skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A bubble usually involves over-optimistic speculation. Are you suggesting that there is an irrational exuberance in iPhone apps? I think there is a bit of a land grab, but people are making real take-it-to-the-bank cash, not just hitting nebulous "soft" performance marks. For of an app Boom than a bubble, imho.
Yep, magically protected. That's what we thought :)
I don't know. When you read the definition of what is notable, you can argue someone has a point. Useful? yes, Interesting? of course, Popular? definitely. But you have to dig deeper to decide if YC is notable.

After some thought, I think it is. One can say YC is just another VC firm, so why should that be notable. But the unique way in which they are investing and developing companies is notable.
Anyone interested in a (paid) project to develop a simple version of this in PHP? I could use this kind of feature for another project I'm working on.

If interested, ping me.
13 Free and Cheap Website Monitoring Services
You are taking Matt's advice out of context. No one is asking HN about cutting a tree branch.

When you consider the legal questions that are asked, his advice seems very sound.
This is the first time I've seen so many respond and no one is right. Your url is unimportant. Stop wasting brain cycles on it. If you've built something valuable it could be buried in the bowels of tripod or geocities and people will find it. Most of the time when I hear about a site these days, I hear the name, not the url. This has been increasing as companies get more desperate for urls and there's a cleverness war (slap-fight really). I google the name (delicious => del.icio.us, first link) or keywords that I remember get me what I want ('inflation calculator' => westegg).
A service that monitors web sites and publish RSS feeds of them
This Valley is my Hollywood
'NASA downplayed the news, calling the virus mainly a "nuisance" that was on non-critical space station laptops used for things like e-mail and nutritional experiments.'

... or PORN. Astronauts are people too. What do you want to bet this is how it started?
Claiming support for an extensible technology should not then require that all extensions are supported. Further, many websites require custom ActiveX controls, which non-MS browsers cannot support. While I am a proponent of accountability and upset about the lack of flash support on the iPhone, I'd rather see "Unlimited" have its meaning restored than chasing ambiguous edge cases like this (but I don't know if they even have that problem in the UK.)

Then again, they are just banning the Ad in its current form, and not taking other action against Apple. If Apple added "standard" to their description of the "entire internet", then they should be free and clear while also furthering the case for the <canvas> tag. That'd make me happy.
Before everyone goes nuts, please consider the following:
- Wikipedia allows for a civil debate on deletion matters. That's why the talk page is there.
- Back up your arguments with logic and facts instead of floods of "YOU ARE WRONG" - that will get you nowhere.
- Don't flame anyone for their opinions.
- Most of all, let's defend the notability of Ycombinator. As a tech entrepreneur and professional blogger, I believe that A) YCombinator is very notable for not only who it invests in, but it's unique style and that B) People benefit from that information. So I will argue with logic, facts, and courtesy. I hope you all do the same as well.
I'd agree completely. Y-combinator is the leading example of a company that is shaking up the the way technology investing is being done.

People who believe in the YC model and people who challenge alike all follow its progress closely as it is the flag-bearer of a new wave of investment.

This is why just about every major tech/business publication and many newspapers have written about YC.

The reality is that YC is now starting to get to the point where it is challenging some parts of the industry. This is why every Techcrunch article that mentions YC or a YC company is filled with the obligatory comments.

“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” –Gandhi
Ask HN: Best SBCL REPL for vi user?
I'm an emacs user myself, and I'm introducing SBCL to a friend who uses vi. Rather than adding SLIME to the mix, I'd like to just get him started in something he can be more comfortable with.

