skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
congrats. i'm giving it a go with some more obscure things that i would possibly use. but even those are taken.
If your startup idea incurs large hosting costs before taking revenue, modify the idea.
> Ever notice how the nicest applications are always ones made by RIM? An outside developer could never create the BlackBerry Facebook application in a million years, again, because of the API access. We heard RIM is actively trying to listen to developer’s cries for help, open up some APIs, give them newer and better tools, and possibly include things such as OpenGL graphics support. But it’s still extremely difficult to develop for BlackBerry devices and distribute those applications.

http://www.boygeniusreport.com/2008/07/16/blackberry-bold-vs...
His response makes me want to get a law degree.
Preferred Stock: Participation
I'm mildly pleased that HN shrank, not grew, this month. Not by a lot, but still. Hopefully that won't reverse. If the community doesn't grow, it can't turn into another digg.
VC will also often refuse to allow you to build simple products, or products that already exist in the market, or to go to market with a product that does not have a hockey stick projection behind it.
My personal opinion is that one should learn, and become comfortable in, Java before attempting Clojure. Clojure is a very neat little language, but if you don't understand what it's doing under the hood on the JVM, a lot of stuff is going to end up being mysterious.

Don't get me wrong, I love the language to bits, but a lot of its beauty is in how it takes the existing Java model and does something cool with it - and to understand that, you need to understand what it's working with.
"but maybe there is a feature which requires background processing, write that in the newly learnt language."

great advice.
PG http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=196547 :

"1. The kind of stories that are most popular on reddit and digg (pictures and politics) are banned here.

2. Because that kind of stuff is banned, the average digg/reddit reader, if he comes across News.YC, finds the content boring and leaves.

3. The custom of the site is to be civil in comments.

4. Votes on comments affect karma.

5. Trolls are fairly rapidly banned. The only reason Giles hasn't already been banned is that I thought perhaps he was joking."
Lisp really is THE language to learn. You can ask Paul Graham about it...

See the following link for how to write new language constructs, which cannot be done in most of the other languages.

http://nostoc.stanford.edu/Docs/livetutorials/macros.html
I actually went to the site the read it. It is interesting. I saw the item about friendship. and it is in fact relies on citations from psychology to explain why people form friendships. Then it suggest if the observation from psychology is correct, then how can readers to use it as a double edge sword.

Sometime I feel even I know how to write code and build stuffs, but if I need to build something people wants, I need to gain insight into human psychology.
I just registered a couple, thanks for the heads up.

Edit: someone beat me to "dontfuckwith.me"
This study sounds way off. It was by NASA which means they were trying to tell a lawn from satellite. That's probably tough--having to discount natural grass land and farms (which there is a fair amount of) and accurately getting the percentage. Not to mention seeing through tree cover to see if there is grass below. There is a lot of green out there, not a whole lot of it is mowed lawns.

50,000 square miles is 1/70th of all land in the US including Alaska (3.5m sq mi total). If you've ever driven through the country, 1/70th is not a mowed lawn. You can drive for hundreds of miles without seeing a single one. If you discount Alaska the total is 1/58th.

Looking another way that would be 32,000,000 acres of lawn. which comes out to 1/10 acre of lawn per person in the country. At first that seems more reasonable, 1/10th of an acre isn't a lot, but that's per person not household. A 4-person family comes to 4/10 of an acre--a decent sized lot. And since there are large numbers of people with no lawn the number increases for people who actually do (10m in NYC without one means 10m other people would need twice as much space, etc).
IANAL but i think non-US startups are also targets for patent lawsuits if they have US users. And many startups have little chance of success if they have to stop serving US users.
Strange, this thread is full of luddites who don't use RSS!

Anyway, I use Google Reader. I tend to read everything I subscribe to. If I don't read it, I unsubscribe to it after I've ignored it long enough. I have maybe 30-40 subscriptions, all to sites that post infrequently, so I rarely have more than a handful of articles unread.

I get a lot of interesting articles via Hacker News too, and also via Google-Reader recommendations (one of GReader's killer features imho).
Top to bottom, left to right.

