skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Agreed. The real article(this is a link to a blog review of it), says:

Web surfing on cell phones - now, that's different. That's why Kleiner recently created a $100 million "iFund" for backing startups building products for Apple's iPhone and other mobile devices.

"Mobile is an enormously important new opportunity," says Doerr. "We think it's the next computing platform and will rival the personal computer."

Which is great, because everything I do is for the mobile.
My stock options are junk right now. It doesn't make sense though because they are pretty much the strongest mobile robot company in the world.

So medium term I wouldn't expect to make money off of IRBT. Long term, they should be positioned to take advantage of both the high and low end robotics markets. They aren't moving fast enough in certain areas -- and if Tipjoy does well, I'll take advantage of that.

The most interesting tech is definitely on the high end. The trend towards thousands of cores in a processor actually works really well with the kind of sensor processing and planning common in robotics. Particle filtering and large matrix/image operations can often be significantly parallelized. They're building a framework called Aware that is lots of C++ & Python to take advantage of such architectures.
http://www.irobot.com/sp.cfm?pageid=32
I upmodded you (because you were at -6 and I felt bad), but please learn from this experience.

The only thing worse than a terse, content-free comment is a verbose, content-free comment.
Well, I'd have to disagree. The only difference between a YC startup and a non-YC startup is (1) access to advising resources, and (2) a bit of pre-filtering due to the selection process. Of course, there is also the $15k of funding-- but for many entrepreneurs, getting 10-20k of seed money is really not too hard (you could probably drum up that much "dumb" money from family and friends-- after all, how many jobless or underpaid teenagers do you know who were able to persuade their folks to buy them cars?).

For your statement to be true, it seems that either the advice dispensed by YC advisors is sufficient to transform a bad idea into a good idea or alternatively, that the YC selection committee only selects ideas destined for success. While these points do hold /some/ water (good advice never hurts, and pg et. al. clearly know a thing or two about entrepreneurship), it is still important to note that YC makes mistakes from time to time and that (participated in YC) -> (good startup) does not imply that (NOT participated in YC) -> (NOT good startup). Heck, even the first implication is a fallacy.

Regardless, at the end of the day, you're asking me to assume that founders who either don't make the cut for YC or whom didn't apply in the first place are either inferior entrepreneurs or are pushing a bad idea. This is simply not true.

Entrepreneurship has been around for a LONG time and plenty of people are working their butts off for a shot at launching a successful, growing startup. For some, YC provides the perfect opportunity to actually sit down and execute an idea; for most, YC is either not an option or is simply not necessary.

In the past couple of weeks, TechCrunch has reported on YC startups with surprising frequency. Given that it is fairly difficult to get TC to profile one's startup, it seems a little suspicious that whenever a YC app launches, it gets a (typically positive) write-up. In light of this, my conclusion that YC and Arrington have some sort of friendly or financial relationship leading to a lowered-barrier-to-article for YC-funded startups is sound if not altogether true.
Profitable After 3 Weeks
I think if it was the plans to make this it would be more Hacker.
http://img.timeinc.net/time/time100/2007/images/time100landi... - misses Obama. (It's good software, was just funny to me.)
The Ultimate iPhone App: Star Wars: The Force Unleashed
Craiglist introduces phone verification systems; spammers are not happy
Techmeme's Leaderboard rankings and 'presence' - where have the A-listers gone?
Kathy Sierra's blog is fantastic:

http://headrush.typepad.com/

Here are printout versions of her posts:

http://enklo.com/passionate/

/Gary
This is one area that google just doesn't get it:

Look at their front page:
http://finance.google.com/finance

Readibility (i am not sure this word exists), is aweful, it looks like a mess of random things placed on a white page.