Suggestions?
How about instead of running in blazing with integrity, already prepared to disagree with someone we "please expand or rewrite the article to establish its notability." and bring it to Wikipedia standards?
I TOTALLY AGREE WITH YOU!
When I'm typing a url, let me see URLS!
If I want to search, there is a search box immediately to the right.
>_<
The Scrum master's job is to remove obstacles from the team's path

Meanwhile, the Dungeon master's job is to insert obstacles in the team's path.
Before you get all excited and start writing your own pseudo-random number generator, make sure to take a stroll through some CodeSOD over at the Daily WTF. There are plenty of examples of people trying to out-smart the built-in generators and failing miserably. This stuff ain't easy.
It now looks very much like http://www.venturebeat.com. In fact both sites look almost exactly the same if all ads are removed with AdBlock, except TC has green-ish palette and VB - red-ish. Also the front page is now harder to read as the mix of logos/images and text looks pretty cluttered.
Maybe helpful info:

With dialog boxes on OS X you tap Return to use the highlighted option and Esc to select Cancel. (Notice how the keys' left-right position on the keyboard matches the dialog?)

For the common "Don't Save | Cancel | Save..." dialog you can type Command-D to choose Don't Save.

To get to the menu bar type Ctrl-F2.

I think OS X definitely directs you toward using the mouse, but I've found that keyboard shortcuts do exist for most everything.
I'm amazed, too, how certain words I have "over-learned" to type. For instance, it's almost impossible for me to type the word "create" without adding a 'd' to the end unless I make a concious effort to avoid it. I also typed "amazing" in my first sentence before quickly backing out the "ing" (freudian slip of my ego?).

I wonder how this over-learning might be related to reading behavior. I'm sure we've all seen those sentences where the author transposes the middle characters of each word while leaving the first and last characters the same; the sentence is suprisingly not difficult to read. Maybe in the same way our brain has a "good-enough" pattern matching behavior while reading, it quickly recognizes the pattern of the word we're typing and says, "I know this one, I'll take it from here."
That's a given. The article isn't up to wikipedia standards at the moment.
I still can't get over that Glaucoma site.
Change, You Say? Start With Some Elbow Room
I would use something like this.

But I went to the various sites listed in the faq as showing ads, and I wasn't impressed -- the ads sucked. For example, on http://www.clarkwood.com/extras/ , after searching the whole page and looking at my adblock settings to see it was blocked, I finally realized the picture of a wrench and the text "software you might enjoy" was the ad.

I might sign up for this anyway, but my web sites already suffer from poor, cluttered design with too much text, and I'll have to block ads that don't make it obvious that they are ads, and why you should or shouldn't click on them.
Bubbles impact more then just VCs and entrepreneurs. Right now, almost noone is IPOing and exits are slim. Why does everyone compare bad VC investments to the dot-com bubble? Do you really think there will be a flood of iPhone app developers going public?

The only impact that will have on the economy is some investors will lose some money, which happens all the time.

In Silicon Valley everyone seems to think that as long as their starting a company, that VC is always an option. But its only appropriate for a certain types of businesses (high growth, exited focused, etc). I'd put the blame as much on the entrepreneurs who can't tell the difference and not the VCs who look for trends to profit off of.

Besides, is it really that hard to stay "indie" developing iPhone apps? I don't see where the need for capital comes in the first place.
Haven't RTFA yet, but it seems like any respectable VC would recuse him- or herself from any funding decision in which personal relationships might be involved.
If you can't remember keyboard commands, programming idioms, etc. will be a bear.
You mean to say that every legal issue is life and death?

There's no variability? There are no minor legal issues? I should consult a lawyer about, say, a parking ticket?
Good article on the whole.

One fallacy though:

These are the guys that looked impossible in the face and knocked it out in the first round.

They knocked it out in the 50th round, but you didn't hear about the other 49 rounds.

Also, seriously... leave the concert just to meet some guy? Don't idolise people. As the old buddhist saying goes: If perchance you meet the Buddha wandering on a mountain path, kill him.

The author unfortunately has his priorities all wrong...
I like the idea ... I think. Here's some feedback:

- Sign up forms must die. I'd have registered if I could view a list of companies that was there and was moderately interested. As was, I ended up just closing the window.

- Blog exchange would be more interesting for me. I don't want to display ads on our site, but I have no problem writing about a startup that I find genuinely cool, especially if the interest goes both ways.

