skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I hate to be the naysayer on this, but I disagree. An ugly MySpace page is interesting because your friends are on it. A bad game your friend made is still just a bad game.

People who are talented enough to make good web games already have a tool to do it with - Flash (typically a pirated version). It's not a perfect tool, but it's very flexible.

I agree that the physics in this thing look great though.
First, let me say, your comments are very insightful. You force me to amend my position a bit. :-)

Regarding your first point -- you are right. Google can't really be like VC. As a company, they are not expected to have failures. Looking at their trading history in 2008, it looks like concerns over stuff like monetizing YouTube is kicking them in the reputation.

I think, however, that they are also suffering from a thing that the media loves to do -- turn in its darlings. Once a "gee-whiz" media baby stops being exciting because of its newness, it is popular to try to take the "darker" angle on it. I think this started in the geek community with the Google in China business a few years ago, and now it's hitting the wider world. I think this would be a problem for Google regardless of their product strategy.

I also suspect that, while Google can't be like VC, they're not really like normal companies, either. I think people expect them to be a little more experimental and to fail a little bit more often -- although, on a smaller scale than YouTube. I think that people still think, "Small failures from Google are just signs of progress." It probably wouldn't hurt them to be a bit more conservative right now with their stock taking a dive.

Finally, I don't think that Google has lost their geek-hipness just yet. I, for one, still think tha Google spits out a couple interesting services every year. They aren't us cool as they used to be, and the Google cool factor will probably wear off for them eventually. But, as one of my co-founders says, they can "burn that bridge when they get to it."
The interface is not loved by everyone, including experienced artists:

http://tinyurl.com/6m9wwd

However, you are right in that there are some useful tutorials out there. It's a neat tool, and the price is right.
Aren't popular books usually crap?

http://www2.oprah.com/obc/pastbooks/obc_pastdate.jhtml#2008
Ask YC: Finding a co-founder(s)
I've been out of school for almost a year and a half now, working as a financial analyst for a large finance/accounting firm in Los Angeles. I've known for quite some time that I won't be truly happy working for a large company and that entrepreneurship is in my blood (no one in my family works for anyone else). I also spent two years in college doing sales for a small web services/software company and got a lot of exposure to the development of a SAAS solution and the web as it relates to small-to-mid-size businesses. I spend a significant portion of my free time researching the web, writing mock business plans, and trying to develop ideas that I have.

But the one thing I continue to struggle with is finding someone else who wants to form a startup. I work with some very smart people, but the problem is, their whole game plan is built around climbing the corporate ladder, whereas mine couldn't be more opposite. So what is the best strategy for someone like myself to find a trustworthy, hard working partner to form a startup? I fully respect what programmers/engineers/hackers bring to the table and I feel that I would compliment those skills very well. I also have a pretty good understanding of the web and wouldn't consider myself one of those "pie-in-the-sky" business types that are responsible for that stereotype. I'm just a guy looking to build something cool, solve some problems, and maybe make enough to quit my day-job. Sorry for the long post, but what are your thoughts?
Wow. That is incredibly poignant.
"i still think i'm smart, actually."

Not smart enough to use proper capitalization, it seems...
I am really disturbed whenever I read about one human being saying he is completely incapable of empathizing with another human being's choice.

Oh, I don't know about that. I am completely incapable of empathizing with the human being who chooses to beat his daughter to death for dating a boy from another religion. Or the human being who chooses to torture an animal for fun. Or the human being who... well actually I can't think of a third example which is significantly different from the first two.

But as far as purchases of consumer electronics goes... sure, do whatever you like! I really don't give a damn one way or the other.
How about the CEO's, management, etc. who "miraculously" brought employee ownership of the company to around 20%! I'll let you guess how much of that was owned by lowly union workers, and how much was owned by executives. Or is it GE I am thinking of?
Pretty amazing considering the initial supply of first-gen iPhones didn't sell out in most places (even the Palo Alto Apple store) until a day or two after launch.
I get the feeling, from most things I read, that co founders should be someone you've already known for years, not someone you find from one day to the next, so it's sort of a catch-22.
Thanks, I'd appreciate that. My email is in my profile.
And when the day comes that I can install an application on an iPhone without the permission of Apple, including those I develop myself, I will buy an iPhone. I've made the mistake of buying one device (Sidekick II) that doesn't allow arbitrary applications, and I won't do it again...and I certainly won't pay $80/month for the privilege of only using the products Apple permits me to use.
>> and I have yet to hear anyone explain to me what OGG gives me that mp3 doesn't

> The right to use - or as a developer, create - a program that can play/record music in that format without permission from, or payment to, the people who developed and patented said format.

And the right as a customer to choose to avoid paying indirectly for a technology license (mp3) by choosing to use another technology (ogg vorbis).