Seriously, I'm subscribed to about 40 feeds, but I usually don't even start my feed browser because it's a time sink.

The S/N ratio with most blogs isn't very high, but I subscribe just to get that occasional important nugget of information/insight.

But I am coming to the realization that RSS is a bit of a distraction - if I start my RSS reader, I feel obliged to read everything just to get rid of the 'unread' icon. It doesn't really help me build great stuff.
I'm using Google Reader for mostly personal blogs but visit sites like HN directly since they tend to clutter my whole feed reader. I had subscribed to the HN feed for a long time but since the feed displays every blog post that hits the frontpage there were a lot of uninteresting entries.

I would re-subscribe to the HN feed if there were some option for a feed which only displays entries with X upvotes and/or X comments (and X could be specified in the options).

The general problem with subscribing to the feed is that I don't see which entries are popular and which not because stories tend to hit the frontpage rather fast on HN compared to other big sites.

For now, I just visit HN and click on a few stories on the frontpage (mostly these with many comments or upvotes).
if you can program in one you can probably get by in another quite easily

Yes and no. That holds true within families - if you know an imperative language, you can pick up any other imperative language easily enough, it's just different keywords and syntax for the same thing. But if you learn a different kind of language - e.g. functional, then you first have to learn a new way to think, and that's where the value is.

As an example, f you want to, you can easily treat Python as a sort of super-shell-script. So it's easy to get into, but most of its power will be wasted. To get the most out of it, you have to learn to think "Pythonically" and that takes time and experience using it to solve real problems, and constant rewriting until you "get it".
Steve Pavlina started out as a pretty smart, credible sort of guy, but now he's always posting this kind of blather.
I just got emails for all the domains I tried to register claiming they are taken.

I really doubt they are - is everyone getting this?
Why do print magazines make such poor use of the internet? It's not like it would have hurt them to add references to their research.(eg, how did they arrive at $40B figure?).
Ask HN: How much traffic from a techcrunch story?
Does anyone know the amount of traffic a techcrunch story will generate for a site. Basically, what do I need to handle to not crash :)
What? there's no karma-whoring incentives? Damn! I totally thought I was going to get to change the color of the toolbar...
At home, I use my web browser (OmniWeb) to put menus of feed items into my toolbar. This is good because I tend to be in my browser when viewing other news sites.

Yet at work, I use my E-mail (Thunderbird), perhaps because the RSS feeds tend to be blogs, newsgroups or other similar E-mail-like items.

In other words, my reader depends on the style of the content: is it E-mail-like, or web-like.
No, but I can tell you how much traffic a Hacker News post will get you.
I use Google Reader, currently subscribed to 68 feeds and get around 250-300 posts per day. I read everything in expanded mode, though most of the time I'll just skim a headline and move on.

I have my feeds logically grouped into prioritized groups so that if I start to get a backlog of 500+ posts I will read my favorite blog from a given category then mark all as read to reduce the counts.
Index fund is the way to go for many people. In fact, it is the suggestion William Sharpe gave to (pre-IPO) Google employees.

http://www.sanfranmag.com/print/node/3368
Many years from now, these courageous young men will look back fondly on this time and wonder why they are still single.
This is a very noble aspiration, but many benevolent stewards of online communities have tried and failed; it is a historically intractable problem.

I think the OP is asking what is the "what it takes"?
Looks like all 5 of mine failed, even though they charged my credit card. Just got the "we're sorry but the domain failed to process" emails. Thanks godaddy!
jon_dahl is dead on. Understand Malkiel's Random Walk and the rest is details.