This is one of the features that yahoo actually does a decent job:
http://finance.yahoo.com/

Sure, it looks like an average portal page, but it does the job. Much easier in the eye.
Digg / Kooncat / Shoutsin
I knew that it was going to send a message to my friends, but there wasn't much in the way of visual feedback telling me that the requests had been made, so I had thought that the request just didn't go through and accidentally sent 2-3 messages to each person.
Ohh, and if you want to work for a robot company, but you're worried that you don't know enough about robotics: apply right now. You don't need to know robotics. Robotics is just a collection of different fields, with individuals doing their specialties. You should most especially apply if you know Lisp, because the Home Robots side needs you. http://irobot.com/sp.cfm?pageid=79

Ohh, I hear Anybots is hiring too, as is Willow Garage

http://anybots.com/join.html

http://www.willowgarage.com/Careers
There is pretty much no chance of accidentally sending your contacts SMS so long as you don't go clicking willy-nilly. You have to explicitly click someone's name and odds are your colleagues aren't on a supported network anyways.

So really, this is all FUD from the trailing edge of the mac world.

And I know the kind of social pressure you're describing, I worked with LMCO for quite awhile, so I don't meant to sound dismissive of your concern. But really, Loopt, Whrrl and Zintin don't send SMSs to people without asking your first. And it sounds like you can safely pass on them anyways, because you're probably not in the target demographic for these products.
Steve Wozniak Is in the Second Row on Today's The Price Is Right
In the audience. Apropos of nothing, I know. Anyone else have a love for the game shows like myself and Steve?
The main challenge with working in the US is that you can only get a work permit if you can show that you have enough money to pay yourself at market rates.

Which, in places like Silicon Valley, can mean $100k/year. Usually, your startup does not have that kind of cash. So you have a problem.

A quick summary of visas:

H1: the most common. As long as there is a US company and they can pay you market rates, it works in theory, except there are no visas available, due to quotas, except a few days a year. It's crazy.

L1: that only works if you are transferring from one foreign corporation to a related entity (branch, headquarters, etc...). Highly unlikely for startups

E1: if your country of origin has a special treaty with the US, and you have established reasonable business, you can send yourself on a mission to start the US branch of your business. That visa is very convenient and has fairly open guidelines, but it very rare.

Alain - fairsoftware.net
I disagree.

If you look at how they arrange data around a symbol (e.g. http://finance.google.com/finance?q=KO) it's much better than Yahoo's version.

In particular, tying news updates to price points on the chart (as well as updating prices and volumes on mouse over) is excellent.

Another nice touch is putting the latest price and tick in the html page's title tag, so I can see what's happening even while in another browser tab.
That just reinforces what the guy quoted in the Telegraph said.

My point, though, was the reason for inaction on Paulson's plan is due to something else entirely, and it was a bad job of the Telegraph article to miss it.
All I'm saying is that if you're the kind of person who is irrevocably damaged by sending an SMS to someone, then these sorts of social networks shouldn't have been on your slate to begin with.

Also, it seems weird to me that people are worried their number may reach advertisers. Unless you're extremely selective about who you call and you pay your carrier extra, your number will end up in the advertiser's hands. Odds are even if your number is "unlisted" you've been redflagged by someone that your credit card weaseled their way into selling.

If we're going to complain about privacy in this modern phone-bound world, let's at least complain about the phenomenon and not specific expressions thereof. Loopt is just a scapegoat for the reactionary stance of people who are being suddenly immersed into the modern world of cellphone ownership.
Connections are always important. In an ideal world, ideas and startups would stand on their own merit. It wouldn't matter who you know.

In practice, it can't work that way. It's not that people are evil, it's just a question of how to be efficient. I can't spend my time listening in detail to every pitch of every person who says he has a great idea. It's jut not possible. I need filters to spend the little time I have on interesting stuff. Filters include my friends recommending me something. That gets my attention.

At the corporate level, a good filter is YCombinator: if you made it through their selection process, it tells me something. It's not a guarantee that you will succeed, but at least you passed some basic smoke check. Which in turn gives you an unfair advantage, because now you get easier access to smart employees, advisors, business partners, etc...

Alain - fairsoftware.net
This is sad. Back in school we had to read "The Goal", about how a new manager is able to turn around a dying manufacturing plant and save it from closure, by focusing on "the goal", namely profit.

