skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think they've read Cryptonomicon one too many times.

http://ask.metafilter.com/47531/What-would-be-a-good-way-to-calculate-fuckyou-money

This is an allusion to a Randy/Avi conversation of two years ago wherein Avi actually calculated a specific numerical value for "fuck-you money." It was not a fixed constant, however, but rather a cell in a spreadsheet linked to any number of continually fluctuating economic indicators. Sometimes when Avi is working at his computer he will leave the spreadsheet running in a tiny window in the corner so that he can see the current value of "fuck-you money" at a glance.

I would say it's only depressing if you don't plan on working hard.
Yes, educational as you say. 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?
It's not a harmful bug, but it's certainly not behavior users will appreciate. I could imagine a new user not understanding the one man, one vote property of the system, then being confused later when the votes seem not to have gone through.

Adding the visual effect of idempotency on the frontend is probably a two-second fix, anyway.
Does News.YC form submission break in Safari for you?
Every time I submit (story/comment) or delete, the /r page comes back as "This page can't be found" in Safari. All of the POSTs are submitting, I just don't get results back. Dunno if it's just me.
Yeah that's me. I noticed my LinkedIn is a bit dated, but otherwise it knows me. I might add some more information in there or I might just see how fast they update it.
Yeah, looks like there is some kind of problem. It looks like some arguments (specifically the fnid argument) may not be getting sent to the server in form submissions, though Firefox and Explorer do send this argument. Any Safari experts have any idea what might be going on?

Edit: The args arrive fine. The prob may be with the redirect after the form submission. The main difference I see in requests from Firefox and Safari is that F says Connection: keep-alive and S says Connection: close.

Edit 2: The prob is with redirects, not forms. But I'm not sure why, and it doesn't happen in more recent versions of Safari.
'... Business 2.0 had a smart response to Om Malik's departure - turn all of their writers into bloggers and create a blog network ... challenge for Business 2.0 is that all of these writers also have to put out a print magazine ...'

Someone who gets the changes occurring in newspaper & print world. Another problem is being able to morph content that's blogged into print quality articles along with all the associated things we have come to expect of good print articles (journalists that can do fact checking, citing, entertain and get copy out the door at the same time)
'... Yeah that's me. ..'

I've added you as a news.yc link. The thing that gets me is spock falls flat adding people to networks. If you have a photo you might recognise a person. But if you select "John Smith" and there a lots of Smiths and each is missing a photo it is unusable.
Hey, I'd consider it, but I'd just wind up replacing your PHP with the full J2EE stack. :P
Dupe: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28298
Just a test to observe network packets.
I'm talking about the ability to go to the doctor routinely, to get things like vaccinations and annual checkups. The government doesn't make you do sensible things elsewhere, but the cost of doing sensible things if you're in the US and don't have health insurance is prohibitive.

To take an example from dentistry: getting a biennial checkup, finding an early-stage developing cavity, and getting it fixed will most likely cost you under $200. Not getting the checkup and waiting until the tooth is abscessed and requires extraction, a root canal, or oral surgery can cost you $2000 or more. But if you don't have the $50 for the initial checkup, what are you supposed to do?
Even then! I've seen programmers read the code, get it wrong, and rewrite it in a way that introduces bugs. Hell, I've been that programmer. It's clear, it's readable, it's concise, and it's wrong.

Readability and correctness are orthogonal concepts.
One issue with comments:
If a comment is deleted, the comment count remains the same.
Right, but stupid business types don't distinguish between "web startup" and "non-web startup." You might be able to make headway by talking about core competencies and business expertise.

Outsourcing programming tasks is a very reasonable thing to do when the core of your business is something else and the programming is just supporting that. If your business's core expertise and value proposition is that you have highly skilled plumbers on call 24/7, then insisting on developing the website and billing software in-house is a waste of effort. But when the core of your business is the software, outsourcing it is foolish. If your business's core expertise and value proposition is that you have a location and scheduling algorithm that will guarantee you get an affiliated plumber at your house within 30 minutes of your request, then the software to support that should be developed in-house.