Its a bit like the argument of the people who want to buy just a PC (say for a freebsd server); and implicitly must also pay for the included Windows they're forced to take, even though they never want to use it (is this not now illegal in some states)?

Except in this case, you are paying a portion of the cost of the phone, a portion of the cost of Windows (or Mac OS), and a portion of the cost of tune downloads, as a license fee for mp3 (well the vendor is paying the license fee, but guess where its coming from).
I don't think it looks all that bad. But, I couldn't figure out how to buy and use one. There seems to be no actual way to purchase one, or any way to activate it with any carriers. I'm sure it's possible...but it's not obvious to me how to do it.
You can't tell from the video, but the social aspects are really big. It's about making, sharing, and playing games with friends.

This isn't for people who know flash. This is drag and drop game creation. They might have solved a really hard problem here.
If you think it's hard now, just wait until you start the business, it becomes mildly successful, and now you want to bring in someone as a co-founder to help you grow - it's twice as hard then. I'm going through that right now and it's tough.

I don't think cofounders need be friends before starting - I think that like-minded people hang around each other so, if you're in an area like the Valley, there are more people of your mindset and you'll find it easier to co-found with a friend. I think co-founding is tough and there are no easy ways of doing it.
If you look here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inductive_reasoning you will see inductive reasoning is all about drawing broad conclusions from limited evidence.

In this context, the tens or thousands of experiments are generalized to support some "theory"

Every time i touch ice it is cold. By induction, all ice is cold. that's not "proof" but it's a great theory of ice.
How much is it? The online store doesn't look too happy right now..
The problem is that the cost of Maya seems expensive to the student or casual 3D artist, but it's actually peanuts for a full-time visual effects company; it probably works out to less than the cost of the hardware -- certainly less than a month of employee costs. If you add in the network effects of reduced training costs, "standard" formats, and consultant availability, Maya may actually be cheaper than Blender... at least in the current market.

I wouldn't look to a big studio to change the situation, either. They are not "paying through the nose"... In fact, they are in a good position to negotiate even cheaper prices and better service than smaller studios.

Any initial adoption will come from small, independent groups that teach themselves Blender in school, end up preferring it to the big packages, and don't mind that this keeps them from working at larger studios.
Ask HN: Which social network to develop apps for ?
Almost all the Social Networks like facebook, bebo, hi5, friendster, myspace support app devlopement and in PHP. So, if you have an app, it's not too much work porting them over to the others. If you are a new developer, which one do you recommend to start with ...
If you read Hume or Popper you will see that inductive reasoning is logically impossible, and therefore can't actually be what people do.
Good luck, Austin - hope it's a great camp

-- A Dallasite
This could do for games what Dreamweaver and FrontPage did for web authoring - sweet!
It would be nice, but I doubt it will make a difference. Anyone else here remember when Best Buy used to sell Linux several years ago? They carried quite a few distros - Red Hat, SuSE, Caldera and maybe even a couple others. CompUSA sold Linux back then too.

It doesn't hurt to have it in the store, but I really wonder how many people go to a store to buy any operating system. But who knows? Maybe it will be different this time. Ubuntu is much more user friendly than what was available a few years ago.
IPhone 3G: long lines in SF and phones running out
I was on of the first in to get one in the O2 store here in the UK. They sold out within a couple of hours and they had around 100 in stock.
Stephenson's idea--generate high-quality stuff on the first run by cultivating your subconscious to spew only high-quality stuff--reminds me of performing improv. An improv scene is anything from a skit to an entire musical, performed without a script or planning. The players get on stage and just do it, by saying, acting out, and/or singing the first thing that comes to mind, one line at a time.

There is plenty of bad improv: amateurish stuff, "gaggy" stuff (consciously aiming for cheap laughs), etc. But I've also seen amazing improv: entire plays and musicals, sometimes with serious themes, of such coherence and high quality that it doesn't seem possible that they could have been improvised. I once saw an entire Alfred Hitchcock "movie" improvised on stage, that somehow achieved Hitchcock's signature combination of eerieness and worldly elegance.

I've spent about three years training in improv, and it's actually a lot like Stephenson's tale of needing to keep the typewriter ribbon moving. Training in improv is mostly learning ways to tune into what is happening in a scene, let that trigger your spontaneous imagination, and trust that without judging it. There are some very specific techniques, like "very early in the scene, establish where you are," but mostly it's developing that skill of stoking your spontaneous imagination and taking what it gives you. You know after a while when you're tuned in and when you're not. A non-obvious but important element is to go s-l-o-w (like Stephenson with the fountain pen). That enables you to tune in.

If you don't have your imagination ready to go that way, cultivated by life experience and learning as well as by a feeling for how to tune into a scene, the good stuff just ain't going to happen.

