skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The one about thinking that they needed to move really fast reminds me of one of my favorite quotes, recounted in "The Dip" by Seth Godin:

"We knew that Google was going to get better every single day as we worked on it, and we knew that sooner or later, everyone was going to try it. So our feeling was that the later you tried it, the better it was for us because we'd made a better impression with better technology. So we were never in a big hurry to get you to use it today. Tomorrow would be better."

~Sergey Brin (cofounder Google)

That's a crazy mentality to have, and stands in such stark contrast to most of the frantic behavior of startups today.

Take your time and build a great product.
Anyone want to finish the third paragraph from the bottom?

"One way that Erlang differs from OO languages is its emphasis on failure. Any message can fail. Processes don't raise an exception, they fail. Systems are structured as worker processes at the bottom that are likely to fail, with manager processes above them that restart the failed processes. Because programmers expect processes to fail, they"
doesn't work on safari on the iPhone. Author needs to doublecheck his list of compatible browsers
Zeep Mobile: Free SMS Gateway For Developers
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Startup:gitHub, S3 & EC2 (just experimenting, so minimal actual charges), zonedit

Personal:eRobertParker, MyFoodDiary, eMusic, iTunes (mostly for TV Shows and kids movies), callcentric (VOIP line for my house), .mac/mobileMe (I know, I know)
*just recently canceled so I can afford my startup.

Business:Safari (as part of my Komodo/ActivePerl Studio license)

Looking at soon: a slice at slicehost, Balsalmiq (an app, really)
A tale from the agency side :

Breaking point in long conference call with client. Senior Project Manager says something to the effect of: "Look, we know what we're doing and we can either do it this way or we can do it that way but its your call and you need to figure your shit out and make a decision as to which way you prefer to proceed cause you won't trust us to make that decision for you."

Client asks for a short break.

Phone beeps to let us know we're on mute.

Senior project manager immediately releases a booming laugh of triumph.

Developer reaches over and presses our mute button.

Senior project manager shrinks : "Oops."
I voted, but honestly none of these would end up on my phone if the cost anything.

If they were free, I suspect my wife or I would install the movie showtimes, restaurant suggester, and/or the contact maker (the latter just as a toy).

Best of luck!
Consumer: Flickr, Giganews.com, Amazon S3 (personal docs), DirecTV +HBO +HD, access to a private tech forum, Wufoo for my blog's contact form, Google Apps Premier, misc iTunes Store purchases

Startup: Campfire, Basecamp, Amazon S3, Pingdom and soon Liquid Planner
I think part of what gets confused in these discussions is that there are (at least) two reasons we might restrict a behavior: 1) because the act itself causes harm; 2) because allowing the act to occur will lead to an undesirable outcome.

Historically, copyright law is type (2) -- specifically, it's a response to the threat that creators will not create without financial incentive. The copying isn't itself undesirable; we're more interested in encouraging a specific outcome.

Where most of the purportedly analogous arguments go wrong is that they describe actions that are type (1).

As an example, lots of people here are suggesting that a better analogy to file sharing is the act of sneaking into a movie theater. But this seems pretty clearly to be a case of an act that is restricted due to (1); that is, it's illegal because it's trespassing, which is undesirable in its own right.
Veoh defeats lawsuit; Youtube next?
I think the problem was with bad arguing.

One person arguing the legality. Another, the morality. A third steps in with semantics. Since they all use the same words they think hey are talking about the same thing. But they are not. If you replaced the words they used with the words they mean they'd sound like a pack of hyenas.
No good analogy. Giving bad advice professionally can be illegal (so is piracy). But it's still not theft.
Welcome to humanity.
Our startup (http://feedity.com) delivers custom RSS feeds, and while working on a similar mechanism, we kept it relatively simple by performing a 'Conditional Get' before any content (HTML or RSS) is even fetched. Checking the 'Last-Modified' date, 'If-Modified-Since' date-time, and ETag HTTP header values for the source content, or the published data (meta data) if the HTTP header values are missing.

This makes for a simple and efficient solution, without over-hitting the resources.
To take it one step further the problem is that everyone keeps talking around the fact that the entire argument is centered on "money" not "piracy". Before the internet and before personal computers artists had mechanical control of who had access to their products. That just isn't true anymore and what it means is that artists need to find some new business models. Once they do that the whole issue is going to go away. And that's a good thing, because I've been debating it since the internet was born and that's more than 15 years and I'm getting tired of going round and round and round on the same old arguments. Time to move on.
As Fred Brooks says, "build one to throw away."

Speaking as someone with a CS degree, I can say that the Computer Science is not the hard part of making a good application. Rather, it is the domain knowledge. Build something you and others will want from the start.