But for a really thorough discussion of those details check Investments by Bodie, Kane and Marcus (http://www.amazon.com/Investments-Zvi-Bodie/dp/007293414X/re...). My corporate finance prof encouraged me to look into it, then it was required reading for an economics course I took later. I understand it's the standard-bearer in most finance departments, so there's no going wrong if you're willing to work through the technical parts.
And polls! Why else would I post but to reach the HN Nirvana of being able to post polls?
At 38, am I too old for a startup?
I've had an idea that's been eating me up for 18 months. What's your position on 'older' founders and startups?
A Million Thoughts
"A Million Thoughts" is what the name implies. The goal is to collect and publish 1,000,000 thoughts. These thoughts can be about anything. The catch is that a single thought can be no more than 15 words long, and each thought costs $1.00 US to publish. Thoughts are published in the order that they are received.
In all honesty, 38 is probably more "ideal" than "too old".

Been done plenty of times. Now get to work!
http://redeye.firstround.com/2008/01/after-the-techc.html
Not exact numbers, but a start.
a lot less ;)
I use Google Reader to read about 200 feeds. But I've ruthlessly pruned anyone that

a) took too much absolute time (high volume, long posts - ie big news sites without targeted content)

b) too low signal to noise ratio (typically from someone that writes one popular posts that's a little outside their main topics) - Stuff White People like was on this - funny, not that funny, repetitive, too often. If it was once a week, I would have read it.

I read (see) probably 50 posts a day - anything more than that and I go back and prune some. I spend maybe 1-2 hours a day reading. It's my equivalent of watching TV. Here are the main categories:

Must reads - the Yegges, Grahams, Mosers, etc

High volume, quick reads - FAIL blog, Seth Godin

High volume, useful but not always great - SvN, CodingHorror, Joel

Low volume - product blogs, occasional bloggers
There is the difference between HN and reddit/digg etc. that pg and co. do HN for love, whereas, whatever other motives they may have, the other sites are trying to make money.
Maybe they registered those for themselves...
They've said multiple times that the main reason was to get access to Bezos. They didn't need his money, they wanted the man.
technoguyrob: Yep I wrote it to use Canvas for browsers that support it, VML for Internet Explorer.
Well, learning C will help with the Obj-C side. If you want to learn iPhone programming (I'm picking it up myself, but I have a C background), there are several meetups in Silicon Valley.
as long as you feel you have the time/flexibility/energy/whatever to make it happen, you're not too old.

the standard difference is that younger people tend to have more flexibility in failure -- if they don't succeed they can still get a regular job and retire and live happily ever after. they don't have a family, a house, sometimes don't have a car, are comparatively more healthy, etc. its easier to live off of nothing, bootstrap themselves, and fail gracefully.

a prototypical older person has more responsibilities, has bills to pay, has a family to support, etc.. there's more of a need of a steady income stream. if you feel like you're in a situation to be able to follow your idea and still uphold your responsibilities, then go for it.
Fair point - what I'm also saying though is that this step, and the unique manner in which 37signals accomplished this step, is not part of their advice for others. 37signals offers workshops on keeping it real, but not on building the hype. Before you start bootstrapping make sure you aren't wasting your time or you could end up yanking on those straps for 3 years and little to show for it.

I think the democratization of software, of the ability to build websites etc, is a wonderful thing, but I also think that it has tended to undervalue the marketing aspect. Perhaps its because for so many years the coders worked under the yoke of 'business types' who didn't know why a baby couldn't be delivered in one month with 9 mothers and now we feel like we can break free.

Hopefully someone will come along with some open source marketing AI and I won't have to worry about it.
It probably will. I followed a similar path of another person on here: /. -> k5 -> reddit -> HN.

At the end of the day, nothing can stop 50 users up-voting cat pictures except to shut the site down.
Cool... I got SCHE.ME

Hopefully it actually went through!
Nooooo.....

