically the case that startups fail because they have something go wrong. Startups fail because they don't do enough things right.

Following that, the problem joining with a stranger is not that you don't know their quirks, its that it is difficult to find someone with complementary strengths. However, since we hackers are typically drawn to others similar to ourselves, many of those going to YCombinator with someone they have known for a long time will be similarly disadvantaged despite being acquaintances (they will still be two individuals with similar strengths and weaknesses).

Thus what we really need is for two business types to go to YC together, and two hackers to go to YC together, and form two teams, each with one hacker and one business type. Or, better yet, to forcibly enroll the hackers in business courses and vice versa. :)
Interactive Colorado Nightlife Guide - "Social Nightworking"
Yeah (well, a different subdomain ;-) ), but http://news.ycombinator.com/favicon.ico redirects to the icon at http://ycombinator.com/favicon.ico . It seems the browser don't follow the redirect (IE doesn't seem to either).
Hardtack - Real Estate Inventory Tracking
isn't this like http://www.wikisummaries.org ?
How JavaScript Transcends OO Languages like Java and C# (closures and lambda functions)
Collective intelligence in Word 2007 spell checker (Learn from users RT & improve software)
Why would you want to write an iPhone-only application, though? The only reason I can think of is to catch Mac Fanboys by the "teehee, my app is better than yours and you can't use it because you don't have an expensive Apple phone" method. OK, that might even work...
Curious about YC.news statistics
Close to 10% of all newly weds meet online these days. And while it's still too early to know the long-term success rates, early ethnographic studies seem to find little difference between couples who meet online and those who meet in person.[1]

If it works for marriages, why shouldn't it work for entrepreneurs?

If anything, I would expect meeting people online to work out much better than meeting people in person. In real life, people tend to organize themselves into hierarchies and befriend others in a similar position. Whereas online, people organize themselves into networks. And networks seems to be more efficient than hierarchies at everything from social introductions to constructing identity and reputation.

Yeah, there isn't a lot of theory surrounding meeting people through online networks, and it seems excessively easy to get yourself into some serious trouble. But that's just sort of the nature of entrepreneurship in general, and I suspect that at present there's something of an arbitrage opportunity for those willing to figure these things out for themselves.

[1] C.f. Double Click by Andrea Baker
After seeing some stats about the size of the user base on Reddit and Digg, I'd be really curious to see the number of users on YC.news, and quantity of active users (lets say active is having logged in in the last month).

Also getting stats on the number of people in each karma range (0-50, 51-100, 101-150, and upward) would also be pretty interesting.

Finally, I'm curious to know how strong the correlation between YC acceptance/submission periods and quantity of posts and submissions is. Admittedly this would be a bit less trivial to calculate.
But it's a mobile phone app...what mobile phone can run Firefox?
At this point, all we have is:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27384
Couples may meet online, but they usually date a while before getting married.

It would be fine if founders initially met online, but I think they'd want to have been in-person friends for several months before starting a company.
No, that's not what I meant. What kills most startups is that they build something lame-- something users see and think "meh" and click on Back. It's not ability to solve problems that makes the difference, but what problems the founders choose to solve.

Friction between founders is somewhat of a threat to startups, but small in comparison with making something users don't care about.
actually, discussing what is more important than code is more important than code
_to have enterprise software projects done cheaply_

