skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
From a guy's perspective, those wireless keys are annoying as hell, because I keep it in my wallet. Most cars will start freaking out if you leave the car with it in your pocket while it's still running. Not only that but sometimes you get locked out when you don't want to, etc... because you left a certain radius. Example: returning a cart at the store.

Keyless entry fob... OK.
Proximity system... needs some work still, especially from a wallet-carrying perspective.

I'll have to admit, I like just pressing a button on the door handle to unlock and being able to just walk away, but more often than not the slick-factor gets carried away and causes more pain than good.

edit: I have a Mazdaspeed6 with the proxy key.
If you find a security flaw in Tahoe, the Least-Authority Filesystem, we'll give you a customized t-shirt with a big thank-you from us and a working copy of your exploit printed on the front. (See site for pictures of people receiving their t-shirts.)
tell that to einstein
Every idea worth having has been had thousands of times already.

Even if this were true (which seems extremely unlikely) someone had to think of it first. So there would have been a point when it was possible to have new ideas. How can you be sure the present is not such a point, when we know there were such points in the past?
This isn't some case of corporate espionage or something. The "secrets" this guy is accused of taking is basically just run of mill information that he would need to be privy to in order to do his job- pricing, margins, planning, etc.

The meat of this is that he signed an agreement not to work for a competitor for at least 2 years. This agreement probably isn't unlike the types of agreements many corporate employees are required to sign.

Now Apple is doing well in the phone market and Motorola is slipping. I guess I don't blame them for suing. I'm sure this will be settled, but it would be interesting to see it play out in court.
>30. Startups for startups. The increasing number of startups is itself an opportunity for startups. We're one; TechCrunch is another. What other new things can you do?

fairsoftware.net?
"The question I'd be asking is how easy is it to get an established application off App Engine." ... this is the most important question.
Hilbert's list was a little harder :)
Systems/Debugging Specialist wants in on the fun.
Okay, my specialties lie in asm/c (C++ when I have to), debugging, code optimization, etc as a interest/hobby. I have worked in C# as a matter of profession and I would consider myself at least respectably familiar with .NET.

That being said, it appears that if I want to seek any meaningful employment in my area, I'd better learn web development. Furthermore, I'm just plain curious. I actually have some side projects I've always wanted to attempt to implement, and it would require (on my part), some web application development.

I'll admit that I am something of a dichotomous programmer. I'm usually either doing rapid application development in C#/.NET, or I'm tooling around with a disasm'ed binary.

For the purposes of web development, I'd rather the experience (for the time being) be more like the former.

What kind of tools/frameworks would be best for getting me off the ground in web app dev? The only language I know that I believe would be relevant is that I can hack perl. I do know HTML/CSS and have, IMHO, made some nice looking albeit simple web sites.

So, where do I go from here and what do I learn?
Also, is it possible to avoid javascript? I have a peculiar dislike for it.

Thanks for your time and your responses!
Regarding #22, "A web-based Excel/database hybrid," have you ever seen dabbledb.com? It's pretty much fits your description completely and I've really liked it the few times I've had a need for it.
It depends on what you want to do with your startup. With App Engine, you're limited to Google's sandbox, that means that third party libraries can't be installed, and Python has many, many third party libraries that make a developer's life so much easier.

The initial example was PIL, or the Python imaging library, that a lot of web developers use to resize images for their sites. App Engine didn't support using PIL because it was a third party library, and when enough developers complained they opened up the API that's used for Picasa's web albums.

Another issue that you might run into is merchant accounts and libraries for credit card purchases. You can't use them, and as of a month ago when I was looking at GAE, there was no solution.
Every idea worth having has been had thousands of times already.

Perhaps, but not by me, and not all at the same time. ;)
Yeah, that's what I was getting at. As soon as you need any persistent storage you're chained to BigTable. That leaves a lot of code that needs to be rewritten if you need to move to a new storage model.

This isn't unlike the storage problems PHP had quite a few years ago. There was a separate module for every database that was supported and they lacked consistent naming conventions as well as consistent functionality. It was literally one set of functions you used to talk to MySQL and a completely different set of functions for PostgreSQL or SQL Server. This is still reflected in the documentation: http://www.php.net/manual/en/refs.database.php

For a long time there wasn't a common wrapper for all of these modules so if you started with MySQL and needed to move to Oracle or something you had to rewrite a bunch of code. I had to do that once and I never used PHP again.

It seems that's where we're at with App Engine and BigTable. I'm sure there's going to eventually be something equivalent or some sort of abstraction, but I wouldn't want to be holding my breath.
Of course, you can use cmd-; to toggle Option between Meta and system (and ESC works as Meta anyway).
I agree, although when you're funding 20 startups at a time, I bet you start thinking about throwing some scratch-ticket ideas into the mix. It's unlikely they can pull it off, but with a basket of longshot, astronomical payoff startups, if one pays off, you're in great shape.
I find it encouraging that (as is often the case) pg's thoughts and ideas resonate with my own - bigtime. 4, 5, 7, 19, 21, and 27.

