skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you read Arrington's first post about YouNoodle http://bit.ly/326Nx6, he was very scathing to the point of being unfair. Along with Crunchbase, my guess is that he wants TC to be the Goto point for startups, not YouNoodle, and YouNoodle is positioned to establish many relationships with many entrepreneurs to which he may be jealous.

"It’s hype and nonsense, and it won’t work." ~MA
I'd be interested see how YC companies are valued by this predictor.

YouNoodle may or may not be an accurate predictor, but I bet they're good at predicting which teams/startups are likely to get funding from investors/VCs.
Can you convince a population to move somewhere else without doing something villainous?
Thanks Alex. I think this latest feature is much more basic than that; we're not implementing a collaborative filtering algorithm for applicants. We let startups rate everyone who applies for their job. We think this helps, as everytime they log in, they can see who their preferred applicants are. The "collaborative" part of this just refers to the fact that we make it easy for multiple people on their team to rate a resume.

A positive side effect of this is that we get data about how good our candidates are (or how good startups think they are, which is generally what counts here). This will let us focus our very limited resources much more accurately.

"Empirically proven best practices" are tough in HR, especially for small companies, because every startup has such a distinct personality. This idea of "fit" is huge, and it's something we're working to address, but we also think it's important for our process to be as transparent as possible in such murky territory.
I agree. I wanted to see something like this also. Maybe even scaling the size of the bubble using a point system for type of medal.

Hypothetical example, Gold medal = 3pts, Silver = 2pts, Bronze = 1pt. Total the # of points and scale chart accordingly.
It'll be interesting to see how this goes in the future. In San Francisco, there has been a huge resurgence in the number of families with small children.

That's small children, not necessarily school aged children, which is why I'm still wait-and-see on this. I attended public elementary school in SF in the 70s, which surprises a lot of the parents I meet now (I have a three year old). I don't, unfortunately, have very encouraging things to say. It was a rough environment. Fights (and by that, I mean fist fights) were extremely common, even among eight year olds. Then again, a lot of people didn't enjoy school, so I'm not necessarily saying things were all peachy in Marin or Palo Alto.

I have to wonder if the middle-class people will stick around once they are faced with difficult decisions about school. San Francisco still uses a lottery to determine school assignment, while wealthy suburbs guarantee you access to the "free" wealthy local school.

I know a lot of people with three year olds, and I really like these folks, but very few of them grew up here, and I wonder how they'll react when the city tells them they've been assigned to a poorly performing school across town. Will they accept the assignment (hard to swallow)? Pay $17K+ for private schools (hard to do when you're struggling to make the mortgage payments)? Or will they just move out of the city? Keep in mind that SF is very expensive, just as pricey as these tony suburbs.

It could be that city centers become wealthy, safe playgrounds for singles, retirees, and young couples who stick around until their children hit school age.
This makes me want to make a YouNoodleNoodle that predicts whether or not YouNoodle will succeed.

Done! Here's the code:

<html><body><h1>NO!</h1></body></html>

But seriously, there are so many subjective factors (including luck) in judging the viability of a business that I doubt their ability to do so. If they produce a better-than-random track record, they can change my mind. Until then, I am highly skeptical.
The article talks about the same thing happening in Chicago and its public housing projects. Basically gentrification does it for you. Prices go up, developers push to have crappy housing torn down, lower income people move out one way or another.
Also check these out:

http://webapps.slinkset.com/
Web Apps to poke a stick at. (from 8 sources)

http://roomyc.slinkset.com/
120+ blogs of News.YC's top users
Not to take the conversation into semantics and web marketing but, what qualifies for entry into the new club? Only YC funded startups? Anyone here who blogs about starting something? A company that has an idea and is moving forward? A company who has a product/website and is trying to get traction? etc, etc...
Speaking of which, you probably want to work on dealing with card sets. Search works...by some definition of "works", but it looks like things are getting a bit out of hand with repetitive sets. One of the cool things about Supermemo and imitators is that there are big, maintained sets for a lot of common tasks. You might want to make a "Featured Sets" page, that gives props to the folks who make awesome sets. Allowing folks to rate sets might also be cool, since quality varies so wildly...but, be careful not to clutter up the page too much. It's nice and clean right now.
Aren't fistfights between eight-year-olds common everywhere?

It's the fistfights between 16-year-olds that indicate an area has problems.
I wouldn't be so sure. While I doubt YouNoodle will be able to make valuable predictions, people are gullible and this tool will produce great linkbait.

The predictions from YouNoodle might be closer than simply picking a random number from 0-$1B, but I think a regression with a few regressors(founders previous startup success, current income, market size, etc) would be just as useful.