The following domain name has failed to be registered:

SCHE.ME

Error: SCHE.ME: cannot register - already registered
Which I think this tweet did. It captured a whole lot of wisdom and experience into a small package, but it didn't match every situation. Rules of thumb like this one are usually like this.
Graceful Server Provisioning with PowerShell
This question comes up quite often here on DevCentral: "How can I gracefully shut down my servers for maintenance without disrupting current user sessions?". In fact, I answered this question just the other day again in the iControl forum and figured I'd throw out an application that accomplished this. So I went about writing this application to allow for the graceful shutdown of a given pool member. Of course, the application wouldn't be complete without listing the pools and members for a specified pool as well as allowing for enabling and disabling of the server so I went ahead and included those pieces as a bonus.
Sage a Firefox plugin, and sometimes Google Reader.
Food for the brain: What to eat to make you smarter
Upmodded, but I feel compelled to add systems programming, which will probably mean C. After doing some lower-level systems programming where the whole point is managing resources, you'll gain an appreciation of the power languages like Ruby give you, and how much a web application framework abstracts away.
Basic Principles of Enumeration (PDF)
Integrating your HUnit (or other) tests into your cabal package [haskell]
ha, exactly :) But I was serious, for whoever down-modded me. I kept track of the hits I got after I made a post here, just to see for the future. How many total/first hour/first day.
considering one was aweso.me, maybe
Not lots. Only a tiny fraction of startups have the luxury of being overfunded. Most are underfunded. And poor startups produce lame products at at least the rate that rich ones do. Therefore overfunding is responsible for at most a tiny fraction of lame products.
Yesterday I saw a guy with the Chinese word for lesbian tattooed on the back of his neck. I really wanted to ask him what that was all about.
These problems are going to be solved by capitalistic means, not moral ones. When the economy and prices get people to do something, it will be done. But saying, oh please why don't you help the environment will not have a huge effect.

This is why I don't participate in environmental rallies or clubs or whatever other crap our school tries to get us to participate in. Because for change to occur, it has to occur forcefully, not willingly. Either there have to be climate change/environmental protection laws, or there have to be economic incentives.
Interesting. That's the exact same argument I made above with C and systems programming. Clojure has caught my eye, and I'm familiar with Java, but I'm not as familiar with the JVM itself. Any resources that are good overviews of the JVM?
If you aren't generating revenues, you're not a business.
I think GoDaddy is sending those out for every domain...

I even got it for a really random/unpopular one.
wouldn't this be easy?

1) Search browser history, look for porn.
2) If porn site = true, gender = male
3) else gender = female
they wanted the man

And to cash out individually, I suspect.
I don't agree, but this shouldn't be downmodded either.

I definitely don't have a month free to learn a language. But I have a few hours a week free, and I'm not in a hurry. :)
who got sche.me ?
Bloglines.

129.

Read the most important ones, then eventually catch up on the other ones.

I'd go mad if I didn't read them selectively like this.
Depends where you go.
"get tens of thousands of users from the "Techcrunch Bump""

I'm trying to figure out the time span for this. Is it tends of thousands in a day? In an hour? What's the peak?
There's more to software besides the web. Start off by learning C. Learn enough so that you could understand this http://www.kegel.com/c10k.html - and see the implications of what's discussed there (low-level UNIX system calls, C code) on issues you deal with.

Finish learning C, by writing your own C compiler. Yes, really: pick up the dragon book, learn lexx/yacc and do it - it will test your knowledge of data structures and algorithms, automata/language theory and software engineering.

Learn Lisp or OCaml or Haskell just to know a functional language. Don't learn it to write webapps in it.

Learn Perl - and not just for webapps (although mod_perl is incredibly powerful as far as fast, transactional, web applications go), including Object Oriented Perl. Learn enough to automate your systems administration / operations tasks (being able to modify bugzilla would be a plus too).
A Rebels Answer to “VC or Bootstrap?”
I don't think it's as hard to keep a site from sliding as one might think from the examples of previous sites where things went downhill as they got more popular. Slashdot, Digg, and Reddit were all companies. They wanted to grow. Whereas News.YC is a side project. We don't care about growth. It's much easier to do things to keep up the quality when you're willing to sacrifice growth.
I use Opera's built-in feed reader. I like it. I have about 20 feeds subscribed, and I obsessively at least skim every article until it tells me there are zero unread.

