skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Also, he wrote the first version of Emacs for Unix (which was later forked by Richard Stallman to become GNU Emacs)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gosling_Emacs
It seems the closest, but it reminds me of the predecessors to Dropbox a lot. I couldn't even figure out which of their 7 products I should choose.
The FAQ[1] says that “there will be a WWDC Student Scholarship.”

[1] https://developer.apple.com/wwdc/faq/
Is it only Electrical Engineers or all Engineers ?

Must an engineer (CS or EE) be on the team? Does the engineer have to be a student?

EE stands for Electrical Engineer or does that encompass SE and CE as well ?
how bout http://mealtik.com ?
I heard Brian Chesky (Airbnb's cofounder) on Gigaom talking about announcing other categories in 2011 on top of housing (which sounds like a natural extension).So kudos to the guy who executed this but I can already see this space is going get ultra competitive pretty soon.
What was John Nash like as a professor?
doh! thanks for the catch.
MyLastVid
A service that allows people to record and store videos to a secure database. They can specify a specific time that the video be released, or that it be released upon their death, as well as to whom. This service is ideal for preserving precious memories and messages for loved ones, in a medium that goes far beyond writing or voice recording, in terms of intimacy and emotional depth.
You are excused, I am from the western world.

It is a fallacy to say that we cannot improve living conditions for the entire human populace without increasing power consumption. They are not conflicting goals.

It is a fallacy to say that the standard of living must devolve for all those in the western world to the 1950s era levels, to support improvement for the other 80% of the human populace.

You are drawing conclusions based on that fallacy to claim that I am dishonest and lacking in perspective. It is a fallacy to claim any percentage forfeit is necessary to improve living conditions.

You may believe that it is painless to find additional power sources, but the power sources you advocate have already been found and demonstrated as not painless.

Your poetic expression is utterly disgusting. What happens to your perfect life form after it has drained the whole universe of its energy potential? Or even before it has drained it, when the sun don't shine?
Convore is pretty new, but have you tried it for private chats? When it was announced, I immediately started to think how much easier it would be to set up for my non-technical co-workers.

Link that explains basic functionality: http://gigaom.com/collaboration/set-up-real-time-conversatio...
Don't build bubbly products.

Startup/VC bubble seems to be a very popular topic in hacker circles, as if all web businesses might get wiped out when the bubble "bursts".

It's wrong to think of all startups as being susceptible to the same sorts of valuation bubble concerns -- tons of "web startups are just businesses with a web component". Tons of web startups are just retail outlets that happen to do most of their business on the web.

Airbnb, Etsy, Amazon, etc just connect buyers and sellers, which is something brick and mortar retail outlets have been doing for time eternal. The valuation of Color doesn't affect their (Airbnb's, Etsy's, Amazon's) business model.

Don't build bubbly products. Investors will always invest in cashflow, whether its web based or otherwise.

Edit: Clarify ambiguous referent.
I have been thinking about this a lot lately. All the parts are laying around, and I just need to start putting them together..literally, I have steppers and servos, and some DSP test boards. I am getting de ja vu all over again. When I was finishing up school, i commented that if I had a little more sense i would just quit, and make web pages. Here it is 15 years later, and about time to close up the pottery shop. Zafka Robotics does have a nice ring to it.
EE is generally separate, and when I went to school 7 years ago, my college was just starting it's CE program, and didn't have an SE program.

Edit: Implying that they may not have an CE or SE program (didn't look)
Sorry I omitted that one!
I think that in this prank there is hidden an interesting experiment, which shows alternative ways to create micropayments.
I wonder if you can build a bookmarklet was built it would become less cumbersome to use.
Ask HN: How do I downvote?
Hi all - been here for a while - but never worked out how to down vote? What am I missing?

Thanks!
I almost got a Roomba but I went with a Dyson instead because all reviews said you still need to vacuum. I'll probably get the next generation, which should be out in a year or so.