But most people don't understand statistics, and if you overestimate the valuations of new startups, that particular startup will likely link to YouNoodle. They could turn into a successful player in the TechCrunch/Valleywag space.
Surely they don't have enough data on the startups that didn't make it, that didn't have a high profile. Will the algorithm not tend to be very optimistic?
I wonder if the prediction will be more than just a single number but in fact a distribution of probabilities with predictions. That will make it less trashy.
I'd definitely like to attend, I'm a soon-to-be (full-time) entrepreneur and avid HN reader living in Boston. I'm strongly considering applying for the next YC round, so it'll be cool to see what pg and the YC summer '08 folks are up to, and hopefully meet you all in person!

-Chris
rand(60,150)*1000000
> There has to be some kind of middle ground. If my team invents the next google while working at company XYZ, I don't want a T-shirt and an opportunity to become senior muck-slucker. I want a cut of the action.

I'm not sure what the solution would be in this case, but Google used to give out Founders awards, were by if you created a cool new technology or product they would try to compensate you as if you were a startup they had to buy.

They ended up scrapping this as it, in their estimation, caused more harm that good with in the company.
There's not really a technology here. They are a research firm. They collected a dataset from many web startups and can sell that data or make a nice ad based website out of it(in the TechCrunch/RWW space). It could be a profitable niche. Or it could turn into little more than a thesis paper. Of course, if it turns into a profitable niche it could always grow into something different and bigger.

But the technology, at least in my understanding at this point, is nothing more than running your standard regression on a proprietary dataset.
See http://www.path101.com/explore/
What a bunch of tripe. Summary: concern about self-esteem and diversity has caused our students to become shiftless. Proof: because he said so.
Could be. They're definitely less dangerous than they become later in life.

I really don't know how it was elsewhere. It irritates me when people think they know me better than I do, and I don't want to be guilty of acting that way toward someone else.

When I transferred to private school in sixth grade, fights essentially vanished. Believe it or not, there was never a single fistfight in my high school.
Universe by Jonathan Harris (data visualization)
Web's secret stories by Jonathan Harris [video]
it doesn't calculate for supply & demand.

Powerset is worth whatever MSFT was willing to pay for it, not what the predictor says its worth.
Pretty sure it's just YC funded startups.
ShomWow was the first commercial where I ever had to slap myself afterwards for even thinking about buying a product shown on TV. I even looked it up online because it looked far beyond "too good to be true" and off into "miraculous"...
How to do search on Google App Engine?
I'm trying to hack around GAE search functionality, because something LIKE %query% is not supported and only whole words are indexed in strings, so again no support for substring queries.

I found advice for more relevant search that basically says to derive the substrings myself, put them in a list a query this StringList.

Please, do you know other algorithm? Thanks
Thanks, I think I see what you're getting at now.
I have a hard time believing they have no facility for changing pay. Seems like it would have been in version 0.1
DailyCandy Bought by Comcast for $125 million
The problem is that Australia lacks a startup culture. There are few people to learn from, and few opportunities for those who want to join startups. I was lucky as with my US citizenship I was able to move to the Bay Area to get the opportunity I wanted.

Now, if we could convince some of the 100,000 ex-pats in California to move back with what they've learned...
This book is sorely needed; Merb deserves more recognition :)

That said, with only two chapters of thirteen available it seems an odd time to start sales, but if it's easy for purchasers to get the new chapters as they come, it'd be a nice gradual read :)
Make This Startup: HD Video Serving Service
Aye, it's originally intended for YC-funded startups. This isn't going to help our cult reputation, is it?
Cool. I like roomyc -- I'll make an ad for this to run on YCstartups.com.
International tests indicate that American fourth graders rank among the top students in the world in science and above average in math. By eighth grade, they have moved closer to the middle of the pack. By 12th grade, our students score near the bottom of all industrialized nations. As a result, too many of them enter college without even the basic skills needed to pursue a degree in science or engineering. </quote>

Example of international tests: PISA 2006 http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/15/13/39725224.pdf
Seattle meetup?
I'm in Seattle until the 25th or so, anyone in the Seattle area want to meet up?
congratulations to dailycandy! my sister has been an exec there for a long time, so this is really exciting haha
Given the current state of insourcing/outsourcing, why study science or engineering when both of these fields are vulnerable to job transfer to different parts of the globe? Better to concentrate on those things which will survive such shifts: Law, Medicine, and seemingly mundane things like repair-of-stuff. Business is popular right now, but after training our competitors, I think many of today's business people will see their jobs, if not their entire companies, attacked by foreign competition. Medicine's not even safe, as anything that can be done w/o patient contact can be done in different time zones.