Quite a pain on Monday (I don't read feeds on weekends) to come into work and have 50 new articles on Business of Software and Hacker News :P. Just one of those burdens I bear, I guess. I used to actually click through and read each and every HackerNews article, so I've improved somewhat from there. Little baby steps.
Except a Bayesian cat-picture filter written in Lisp!
Well, if you want to carry the analogy further, to know Java is to know the basics of how the JVM looks at life. The JVM has concepts of class, inheritance, methods, instances, constructors, and garbage collection baked into it, and they have the same semantics as Java. Arguably, the only difference is one of coding: the JVM codes a Java method as a series of stack-based opcodes, and a class as a set of methods with attributes, but the basic operations are the same. JVM bytecode directly encodes all basic operations: "invoke method X on this class", "declare this method as public and static" - even "if an exception occurs between <this instruction> and <that instruction>, jump <here> to handle it".

By contrast, there's a level of indirection between Clojure and the underlying JVM. And so, for much the same reasons as it's a good idea to know some C when doing systems programming, you won't really understand what Clojure is doing (especially not the stack-traces!) unless you understand Java.

There's also the practical point that, if you're working on the JVM, you'll be wanting to make use of the massive class libraries available for it. They're all written for native Java, so you'll have to be familiar with Java semantics to use them effectively. (Although the Lispy macro goodness means you can then wrap them up inside a concise functional abstraction when you're using them).

If you still want to look at the JVM (for fun, or for implementation reasons), I'd say a good knowledge of Java is enough to just jump head-first into the specification: http://java.sun.com/docs/books/jvms/second_edition/html/VMSp...
Actually, more like 5.
I guess humor (even when mixed with serious contributions) is down modded at HN.
App Store alphabetical listings quietly fixed
"Love dollar." Wow.

>>I earned a whopping $2.36 from ad clicks.
...
Twenty months later my daily income from this website had increased by more than 500 times.<<

He really makes $1180/day == $430,700/year? Dang. I need to get into self-help love-dollar blogging.
Amen to that! It's the only refuge from all the trash out there. Hopefully fanboys will never invade it...
Water is entirely unlike oil, in that it's renewable. (You might have noticed that it falls out of the sky every now and then.)

Whatever water you use in 2008 will still be available for use in 2020. Dams are already built and are collecting water whether you use it or not, so unless the water levels in your local dam are getting low there's no point in conserving it.
Ousting the Founder
The link works for me
Yeah, you and I agree 100%. I'm reacting to the tendency people have to discount 37S because "they had a popular blog". As if building a popular blog was something they were able to do only by being bitten by radioactive spiders.
Well that would rule out Arrington from working there...

(Sorry, I could not resist)
Mozilla Malware Part I: Hide it.
Has anyone ever made much money selling on domain names?
(edit: anyone here, I mean)
Thanks for the enncouragement. I wonder what YC's position would be?
Entrapping Minnows in the jar with PL/1
Yeah you can get a boat load of hosting for $500 per month or less. And the following is a great pitch to a VC:

"we're getting too much traffic, and I can't afford the hosting - will you invest in me?"
Do not conflate capitalistic means with legal ones.
Related: http://isteve.blogspot.com/2008/07/save-ants.html
That might be true in consumer web products. I wouldn't know. But it's wrong in enterprise IT products. Venture funding pushes people towards rube goldberg contraptions that overcome "defensibility" hurdles by sounding unlike anything else on the market and, not coincidentally, unlike anything anyone would want to buy.

You want a good example? Procket.
VC Funding Drying Up For Facebook Apps
Well, yeah, but it would give them an incentive to invest more in targeting their customers correctly. At this point, a million new addresses to a spammer is an asset; if we implemented this plan, that would be a huge liability.

The ideal, once your email-receiving price gets high enough, would be for spammers to basically send the kind of spam that you would have paid to know about anyway (e.g. instead of reading a gadget blog, spammer pays you $1 to look at his customized spiel pitching a particular gadget similar to the ones you've previously liked).
How I Built a Working Online Poker Bot, Part 6
How I Built a Working Online Poker Bot, Part 5
How I Built a Working Online Poker Bot, Part 7
Can't this be done with Gmail and "+" addressing?

Just give sitename the address username+sitename@gmail.com and when they start sending you spam, make a filter on that address.