Moore's Law is a bit flat at the beginning. For example, only 1% of the human DNA was sequenced at the first half of the project and the other 99% during the second half, if I remember the story correctly. We need a few more 18 month periods before robots start to become more useful in a non-controlled environment. My money is on 2015-2018.
This is very strange, because I thought Ev stepped aside as CEO to focus on product.
Have all audience members on Oprah for the past 3 years been given cars?
You have to say things people like enough for them to upvote you 500 times. Then you're accepted into the pack and given the keys to the downvote button... but it only works on comments. You're not allowed to downvote stories.
I have said that quote a lot in jest. :) But I always remind myself that it is based on the problem that there is actually very little theory going on -- that the developer is doing a lot of random fuddling around with little understanding, little theory, until some piece of code produces a desired behavior. The developer may decorate his muddling with tests and wordy comments, but it is still muddling around. If the developer understood his system, then the little mysteries that break theory would not be so magical anymore, and he can move on to keeping his theory on par with his practice.

Countless times over the years I have seen areas where Academia is decades ahead of us so-called industry experts. What is "new", "shiny", and posted all over the place online today is built of theory produced 20+ years ago. In practice, we have gotten our tasks done without some of this knowledge, but theoretically, we have, over time in our ignorance, cost our employers millions of dollars in hours dedicated to bug-fixing and features that could not meet deadlines. It is a hard pill to swallow. The silver lining is that we can recognize this and work to grow, to learn that missed theory, rather than fall into the trap of complacency.

Today's fad is functional programming. In the coming years, we will relearn the weaknesses of functional programming, why OOP was the next stage of evolution. Hopefully we will have learned not to fall into extremist camps again (the notion of a "functional vs OOP" conflict still strikes me as hilarious misunderstanding).
Which tax rates in particular?
I run a small business in the UK and I don't find any of the taxes problematic relative to the money I can make off customers here.
> "...each winning team receives $5,000, and each individual fellow receives $10,000..."

That's going to be $25k in most cases, not $45k unless I'm missing something.
It seems to me that any "bubble" which exists is on the funding side, I'm not seeing a ton of seemingly irrational exits (which is the strange thing about this "bubble")

Seems to me the smart play is to try to get as much startup funding as you can right now, build a really long runway and a huge, sustainable company.
This should help clarify. You need one engineer, but they do not have to be a student.

· Each team must include at least one individual who was a student (graduate or undergraduate) in the 2010-2011 academic school year
· At least ONE member of the team must have a degree in Computer Science or Engineering
hmmm. Where can I get my hands on some fresh students!
500 karma

It's easy to reach. Just say enough interesting, informative, or entertaining things to convince people that you're worth attention. Then spend 500-1000 seeing if people catch on.
Considering how we treat our politicians in the UK is that any surprise?

Anyone with any talent or ability steers well clear of politics for good reason. The reason being that (almost) irrespective of what you do you'll be butchered by the press and the public.

If you have any substance then the likelihood you'll be voted in or accepted by either party is close to zero.
I hope the vote on the 5th of May for AV helps address this a bit.
Oh I see. That explains it! I always wondered what the number was next to my user. Thanks!
Well, I'd disagree that Color's valuation doesn't affect their business model. When you take $40M then you're saying a few things including: we're going to build a great (ala expensive) team, we're going to build it fast, and we're going to get users right away. That impacts one's business model greatly.

Also, I don't want to build products to appease investors. Cashflow is the goal, investors are a less important detail if you want to go that route.
This student requirement seems a bit weird, arbitrary, and makes me question their agenda. Are they doing this to truly support hot new startups, or are trying to to encourage some kind of academic accomplishment? I know lots of great founders who would love to apply, but have been out of school for a few years so they're ineligible? wtf. As far as I can see, the FAQ doesn't address what's up with the full-time student requirement thing.
It seems that the author is a theorist, not a practitioner, as his theorist insults ("Despite all the equations, it seems to me that your work didn't require any real mathematical sophistication. Did I miss something?") are much better than his experimentalist insults ("Wasn't all this done years ago at Xerox PARC?")

