skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree and I've tried that route a bit, but I've had a little bit of trouble conveying the idea to someone else in order to get them to believe in it. I've found that I really need to create a mockup if I'm going to go that route and I just haven't taken the time to do that yet. I also live in an area that's not rich in technical-minded people (Waco, Texas), much less developers. So finding someone locally is almost surely out of the question.
For a while I've worried that will start to happen. So far I haven't seen it. Rationally it shouldn't happen, and the best investors are pretty rational about "deal flow." But I'm still going to keep watch for signs of trouble.
That sounds like Neil Gaiman's take on piracy:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2351978
I'm not sure discipline has any place here at all. If there aren't 10 moments every day in your corporate job when you wish you were in a startup and could do things your way, then you probably wouldn't enjoy being in a startup anyway.
Can anyone recommend a good domain name marketplace or auctioneer that doesn't have some kind of volume requirement? I merely want to unload a single domain name that I think stands a chance to chip in on my DSLR habit.
No DRM on ebooks, that is.

I agree that Safari's usefulness is severely hampered by the copy-protection methods (I used to use it as a free service through my university library). Unfortunately, as a subscription service O'Reilly has stronger incentives to use DRM because if it was easy to copy content from books, you could sign up for one month, copy everything you wanted, and then cancel your subscription.
What makes a Microsoft technology stack a poor choice? Any site at the scale of MySpace is going to have hundreds of hacks to make it scale that no one wants to touch. MySpace was able to launch their 1.0 in days and become the leading social network (for a while), without major scaling issues.
This article made my hair stand on end. If the discovery holds up — and keep in mind that the Talamanca had 300+ years of contact with the Spanish, plus a millennium of contact with the Maya, both of whom had written languages — it could be an additional independent invention of written language.

We currently know of three or possibly four independent inventions of writing: China, Sumer, possibly Egypt, and Maya. This could add a fourth (or fifth).

Unfortunately, the vast majority of the khipu were burned by the Spanish centuries ago. Most of the 751 known to survive are only a few centuries old. Ruth Shady reports one anomalous khipu of 5000 years of age; if that discovery holds up, the khipu would represent an independent invention of written numbers, and possibly written language, nearly as old as Sumer's, and far older than the writing systems of China, Egypt, and the Maya.

In short, this could be a very significant discovery in the history of digital technology.
If a headline ends with a ?, the answer is generally "No."
Twitter had scalability problems and they were on RoR, but it got solved. Scaling to those levels is always going to uncover problems in your architecture. What mattered was the way MySpace chose to execute, not the technology they did it with.
I think it has more to do with terrible design and a lot of bugs. How many pages had 3-4 videos all playing at once with sparkles stabbing you in the eye. When FaceBook came on the scene it was clean and stable.
No- I worked for a high-traffic .NET based company in LA that was doing great. Myspace just had a crappy product that couldn't keep up with the Facebook steamroller. I think it's as simple as that.
Nike Zoom Kobe Shoes
Have you considered freelancing?

If you take 4 - $5000 dollar contracts (website, app, etc) in 1 year, you've made more then what you make now. If it takes you a full month to do each project and a full month to get that project, you still have 4 months left over to get creative.
Of course! If you give a crappy browser away for free, nobody will use it. However, if you make it good but you don't support Netscape's server-side integration, you kill their server business and their browser business.

Then after they implode rewriting Netscape, you pull almost everybody off the project and rake in the billions.

Until, inexorably, people work around your cruft and release cross-browser libraries that eliminate the "lock-in effect" of websites that require IE. Now you scramble to put people back on it and start active development again.

I think the point about the moat and scorched earth stands. For a very direct comparison, consider Android. I believe Google are trying to make it superior to iOS, even through they give it away. Their plan is to scorch the earth so that neither Microsoft nor Apple can turn mobile devices into a Google-free browsing device.
Functional programming is not going to help your amazingly-retarded startup idea. Skip this and start programming motherfucker.
I think it's simple. If you're business requires scaling at this level you need to have really good engineers and they need to have a lot of say in how things are done. I've worked with a number of "product" people from myspace, and they were definitely not doing 1 of these two, maybe both.
The Microsoft "bet" seems to be working out for the StackExchange crew...
IOS 4.3.1 Released, Available to Download for iPhone, iPod touch and iPad
I heard a rumor that they used to be on Cold Fusion? If true, a move from that to any other technology, including Microsoft stack, would be a good move.

While Los Angeles doesn't stereotypically have good developers, good developers exist here. Demand Media and Google have 300+ people offices here. I suspect the problem is, either MySpace didn't hire good developers/architects, or MySpace hired them but management didn't listen to them.
Poll Results: the Y Combinator company readers voted to fund
Agreed -- even the technology problems he mentioned seem to have a lot more to do with MySpace's own architecture than the underlying platform.

