skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ivan,

Thanks. Playcrafter looks seriously fun. They look like they could be a big hit -- I'll keep my eye out for them when they have a public release.

What does Sproost do? Are they still in "stealth" mode, or is there a press release somewhere in the world? I really like their design.
Yes, that is probably the best alternative. However, the main problems are

1) rigor; comments have a tendency to be whatever pops into a person's head rather than a rigorous assessment of a business model. I think rigorous feedback would provide an opinion on each component of a successful business.

2) reputation; I know people here are very smart, but if you have a selected pool of entrepreneurs you can guarantee a certain level of reputation for your feedback. On ycombinator, you can still get a scathing review from a 17 year old startup wannabe and then sit there wondering whether they really know what they're talking about.

3) non-disclosure; when you post on ycombinator, your business plan reaches a public audience and gets indexed on google. With a random selection of 3 reviewers from a selected pool of advisors, this narrows the audience down, and furthermore you can get NDAs from them. Also, if your business magically appears the next day, you have some legal recourse if it's one of the reviewer's best friends.
I said "hardly anyone wants Detroit's cars". Remove trucks (yes, that includes SUVs) and fleet vehicles from your figures.
The more important point is about advances in genetic engineering. That's been going on for maybe 30-40 years, at best. If the pace picks up a little, what the grandparent says (significantly larger life spans) may well be a reality.
That doesn't sound like filtering, it just sounds like an outage. I doubt the FCC is going to force ISPs to provide reliable service.
And you can globally disable all Location Services in the prefs.
Heh, this is why manually installing the leaked update before everyone bangs on Apple's servers is good :)
Canonical hopes Best Buy Ubuntu will spur Linux adoption
Quantenna : co-founded by Andrea Goldsmith (Stanford prof)
They make it up on commodity x86 servers, of course. And selling $250 SATA drives for $950.
It's true that there are potentially dangerous incentives, and it won't work for startups with significant trade secrets. However, there are a large range of startups, and some people are even willing to share their idea in public! This would be sort of a middle-way. If you have a business idea that you'd prefer to not post publicly on Hacker News but you're not afraid of it being stolen by experience entrepreneurs, then this would be the way to go.

Lastly, although VCs are a good source of feedback, usually going and pitching your idea means a significant commitment (quit your job already, developing the idea). Furthermore, this form of feedback doesn't work for bootstrapped startups and startups in small markets.
A really excellent analysis of our current dilemna.

We gotta get off the fossil fuel bandwagon and start using things that can be produced at home. Andy explains how to do that.

Great post.
I think people choosing to invest or not invest in you is probably the best form of peer review in business. The fact they are committing their own money forces honesty and helps to ensure that the quality of insight is high (mainly as bad investors will,eventually, stop investing, while good ones will invest more).

I hope I am wrong and what your looking for can be developed. It really would be an excellent service.
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/39236

The graphic says it all.
Ask YC: What's a typical stock compensation for joining a series A, 6 months old startup?
I have a job offer from an early stage (6 months old), series A funded startup, consisting of cash and around 0.35% equity (common stock options). The stocks can go up to 0.5% max, with less cash. Some health coverage, no 401K, nothing else actually. I'll be the 8th employee.

Since I have never worked for a startup, I am asking you: what's a "typical" stock offering figure for a early stage startup? And what would that be for a more "established" startup (e.g. Twitter)? I'm trying to understand if their equity offering is below or above market.

This is all very exciting but also confusing because I don't have anything to compare it with in my past experience.
Power of free
Well startups that start in stealth mode might want to get feedback. They can post their business plan in public, go to VCs, ask whatever contacts they have in person. The problems are posting in public defeats the purpose of stealth mode, going to VCs doesn't make sense if you're not ready or are bootstrapped, and you may not have many contacts with sufficient experience in entrepreneurship.
The mobile phone industry is traditionally very restrictive, it's not just Apple.