If you want to insult an experimentalist, it's there's a much more cutting one - "Didn't Microsoft do something similar when they were working on CORBA?".
Japanese Robot Surveys Gymnasium Too Dangerous for Rescue Workers
Hacker’s Guide to Tea
Interesting. So you're saying to capitalize on the money which is being made available. I was wondering what the pros and cons of this are.

I agree that the bubble exists on the funding side. When you take investments aren't you then participating and abiding by the rules of the bubble?

I was wondering if staying away from the funding (bootstrapping maybe) would let you make decisions that didn't include pressure from the bubble.
My reaction to "food porn" wasn't for the same reason as you, but just because I don't think the final product here is food porn. Food porn is slick photography of stunning meals. There might be a few home cooks that can manage that, but I don't know if the majority will and it creates a huge expectation otherwise.

Your second point made me think - Housefed Pro could even be in-kitchen dining experiences offered by winery kitchens, restaurants, etc?

The concept could be awesome in Asia, but when scams like the tea-house scam (China) are rife, it would have to be heavily policed/vetted or very much reliant on honest reviews.
To answer the question, I would advise you to go on a startup weekend.

(54 hour hackmarathon, but not just developers, but marketing and biz people also)
There was an interesting link here the other day, a post titled "What are the picks and shovels of the digital Gold Rush?". It makes some good points.

http://erehweb.wordpress.com/2011/03/17/what-are-the-picks-a...

Other than that, take advantage of the number of willing investors!
What's with the editorializing in the title? In any case, taking no equity in companies is not necessarily a good way to compete with YC; in fact it makes the two programs complimentary by making it easy to do both programs, as Indinero did.
An HTML5 Game Boilerplate is the only stone left unturned (hint hint).
My biggest mistake: using the word "good"
What I should of said is "has value"

I have since conceded that point and removed the word "good" (which is subjective) from the post.

Also, the only evidence I have is observation. Which is why I posted the idea. To get good constructive input from people like you!

You make some good points. It is an expensive proposition to switch languages, which is why I excluded that explicitly in the post.

It is also expensive to train people. So that alone may disprove the theory. I'm not sure yet.

On a side note, as far as I know, being based on observation only does not preclude the use of the word theory. It is technically correct (at least according to the dictionary definition of theory). Although, I agree hypothesis may be better.
Out of curiosity, could you share these weaknesses of functional programming and how OOP solves them? Or at least point me to some material that discusses them? I would be very interested. I have programmed in OOP for over a decade and just picked up functional programming in the last 2 years so do not have enough experience with FP to make any definite conclusions yet (although I am really liking what I see so far). Thanks.
You're basically obliged to let them invest in you if they want to and you are raising an institutional round, and if you do this program and they don't invest in you that is a strong negative signal that will leave you basically incapable of raising institutional investment.

But free money is free money, if you get into this, do it in a heartbeat.
Quadrocopters juggle balls cooperatively
MIT's artificial leaf is ten times more efficient than the real thing (Wired UK)
I'm absolutely in this boat at the moment, and I've covered a ton of ground. Lynda is great, railstutorial.org is fantastic as it covers pretty much all you need to know - testing, git, github, heroku etc.

But I have to say, as others have said - you just have to get down and code. I've covered a lot material, but the moment you sit down to write a piece of code by yourself - the game changes. Its like a different dimension.

So my advice to you as a fellow noobie is run through the tutorials enough so that you know your M from your C and get writing.

Join StackOverflow (which never ceases to amaze me) and read read read!

Best of luck.
With a headline like that, it's clear to me that Lightspeed misses the point entirely wrt YC.
This is from my completely anecdotal observations so take it with that grain of salt. But I actually think a bubble is good for people like you. To explain that let me give you my advice...