Besides, science/engineering is hard - requiring 6+ years for engineering and 8-10+ years for science to be able to work as a "full member" of the field. Why take all that time when you can do 2-3 startups and retire rich?
I saw this ad on TV and had a similar response. (Didn't actually seriously consider buying it, but it's the first time I've ever been impressed by something on a late night infomercial.) I didn't realize so many others felt the same way. This guy must be really good.
It may be gratifying to see your hunch written out but the author of the original article is just wrong about the history of relational databases. They were not just in the right place at the right time, or "good enough," or driven by marketing hype as the article claims. You might want to read the well-documented history of relational theory, early RDBMS implementations and how they fit with what was already in use, and the ongoing evolution of RDBMSs and SQL.

Since the relational model predates OOP, to say nothing of flashes in the pan like Rails, it's backwards to say that the model is "fundamentally flawed" because it is mismatched to OOP. The mismatch isn't even real: OOP is a valid way to describe applications but it is not intended to describe databases. The relational model can enforce consistency and data integrity at the whole database level, which is a lot different than the object or single application level.

Programmers who developed large systems pre-Oracle have a very different view of the benefits of RDBMSs than programmers who first tried to use a database while developing a toy program with Rails. A little experience will teach you that for pretty much all real applications in the world the data is the only thing that has value; application code comes and goes. Any business that puts OOP purity before data integrity and consistency will not last. Would you feel better knowing that your bank uses Oracle, or that they use Rails and a half-baked ORM?

You might think "no one cares about the relational stuff at all" based on ORMS and Rails, but that is a peephole view of the world. The sooner you realize that Rails et al. are the Hollywood celebrities of the IT world the sooner you'll figure out how important those things really are.

I had more to say about this subject a while back in my article "Why Programmers Don’t Like Relational Databases" at http://typicalprogrammer.com/?p=14
I agree. I am happy to have the problem. I am thinking of some sort of "Flashcard-Rank" that rates the quality of the card sets by using metrics such as number of times studied, number of users who have saved the set, more than X number of cards and maybe a simple user rating system.

The "featured card set" on the home page was a start of the "Featured Sets" idea. That was ok when there were less sets to choose from. But, yes, it is time to expand it now. Good examples and how-tos can really help.

Thanks very much for sharing your thoughts.
This one's probably more accurate and much simpler: http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~ssanty/cgi-bin/eightball.cgi
There were fistfights up through 8th grade in my suburban Boston school. I transferred schools at that point, so I don't know if they continued, but given that one of the guys who used to beat me up was arrested for assault and battery with a caribeaner, I'd guess so.

My suburb's been gentrifying along with the rest of the Boston area, though. When I was in school, there was still a sizable working-class population here, and I considered $400K to be a really expensive house. Now you can't find housing here for less than half a million, and the house around the block just sold for $1.2M. It's changed the character of the neighborhood a lot.
I think you're right, but I don't think that the merit-based pay described in this article is simply based on the total contribution. The problem was that not everyone on the team could "exceed expectations".
I think I was too busy trying to figure out who in their right mind would try to sell something named Sham-anything to actually pay attention to the pitch.

I just can't shake the feeling that the name is intentional and a big joke on the consumers.
let me point out: its a great read the information and flow are nice, he linked out to very good resources.... good job this deserves the hn front page
... and a few months later we made it: http://paulstamatiou.com/2008/03/18/first-impressions-viddyo...
Microsoft accuses open source community of stealing its ideas
I predict that web frameworks will emerge that will automate the writing of JavaScript in the same way they automate HTML creation. A sub-language with JS features but syntax like Ruby or Python will be silently compiled into the JS version when transmitted to the client.
If my team invents the next google...

The article described a situation like this (well, not quite Google maybe), but the company wanted to single out 1-2 team members for reward, while ignoring the rest. I'm all for being paid better for performance, but when working as a team, there's something to be said for rewarding the successful team, not just an individual or two.

Definitely a different story if you're a hired gun, and I've been on both sides of the table there.
How is it impressive that a company in 2008 predicted data that is accurate as of 2008? I'm sure they legitimately used 2005 data in doing so, but they probably tweaked their algorithms until the 2005 data was accurate given what we now know. Anyone could do that.

This is posed as being equivalent to making accurate predictions of the near future, but it's not.
You may want to come out to the Seattle Tech Startup meeting on 8/12 on the UW campus. I've been going for the past year or so and it's usually a fun event. http://www.seattletechstartups.com/doku.php
This is my favorite parser/compiler book. It is better on paper tho. :P
Sure - just add things like parks and restrictions on new construction that increase property values. This will lead to higher rents. The population that can't afford it will eventually have to move somewhere else.
Apple's iPhone-App-Approval Mouse Falls Off Treadmill
'"The MobileMe launch clearly demonstrates that we have more to learn about Internet services," Jobs says. "And learn we will. The vision of MobileMe is both exciting and ambitious, and we will press on to make it a service we are all proud of by the end of this year."'