The iPhone has brought lots of innovation and benefits to the industry, namely the concept that cell phone interfaces shouldn't suck. Things like visual voicemail are great. And AFAIK the first affordable unlimited data plan. Apple originally wasn't even planning on having a native SDK. So I'm willing to let them do it their way as long as as a consumer and developer I get most of the benefit that a fully open solution would provide.
I spent weeks getting a USB wireless adapter and a new-ish video card to work with my Linux desktop. Then I moved to a new apartment and the wireless driver can't handle the standard encryption used on our router, so I'm back to square one compiling kernels and blacklisting modules and spending hours booting back and forth into Windows again.

The point is, I don't want to do that with my phone. My phone should WORK. The ultimate solution to the desktop problem will be buying 100 feet of cat 5 cable at Fry's today. I drive too far to make this a practical solution for my phone.
As with any other project, constraints motivate progress. Mortality makes life meaningful.
BMW to Make Electric Mini. Only in California. Only 500 of Them. *sigh*
http://www.playcrafter.com/
You mean the father.

Great movie.
my email is wrm932@gmail.com
There's nothing stopping you from distributing your software for free (no "tax" paid to Apple if it's free) or distributing your source code.

Other developers can modify, compile, run your source code on their own iPhones, and redistribute it on the App Store if they are approved.

As Apple ramps up I believe they will approve more and more developers, and eventually get to the point where anyone can distribute an app on the App Store.
In academia the paper is the product.
In startups the idea for the startup is not the product, but the execution is.
And how good the execution is, well that's determined by how successful the startup is. Life is the ultimate peer review.
I don't have the broken-down figures, but I'm sure GM would still be one of the top two or three car manufacturers on the planet if you broke it down that way.

Doesn't "top selling car in Europe" mean anything to you?
Not sure how public sproost's ideas are just yet, so I would suggest just signing up for the upcoming beta.
When I Thought I Was Smart
The GrownChildCam
If you already have a version 1, why not just submit it to the market for judgement? That's who ultimately judges it anyway.
I assumed when I read it that "sales" meant units. Seems like a perfectly reasonable way to track this, and not a "lie" at all.
Had a tiff with my co-founder couple of months back. We argued if we should specify that our service is free and how much importance we should give to that word on the site.

What do you think? Does a word 'free' on a site makes any difference?
thats about average. if you're not a ridiculously important, irreplaceable employee, don't expect more than 1%.
Meebo http://www.crunchbase.com/company/meebo
2 out of 3 founders are women.
This debate is getting silly. Is profit margin more or less important than demand, or just as important? It's a meaningless question.

If you have a nice fat profit margin but nobody wants to buy your product, that's no good. If you're selling lots of products but making no profit on it, that's no good either.

But if you're like GM, and you're selling millions of units a year, each for tens of thousands of dollars, and you're still not making a profit, I think we can diagnose the problem as being in the margins, not in the sales.

Seriously though, if you want to go on a whine about how bad American cars are, I suggest the comments at autoblog.com which are suitable for that kind of inanity. But for this site, I have to say that the sales figures don't support the idea that demand for GM cars is small.
Presumably you can distribute the source and recompile for an infinite number of iPhones.
If HN had a 'best submission of the year' award, this article would be a contender.

What an impressive, thoughtful analysis of a huge problem.

ps - I recommend reading his bio (Swimming Across: A Memoir.).
The reddit time machine (a series of screen captures and mock-ups from over the years)
Looks pretty cool, and the physics are a nice touch. Honestly though, I'm pretty skeptical about people being able to create much of a variety of games unless they can do basic scripting. Still, there's a lot of 'remix this game' possibilities.
What school/teacher? I'd be interested in finding a curriculum or any references about that. I have daughters and I'm dying to find a good way to present science to them.
I think this is important to point out:

Comcast wasn't merely blocking traffic. They were actively sending reset packets. They were creating fraudulent traffic intended to mess up your BitTorrent downloads. I don't think this sets an example/precedent about traffic shaping or throttling. Comcast was pretty blatant here and was actively sending false data.