1. Ramp up as quickly as possible. If there is a bubble than it will pop and funding will dry up. So you need to get funded as soon as possible.

2. Run Lean. Take whatever funding you get and figure out how to live off it for as long as possible. That means staying on Ramen for the time being.

Here's the reason for my advice. People treat the end of the first bubble like it was a dead period with no investments. That is not how I remember it. There was maybe 6 months where funding dried up but after that investors went looking for slightly safer bets. Companies that had survived the collapse and still appeared to be running well. Those companies had their pick of the VCs.

Most VCs will tell you their #1 criteria for funding is smart founders. Nothing proves how smart you are than out living your competitors. So if you can build a good product and survive the initial burst I think you're golden.

At least that's my 2 cents.
I considered a similar idea like this back when the paywalls were first introduced across some of the larger news sites. Simply register 1 account and then funnel all requests through it for free. It did however conflict with my own idea of what should and shouldn't be done, so I never made it.
Massive GTA V Leak: Characters
In the future, I recommend not clicking.
For next headline, choose one:

Arms race escalates, NYT paywall defeated again in 4.3 hours

DMCA takedown issued to $host over paywall hack in 12 hours

Paywall hacker fights back, issues counter-notice and restores access in 10 days

The NYT Paywall and Color: Unexpected connection revealed in weekend hack

Introducing paywal.ly (YC S'11), developed in just 14 days
Why not have two mailing lists, one tweetable in content and the other funny? Start people off on the tweetable one, and give them a link if they'd like more info. And give them a link back, if they choose to do so.
You can have up to 4 team members.
You can have up to 4 people on a team.
Good point about him being uncommon to his peer group...my perspective is skewed since I went to a school focused on math/physics studies and it was common for kids to know basic calculus at his age. Neither teachers nor parents considered them geniuses, just very (Asperger-like) focused on hard sciences.

So I standby my claim, the kid is obviously very bright but not a genius, at least not to the extent where the definition of genius requires some remarkable results.
Yeah, this really sucks and doesn't make a lot of sense, especially given this:

http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/21/engineering-vs-liberal-arts...
Invest in things that you believe can actually be self sustaining.

Stay away from things people think are easy to do and look at things people think are hard to do. And then figure out where people are very wrong about the latter, as they often are.
Plentyoffish and Unusability
I just finished a class with Prof. Comer. He is hands down the best instructor I've ever had. He has a very down to earth method of teaching & personality for that matter.
OAuth and SAML are both stateless web compatible authentication mechanisms. Neither are nasty hacks and neither require the dreaded browser login prompt.
Exactly! that is why I am so interested in Self-reconfiguring modular robotics, there are several companies that are starting to offer modules to the general public, although all but one are for manually reconfigured system. But I see a lot of movement in both business and research over the last years. I think that it is likely that you will be able to buy reasonably priced Self-reconfiguring systems in 5-15 years. and in the meantime you can play with cublets :-) http://www.modrobotics.com/blog/?p=187 more on SRCMR http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-reconfiguring_modular_robo...
For Xen instances I like dull and boring names because they are destroyable (easily).

For physical hardware, fancy names sounds pretty good, examples:

* group of mountains -> db servers

* group of bridges -> web services

* group of cities -> app servers (Kinda fun to say "Portland is down!")
That was unclear on my part. What I meant is that Color's valuation doesn't affect Amazon's business (obviously a simplification and subject to some overlapping macroeconomic factors).

i.e. Who cares if some investments are bubbly, so long as you're building businesses that are less susceptible to bubble dynamics.

Editing previous comment to reflect the original intent.
iRobot, the Roomba company, has sent PackBots and robots of that ilk to Fukushima.
Isn't the world in an awful state when we value other humans' contributions on a lower level than robots. Not saying it hasn't been in the past, but one would have thought the wondrous fruits of Capitalism would have got us past that stage by now...
While it did sell out in less than an hour, you're exaggerating because that doesn't include the ample time offered to previous attendees beforehand.

http://phandroid.com/2011/01/31/google-io-registration-opens...
Everything on this earth began with someone visualizing something and then executing on it. What separates the successful ones from others is "execution" of this vision.