Sorry darlings but saving the planet is not "the goal". Profit, and only profit is. KP is going to have to learn this the hard way evidently.
And I was told I was "caught naked in the shower". How humiliating it would be if everyone learned I take my shower without clothes!
I think the "difference" is that they don't use disposable addresses per se, but rather multiple semi-permanent forwarding addresses that can be individually disabled as needed due to spam. Oh, and it's all streamlined and integrated with your normal OpenID authentication process.

That's something you can't do with normal disposable accounts.
until last year Goog finance was trailing heavily after yahoo finance.
I know that the best product doesn't always win, but in this case it seems that users like Yahoo finance much better.
Yahoo! Finance Market Share 52 times Bigger than Google Finance
http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/070319-114123

Perhaps things have changed this year, with the release of the real-time quotes.
It DOESN'T send a message to everyone in the phonebook. It only sends to people you select.
BlackBerry busted - iPhone success sees analyst RIM downgrade
How is this news? Didn't this come out 4 months ago?
Fisker Karma electric car to be made in Finland. $80k, 125 mph top speed, 0-60 in 5 secs
What did you expect? The title says it's going to say things about PG not tell us interesting truths. I haven't clicked the link, and won't...
Email is only one of the many avenues for spam. Try running a search, using Craigslist, reading a popular blog's comment or reading Youtube comments...
thank you! More motivation for me to finish my CS degree:-)
I've heard that Thinking And Deciding is good, but I haven't read it personally.
Don't recall, sorry.
Google Code Jam qualification round begins tonight
What if you have a school and missiles?
Linus Torvalds on security
Webcaster tries porn, er, pay-per-view as business model
I've never seen an implementation of closures with dynamic lookups. Perhaps you can't point me in the right direction.
Ya I think it's common courtesy to link to the actual article instead of some blog.

http://money.cnn.com/2008/07/08/technology/Kleiner_bets_the_...
Super Rich Tax Cheats Outed by Bank Clerk
i'm pretty sure KP know the goal is profit. they're VC's, by definition the only criteria for success they have is making money.
"Amost a decade later, still without [another IPO], the number of skeptics are growing."

This is bad writing. To claim that Google's IPO was KP's last great deal, and that they haven't done anything for a decade since is ludicrous. Google's IPO was in 2004. It's been 4 years. For all we know, KP has invested in the next Google, and 5 years from now, they too will IPO, coming in under this imaginary decade long deadline.
I read the mind performance one. It was good but only as a introduction to things like remembering things, calculating fast or planning the day.
Lifehack.org delivers also great information about this topic and for free ;)
"All I'm saying is that if you're the kind of person who is irrevocably damaged by sending an SMS to someone, then these sorts of social networks shouldn't have been on your slate to begin with."

And what we're saying is that you're wrong.

I wouldn't be "irrevocably damaged" by what Loopt did, but I'd be pissed off. No one wants to be That Guy who spams people with invites to random services or Facebook app notifications. I hate That Guy.
I harbor a strong distaste for CAPTCHAs. At best, they're annoying. At worst, they're infuriating, such as when I simply can't see the letters or when I stumble into a cross-site hosted CAPTCHA that requires JavaScript -- which I have disabled -- and then loses the post I was going to make when I press the back button to try again with JavaScript enabled.

I see CAPTCHA as a bandaid and I can understand why people turn to it: spam has reached epidemic proportions. That said, any form of CAPTCHA, either the existing form or the proposed 3-D form of this article suffers from two fundamental flaws:
1. It annoys users and makes it harder for people to contribute
2. Spammers will get around it eventually, and once one spammer gets around it, they all will

CAPTCHA bears similarities to copy protection schemes in these two flaws: both annoy users and merely are road bumps to the undesirables (spammers and crackers).

I think the solution is three fold:
1. Make it easy to post so real humans contribute
2. Filter spam aggressively
3. Incorporate trust mechanisms

Making it easy so real humans contribute removes obstacles (such as CAPTCHAs, registration, etc.) that get in the way of people posting. Every obstacle means less people will post. With community contributors at about 1% of visitors, there's a lot of room to grow by making it easier to contribute.