This is something that good business guys will understand.
eBay went straight to the nuke
"Where's the nimble startup ready to challenge eBay in a powerplay without the risk of losing a three-figure $ million revenue stream, and when will eBay recognize - like Facebook - that they're a platform and not a closed bundle of applications."
Any Recomendations on Great Rails Hosting Services?
Never used Safari. I've examined the network packets though and there's some non-standard stuff going on when using Firefox.

HTTP/1.0 302 Moved

Date: Fri, 15 Jun 2007 15:40:40 GMT

Location: item?id=28352

The Location header should have an absolute URI: http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec14.html#sec14.30

Also, you're using a 302 response to a POST request which, strictly speaking, means the browser should re-do the POST to the new URI in the Location header. Many don't, they do a GET instead. The 303 response can be used to say you insist they GET the new URI despite the original being a POST. http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec10.html#sec10.3.3

Just noticed you're using HTTP/1.0. I've referred you to 1.1. You may wish to switch.
On Community Migration from Digg to Reddit
Hotlinking - what it is and how to stop it
Hotlinking is rampant. That guy would be paying $3 per day for bandwidth if he was using Amazon S3. StumbleUpon for example, is practically based on hotlinking images
into one's blog.
Do people using the most recent versions of Safari notice any problems logging in or submitting forms? I ask because I'm surprised no one reported this before. I can reproduce it in the Safari I have, but it's old (1.3.2).

Update: In fact it looks the site works fine in version 2 and later.
I don't see why Safari saying it doesn't want to keep the connection open should matter. You turn down Firefox's request anyway and close the connection, don't you?
According to Compete, at least, reddit is growing and Digg isn't:

http://snapshot.compete.com/reddit.com+digg.com?metric=vel
Thumbs down on this. Facebook is not the new internet.
This keeps coming up, and the response IMO is always:

Set up your own box and run it.

Layered Tech is who I use, but other people have others.
Justin.TV is surely great engineering project to work on. There are tons of cool technical challenges and elegant solutions (creatively laying out video frames onto RTP to deal with high packet loss, for instance). Must be alot of fun to be a part of it.

One thing I don't get, however, is monetization strategy. Sell camera/software kits to Justing wannabees? License the tech to TV networks? Give away the technology to all video-bloggers who cares and sell ads on their blogs?
... but not enough to vote for it? :-)
I would, especially if I was alerted via email when there were unread messages in my inbox.

I am generally reluctant to email people directly for minor comments that I'd rather not post in public. I wind up just not communicating at all.

I also prefer to limit where my email address is posted online (obfuscated or not).

For serious things, email is generally worth it, but there still might be issues with spam filters or accidental deletions.
Jingle Awarded Patent For Free 411 Calls With Advertising
Why are we so polarized about Java?
Look at the comments too. They're even more interesting than the original post.
News.YC doesn't work in standard text-based browsers either at the moment. (Granted, I doubt few folks [other than uber-cli guys] use these!)

When trying to login:

links produces a "Error reading from socket" error

and

lynx produces a "Post request without Content-Length." error
Seth Godin: Shoestring opportunity
Cool idea and I like your lightweight pages. I would still consider spending some little money (less than $1K) to hire a designer, though.
I spent some time navigating around and I have a few suggestions:
- You make me scroll too much, why not put ratings/voting on the right, instead of having them "downstairs"?
- I'll say this again: you need a designer.
- Too much data at once: why not have two tabs for each book? (summary/discussion) Similar to wikipedia.
- You can start a small marketplace right away: give people "offer this book for sale" option.
Reply form: terrible formatting.
I second that. Great functionality, but it suffers from engineer-visual-design. For a couple hundred bucks on elance you could get a much more elegant design. To be honest it has the layout of a lot of spam sites (lots of links, centered text) and you'll lose some users very quickly on that aspect alone. But really great functionality - keep up the good work!
I wonder why I have such limited formatting options in the "Reply" form (the one I'm writing this in right now). I can't even break my own lines. For instance if I want to make a few points/suggestions while replying to someone, I can't start them with new lines, like this:
- 1st line
- 2nd line
- 3rd line
(they'll show up all in a row)