It was created to control embedded processors.
I'd say, the Java language standard is maintained by software bosses for software bosses, not for developers.
Really, it only needs to work on Safari? What if someone, say, posted it to a site that links to newly launched applications? Might it not then be convenient if the app worked for whatever browser the users following those links were using?
Numbers are a bit lower than I would have expected. Thank you for pointing me in the direction.
The Long Tail Is Getting Fatter
I really think OO has been a net loss for the industry and individual programmers. Attaching all functions to data structures, inheritance, hiding fields... these are a net loss. (And about that field hiding aspect of encapsulation - Who are we hiding them from? I ask you.)
Your percentile rank in terms of effort among single founders is... (build a service to motivate single founders to try harder)
Effort could be determined by how much coding gets done each day, how many hours worked, etc.
Mobile startup entrepreneurs
Speaking of Phillip Greenspun and books, he writes outstanding Amazon reviews. His profile page is an excellent resource for anyone looking for random books to peruse.
Hi Guys.
We are a mobile startup that also writes a blog about the industry.If you are a mobile startup, we would like to profile your company.
EMail us. cribornament (at) gmail (dot) com
cribornament (dot) com
We started with a fairly tiny computer, similar to the Gumstix.

I had a development setup on the bench that was running on a mini-itx board. PG convinced us we needed to launch the second my prototype worked, so I literally designed a case around the bench setup and stuffed it into a backpack.

Justin now carries a 2 lb Sony VAIO that runs Windows XP. The technology is simple enough that anyone can use it, and soon they'll be able to.
Recommended hacker skills courses for non-tech founders
Why did you form a US company then? VC money?! You should have formed a local one.
I've submitted to the fact that no code is better than code.
It makes sense to "hide" stuff when you're writing a library/framework that you might update in the future. It doesn't when you're just writing for your particular project.
I was going to say the same thing. The whole article is mispremised. If you think, "Who would switch to a virtual keyboard from a real keyboard?" you'll have questions about the iPhone. If you ask, "Who wouldn't switch to a virtual keyboard from a cellphone 0 - 9 layout?" you'll understand the market the iPhone is targeting.

It's a consumer product, not a business product. The idea for the iPhone is that in 5 years everyone age 14-24 will have one, just as has already happened to the iPod.
I'm wondering if there are any YC companies out there who have hired a patent attorney? I need a web/software focused patent attorney and am looking for a good reference... thanks!
Well, could you give an example of an evil product that's being sold right now, that was known to be evil from the start?
Nice business they've built for themselves, isn't it?

On the other hand, you aren't counting all the raw meat they have to feed the goons they use to keep acts and venues from straying.
That depends. Some observations, like this one: http://fortuito.us/2007/05/how_ads_really_work_superfans_1 suggest that a cadre of loyal regular fans don't bother clicking on ads at all. Instead it is the lost google user that is the real money maker.

It's an interesting counterpoint that would basically mean that the standard ad model may have issues the further down the long tail you go.

It would be interesting to see, and I don't have any data to corroborate this, if the "membership" model shares an inverse relationship to the ad model as you move into smaller and smaller niches.
State of Web 2.0 Design (Jakob Nielsen rates myspace, facebook bebo, twitter, geni)
Could you explain a bit more? If there are no hackers in your startup, you need to learn it all, not just some skills. If there are hackers in your startup, they can do it without you.

If you want to start your long journey to become a hacker and less annoying to your co-founders ;-) there's at least http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html
Yes, it's similar, but more focused on business books, and my goal is also to try and create more of a comunity aspect, with discussion of the books in question.

Note, also, that wikisummaries, from all I can tell, is not part of the wikipedia group of sites, but they're rather cleverly piggybacking on the name.
My co-founder and I met online working on an Open Source project together, but we certainly aren't strangers who met just to start a company. We'd been working together for years, but had only met in person once before starting the company (and twice before applying to YC, post-YC we get together weekly and communicate daily via email and bug tracker).

It can definitely work, but I'd suggest working with folks on projects (Open Source or school or whatever) for a while before partnering up. It's hard to know how well you'll mesh and how much they'll hold up their end of the bargain. Make sure you can compromise, even in the face of disagreements. And make sure you trust the others judgment so that you don't have to discuss every little thing. I almost never have discussions with my co-founder about any specific details of implementation. We discuss goals and objectives, and then go back to our respective offices and do the jobs we said we'd do in the way we think is best. If it turns out to be wrong, we'll hash it out, but that's so rare that it's not worth taking the time up front to figure it out on every little detail.
Codeless CMS - a startup everyone is talking about
I assume you're wondering what you need to know in order to be able to communicate with and judge the skill level of hackers. The former isn't too hard. Most hackers are happy to start by explaining the basics if you have no clue what they're talking about. Exactly what details you need to understand depends on what you're working on. You should understand the overall concepts behind the design of your product.