That said, I think he could have better put it by saying he thought MySpace needed rock star developers, and that they had a harder time getting rock star .NET devs. I'm still not sure that's actually true, but at least it's a little more reasonable.

Anyway, I'm pretty sure Facebook was already eating MySpace's lunch before they even made the asp.net switch. Maybe not in pure numbers, but definitely in momentum.

Edit: Not that I think MySpace needed rock star developers, just my take of what Scoble was trying to say.
I agree, which raises the question of whether they should have shipped Honeycomb in its current state at all. It really looks like they decided that the Xoom had to ship before the iPad 2 regardless of the quality of its software, and that seems to have backfired.
Brian Norgard, who started the thread, mentioned he "was in the belly of the beast due to the acquisition of my first company," which was Newroo.

http://techcrunch.com/2006/03/14/fox-to-acquire-startup-newr...
Try not think of it as being an argument about what Android is, or what Google has done, so much as an argument about what a reasonable definition of "Open" entails.

All along Google has behaved in a way inconsistent with their "Open" marketing. And people have criticized them, not for what they were doing, but for trying to contort the definition of "Open" to still fit what they were doing.

Now that the project doesn't even meet the most-basic definition[1], there is simply no more wiggle room and those who would prefer "Open" still mean something at the end of the day are again pointing out the Emperor is naked [2].

[1] As codified in Rubin's famous tweet.

[2] Not because it's wrong to be naked, but because he insisted he was wearing clothes that he quite clearly is not.
Scoble's thesis seems way off. The problem with MySpace wasn't the technology, or even the site. It was the users of the site. It became a place that people didn't want to be associated with, while Facebook became that place. If MySpace instantly could flip a switch and turn into Facebook (codewise) hardly anything would have changed.

MySpace's problem IMO wasn't technical at all. They built a service that focused on users most likely to move, and repelled those most likely to stick with a platform.
Of course, that's the whole point of declaring statistical significance. With 95%, you will have false positives. With 99%, you will have false positives. There are no guarantees.

Many times, when we declare a winner in test and if you keep running it, you may see that eventually it does not perform as good.

But I agree my comment doesn't negate Jabbles' point.
I'm not saying the substance of your comment is incorrect.
Interesting idea, but I don't think there would be time. When investors see startups they like at DDay, they know they have to act fast, because 350 other investors just saw them too. So investors interested in a startup are usually meeting with them in the next couple days.
I disagree that the PR has been "endlessly positive;" I do think they should be called out when they deserve it, and I think some of the points that you point out qualify. I don't think delaying the release of Honeycomb really qualifies, but that's debatable.

The handset manufacturers/carriers do lock down the software. But that's not Google, that's the manufacturers/carriers. When Google is involved (with their flagship devices like the G1 and Nexus devices) the hardware is not locked down at all.

I think one of the problems with what you're saying is the conflation of specific hardware, Android, and Google Experience Android. Anyone can take open source Android and put it on any hardware they manufacture. That's open. Some manufacturers can negotiate with Google to put Google Experience Android on their hardware. That's less open, but more open than most/all other platforms. Skyhook can make a deal with anyone making non-Google Experience Android devices they want to. Google Experience Devices still enjoy almost complete freedom in the Android Market, as well as openly distributed APKs (excepting ATT devices).

RE Apple and political implications: I disagree with you. Their editorial oversight and the heavy-handed and arbitrary way that they exercise it is political control.

RE Apple and censorship: Apple doesn't enable censorship in China. They actively engage in censorship everywhere (through the App Store). I'm sure if Apple had occasion to enable censorship in China, they'd (prudently) do so. (As an aside, Apple has other issues in China.)

I'll admit I do like Google and have a warm and fuzzy feeling about them. But I think it's deserved. Google has done some amazing things, some (like the release of Android source) unequivocally open.

That said, I do think Google makes some pragmatic decisions sometimes that are compromises of their professed principles. And that does make me angry. I don't reflexively defend those decisions. I do hope that they are pragmatic decisions taken with a long-term view (e.g. working with carriers/manufacturers until Android and specifically Google Experience Android is a sufficient industry power that they can force the industry to open up and allow software freedom).

Again, delaying the release of source code to me does not qualify as a breach of principle, and the criticisms thereof strike me as reflexive, and mostly in the two ways I described above.
there's a troll in the conversation but interesting none the less.
Main gotcha is listed in the "Garbage Collection" section of the readme:

https://github.com/laverdet/node-fibers
Another neat project is Gollum as released by Github which gives you a nice simple layout to a git-back wiki (https://github.com/github/gollum ). Development seems a little slow though, with seemingly important pull requests like this one stuck with no official response:

https://github.com/github/gollum/pull/121

I've also just noticed that notepag.es is open source, and so you can host it on your server (but need to set up node.js and MongoDB).