Should be as simple as replacing /n with <BR>
I think the reason everyone avoids the issue is that it's impossible to give general advice. The amount of stock you should give to a new hire depends on how valuable he is, and how valuable the company is. The amount of stock given to the first hire could range from 1% to 50% or perhaps even more.

Most startups don't pay dividends. Even Microsoft barely does. Owning 10% of a technology startup basically means you get 10% of the proceeds if the company gets bought, or hold 10% of the now tradeable shares if it goes public.

Someone holding 51% could pay himself all the company's profits as salary only if the company hadn't taken substantial investment. Otherwise the investors would have protection against such abuses as part of the deal terms, and the employees would thus be protected too.
Ask the Wizard: Options Acceleration
This one's obvious. Product placement. High engagement means high advertising dollars.
One up for markdown.
"Maybe Google will follow suit and allow developers to embed their applications in Google too?"

I am sure they are considering something along those lines. The main problem they will face is how to create a viral system of distribution for these applications that can be as effective as the Facebook feeds.

"You don't think you're overselling an API just a little?"

It's about the precedent that Facebook has just set by opening up its doors to the world, allowing outside "add-ons" not even affiliated directly with FB to generate revenue through FB.

"the new Facebook Platform is a dramatic leap forward for the Internet industry." - Marc Andreessen

Of course it is, if you don't realize it, you just aren't creative enough to imagine the applications that will revolutionize the Industry. I'm not necessarily saying that Facebook will be the social network that can appeal to 90% of Internet users, but that is what they are betting on. Eventually everyone who uses the Internet will be interacting in a "social network", why? because its a more efficient way to share information.

I think MZ realized that there are so many people with so many amazing, revolutionary ideas, it would not be possible to try and incorporate all of their brilliant ideas. Instead, he decided to open it up and bet on the fact that these entrepreneurs with revolutionary ideas would figure out ways to monetize these ideas through Facebook.

Like MZ says, Everybody wins. Thats the precedent he is setting and that is why this year, leading up to Nov 2008 will be a year to remember. (remember there was no Youtube or Facebook in 2004)
very cool idea.. was not expecting much but was pretty immediately hooked. I like it. get a designer and spruce up that UI!
_Thumbs down on this. Facebook is not the new internet._

No, it isn't. However, if one's site is depends on social networking behaviors, like community-generated content, like this one is, it wouldn't hurt to use facebook's social graph to quickly generate content. Furthermore, as a suggestion, one could implement reddit and news.yc-style moderation on summaries, comments, and even authors to let the community decide quality books/reviews.
Programming language experts, help me out here: Can anybody name a language that is not controversial? I'm drawing a blank.
According to compete's visitors graph, Digg's month-to-month growth is actually 44.7%, much higher than Reddit's 30.1%.

I looked up the metric you used, and compete.com describes it this way:

"Use Velocity to understand how much more or less time people spent on the site, or their level of engagement. If a site can garner and sustain more of an individual's time it should generally be considered a good thing."

So, it seems that reddit visitors spend more time there than digg users do on digg.com.
Religions Compared to Social Web Apps
looks like pg added the favicon!

http://ycombinator.com/favicon.ico
Love this essay, I still can't (don't want to) find an appropriate way to OO.
So the idea is that for every subject area, there is an opportunity for someone to aggregate news and blogs and make money off it.

I have to disagree with Seth this time. There are already plenty of people doing this, and the reason more aren't doing it is because the ones who are aren't making any money.