For a non-hacker to judge the skill of a hacker is nearly impossible - it's hard enough for hackers to do it. PG discusses it at length: http://paulgraham.com/gh.html
The companies that split have turned out to be failures (with the exception of reddit). Try to pick a good co-founder.

So, while it's true that you'll probably fail if you get choose a poor co-founder, it's also true that you'll probably fail without a co-founder. In the end the result is that you're working alone, which is a bad place to be.
Co-founders in the night exchanging glances

Wondring in the night

What were the chances wed be sharing a C-corporation

Before the night was through.

With apologies to Frank Sinatra...
Computer Science is an unusually accessible field of engineering for self-learners. Purveyors of fine computer systems and programming languages market them by writing oodles of documentation, often free. There is an amazing amount to be learned just from reading the GNU manuals. All the machinery you need in order to play around with most of the latest new technology is available at Fry's.

But I should probably warn you against the idea that you can become a good programmer simply by learning to use some of the tools. That's like becoming a chess player by studying the rules of the game, and the mechanics of chess clocks. If you just want to make sure you can understand your more technical business partner when s/he talks shop, or even do some simple programming, surely, you can get a long way simply by knowing the syntax of a programming language or two and some basic UNIX. I've seen some self-taught programmers do amazing things. But for most jobs that are actually technically innovative, you're going to have to sit down and learn some stuff about algorithms, data structures, concurrency, and so on. (This is what I shall snobistically call "real CS".)

Fortunately, even "real CS" can, with lots of motivation, be learned outside of formal academia. I would recommend you start with Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (the book and three different series of free video lectures are on the net for free). In fact, even if your goal is just to understand the techies, SICP is probably still about as good as it gets, and the old Abelson and Sussman video lectures are quite amusing. Other great resources are ArsDigita University and OpenCourseWare.
so i would assume that you do not hold hastily put together teams with less regards as long as the thing they're building is not lame?
"Google runs entirely on OO languages (C++, Java, Python)"

There're some interesting questions about what makes a language an 'OO' language. For one, does a language need only to provide facilities for OO, or must it enforce OO approaches? For another, what flavor of OO must it support or enforce?

Most 'modern' languages will provide facilities that can be seen as supporting some form of OO; data structures are mandatory, and methods are an easy extension of them. However, most of these languages don't mandate an OO approach to coding; for instance, C++ (aka C/C++) doesn't and Python doesn't, although Java may be more dogmatic on the question. (A language that mandates OO approaches wouldn't be to my taste, because I don't believe those approaches to be appropriate for all problems.)

So, it's a bit of a non-sequitur to proclaim that the virtues of OO are demonstrated by the use of 'OO languages'; unless those languages mandate OO approaches you'd need to look at how those languages are being used in practice.
"Computer Science is an unusually accessible field of engineering for self-learners"

Isn't it ever! If you all will pardon me for going on a bit more about my site squeezed books, one of the things that is very frustrating about trying to learn something about business, economics, and marketing is that you realize there is this gaping hole in on-line resources compared to what I know and love - computers, where you can do everything on your own.
Can't anyone with enough money for an iphone just "send the help to pop 'round to the grocer's and fetch me a few things" ?

Kidding aside, I still think my shopping list app is better in that you don't use the phone to input the list:

http://shoplist.dedasys.com
Yeah, thanks PB. It's a big improvement and cuts down bandwidth use a lot too.