- You're going to have to ride a tough line between this struggling to be relevant and exploding into a steaming pile of crap. Maybe link it to something like a requirement to have a Crunchbase entry?
Chef on the Edge
A whole new ballgame in x86 servers?
It is good to study the "old masters" and to learn the lessons of the successful, but I don't think cults of personality or "celebrity" of the successful is putting the emphasis where it belongs.
yeah I'm not a fan of the new look, with adblock its like 60% content, 40% white space
Rather than just complaining about Wikipedia, I've contested the deletion by removing the prod tag and added some sources from major publications. Please help add references from reliable sources (blogs dont count) or help copyedit the article.

Here's a good search for finding reliable sources:
http://news.google.com/archivesearch?q=%22y+combinator%22+so...
Looks cleaner and easier to read, but I don't care about TC's redesign.
Well the Radiohead concert kind of blew anyways, it was way oversold and I was 500 feet back. And some guy was standing right in front of me so I couldn't see. So that made the decision a lot easier.

Love your buddhist saying :D
the search bar moved into a better location, before it just floated in the sidebar nomansland. +1
Personally, I think it's just the start. It's my opinion that we are at the very beginning of another game changing event (like the internet).

Computers are going to become tiny things like the iPhone, and you come home, stick it in your docking station and your desktop pops up.

Apps will have to scale from very tiny screens to massive 30 inch monitors. Things, them are going to be different real soon, like the gospel singers used to sing.

Software will be deployed over the air, just like the iPhone app store.

That's why google has a phone, that's why yahoo is making YUI, that's why google allows everyone use its charts API for free. They are all trying to take control of the API for this new platform. The new world is not just internet based, it's apps built to be completely internet aware and to work with the internet all the time.

Software is changing. It's no longer about writing an FTP client and selling a few thousand copies - when you think of an always on internet, easy distribution, and location awareness, a whole new class of apps will emerge.

It's a big markets, and the business folk can see that.
This method of deletion (prod) is sometimes used as a way to force people/fans to improve the article. To contest the deletion all one has to do is remove the tag, and hopefully improve the article before it is sent to a full deletion discussion.
What Does a Sick C.E.O. Do to His Company?
Ask YC: What do you actually pay for, you, yourself?
Spawned off from http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=288231

It'd be interesting to know what people in the YCNews demographic actually pay for online. Which paying subscription services do you actually bother spending money on?

The question is open to you both as a consumer and as a business. If you are both, please split your answer into two parts, e.g.:

As a consumer, I pay for: Flickr

As a business, I pay for: Bug tracking software,...

Note 1: Please feel free to use specific product names.

Note 2: Please don't include things that everyone pays for online, e.g. Amazon books, electronic odds and ends, hosting - unless you feel your particular version is special.

Thanks for sharing!
"Comcast could screw with my cable."

Was that the worst example you could think of?

"The government could make me disappear."

So could a private firm.
why are there only 16 yc companies listed?
Infoviz is awaiting its public crowning as a coherent and vital art movement
Getting through spam filters
Any of you have any advice on getting through spam filters when emailing your users? I know Return Path helps improve the success rate but not sure how much they charge.
Well that was a rather quick resolution to the problem.
Oh, I dunno. I think you can get more done with a small group of super-smart guys the you could with a big group of mediocre ones (isn't that already an axiom?)

I think the client in this story tried to staff up the way a big waterfall or java project typically scales up: hire as many cogs as you can and give them each a little module to work on. In essence, they want a big group of mediocre developers.

A bummer, but perhaps a failing of the consultant. With any adoption of new technology or process, you have to prep the client for uncomfortable changes. Like paying more to fewer developers, or starting work without a 300 line mpp project plan, or whatever.

Sometimes in our roles as consultants, that's the most important job.
I also don't see what the big deal is. Having a Wikipedia article does not all of a sudden validate the Y Combinator idea, and having it deleted certainly does not invalidate the work they've done.

To put it in perspective, ignition partners, one of the largest north western venture capital funds, does not have a wikipedia page.