Look at row2k.com, the most popular news site for rowers. Ed Hewitt is spending like 18 hours a day on that site, but only because he loves the sport so much, because pretty much the only income they get is from donations. The ads seem to barely cover the server expenses.

For any given blog subject matter there is a blog carnival that aggregates the best posts each week, and none of those seem to be making any money either.

It makes sense. Think about it. If even the biggest news aggregators like Digg and Reddit, which aggregate all stories, can't make any money, then what are the chances that a news aggregator that collects only a tiny slice of stories will be hugely profitable. Especially since Seth is talking about setting up ads. It simply isn't realistic.
http://joyent.com/
iLike: Holy cow... 6mm users and growing 300k/day!
No, it was never "do no evil" -- it just got misquoted a lot.
Oops. I assumed by "velocity" they meant velocity.
I'm gradually going to support more markdown. I don't have libraries for this stuff...
I actually differ pretty strongly on this point (and I plan on writing at length on it sometime). Just because Facebook's network stuff is relatively accessible does not make it the right choice for your site's social features. There are benefits to establishing the links that mean something to your website. I'm "friends" with a lot of people on Facebook, but I trust barely any of their book recommendations, just as one example.
Cool, cool. The statistic "12% of this site's users have read this book" struck me as really interesting. Based on how well read stuff is, you essentially get a "must-read" list for free. That might be a cool feature for folks.
Recipe for selling your company to google:

1) Hire a bunch of very smart people. Now go let them play ping pong and stuff.

2) Pay a graphic designer to make screenshots of a prototype that solves a particularly difficult problem (i.e. Natural language search perhaps?)

3) Egg Google on with a spreadsheet predicting how much market you will take from them

4) Wait for the phone call

Seriously, Google has to be weighing the odds right now - would it be better to buy the tech before it launches, wait and be perceived as the evil villain who swoops in and buys a superior technology?
Actually, indentation style is more important than code.
To be fair, rowing doesn't have the biggest audience in the world. Neither does technical news (a la Digg and Reddit).

Assuming you pick something hugely popular and you're the best (Godin suggests you'd also be the only) aggregator on the web, you're going to have some serious traffic. The presidential campaign videos has one such huge audience. Another might be following a professional sports league or tracking music videos within a genre.
Demographic data is what drives solid ad revenue. In this way, a niche site could actually generate better and more profitable advertising than one like Digg, which are less focused but have bigger numbers.
Alpha launch: Science Hack
I think the standard solution here would be not to lie to the user. A quick sending graphic, which is replaced with a received graphic would accurately portray the events that are happening. These could easily be iconic, maybe just a differently colored arrow while sending, which fades out when it's sent.
Let's not pretend there's nothing good about OOP. Obviously it doesn't solve any more problems than any other programming model (they're all Turing Complete), so personal preference will have to come into play.

Besides, most of pg's gripes about OO are mostly gripes about bad programming. I've seen some seriously elegant stuff done in even the uncoolest of languages. Google runs entirely on OO languages (C++, Java, Python), and you'd be hard pressed to find someone willing to criticize their codebase for bloat, duplication, or inefficiency.
When I tried to start a summary for "How to Win Friends and Influence People" it wasn't clear which Amazon search result I should choose.
http://www.summary.com is your competition.. Gud luck
Most of the problems I solve don't call for OO, but it's definitely useful. The one bug I can think of that I would have avoided by using OO was the one that I introduced just before asking news.yc to evaluate ourdoings.com last time.

I think pg is right not to rush to implement an object system in arc. There are many opinions about what the right object system looks like. Anybody without an opinion should stay out of the way. Someone else can implement an object system for arc later.
The trend of finding an online stranger as cofounder for the Y Combinator program
I'm seeing a trend of hackers looking for fellow hackers online to apply for the Ycombinator program. I was wondering how effective a partnership would such an arrangement yield?

2 dudes. Total oblivion to each other's quirks. Joining force to undertake a significant project. How realistic is that?