Thank you for yet another stimulating and encouraging read pg.

I look forward to getting to the point where I can take on some of those problems, as I am still quite larval at this point.
erm, hackers? really? I don't know...
Producing such videos is so much work.

Here's a concept: Make an online system that makes it easier to assemble a team of geographically and temporally separate volunteers to upload video clips, edit them into a sensible sequence, do voiceovers, and publish the result. Like a Wikipedia for techie videos, though perhaps with a slightly higher barrier to entry to prevent griefing. (Nobody wants to watch the James Burke video that suddenly becomes NSFW in minute three... I mean, show that to a kid accidentally and you could literally go to prison.)

UPDATE: Hey, wait a minute, have I just invented Youtube's "This video is a response to video X" discussion system?! Only with more geeks and fewer cats on pianos?
Imitation == flattery.
That's how you know you've made it.
Most of these seem really hard to do.

I'd rather make a small little application that tries to do something far less ambitious than decapitate Microsoft or Ebay.
Most of us would definitely trade 3 servers for any appreciable shortening of time-to-market.
I think that his lesson number 2 ("No separation between the technology organization and the product organization") is an interesting one, and to my mind very wrong. The goal seems right -- making sure that the product is built with the customer in mind -- but from what I've seen the best case is when the technology group can internalize those needs and make the right product calls, rather than having a completely different org. This is particularly the case in a startup.
Good for YC. Terrible for the startups. Isn't there something clever you can do with Craigslist?
As much as it pains me to say this, I think Google's lack of design sense might be their strong point in search. There's no extra crap to get in the way of search results. (Although I should say that in their other non-search products, it is most certainly a weakness.)

There are of course new ways to view results, but with arguable advantage. A new startup I found recently, Viewzi (http://www.viewzi.com/) does a pretty good job. But it's not better at finding stuff than Google.
as long as its dark thats all that matters, because you don't get distracted by cars, animals, planes etc that you see out the window
We took exactly what you said under "9. Photo/video sharing services" and put our own spin on photo/slideshow sharing. Presentation is key to us. We wanted people to be able to build clean, but custom, slideshows. Make a slideshow's presentation appeal to the users emotions on level apart from the photos themselves. We've still got a long way to go, but the response has been overwhelmingly positive so far.

http://www.photatobug.com if anyone's interested. :)
Isn't this only true until the moment retailers start passing shipping costs through to consumers? Yes, truck rolls to a whole district may have a lower footprint than 200 round trips in cars, but many of the retailers in this article are also doing long-haul hops in air freight to distribute their goods. Isn't oil going to fuck these people too?
@ #7

You mention classes so I guess you are on a campus. I am working on a project with a large colledge cafeteria mgt company. Where we are building specific diets (weight loss, strength building etc) from their daily menu and then letting students access the diet/menu selection in a number of cool ways //Hard to explain in a comment

If you have ideas, my email is in my profile. Cheers/mike
Isn't there already a decent abstraction, namely the Datastore API (http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/datastore/)? Current apps are written against that API and it's not a stretch to see an opensource BigTable on EC2 with a Datastore API. (See appdrop.com for an even simpler datastore replacement.)
Sure if you never need more than 100K page views a day.
Since ycombinator would presumably fund companies with this idea, doesn't that make them a startup that helps startups that help startups?
Not lame, not great; lots of photos.
Just in case you hadn't seen it: http://videolectures.net/

Part of the problem is that such videos are hard to find, and not usefully aggregated anywhere (a problem I am indirectly trying to solve ;).
They're not just serving up images - hundreds of thousands of images are being uploaded daily and millions more are being sent to different users every day.

It's not like a blog or digg, or even YouTube where you can just serve up static files for the most part. Social applications tend to be extremely write-heavy and every request ends up hitting the full Rails stack.

We do around 1/3 of a billion page views per month and we run on about half of those machines. http://highscalability.com/friends-sale-architecture-300-mil...
This assumes that when scaling up a Rails application, Rails itself is the bottleneck rather than, say, the database.

Honestly, I just find that hard to believe.

If the author wants to write another "gosh, relational databases aren't always perfect for every situation" article, get in line.
Google's AppEngine is NOT a good option for a startup today and may never be a good option for most startups.

Today, there is no service level agreement; there is no way to buy more capacity; the service has rigid standards that can be unreasonable for many applications.

I like the idea of AppEngine for both reliability and scalability, but today it offers neither. It has seen a good bit of downtime and it's limited to small sites (5 million page-views a month). Without those two things, what does it offer? Nothing that you couldn't do better on another host.