The programming will come -- the biggest challenge is creating something people want.
Y Combinator Alexa Rank is 205,428

http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?url=http%3...
Tagged - "you_got_to_be_kidding_me." ;)

Patent system is ...as dysfunctional as Britney Spears - love the analogy.

This is too detailed a patent and one can easily set the page down to one line above or below in the scrolled page and claim they don't infringe. Hence this patent is essentially useless.
related: Atari 2600 Pac-Man code in one big poster. http://benfry.com/distellamap/
The problem is that you still need to poll every single feed. SUP allows you to instead poll a single url. See the "update" note at the bottom of http://blog.friendfeed.com/2008/08/simple-update-protocol-fe... for more details.
And this screwed the founders, how? This article is w.r.t. VC partners robbing their Limited Partners of the investment opportunity. And even at that, as many others have pointed out, it's somewhat deliberately slanderous.
As always, it depends.

On the product end of things a fixed price makes a lot of sense. Squeejee builds custom web applications...billing hourly for that is a no brainer.

Much of everything else is a hybrid. I would expect that I could get a reasonably accurate estimate for painting my house based on the experience of a painter. With a fixed set of requirements and a familiar problem domain, I would think Squeejee could do the same.
At some point, an excessive contributor would have to sponsor their own material. It's a business model!
Cutting through the Cloud
JParallax - Javascript parallax effect
Cliff's notes catch:

"..in order to monetize the service, it will insert ads into the SMS messages."
definitely some downsides to this service:

-inserts ads

-your users must signup via the zeep mobile panel

-all messages are sent and received from the zeep shortcode

that being said, there are no volume restrictions, and free is a powerful motivator, especially for side projects or hobby apps.
Ask your lawyer the question you posted here. They aren't machines, they don't simply answer the question you asked and then stop. They'll dig around and ask you for any pertinent info. You don't need people on Hacker News to help with that.

Weeding out bad lawyers is not something that posting here will help you with (unless maybe you ask for recommendations, which I would encourage). Every legal advice post here gets 100 differing opinions. If you assume any lawyer who tells you something other than what you heard here is a bad one, then all of them will be.

The best route might be to do what you do with a doctor or any other professional: get a few opinions. Do a few consultations. They're generally free, and at least will give you some idea.

The problem with "extra knowledge" is that you're getting some amount of information and some amount of misinformation, and you likely have no good way to choose between them.

I don't advocate blind faith in anyone, but legal advice from a lawyer is orders of magnitude more likely to be correct than legal advice from a non-lawyer.
What do plastic bags and paper invoices have in common?
They already take photos of, at the very least, those who slip through without paying or with a missing/faulty/dead transponder.

So step one is just to take a sample: for X thousand FasTrak transactions, for how many did the license plate and transponder disagree? If it's trivial, there's no economic rationale for fixing the system. Just make a note that transponder logs have a Y% fraud/error rate, for when disputes arise.

If still concerned about the other aspects, save the photo log for exactly as long as the transponder log. That reduces all the issues to the same as those with using counterfeit plates, which we've lived with for over a century, without major problems.

(In fact, I suspect they're already keeping the photo logs, but time will tell.)
I Guess It’s Too Late To Nominate Bill Clinton? [Nostalgia] : The Blog Life
Ask HN: Are there any YC founders married w/kids?
Background: we are three founders who are applying for w2009. All three of us are married and both of the other founders have a kid.

From what I've seen, it seems like a lot of the YC teams are young guys just out of college. We're young (mid-20s), but we have a bit more responsibility than we did a few years ago. Just wondering how much of an outlier we are, and if any of the funded YC teams had founders who were married and/or had children.
The Mac at 25: Andy Hertzfeld Looks Back
It will be interesting to see how the economics of that one shake out. Even if Zeep is down to 1 cent per SMS, that's still a $10 cpm just to get even.
True, Squeak has bad UI color choices. Also, it's a "Burn The Diskpacks" environment. They aren't going to kowtow to any conventions -- they just want to innovate. If you can go with the spirit of that, there's some brilliant stuff in there!

Smalltalk is radically different in a fundamental way when it comes to your relationship to source code and the dev environment. All your source code changes are in something like a transaction log. When you're programming, you're just manipulating the meta-level more or less directly. When you do get it, there's a "whoa!" experience. Better yet, persevere and "get it" then go back to something like iPython. You'll get a real perspective shift!
with our patent system I bet this patent infringes on one of the prior ones, I just don't believe that none of the early keyboard manufacturers didn't bother to patent such an innovative leap in keyboard technology
SlashBe's Xombytes
I'm not a YC founder, but I do have a wife and children.