I guess time will tell whether this is a bigger precedent in the fight for net-neutrality.
I am really disturbed whenever I read about one human being saying he is completely incapable of empathizing with another human being's choice.

Instead of trying to figure out why otherwise intelligent people like something you do not care for, why not just sit back and accept the idea that we all have different likes, dislikes, and preferences, and that we need not justify our particular differences to you before going about our merry way?
Testing is overrated?
OpenMokos begin shipping in the US
I think you mean FreeRunner's begin shipping in the US.
Yes, thats what I mean.
The problem is that they are not seen as a VC. So when one of their projects fails people say look google has failed, they are losing their focus, they have peaked and now they're going down.

And that means more money will go into stuff that google competitors are doing because now they can say to their investors, look, google can be beaten.

They will stop selling their businesses to google at the earliest possible moment. More startup founders will be willing and able to go it alone, and fewer will want to go work for google just to watch their baby flounder like all those other half hearted me too projects.

There's another reason why they cannot act like a VC. Much of what they do needs size and network effects. If people doubt that a particular app has a future, it doesn't get traction, which means it's not going to get big fast. An app by a big vendor that doesn't get big fast is not geeky and cool, it's dead in the water and totally uncool.

Microsoft has lost its influence long before their profits started to go down. That's why google absolutely needs focus and they need to be very convincing. They need to be so cool and then they need to say, oh and by the way, we'll crush any competition, so don't even try!
Maybe the car companies should try the XBox business model. Sell the cars at a loss, then only let them use special gas that is massively marked up.

For $7.99 a month, you can have "airbag live gold" which automatically deploys the airbags during a crash. A great idea!
And AFAIK the first affordable unlimited data plan.

Not quite right.

My Sidekick on T-Mobile has had a $20 unlimited data plan for many, many years (total price of service including data is $59/month, vs. the $69/month price of the 1st gen iPhone with unlimited data, or $79/month in the 2nd gen iPhone). The Palm has also been available for several years from a few carriers with a $10-$20 unlimited data plan.
Apple Releases iTunes 7.7 [Updated]
Because it doesn't have a chip to decode ogg, so it would have to use the main CPU which would quickly drain the battery.
Boston still has some.
The iRex iLiad has a touch screen as well as being eInk.
I'm a regular HN community member (under a different account). Coincidentally, I also work for AMD. Everything I say here is my own words and none of this is endorsed/backed by my employer.
From what I can tell, AMD's strategies are more long-term than some people would like. For instance, we're taking time to rewrite software when we could squeak by with just modifying it. We just reorganized my entire building. These things have lots of up-front costs: lost time, productivity, etc. But I would be surprised if they didn't pay off in the future.

Until last month, we were in a hiring/raise freeze. Most benefits were frozen (profit sharing, buying stock, etc.) Now that stuff is being lifted. Management believes (as do most employees) that we have passed the worst of the storm.

HR and legal can be a real pain (more so than many other companies i've worked at). They can regularly prevent real things from happening. Thankfully, they are physically seperated from the hardware/software boys (literally on the other side of town). They have a dress code; we don't, they have lots of inane security policies (no camera phones, etc.), we don't, etc.

The management style is very hands-off (at least for hardware/software boys), which is both good and bad. The "very good" developers can really shine. If you want to work on something, just do it. Rarely do you need manager approval, and if you do it's usually just one level up. I've had several ideas that I've gotten a chance to implement in the last few months that have really streamlined the manufacturing process and saved the company a lot of money.

On the other hand, average/mediocre software developers are totally lost. Upper-level management communication basically consists of elaborate ways of saying "Make more money" and "make chips fail less" and that sort of thing, things everybody should already know anyway. How to go about doing any of that is largely left up to the ingenuity of the small team or even individual developer. Great for smart people; bad for mediocre developers.