Take a look at the articles on VC firms on sand hill:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sand_Hill_Road

Only KPCB has an informative, encyclopedic entry - the rest I would argue don't even need to have articles.

Not to mention YC isn't a big VC firm, it's seed-only.
Tim Bray's evaluation of the predictive power of 9 factors of technology success

1. Management Approval	- all over the map
2. Standardization	- another signpost pointing nowhere
3. Return on Investment	- apparent ROI has no predictive value
4. Compelling Idea	- weak negative correlation between buzz factor and success.
5. Investor Support	- not obviously a useful predictor

6. Good Implementations	- a useful predictor
7. Happy Programmers	- a useful predictor
8. Technical Elegance	- a handy predictor
9. 80/20 Point	- This one is a slam-dunk

http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2004/01/03/TPM1
Yeah I don't know - they removed RescueTime and some others. It seems pretty incomplete to have some but not others. I don't know what criteria they're using to decide which should be listed.
"People in business pursue the profit-maximizing choice, which at its worst means providing something unique enough that you can charge a monopolistic price."

You're assuming they're bound by laws and aren't willing to subvert them to make a profit. At their worst, people in business have done a whole lot worse.
The only 100% way is to become your own lawyer. Barring that, the best thing to do is educate yourself and research the area in which you need legal advice. Once you can get a feel for the intricacies of the situation the less you'll have to blindly trust the advice of your lawyer.
It occurs to me that I've strayed from the point I wanted to make. I'm not arguing that advice from non-lawyers can or should be used as a replacement for a lawyer's advice. I'm arguing against the idea that advice from non-lawyers is worthless and should be avoided at all costs.
I'll start the ball rolling.

As a consumer, I've paid for: peepcode screencasts; a flickr pro account; an account to freshlymixed.com while it was still up; That's about it over the last couple of years. I'm not a prolific purchaser of consumer services.

As a business, I'm paying for: EngineYard hosting, Fogbugz, and we paid for Basecamp for a little while. That's it.

Almost everything else seems to be pretty much free.
Raising Venture Capital: How Much Money Matters
The article itself is a bit of a rant/whine (rhine?) but I found the bit of dialogue in the section "The VC mentality" interesting.

To some extent I think the VC might actually be right here. I think some people get too caught up in the idea that there's a tiny minority of "great" programmers who can perform miracles, and everyone else is a mindless drone unworthy of coming anywhere near your code.

I'm not saying that all programmers are equal, but if this guy can't even find _one_ programmer in the whole of Silicon Valley that he thinks is worthy of working on his project (which appears to be an iPhone-based grocery list -- not exactly the most intellectually demanding project in the world) then he might be looking for something that doesn't exist.
I don't mind Wikipedia's standards, but I wish they were more evenly applied. There are hundreds, maybe thousands of companies that are less notable than YC that will never be deleted. Instead it is those that are somehow controversial and questionably notable that will be flagged for deletion.
Of all the things, they probably picked the least misleading bit to ban them. The "twice as fast" was an easier pick. Also, "half the price".
I am looking to leverage both Ruby and ASP.NET libraries, that's why I'm hoping IronRuby is mature enough... In May, they made the announcement that it supports Rails. Of course performance and memory are still issues, I think that's what they are focusing on improving now.
Flickr and blogging software (Typepad).
>At their worst, people in business have done a whole lot worse.

I challenge you to show me a single non-governmental entity that has done anything as bad as the Great Leap Forward, the Holocaust, the slayings of the Khmer Rouge, the starving of the Ukraine, etc. You aren't really competing with government in the killing-people field until you do it by the millions.
I pay for: unfuddle, itunes
Portal to Maya Underworld Found in Mexico?
Do you know of any private firms that disappear people who speak out against them? Governments have been doing that for millenia, but I can't think of a single private firm that has done so. The US government has a military and intelligence budget north of $600 billion and operates secret prisons around the world.
It's the Internet, you can swear here
In addition, my bet is that the company that beats google will probably come out of this pack.
This is a theme I'm hearing from a number of directions these days: namely, that Rails has (deservedly) attracted a lot of attention for web development, and tempted a lot of people from the PHP and Java camps into doing Ruby, but hasn't produced nearly as large a crop of expert Ruby developers as one might hope.