As to your original question: don't worry about it. Just focus on your application, and try to get some sort of basic demo of your idea together.
I think this should be written as a "Law." All sufficiently powerful software languages/frameworks are misunderstood by those who have never really used them.
All of my current client projects are hourly. I typically give them an estimate so they have a ball park figure and then bill hourly and update them as the project progresses. This seems to work out really well.

The only downside that I see so far is that as you get better as what you do you tend to get quicker as well, which in an hourly arrangement means you make less. You can always raise your rates as your experience grows but for previous clients it can be hard to explain.
Web to get more social as OAuth is sanctioned for use
Oh, it's not going to stop us, or even slow us down. If anything, having responsibilities like a wife and kids has focused our energies on what's really important to us.

I was just curious as to how YC might view things like this.
Neat idea to have us vote on a few projects. Why not some sort of tv guide that alerts you to your favorite shows, and allows you and your friends to comment on (or rate) them?

Give the app away and gather all that valuable demographic data :)
Wayne Crosby of Zenter

"JR: What was the downside of your experience YC?

Y Combinator requires you to move to either Cambridge, MA (Summer session) or Mountain View, CA (Winter session). The night we submitted our application to Y Combinator, we found out my wife was pregnant with our first child. The hardest decision my wife and I made was me going off to do a startup while she remained in AZ. We bought video phones and used Skype video conferencing every night to stay in touch. The video phones helped a ton, especially since I only made 1 trip back home in the 3 months. Looking back it was absolutely the right decision for me, the family, and our future - but it sucked not being around her for 3 months."

http://pioneerit.blogspot.com/2007/04/my-innoview-with-wayne...
Interesting use of the term 'commented'.
Isn't that the point? It's not for everyone, sure, but if you can just jump in and combat introversion all at once then more power to you and welcome to the FU.
The Backtype RSS feed for your company name is now required reading, fellas. You'd have to be crazy to pass up on a chance to get feedback and join conversations about your product. Just hope that your competition hasn't already started using it.
4 Questions for Every Early Adopter
Awesome...exactly the kind of stuff I was looking for. Thanks!
Yes. Having "front lines" advice and anecdotes from actually building a startup are helpful even if they are only tidbits (i.e. cliff notes) of information.

Founders at Work is a great example of this.
This is the definition of ad hominem. For those like me who didn't know.

An ad hominem argument, also known as argumentum ad hominem (Latin: "argument to the man", "argument against the man") consists of replying to an argument or factual claim by attacking or appealing to a characteristic or belief of the person making the argument or claim, rather than by addressing the substance of the argument or producing evidence against the claim.

More on wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem
Speaking of Hollywood, the term there for people who behave like this is 'starfucker'.
... and the article is still pretty bad! apparently these comment threads don't inspire much action ;-)
Five software build patterns
NYC needs another early stage VC, or two, or three
Go Motor Scooter
Blog about motor scooters, mopeds, etc
Only the site owner can use Robots.txt. The commenter cannot control it.
Dealing with Difficult People
Good point here. In case of Adobe and Microsoft piracy actually creates income.

If we didn't have pirated MS Office and Adobe Creative Suite folks would improve openoffice.org and the GIMP/Scribus/Inkscape instead and these monopolies would die and lose everything.

Piracy actually helps software monopolies to be de facto standards and kills all alternatives (or keeps alternatives unusable).

Thus software piracy "steals" only our own freedom.
[Tell YC]Let's build a Crowdsourced webapp
A litte backstory: When I left my Job to start my startup life, the first thing I did was http://www.7days7app.com/ . Building a webapp in a day is taxing, but a lot of fun. But these are just ... webapps, not usable webapps.

So at news.YC, we have a great collection of people who are interested in Webapps. It would be a great idea to crowdsource together, to build an useful webapp, with a deadline of a week. (This part is important! :) )

What we need:

An Idea: Let us all propose ideas, as a new top level comments, and discuss them. Vote up trhe ideas you like, and we can agree on the most promisisng idea.

Development: A lot of us here are developers, so I don't think this should be a problem. For whatever this is worth, I would be willing to deveote a significant amount of time next week to this.

Design: I don't think there are a lot of designers on news.YC. If we can find designers who are willing to be part of this experience, cool. Otherwise, I think I can convince my partners at www.Uswaretech.com, to sponsor a reasonable money for the designs.

So what are we waiting for? Let's get started!

[Edit: Formatting, of course]
Thanks for that. I've looked at io a bit, which is similar to lua, and been very impressed by stuff like this. Also that you can effectively reflect against function definitions in order to create modified versions at a later time.
Also, what's wrong with the question "how do we get to 100 apps?" In the VC's position, I might have asked the same thing. In his position, I'd have been impressed by that question.

In most creative endeavors, quantity leads almost inevitably to quality.