I certainly don't think AMD is in danger of collapsing or anything. It's just not as competitive at this precise moment as it was in 2001-2005. I can say that the company is treating its engineers/developers right--flexible hours, casual dress, nice facilities, all the sort of things that lead to happy programmers/engineers and great products. Most of the employees in my building seem to own stock, so I would imagine they also think AMD has a good future.
I think this could be really valuable, although I wouldn't really restrict it to 3 random people.

Flickr for example, have groups that require you to comment on the previous 2 photos to post in that group. That doesn't mean all photos in the group have only 2 comments, many have much more because it creates a culture of critique.

As much there has been talk about "Not going dark" for programmers I think this is equally true of businesses. If you believe in what you do enough to tell other people about it then they can help keep you going in the right direction. If you stay in stealth mode forever you could be digging your own grave without knowing it.
"If you're good at sightreading four-hands piano music, I have hundreds of pieces I'd like to try playing with you; please drop me a note and we can hopefully get together for a jam session."

Playing four-hands piano with Knuth would be an unbelievably cool experience, and definitely a great conversation starter when among other hackers. It's almost enough incentive to start learning.
Get all Apple and iPhone news at one place
Prof. Peter Stein at Cornell. The class is Physics 202. I can email you the class notes and problem sets if you'd like. I'll also email him and ask if he's thought about publishing the course materials online.
What web-based Whois tool do you use?
I've just discovered http://IPmango.com, it's fast but it doesn't have a bookmarklet or querystring lookups. Betterwhois doesn't always give full results, I have reservations about doing lookups at registrars, and domaintools occasionally asks for a login. Others have captcha or have minimum times between lookups.

What have you had success with?
I don't see evidence of the quality going down. As far as I can tell, discussions around non-computer, non-startup posts are as high-quality as discussions in general. And the vast majority of troll/spam/flamejunk I run across here has already been killed.
While blender is superb for modeling, its video capabilities are somewhat inferior. It is rather more cumbersome in animation than its commercial alternatives, though still decent.

It's game engine, though often touted, is hell to work with. I had to wrestle with it endlessly for even a simple lightcycle game that takes less than an hour in pygame.
10th ICFP contest has begun
main page here: http://www.icfpcontest.org/
Rails - Simple Asynchronous Processing
I like EasyDNS, which provides:

http://www.easywhois.com
i used to use pcnames.com but its been having problems lately.
If a private individual was sending such packets, it would be a felony.

Sucks when your ISP is performing man-in-the-middle attacks against you.
I think they have a basic event framework. Think about all those side scrollers out there, working with the same physics and layout - with almost unlimited possibilities.

It's like myspace layouts + flash gaming. I think people will love it.
For whoever voted me down:

1. The joke is old and I assumed that most of us have heard it before
2a. What he said really didn't comment on the article
2b. Therefore, I felt the comment didn't add anything
2c. I would, however, automatically expect to see such a comment on Reddit
3. The fact that it's being voted up (5 at this point) disappointed me
4. I voted him down. People always complain when they are voted down without explanation
5. I intended my previous comment to explain why I voted him down

That's all. I could make the leap and say that the quality of comments here is going down, but that might be going too far for everyone's tastes.
The essence of IPSec is a mandatory feature of IPv6. I don't see how this could mean anything other than "packets don't have to be encrypted by default, but encrypted packets must be allowed to be sent and received at any time". That makes IPv6 very much not orthogonal to the topic at hand.

What I'm trying to get to is this: why are they trying to figure out how to encrypt the internet when they can just use IPv6 (presuming that existing implementations support all the "mandatory" features)? The only rational answer I can come up with off the top of my head is if they think governments will have backdoors for transparently observing the traffic unencrypted, but that wasn't mentioned in the article as a rationale for anything.
Google considers everything it does a mechanism to get folks to use Google's properties and to create more ad-revenue.