Spam filtering works because spam is fundamentally different from a valid post, and always will be. Bayesian schemes such as pg described long ago work well. Gmail, for example, does an amazing job of filtering spam. The few posts that get through are easily dealt with.

Trust mechanisms take advantage of the fundamental weakness spammers have: they aren't members of the community. A simple trust mechanism is don't auto-link links from posters with less than 10 comments. Since most spam contains links of some sort and most comments don't, spam will be predominantly affected by this. Once a posters get to 10 posts (or 10 karma), their comments retroactively get auto-linked. This is simple to implement, but reduces the impact of spammers significantly since their spam isn't accessible unless someone goes to the trouble of copy-pasting it, preventing accidental clicks by users. At the same time it doesn't punish new users, since their valid links will still be accessible and will become on equal footing once they grow into the community.
Talk Of An AOL-Yahoo Combo Rears Its Ugly Head (Again)
I thought it was making reference to essays rather than him specifically. Oh well :-/
It says its new on http://finance.google.com/. I doubt Google would mark it new for 4 months.
This is a great case study for anyone who wants to go independent for a while.
Their recent actions and results indicate otherwise.
I've never heard of meta-learning, but about a year ago I stumbled onto a branch of philosophy called epistemology or the Theory of Knowledge. My studies there have been absolutely exhilarating and disturbing.

Next time you see someone at the coffee machine, ask them them what is meant by knowledge, reason, belief, truth, evidence, opinion, conviction, and hypocrisy.

The incoherent jumble you'll get back is indicative of the broken and sloppy process of the attempt to process data into knowledge (learning).
Loopt is just a scapegoat for the reactionary stance of people who are being suddenly immersed into the modern world of cellphone ownership.

What, reactionaries like Justine Ezarik?

http://blogs.business2.com/apple/2007/08/video-ijustine-.htm...

http://www.technologyevangelist.com/2007/07/ijustines_lifeca...

Pull the other one.

And we have another entry for the list:

4. We shouldn't try to fix this problem, because it's just a specific instance of a much more general problem that we also shouldn't try to fix.

---

I do kind of agree with this:

if you're the kind of person who is irrevocably damaged by sending an SMS to someone, then these sorts of social networks shouldn't have been on your slate to begin with

Absolutely: Social networks that don't give you firm and clear control over who gets contacted are going to make this class of people flee in panic. The question is: How large is this class of people? It's probably larger than you think. For example, ask any woman who, like Justine, is justifiably afraid of being stalked. I'm afraid that such women are not very hard to find.
Warren Buffett’s 7 Secrets for Living a Happy and Simple Life
Out of pure artistic curiosity: What did linked article use to make those charts? They look nice.
A Couple of Caveats on Queuing
The 3D captcha generates new images rather than using a library, so a captcha breaker needs to use a more sophisticated approach than comparing the current captcha image to previously seen images.

The difficulty of the image library captcha depends on the size of its library, while the difficulty of the 3D captcha depends on the fact that it's much easier for a computer to go from a 3D model to a 2D image rather than the other way around.
I wish this would happen. I'm hoping the suit against Psystar will see a ruling that Apple can't stop people from installing OS X on non-Apple machines.

However, part of Apple's OS is that it controls the hardware as well. The Windows and Linux world sometimes doesn't work 100% with the hardware you have from the start - partly because Microsoft and a hypothetical Linux owner don't control what you have in your PC.

I'm guessing that if there is a ruling against Apple, Apple will start licensing OS X to a select few manufacturers. Why would a manufacturer pay for this? Because it would mean getting to use the Apple/Mac trademarks (which Psystar is likely infringing on). Apple's market share could become huge (especially with a hardened Snow Leopard coming). Of course, it's also a risky course. Apple is doing quite well as a closed shop. While opening up has a lot of potential upsides, it also has potential downsides (no one buying iMacs anymore).

Here's to hoping a court will help Apple in a way Apple can't help itself.
I'm in Australia, and here, mobile charges for calls and SMS fall solely on the caller/sender. The US convention, where the person who is charged for an action is not the person who decided to take the action, has always seemed slightly insane.