Finally, the concept is very similar to the now defunct infogami (which I believe was funded by YC and then merged with reddit?), by Aaron Swartz.
CloudFlare (http://cloudflare.com) also works great, since it does a quick Project Honeypot check on any suspicious visitors (along with a bunch of other good stuff).
Please see my comment http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2369512

I do understand statistics behind A/B testing quite well but there are many subtleties (especially related to interaction effects) that I still need to understand and learn on the way.
Abusing Open Records to Attack Academic Freedom
I'll add my $.02.

So for the last few batches, I've started doing a/v and random behind-the-scenes stuff for demo day, and it's the two weeks a year I look most forward to.

It's great to see how pitches can go from confusing and meandering to on-point perfection with little time. Even from session to session each pitch improves till the final session ends with all the founders feeling confident, and with investors lining up to talk to them.

My biggest lessons after demo day are simple: Everyone needs the right coach to be at their best. Raw talent gets you in the door, coaching shapes you, and investor support (monetarily and connections wise) pour rocket fuel on your company. The combination of the three is why YC companies are different. Without the coaching and support of YC, I've seen a few early stagers explode after getting burned by less savvy investors who are trying to "do the right thing". I'd say that a lot of other people find mentors and coaches in other places than YC, but that coaching seems to be the difference maker between "hobby startup with no shot" and "thing thing is going to be huge." It's a way of hacking through a lack of startup experience.

The other huge takeaway: Every company founder is probably as uncertain as you are at some point in their company's history. Some of my good new buddies (shouts to the Oracle of Web3.0!!!! [inside joke]) seemed to go from uncertain about their future, to gain a newfound confidence even over the course of a week.

Smart people: Press on, hack your lack of experience through mentors, and you'll get it eventually.
At this point, I'm not convinced google would even be slightly concerned by this.

We seem to read the great power of likes and social searching but unless the search paradigm will shift or unless the actual content which we seek is something that is shared on facebook, I can't see how they would even begin to build a search engine related to that of Google's.

I'm not disregarding a different type of search engine, and I'm sure there are innovative minds of facebook thinking of fresh and new ways to use the mountains of data it has.
Why Rubyists should try Elixir
Becoming a Mozilla Technical Evangelist
What else is left? Pirate? Astronaut? Clown? Zombie?

(also, it is spelled "people")
"It wasn’t lost on me that yesterday when I was at Y Combinator several of the folks involved there bragged that Ashton Kutcher visited the headquarters a few weeks ago."

What on earth does this mean? I thought the ashton kutcher meme was simply down to his meteoric popularity on twitter, but this implies that there is something startup-specific about it.
If the MS stack killed MySpace, then PHP made Facebook?
To suggest that MySpace couldn't have changed their product due to a technology stack they moved to (I'm speculating a bit here) rather late in the losing-out-to-Facebook is pretty silly.

Even if close to true, it would be their specific architecture, not the stack.
>If they're ready to ship the binaries

It's a little more nuanced than that. They believed the binaries were a good product for 10-inch tablets, but would perform badly on smaller screens. If they ship source, though, people will try to get it running on small screens.

That's what the Ars article is referring to as cutting corners (an inflammatory statement): Honeycomb could have been generic enough to be a good product on all screen sizes, but they needed to save time to let the Xoom meet its ship date.
This smacks of black/white thinking of extremes to me. Perhaps what they're doing violates the principle of openness, but if Honeycomb is the one exception to Google's "openness", and they end up releasing the code soon, for pragmatic purposes who cares?
Ah, good point. Any details on what they're running?
The fascinating thing about Buffet is that so many people claim to respect him and his opinions while they do the exact opposite.

Fundamental value investing? Investing only in companies that you really understand? Taking a long view? All seem to be horribly out of fashion the moment people start feeling exuberant. While people are investing millions in yet-another-photo-service, what was the last big thing Buffet bought into, railroads?
Yes, I think they used to run CF.
These articles are cropping up because Google (quite cleverly) utilized the "We're Open" mantra to gain a lot of momentum very quickly. Since the evolution of Android shows more and more evidence of "We're Open When Convenient/Beneficial", a lot of their most ardent supporters now feel betrayed/played.

If Google had said "We're not as secretive as Apple", there would be less bitterness now, but there also never would have been the sort of momentum/buzz they built early on.
When someone blames their failure on their technology, I'm always highly skeptical. Good developers and good management (equivalently: good strategy and good execution) could use Cobol and still beat super-advanced alien technology if it's being run by a pack of monkeys. I'm not going to comment on whether .NET is a good choice or not, but even if it was not as good as alternatives, I strongly doubt that MySpace would have beaten Facebook if only it were on a different platform.
Why a startup's initial business plan doesn't matter that much
Richard Bird's book is also really great for the more theoretical side of things (it's like if you took Hutton's last chapter on "Equational Reasoning" and stretched it to an entire book).