This is nothing new and has been repeated many times by life coaches (think Tony Robbins et al) all based on concepts Napoleon Hill taught over 100 years ago.

There has been many blogs and books which talk about goal setting etc but in the end it all comes down to execution. This obviously means starting someplace even if it's not the right place and following through with the vision and adjusting along the way.
I've just spotted an error in my hastily edited code above... I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader :)
inDinero got $35k from them, and it was everything they advertised: free office space, no equity, no strings attached.

With that said, I'm very happy to have taken the dilution hit from going through Y Combinator the summer after :)
And you can have as few as 1, so the title could just as easily be "$15k".
Here's another video of quadrocopters flying through windows: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7X0_6o9J10

Fascinating and slightly disturbing at the same time.
I can't argue with the claim "If somebody is using something, they must place a nonzero value on it." But it seems a lot weaker than what the article says, and it's not even related to the Twitter conversation you linked, which was about the relative qualities of programming languages.

This restated thesis could be 100% true and it still wouldn't mean that the dominant programming language isn't the worst one ever invented.

And a language with nonzero value could still be effectively worthless — if Language A is worth 1 Foo, Language B is worth 10000 Foo and Language C is worth 15000 Foo, then choosing Language A means you lose more (relative to the others) than you gain.
Time capsule: assorted cooking advice
Barack Obama owns an iPad but still loves his Blackberry
"Disregard hype, acquire savings", whether by taking on project work at high rates or getting investments (if you feel you need them).

A bubble is a good time to build your reserves, especially if you're aware it's a bubble and stay frugal. This'll put you in a good position during the inevitable slump.
I've been working on a theory on this one.
In the most abstract sense, computers are an extension of the human self. Cave Paintings, Papyrus scrolls, Guitars, Printing Presses, Pens, Televisions, Computers are all an evolution of this. You can think of a mobile phone as a inanimate (non-sentient) robot that lacks the ability to self-ambulate. There is a distinction between sentience which has not yet been achieved, and partial autonomy. There simply is not a mass market use case that makes small scale robots like the finch popular enough. Instead, I believe that mobile devices will continue adding new and interesting features. NFC will be the big thing next. After that, some new pathways will be: printing from mobiles, and possibly some of them will have movable parts that developers can program.

Eventually, the mass market appeal of mobile devices will combine with the usefulness of a physical manifestion of our ideas into reality. You need to make a cheap robot USEFUL.

Ultimately, it is the person that controls the robot that will get the most use out of it. Just like a master craftsperson can use his or her tools far more effectively than any random person.

So...in one idea, the reason robots are not really here is that there is no mass market appeal to justify the hundreds or thousands of dollars that they cost.
Execution is prioritizing the good ideas.
It's more than just the money and the office space, it's also about mentorship.

Each team is given a partner who works with them throughout the summer. The partner helps with intros and getting you in front of the right people, vetting your pitch deck, etc.

They also bring in incredible founders and mentors for lunch each week.

Last year we had:
- Liam Casey (PCH)
- Dave Lieb (Bump)
- Wences Casares (Bling Nation)
- Joe Greenstein (Flixster)
- Jedidiah Yueh (Delphix)
- John Schroeder (MapR)
- Max Simkoff (Evolv)

Plus, they ran the best presentation I've seen on fundraising. It was basically the stuff that a VC is thinking, but they will never tell you.
One point I would like to make on this is when most people say Session is a bad design or an anti-pattern they are generally referring to the server side portion of the design. Basically the server side hash map that serves to approximate the state of the client. There are few that would argue that there is no merit in cookies or storing a proxy in a cookie to identify a user. It is all the junk that gets stored on the server to emulate the state of the client that creates so many issues in web development.
Too late? :(