If its not leaked & not intended for general consumption its pretty worrying. Could you imaging working with someone who says 'we will press on to make it a service we are all proud of' instead of 'this sucks. We need to fix it.'
Well, sure. That app must have taken seconds to approve. An app that doesn't do anything can't do anything fishy!

Besides, it's not as if a bug in that app will bring down a large percentage of the userbase.
When Seth Godin talks about how companies should be remarkable, he usually focuses on industrial sectors that are currently en vogue (technology), or boutique premium services/goods. He excludes about 95% of businesses, which sell mundane goods like vacuum cleaners.

I guess guys like this are the answer to how you should go about selling vacuums, rags, and industrial pipe fittings?
In regards to the first paragraph: my mom has a sweet gadget I'm envious of. It is a sensor you attach to your electric metre (its a camera which reads how fast it spins) with a wireless monitor. The main feature of the monitor is how many $/hour you are spending on electricity (you can have it in real time or averaged over any length of time). I enjoy walking through the house turning on various lights and appliances to see how much they cost to run.
I think you're on the right track here when you mention vehicle weight.

Some kind of feedback for drivers on the ridiculously weights new cars are carrying these days would be more useful than gas pedal feedback.
I only caught the last ~5 minutes but man, there were tons of spammers. Here's some feedback:

* Limit # of times you can submit to chat room per second

* Or autokick someone who repeats himself 10x
It might even make sense for Techcrunch etc. to buy the thing to stick on their website.
High Tech Criminals target Twitter
It is rather troubling when the "executive director of the National Association of Scholars" is unable to formulate a coherent argument.
I agree with the basic point that a hierarchy is too sparse of a format to represent human knowledge. For a single category there are many different ways you might want to break it up. Like if I am trying to organize the category of Trees... if I am trying to build a fire I am going to mentally organize trees by "distance to me" and "burnability". Whereas if I am going to build a tire swing I am going to mentally organize trees by "is it in my backyard" and "does it have sturdy branches". But a scientific approach would be entirely different from either of these, and useless for either of my tasks.

But he seems to jump from "a regular hierarchy is too sparse" straight to "therefore we need a special super dense hierarchy". Maybe the hierarchy metaphor is the wrong one for this task.

Here's the logic that seems questionable to me:

But I hated the idea of having to search thru all ten zillion complex items, looking for matches to some pattern. I wanted an indexing scheme that allowed you to step right to exactly those right items. And what gradually came clear to me was that the general topology to allow this, has to place a self-similar sub-hierarchy under each node on the simple hierarchy, trees within trees within trees.

Why focus on the problem of "how to handle ten zillion items"? There are plenty of ways to get only a relevant subset of data out of a sea of irrelevant data. The real problem is what sort of AI data structure can help with some useful task, and this totally ignores the question of "what could you do with a fractal thicket".
If anyone is dumb enough to actually buy this the author is a genius.
Dave Thomas on Developing Expertise [video]
Kodak EasyShare V1253 Digital Camera
Kodak EasyShare V1253 Digital Camera is a compact and stylish camera that is packed with innovative features to enhance your photographic experience. It produces images with an astounding 12.1 megapixels of resolution.
I could take issue with some of these arguments. But I'm upmodding you anyway because your comment is an order of magnitude more sensible than the original article.

I used to work in the fabs of the former Hewlett-Packard, all but one of which have now been outsourced to Malaysia and Singapore. It happened to the fab I worked in -- just after 9/11 we were told that our factory would be closed in a year and that most of the local workers would be laid off. It was a profoundly depressing experience -- like the opposite of working at a startup. I was working at a shutdown.

Every time a factory closes and lays off, say, five hundred people, that's five hundred families -- and their friends, and their relations -- who learn the lesson: Technically skilled people live in fear of being laid off.

It's pretty hard to get someone excited about mechanical engineering when every automotive engineer and machinist she knows is living the life of a frightened rabbit.
This really makes me wonder how valuations are calculated for newsletters. Anyone?
I have to agree in large part with the author's lament w.r.t. American students. There seems to be a new generation that is especially glib and shallow. There are many counter examples of course, but in general it is no surprise that they are drifting away from tougher fields. And the grade inflation at U.S. universities, oh my...

In the final analysis it smells like decline. And yes I agree that it probably has cultural roots.
Yeah, sports stars and celebs are typically horrible at saving money. It's all spend, spend, spend. There are exceptions, but they're just that - exceptions.
Right. I would argue that the descent of much of America into religious fundamentalism, with its associated medieval beliefs (evolution isn't true, the planet is only a few thousand years old), is much more detrimental to producing quality scientists than any diversity program.
I'm also a fan of the NHS, but also try to recognize where it (like any organisation) fails.

Very courageous, and incredible initiative by the doc! (I can imagine a number of docs thinking about how they could do it, but this guy actually made it happen.)