Also, would Ycombinator have less regards for such hastily put-together teams, irrespective of their skills/ideas?
Try an iPhone-optimized Web app: Simple Shopping List.  (Best viewed with Safari.)
i hate OO programming because of inheritance. It pissed me off to have to look through layers and layers of parents to search for a method. Stick with good ol' functions for easy debugging.
I'm skeptical.

This sounds more like a request to the Lazyweb -- http://lazyweb.org/ -- because it's something he'd like to use, rather than a business opportunity.

If he really thought it was the latter, he would probably just go ahead and do it himself.
Many samples of (working and effective )online partnerships are in world of open source where many hackers around the world are working on much more complex problems than those backed by YC.
Except you can't have just functions, because then you end up with a semi-object system anyway. For example, you might have a function "dot" which puts a period at the end of a string, and a function "dot" which returns the dot product of two vectors. The first should be a string method, and the second should be a vector method. Without an object system, you'd call it dot-string and dot-vector, which is okay, but semi-object-oriented. Lisp has something that specializes functions based on its first argument.. That might be useful for that.
Sweet. Thanks very much. You really have made my day :)
Could someone tell me why Google allowed advertising by essay writing companies for such a long time? What happened to "Don't be evil"?
So don't use inheritance. Seriously. Inheritance is annoying, but unnecessary. I generally avoid it. You can still use other parts of OO.
Does that mean you're not going to fix the Location header and the other standards non-compliance?
Can we have a taller text area before then. There's little visibility of context. I end up using a Firefox extension to hotlink it into vi for more complex posts.
Ug, this is like the bad old days of 1995 when people made sites that said "Best Viewed with Netscape." I thought that was gone forever, along with splash pages and "under construction" gifs.
The main difficulty in a startup is not the complexity of the technical problem you're solving.
Chad Fowler joins Info Ether as CTO
i agree. It is usually people problem. Personality clashes etc.
Funny,

I've been thinking about a startup that would hold several gigs of data per user (the first set of data would live on S3.)

First thing I did was write a simple monte-carlo code to determine the average and +- 1\sigma cost per user. Proud of myself, I showed my analysis to some business types who told me I was wasting my time when I should be building a product instead :)

Nevertheless, I believe the exercise was useful. I now have a fairly clear picture of how much it directly costs to serve a user.
Rolling the dice - it may work, it may not. Your chances of getting YC'd without it, however, are apparently nil. If you do get funded and don't get along, you can always split up, and it'll be like the group projects in school where one person had to do all the work while everyone else flaked. ;)
Safari is the same web browser that the iPhone uses. Because the site is optimized for the iPhone, it only needs to work on Safari.

Anyhow, I tried the app out, and I can't decide if it's really useful.
Another business card idea is to put a demo on a USB key and make the USB key your business card, or glue it to one. If you are willing to spend a bit more, you can get wafer-thin usb drives, and/or higher capacity ones, and make a bootable Linux distro on it, so it can be plugged into a PC and your fantabulous demo pops up. Also see

http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/peripherals/usb-flash-card-is-waferthin-holds-a-gig-203617.php
CL's generic functions are a bit more sophisticated than just specializing based on the first argument. Peter Seibel's book has a good chapter on them: http://gigamonkeys.com/book/object-reorientation-generic-functions.html
Those are called blogs, no?
Cool. It doesn't show up in FireFox for news.ycombinator.com though, even with a hard refresh.
OO is good for you as long as you are not trapped into all-OO thinking.

In bad code you can see, for example, a lot of duplication (literally copy and paste) of some small 3, 4, 5-line pieces only because a coder was too lazy to declare another method in the class. In fact in most of such cases a simple static function was needed, not a method. These coders are usually surprised to hear that static/global functions aren't bad, if not best.

Bu that's, of course, is not the only problem with OO.
I'd agree with this is theory. But how many demographics really have a higher discretionary income than web-savvy rowers? The people-who-light-cigars-with-100-dollar-bills society? :-)