A TV network analogy would be that Apps, Lively, Earth etc. are programs. We tune into Google because it has the best programs. And then get served ads.
Interesting choices. They are mostly relatively obscure. That is, not the top or even secondary tier of popularity.

I'd be curious to know his book picking methodology. Personal recommendations? Book review publications? Or something else?
Startup Camp Austin
They may be holding that information until the next earnings report. I'm pretty sure they'll be pressed to disclose it then.
http://web.archive.org/web/20030215210203/www.snew.com/

Snew was once devoted to a higher purpose.
http://www.casttv.com/about/
So... you're suggesting what's currently called Closed Alpha.

I guess the innovation here is creating a randomized pool of alpha-testers.
Sounds vaguely like Nostrademons' GameClay idea... I wonder what they are doing differently?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=225209
Y Combinator Diaries Week 5
Unless you are doing something truly unusual or something that requires a lot of investment in time and capital, you should just tell as many people as you know about it and see what happens and reiterate based on feedback.

Consider some YC companies that are still fine-tuning their product. They've been reviewed by the likes of pg and co and had the benefit of their advice for 3 months as well as the benefit of experience from the large pool of YC alumni. But even they need to fine tune based on what the larger market thinks.
Google Hiring Slowdown? We Hope So
I could make the leap and say that the quality of comments here is going down, but that might be going too far for everyone's tastes.

So set a good example and don't reply to downmods with 7 reasons why your comment shouldn't have been downmodded. Even good comments get downmodded from time to time; deal with it.
Maybe not - since you can't see the code you don't know when location info is being transmitted without asking your permission.

Considering that OnStar is apparently being pressured to provide a remote "kill switch" to law enforcement, that printers put hidden codes on each page at the behest of law enforcement etc, would you be troubled if your phone secretly had a feature to pinpoint you within meters without your knowledge, upon the mere request of someone who appears to have the correct law enforcement credentials?

As to already being able to do this via triangulation etc: perhaps, but this would make it even simpler; as I recall in the CDMA world pure network-based location can't get more accurate than 250m and can't do elevation.
> I don't see evidence of the quality going down.

My recollection with reddit was that it was a 'tipping point' sort of process, and it went fairly quickly from being good to full of politics articles with roving bands of morons voting down everything they disagreed with.
There is a way to liver forever, but it cannot be achieved through scientific endeavor.
Loopt Eagerly Joins the iPhone Gold Rush
Interesting. To me Quality = Adherence to Spec. If the software matches the spec perfectly, then then quality is 100%. Users can eat it as far as I'm concerned. If something is written according to spec, then it is a quality product, "usability" be damned. Just my personal opinion. :-)
If everyone explained their downvote in comments, how crappy do you think this site would be? Please don't.
ogg has not been legally tested. The developers read through what they believe to be the relevant patents and declared themselves clean, but no one knows what those patent holders think and what patents may have been missed. Only when a company with deep pockets releases ogg vorbis in a high volume device will we see who is waiting to come out of the woodwork and start a patent suit.

For the tiny and shrinking set of people that want ogg vorbis, it isn't worth the legal risk.

(Sidebar: I don't mean to imply that vorbis is vanishing now, but as storage gets cheaper I expect mp3, aac, and vorbis to drift away in favor of lossless formats which are not subject to the body of psychoacoustical patents. I rip at 192kbps AAC or 256kbps mp3. Lossless encoders end up around 750kbps. I never fill my 8G iPhone. Using lossless on a 32G device would be a no brainer decision.)
On a similar note:

http://vertonghen.wordpress.com/2008/06/25/i-have-an-idea/
here lies nazgul, the world's oldest man. No one knows how long ago he was born, but some say as far back as the 20th century. He died peacefully in his sleep after a strenuous night, several of his girlfriends reported. :p
Can you just put them online somewhere?