I'm working through it now and will be posting notes and solutions as I get them done.
Optimizely (YC W10) launches super simple behavioral targeting for A/B testing
.NET is such a heavy toolset

What does that mean, specifically? I've found it is a great stack, and the biggest problem it has is public perception :)
Is it a CRUD app? Forget the marketing, etc. Are you only Creating, reading, updating and deleting data?

If that's the case pick a language + web framework and go to town nights and weekends.
Ugh, too many of them. I put my vote in for the same: too much freedom with web page layouts and horrendous bugs. Too many times I would try to go back to my profile after having my senses violated only to be greeted with a page telling me that I "must be logged in to do that," never minding the fact that I already was.
I wrote a pretty simple iPhone app that could be used for this called ToDo Timer (http://bit.ly/hBn9jk). Here are some promo codes: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1867872/ToDo_Timer_Promo_Codes
Not sure why people down voted your comments. I agree with what you're saying and I appreciate the feedback.

I work for an IT Services provider as a Level II technician and I am in charge of providing a certain service to our clients on a daily basis. To administer this service I have to take time out of my normal routine of working tickets and sometimes I find it hard to find the time to do that. My app would make administering this service easier for me, but it would also allow me to pass the duties down to a Level I tech who isn't as busy with working tickets. There's not a product on the market that does this and I believe that the market is huge as far as IT Services providers goes.

Writing this app is all I can think about. I think about it before I go to sleep every night, I think about it in the shower, I think about it all day at work. I don't think it'll make me rich, but that's really not my goal anyways. It's more about contributing to the industry that I work in to make life easier for techs like myself.

I sort of agree with your thoughts on hiring developers, but I have to believe that this isn't the case with all developers. I think it's possible to find a developer to work with me instead of for me and in that case I think they'd play a key role in the discovery of the product.
an impressive and lengthy response to the issues that arose around Prof. Cronon's original piece of ALEC's role in Wisconsin politics (among other things)

Original Piece
http://scholarcitizen.williamcronon.net/2011/03/15/alec/
Google Sync vs. Firefox Sync
Eagerly installed Firefox 4 and started playing with it. Was immediately disappointed when I realized that Firefox now has its own (competing?) bookmark syncing system. With the amount of content out there I hope to read, I rely heavily on bookmarks, and syncing as well...so that when I switch from my work laptop to personal, I can easily pick up where I left off. (Not to mention of course keeping track of the many archived go-tos.)

Anyway, I don't believe I have to extoll the virtues of bookmark syncing, but why didn't Mozilla collaborate with Google on this? Smells a lot like creeping "lock in" to me, which is not how I thought either of those organizations rolled.
I'm very skeptical about this. There's a lot of assumptions being made about Facebook's move into search. I'll just hit on a few (assuming they go into search at all):

1) That they'll be good at it. Search isn't easy. It has taken Microsoft, the most resourceful tech company, over 10 years to get search right.

2) That people will choose to use it. Very big assumption; people tend to use tools for specific tasks. Facebook having search is certainly convenient, but I'm not sure it trumps habit and perceived utility.

Facebook wasn't able to kill Foursquare. They weren't able to kill email. But they'll kill Google.. why?
> What about Twitter's actions that are yet to come?

No telling. That's the point.

> And why not just try?

Because human hours are the most valuable asset on this planet. If you have a .01% chance of success then it's not necessarily worth trying. But that's up to the person who's putting in the time. In this case some people do believe it's worth it and by all means they should try.

I just wonder if there's an option that's more than .01%.
Действительно, нахуй?
No problem with that. But compare these two experiments:

for i in range 623:
data.add_result()
s = calculate_significance(data)
if s > 0.95:
publish()

for i in range 623:
data.add_result()
s = calculate_significance(data)
if s > 0.95:
publish()
break

The second one gives you many more chances to succeed, which must result in your confidence in the answer going down.
Another story on it, since this one isn't working for me: http://www.treehugger.com/files/2011/03/samsung-unveils-see-...
This article is true. After all, grils do indeed look up to Britney spears and Paris. The I.T dudes are approaching the problem from wrong end. Are we interested in girl's heads? HELL NO. Are the dudes rich ? YES. Hire whores you idiots.
Next-Generation Scientists
Could Facebook be Priceless?
Learn You a Haskell for Great Good (http://learnyouahaskell.com/) is another good resource for learning the language. It's a bit lighter weight than Real World Haskell, and doesn't have the breadth of practical examples, but I think it makes up for that by being more consistently interesting. I went through LYAH first and then Real World Haskell, and although the latter was very informative and useful, I found it to be painfully dull in certain parts (particularly the chapters that discuss the building of a JSON parser).
Why do they have to use GPLv3 to be open source? Apache, BSD, MIT, are no longer open source licenses?