My own experience with writing code is something like improv. Sometimes it sucks, and sometimes it's wonderful. There's no way the good stuff could ever have come about by continuous distillation and debugging. It had to flow. I debug very little. If code is buggy, I just throw it away and start completely from scratch. When the code is flowing, nearly all of the "thinking" is subconscious. I'm just tuning in, as if someone else is writing the code. When it's going super-well, it feels like I'm taking dictation. Just like in an improv scene, I'm writing the current line because I'm curious to know what happens next.
Usually, except for Elie Wiesel's "Night".

Even broken clocks are right twice a day.
You hit the nail on the head. The problem is, most of my peer network are people who see the allure of money in the finance world and want to work their way up the ladder. And the engineers that I know are not yet ready to break out and do something on their own.
Work for the enterprise, don't ya?
Not sure I'd want to use your software, Allocator2008!

I'd say that this is wrong for two reasons. I think you're right that adherence to spec is important (if the spec says "Send an email" and the app doesn't, then something is wrong). But:

1. Within spec adherence, there is still good code and bad code. Is the code maintainable, understandable, secure? And was it written efficiently?

2. Sometimes the spec is wrong. Documentation isn't infallible, and software should change based on users' needs.
I also see some Faulkner, Márquez, Tolstoy and Steinbeck.
Reading a book is a linear process. Writing may be anything but, especially with fiction.

I have never exactly 'made' a story. With me the process is much more like bird-watching than like either talking or building. I see pictures. Some of these pictures have a common flavor, almost a common smell, which groups them together. Keep quiet and watch and they will begin joining themselves up. If you were very lucky (I have never been as lucky as all that) a whole set might join themselves so consistently that there you had a complete story: without doing anything yourself. But more often (in my experience always) there are gaps. Then at last you have to do some deliberate inventing, have to contrive reasons why these characters should be in these various places doing these various things. I have no idea whether this is the usual way of writing stories, still less whether it is the best. It is the only one I know: images always come first. -CSL
Digg's new recommendation system, like the site, relies on the wisdom of crowds.
Only tangentially related, but years ago, in elementary school, I decided to guess the password after the school restricted access to SimCity. I got it right on the first try, it was just the school name, but I told everyone 'I hacked it', for major props.
I think we do this, or something very much like it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_inference

I'll agree that we can set up a game we play with symbols and rules that doesn't permit inductive reasoning as valid. I can't agree that "what people do" has anything to do with logic.
Yeah, onion routing will grind your data rates way, way down. It also very much works against the inertia of the internet as it stands, which it turns out to not be all that useful.
A new book describes the man who created modern venture capital.
Well, maybe not the only one...
http://www.ziphoneunlock.com/?id=yuga

Just sayin'
While your examples are extreme, we are only talking about degrees of difference. For example, I empathize with people who send their country's youth off to a foreign land to fight and kill for oil even if I don't agree with their choice.

Empathizing is not the same thing as agreeing with or countenancing.
This is pretty typical of my experience. I was offered 0.1% at my first startup (angel-funded, about 4 months old, I was straight out of high school, think I was employee #13 but the first 6 or so employees were from an earlier bootstrapped incarnation of the company and were no longer there). 0.022% at a startup I interviewed with just out of college (series A coming up on a series B, about a year and a half old, employee #22). No equity at the startup I ended up taking a job with - companies that intend to remain private forever are often very stingy in giving away stock.

It's pretty typical to have health benefits but no 401k. You should be getting roughly market-rate compensation at a funded startup though; that's why they have funding. If you want big stock grants, you need to take big risks, i.e. work for little or no salary.

Edit: One more thing that I want to add since I've seen many friends get burned or disillusioned by this: you should assume that the only thing you'll get out of a startup is the cash you're paid and the experience of having worked there. Very few early employees cash out with enough that they never have to work again: the ones I know all fall into 3 categories:

1.) They founded the company.

2.) The company went public and became a household name.

3.) They joined early and rose really high, i.e. VP level.

The vast majority of early startup employees don't fit these categories: either their company is acquired in the $40M range and they end up with $3K (true story), or their equity is diluted by multiple successive funding rounds so that they end up owning a tiny fraction of their initial equity stake (also a true story), or the company goes bust and their equity is worth nothing (yeah, that's me). If you go in expecting a job where you'll learn things and hopefully build something cool, then any massive payday is just gravy. If you go in expecting a massive payday, you'll probably be disappointed.
Major flaw in Internet design is being repaired by a large group working in concert.
Oh, I don't know about that. I am completely incapable of empathizing with the human being who chooses to beat his daughter to death for dating a boy from another religion.