If there is some change in technique, or some application of capital, that would let your company crank out LOTS of apps instead of a few mostly-pretty good apps, then the VC is absolutely right to suggest it. Write so many apps that you can throw away that bottom 50%, and not even notice.

John Lennon and Paul McCartney became expert songwriters by writing an incredible quantity of songs.

There are creative ways to leverage talent. What's stopping all those "mediocre" developers from building apps? I'd bet that at least 1 in 10 of them are better at it than you or they think, or at least, would be with a little practice. How do you take advantage of that?

It's up to you to know how to set up virtuous spirals, not the VC. If you can't do that, then why should they give you money?
Surely the robbery part is theft. :)
This, of all things?
I wonder if godel has any say here: it seems to me that it's impossible to actually create a perfect set of laws.

You can't legalize "it" (speed limit, drugs, copyright, whatever), but zero tolerance enforcement doesn't work. On the other hand if you set guidelines (we'll tolerate small amounts) people will go right to the line - so you don't.

Instead you look the other way most of the time.

And it works.
Perhaps you meant http://www.7days7apps.com/ instead of the broken http://www.7days7app.com/

Have you created a project at some hosted distributed scm repo service?
People there are complaining that they once put up a slide with the text "Fuck you" at a Ruby conference. I really don't have a problem with that.
> Yes, it's illegal. I don't think anyone actually argues it's not

It depends on where you are. In Spain it's not illegal to make private copies of music and movies, and share it with friends. P2P is slightly different, and a legal void here because, although maybe not completely legal, its prohibition would be unenforceable due to privacy laws.

In fact, the right to make these copies justifies the "canon", a compensation that goes to "spanish RIAA" charging recording media, formerly CD/DVD and recently expanded to hard disks, memory sticks and even phones.

>- Morally, it's hard to argue that it's right

Not so hard, I've seen very convincent reasons. Excuse me if I don't share them, but, as you say, this is often an endless and unproductive argument.
Towards Hard Real-Time Erlang
I just completed a YC session and my co-founder was married, but no children. I must say, an entire summer seems like it might put a bit of stress on your relationship.

Let me be very clear! You can definitely do a startup if you have a family. YCombinator and startups are a great opportunity for anyone, regardless of age or family situation.

With that being said, a YC summer can be very intensive. Three full months apart and under stress might be more than you were bargaining for in terms of your relationship with your spouses and family. It seems like if all three of you are in this situation the odds are good that at least one of you will run into a problem.

There were a lot of guys in our class who had serious girlfriends and they all seemed to come out fine. My co-founder is married and our startup is doing just fine. Just think about what could happen, I would hate for that to be a big distraction for you guys.
Yeah, I actually think I really like Smalltalk-the-Language - it's a really tight set of primitives which interact in a powerful way - it reminds me of Scheme or Forth.

But being born and raised on the commandline, it's Smalltalk-the-Environment which causes me trouble. I often find myself wishing that I could just play with it like you would with, say, Ruby's irb. I find the conventions (having to highlight code and hit Ctrl-I to get it to run, and so on) quite off-putting. If I can get over that, I'm sure it'll be worth it, but it's a bit of a struggle.
pg is married! No kids yet, though, afaik.
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I totally agree. This stupid argument comes about for one reason, and one reason only: the law has not yet caught up with technology.

No, it's not stealing. Yes it is wrong - if you don't pay for creative content, content creators won't create, which is a bad outcome for society (and no, don't give me any crap about people creating for free - sure, some might, but I certainly wouldn't be spending my weekends and nights writing an application if I didn't think I'd get some money for it, and I doubt that I'm rare!).

This is where governments are supposed to do their jobs - create laws to encourage desirable behaviour. For example, they could start passing laws to make it illegal to publicly share copyright-protected works. They could also make it illegal to facilitate the sharing of copyright-protected works, putting operations such as TPB under pressure.

Better than just making it a law, make it one of the conditions of membership in the WTO - it's a logical activity for the WTO anyhow, seeing as an increasing percentage of world trade is IP. That way, there is a powerful tool available to force compliance at an international level.
Not yet, let us decide on the idea, and we can host it on Google code/Github etc?
The jet engine factory with no middle managers
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Every woman would want to look beautiful and so did I. But the square jaw line of mine was something which I never liked on my face. Though it was making my face look odd, I had no other go as it was something natural. I came to know about the surgical method of shaping the jaw line but I was not for it as I had absolutely no time for a challenging operation and to manage the post operation hassles. My parents were still interested in the operation but I was totally against it.
Totally agree, I've wanted this to exist for a while. Thanks guys.
Thanks for posing the question. I'd been wondering the same, Have there been any YC startup people with teenagers??!!!

I suppose having teenagers would be a great way to recruit your first coding employees! Except mine aren't techies at all. Yet.