The basic fact is that a year or two of Rails development experience doesn't make you a good architect, systems programmer, or database administrator. Good back-end engineers are much rarer, and should command a premium, if only because such knowledge really does only come from years of hard-earned experience.
Get Email Lists for low cost startup marketing - Sir Spamalot would be pround... :P
You don't really need VC funding to launch most iPhone applications.

The cost of development is so low compared to other types of development. I'm the lone programmer at my startup at the moment. However, I just left a team of 35 programmers trying to ship a PS3 game.

I could see maybe 4-8 programmers top on an iPhone application project. There were 9 programmers on the last Sony PSP project I worked on. VCs don't want to fund that type of development either.

They may fund an app that integrates somewhere in the cloud and also has a web interface. That's a bet that is actually big enough for them to care.
Skype, Amazon MP3s.
For web analytics I pay for GetClicky.com Even though there's Google Analytics, Clicky is well worth the money.
I should add that I'm about to pay for Balsamiq's Mockups (for business).
Ummm... The length of the JD, a doctorate, is 3 years; Ph.D.s tend to be 4 or 5 (or 6 or ...), and an MD, 4.

Short of someone who's done all three degrees, my estimate is probably pretty good. I had room-mates and friends in graduate school (Ph.D.) who were law students, and a friend of mine went on to get a JD after his Ph.D. My wife is an MD. You could say I have a bit of knowledge about this.

Perhaps you didn't mean to reply to my post, but rather to someone else's. I am not saying the law is easy, I'm saying that being a lawyer is not enough of a qualification for getting your hard questions answered. Experience matters.

Consider accounting: you can do the numbers yourself, but an experienced accountant can bring more to the table than just how to classify expenses.

(You could, of course, make the same arguments for the other degrees in various situations.)
A Wikipedia competitor is one of the things pg would love to fund so....
Well you said no hosting, so besides that I'd say nothing really. I'm a cheap ass.
.net is for IT infrastructural plays and .com is for commercial consumer plays. Stick to the formal reasoning behind the creation of each.
I pay for Backpack and Basecamp, and will start paying for GoToMeeting once we have more use for it.
Second Trailer For Twilight
I have to admit, the film actually looked original when I saw the first trailer, but it’s looking a little familiar after the second trailer. Standard bad-vampire vs. good-vampire with cute high school teen caught in the middle, perhaps?
This is very impractical advice. A good lawyer, like a good VC, is not out to "screw" you. They want to see your company get really big and give them steady M&A business for the next 30 years.

Only choosing a non-sharky Lawyer is much easier than a non-sharky VC. Go to some reputable law firms, tell them about your company, listen to them, and go with the one you like. If you haven't figured this out yet then it probably means that you have very little to be "screwed" out of anyways so you won't have to worry about them doing that.

Mentally masturbating over legal issues you'll never understand in a bootstrapped startup is just as impractical as not trusting landlords and insisting on building your own office.

If done right you will get a rough feel for legal issues as you go. And it will come from your lawyers.
Download Twilight Movie
Download Twilight Movie - Official Twilight Film's videos
Business: Freshbooks, Github, Vonage
Consumer: iTunes, Peepcode
Since we're refraining from flaming the wiki wackos on wikipedia let's do it here instead: Get a frigging grip on reality. That page is not that bad. It is useful information. Deleting should be reserved for obvious spam or completely irrelevent or wrong information. But that's fine. The wikieaucracy is gradually destroying wikipedia paving the way for something better to take its place.
YC isn't "Not Notable" they're saying the article doesn't have the sufficient supporting evidence of its notability. (Which it doesn't)

This is an easy fix.
When people at large (i.e., a majority of people likely to buy the phone) think that "the Internet" is the same as "the web" (which is what they meant), it's not really surprising that they phrased it the way they did.