Amen to that.
Facebook manages a vast and rapidly expanding web of connections for its millions of users
Jessica, what happened to YC's plan to open-source some of the legal paperwork?
Tesla hires black-belt in "making cars". Now time to make electric cars for real
That's exactly the problem I've had. There's 2-3 people I've worked with in the last 3 years I've approached about getting our nuts out of the corporate lock-box, and none of them have any interest. With two of them, you can tell immediately that the thought of leaving a corporate position for their own enterprise has never even crossed their minds. The other one overestimates the risk involved.

sigh
I found a co-founder by posting on craigslist.

We have very different styles: I am improvisational, creative, always willing to try an idea, in love with writing beautiful code, mostly driven by aesthetics and idealism. He is organized, managerial, skeptical, oriented toward business and negotiation and the world of money, good at researching and finding out how other people have solved a problem, though he still enjoys code.

We have disagreements sometimes, but it's working well. The disagreements have turned out fruitful. That's probably how it should be.
A post-founding co-founder?
I love the obligatory photo in front of MIT! I'm guessing it is from the day before convocation.
I just hope they get around to making a light-duty truck like my Ford Ranger. My wish: all-electric Ranger-like truck for $10-20k
> In that time-span we've been able to create the core product in terms of basic functionality: this includes the functionality that any iteration of our final offering will need. It's a pretty well-oiled machine of planning, building wireframes, development, final design/interface decisions, and user-flow integration.

Can anyone with experience post quick step-by-step instructions on this type of product development? I.e. if I just got an idea for a web app, what would be the quickest way to flesh it out?
i think the financial docs are pretty helpful - i was looking for some templates recently and these look decent.
They don't appear to support GSM 1900, which will limit which carries they can be used with in the US.
http://www.alexkrupp.com/Phys202.zip

If you glance at my answers to problem sets 4, 5, and 8 then you'll get the general idea of what the course involves. The problem sets are really fun because you're forced to play with the numbers and really understand the material. It might not be as hard as a traditional physics course, but it's every bit as rigorous in the real sense of the word. It's brilliance is that it really stresses the fundamentals, probably more so than any other physics material in existence. This is important because, as one professional Go player said after observing a Japanese baseball game,

"In every confrontation with a real American professional team it seems that what we need to learn from them, besides their technique of course, is how uniformly faithful their players are to the fundamentals. Faithfulness to the fundamentals seems to be a common thread linking professionalism in all areas." (T. Kageyama)
Bayesian Inference does not explain how new knowledge is created.
They started heading down that road when they developed Java... because when the rest of the industry outpaced Sun's hardware performance, Java made it easier to get their software off of Sun's platform. And the didn't really do all that good a job of monetizing Java, maybe because they thought that it would make it easier for people to develop on their PC's and migrate to Sun servers?

BTW, as an aside, it seems to me that MS is to some extent following that route; there have been an increasing number of projects using various dotNET technologies cropping up in the open-source community over the years. Unless the trend has changed in the last year or so, most of them have been based on Mono rather than MS' implementation.
A web framework author on why he chose against ERB/JSP/ASP style (string template) views
It's coming. We're just waiting for some startups to test it out on investors.
either they will get around to it, or their existence will prompt other companies to get around to it.

it'll just take a little time.

also, for reference they used to make electric rangers:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Ranger_EV
Awesome... thanks!
maybe my sense of humor is bad, but am I correct in assuming the mars rover reference is joke?
The European cars (like the Opel I have) are built by highly unionized European employees, though, right? The models Ford builds in Europe are pretty good too.
My mother (who thankfully is not so old) uses the Justin.tv officecam for exactly this.
Restating your problem: the circles I run in now don't have what I am looking for, how can I find what I am looking for? Simple answer: change the circles you run in. Go to the watering hole for the prey you want to take down -- users groups, coworking facilities, and professional networks like workingwithrails and linkedin. Then, do a small test project, then try a harder project together. Expect to go through many before you find the one that fits.

'Just because you've become a young man now
(Man, now)
There's still some things that you don't understand now
(Son, now)
Before you ask some girl for her hand now
(My son)
Keep your freedom for as long as you can now'

My mama told me...'you better shop around'
(Shop, shop around) a-whoa-yeah
You better (uh-huh) shop around!
(Shop, shop around)
Uh-uh-uh
May be he is afraid of the Mark Zuckerbergs
My life is so miserable now that you have an iphone but I don't.
good for them, but I have yet to know anybody that uses them. And most of my friends are the early adopter types.

I think Loopt has some really great PR, as we have been hearing so much about then, yet I don't know anybody that uses them. I think they are going against a human trend, that people most of the time, don't want their friends to know where they at.

Now, that Yelp app might actually be useful.
How many people did you interview before you found your current co-founder?
8 Ways To Quit Mousing Around