I've heard that the rationale for receiver pays in the US is: the receiver is the person who decided to carry a mobile rather than use a landline, and therefore should bear the cost. This makes some sense. But I prefer the Australian system, where the caller can distinguish mobile numbers from landline numbers, just like calling long distance.
Just out of curiosity, do you guys have a facial recognition (not detection) demo available?
Rearchitecting Twitter: Brought to You By the 17th Letter of the Alphabet
The cleantech play is hardly altruistic. Rather it's a bet on ability to extract government subsidies to make profits, and to time the market for a successful exit. Note the lobbying cleantech VCs are doing in Washington DC, and consider Al Gore hire in terms of its lobbying power, especially if Democrats come to power. While making money by transferring wealth from taxpayers to institutional investors is arguably unethical, you can't fault its business viability.
Sony Ericsson Z555 (Unlocked)
This slenderizing handset of 95×49x 16.55 proffers a strong 2G network of GSM 900 / 1800 / 1900 - Z555i and GSM 850 / 1800 / 1900 - Z555a so as to make you stay connected even in the weaker vicinities.Its a good looking black phone.
My Code Blog: ICFP Contest 2008
Looks like Excel 2007 to me.
It's a great accomplishment to book thousands of dollars of revenue within a few weeks of launch. But as the article states, this is profitability without covering salary -- a big disclaimer.
The mockup app rocks.

Is it just me or is your site a lot like 37signals?

I personally had some trouble finding my way around. To me, it's not clear what confluence is, what the flatworld thing is and how the mockup app ties in. No big deal though.

Overall, congrats!
Is The Business Plan Dead?
I'm not seeing the difference. And I'm not finding anywhere where its explained that way. Your description "multiple semi-permanent forwarding addresses that can be individually disabled as needed due to spam" is exactly how disposable email address services work. In fact I know in sneakemail you can set a particular address to bounce, accept and delete, you can turn on greylisting for it, or you can deactivate it, you can even filter keywords on it.
Wireless Philadelphia's PR Machine | My Philly Network
Not yet, but hopefully soon. We have a recognition SDK but not online demo. I am pushing hard to get our demos up to date. We have so much cool stuff that isn't online demo'd yet. Once other stuff cools down, we can turn more attention to the website demos.
It must have been out in March, because I was able to complain that it didn't work then:

http://groups.google.com/group/Google-Finance/browse_thread/...
I have always found the Google Finance site easier to use. Even at the time they trailed in functionality, just getting round and finding information was a lot easier.
Startup Marketing Advice.
This has been around for at least few months now. I like it because it's much more user friendly and faster compared to the one at my brokerage account, without the hassle of logging in.
Windows now open source
This will be great until someone throws it away because they think it is junk.
And how does that logic work in a situation where land lines are becoming somewhat obsolete or atleast not a mandatory option? Plus, I carry a mobile, but does that mean I should only receive calls when I am home or near a land line? Sounds archaic at best and telecom company plan to get the most money they can at worst. The US system has never made sense to me.
Yea, it does. I just re-ran that image on our newest models and it does find Obama in that image, but at low confidence. See above about how our website demos are out of date.

Gonna be adding newer, better, cooler ones soon.
Is it a job requirement for tech super geeks to have the maturity of a high-school kid?
apple is never going to license macosx to other manufacturers. not so long as steve jobs is alive, anyway.

if they did that, they'd be in the same position as hp, dell, et al: nothing to differentiate their hardware but price, margins getting thinner and thinner every year, having to cut back on r&d, etc.
I always thought Drucker had a better philosophy: "A company's primary responsibility is to serve its customers. Profit is not the primary goal, but rather an essential condition for the company's continued existence."

You can find plenty of examples of companies that have crashed and burned because they believed profit and only profit was the goal, eg. Enron.
I wonder if it would be worth my while to create a web service that does this for any site?
Yahoo! Finance was already well established when Google Finance was launched. It's not surprising that it still leads, just as the bloated Yahoo! email service leads Gmail.