I've peered at the Javascript and most of its obvious even without knowing Javascript :-) Might someone answer a few questions?

node.href just returns an empty text/html document when fetched. Does this happen synchronously or not? What do browsers do when they're given text/html as the content of an image and what do the specs define they do? When is ping freed? Is it automatic when it goes out of scope and does that suggest that the image fetch is synchronous?

I'm trying to understand what delays occur when and whether on a larger scale you'd need to manually free some of these resources.
Art of Innovation Online Video with Slides
yes, all of this fb drooling is making me sick.
It's OK, that numbers are "lower", I personally welcome that.
Here lynx warns me that the Location URI isn't absolute. Nice of it.
Whether I'm logged in or not, let me pick my favourite bookshop from your list, e.g. amazon.com versus amazon.co.uk versus ...
Cost of an LLC in Oregon: $55

Cost of an SrL in Italy: north of 3000 Euro

Cost of something similar in Austria, where we recently moved, and I don't speak the language yet: much closer to the Italian one than the Oregon one.

It would be insane for me to throw that kind of money away when I can just do it at 'home', and any businesses I do are likely to be internet based.
Good advice, but it doesn't help when one's coding in a larger system not just written by oneself. Then there's operator overloading; you can't trust anything to be doing what it suggests in an unknown, or large, codebase. Code readability goes down the pan if too much is hidden by mis-used OO techniques.
I'm learning economics, marketing and business as well and there are good resources online (although, that's true, I'm reading a few books as well, but it's the same for computer stuff in fact).

Among the resources I know and use are:

Paul Graham's essays, like many people here (I prefer reading them on paper anyway, but all of them are available on his website);

Joel Spolsky's blog (joelonsoftware.com) used to have very good articles (lately it's not as good as it used to be); he had the best of them published, too.

Eric Sink's blog (software.ericsink.com); great articles on marketing and business for geeks.

There are good articles about the basics of business in the Trizoko online business journal: http://www.trizle.com/trizoko

On changethis.com you'll find a lot of great PDFs on business subjects (very good resource; there is good stuff by Seth Godin here)

For economics, I'm reading the work of Frédéric Bastiat, available online here: bastiat.org.
Sure, that's all good stuff, but there's a difference between "reading" and "learning". The part of the learning process that works so wonderfully in the world of computers is that you can:

1. Read something

2. Try it out.

3. Ask questions of others about the results, then go read more, try it again, and so on.

Not quite so easy for economics, business and marketing.
Good old Bastiat... That's definitely fairly remote from "mainstream" economics these days, although there is a lot of sense to the proposition that the works of the classical economists are more practically useful than the abstract modeling you'd learn as an economics major. If you nonetheless want, for whatever reason, to learn something akin to the modern standard microeconomics curriculum, albeit with a good deal more game theory thrown in, I can recommend the free (Creative Commons!) textbook by Preston McAfee at http://www.introecon.com
How do you define 'fast'?

I type a lot slower now that I did 15 years ago (as in LOC/hour), but I think a lot more about what I'm going to type, and my code is much more efficient.

I have this crazy drive to constantly improve and learn more , and I'm enjoying what I do more that I ever have (attitude probably counts for a lot, at any age).
"The other half, the younger half, will complain that this is old news."

I laughed out loud when I read this because, as a 17 year old, it was exactly what I was thinking when I saw the essay's title.
Your evil might not be Larry and Serge's evil.
Facebook's app feeding frenzy
Inheritance is helpful in some instances. I can't imagine JUint with inheritance. But it can definitely be misused.
I think it's difficult for a company not to be "evil" once they grow to the size of Google. A company of that size has to please too many stakeholders. I think Craigslist is the perfect model of how a company can avoid being evil -- stay small.
Where are you located? You can give my patent atty (and friend) a call, I've used him for 10+ years and done at least 10 applications with him. His name is David Powsner with Nutter, McCellan in Boston.(http://www.nutter.com/attorneys.php?AttorneyID=110). Great guy, friendly and very knowledgeable. If you do email him, tell him chandra referred you.