Probably more important are the rigid standards you must adhere to. File uploads are capped at 1MB. Someone tries to upload a photo larger than that and it just fails. Likewise, the datastore isn't flexible. Your advantage as a startup is that you don't have to worry about scalling to 100 million users at launch. You can use things like database joins to make your development faster.

Not only that, but the AppEngine can't handle this simple SQL:

select * from articles where author_id in (:mike_id, :adam_id) order by date desc

Why? Because you must order based on the first filter in the where clause! Now, that's an important restriction when you're dealing with a petabyte of information. It's just a handicap when you're a startup. There are restrictions all over like this - restrictions that make sense when you're storing information for hundreds of millions of users.

Basically, AppEngine forces you to scale your app from day one. That means that you loose your main advantage that you as a startup have against large firms.

And it just isn't that hard to set up a server. Install Apache and a SQL database and start coding! It's a lot easier than AppEngine's restrictions.
Ask YC: Fun gadgets for your work station
After a recent move, my desk is pretty bare (all I have is a laptop now..). I'm planning on getting a few toys to hack around with and place on my desk, here's two of them:

1) usb missile launcher: http://www.thinkgeek.com/geektoys/warfare/8bc4/

2) tux droid: http://www.tuxisalive.com/

Do you guys have any other suggestions?
Well an idea (such as a flying car) can differ so marginally from its ancestor idea that the two are almost impossible to distinguish. But while the idea can have several thousand iterations, it's usually measured externally only by its popular implementations, discretizing the process and making ideas like Google search seem "new."

Sort of like looking at each generation from chimpanzees to humans.
The problem is not coming up with good ideas, it's coming up with the time (and thus money) necessary to bring them to fruition, and then create something that lasts.
I wish that I remember which law of thermodynamics makes 80% "unlikely".
Sure. I think most people merge the very late night with the very early morning.

Ie my most productive coding sprees are from about midnight through 10am. And then I hit a brick wall ;)
The application, BumperSticker, simply serves out customized images to users - online bumper stickers

The vehicle, Space Shuttle, simply carries a payload a few miles off the surface of the Earth.

The author gives no basis for comparison, what would the identical app in Python require for hardware? Also, the app does more than just serve up images. It seems that the most common experience with RoR is that it is less performant than other Languages/Frameworks, but this article can hardly be considered proof of that.
My startup adresses several of the points in the article, and I didn't get invited to an interview either. Maybe it's the single founder issue? Or maybe my ideas just suck ;-)
Yes, that's BigTable specific. My point was that right now you have no option but to rewrite code if you need to move off App Engine and BigTable.

How is it not a stretch to see an open source BigTable on EC2? As far as I can tell BigTable has, up to this point, given Google a competitive edge. They are merely letting us come along for a ride and Amazon is a direct competitor in this market. Why in the world would they allow it to run on EC2?
Not anymore, but if there were no 64 bit machines...

Video ram mapping reduces available memory space. Clawing back a few tens of megs of system ram could potentially have been worthwile(1).

Supporting a 32 bit colour depth screen at 32,768x32,768 resolution would require 4gb of video ram, leaving 0 bits in the address pool for the rest of the system :)

(1)For very, very low values of worthwhile.
If you are coding to the Datastore API, you won't have to rewrite that code when moving to another provider who offers the Datastore API. AppDrop.com, for example, was a proof-of-concept that let you run apps on EC2 unchanged. He simply replaced the implementation below the datastore stubs.

Google may not open-source BigTable code, but as I mentioned above, there are a number of open-source projects that provide similar features. Any of these can run on EC2 together with the open-source AppEngine SDK.
I doubt it. Even the ACM conferences I've been to have fees around $500. Putting on a conference is not cheap. They have to rent a large amount of space in a high demand building for a weekend and feed everyone who comes.

Think about it this way: a medium sized wedding reception in a nice hotel can cost around $20,000. That wedding reception takes up one large room and lasts less than five hours. Now imagine taking up that entire floor of the hotel for 96 hours. It won't be cheap.
9. Photo/video sharing services
13. Online learning

http://freescreencast.com
The way to approach the Google problem is to ask, when have I been dissatisfied with google search?

And you're right, there are very few weaknesses.

One of the startup approaches to the Google problem is to join forces with them instead of competing with them. Provide a page that wraps google search, but adds additional searchable items into the searchbar (search emails, todo lists, events, facebook, google all through one searchbar).
Most of the conferences I've looked into cost around $500-$800, rather than $1,800, which makes me think there might be some money left over.
The authorities should utilise cracker-hackers for 'good' by compelling them to turn from poacher to gamekeeper. What use is a jail sentence when they could be helping secure government systems or helping spying on enemy government systems?
I don't think the technology makes a difference.

In my opinion, a startup is about idea + team + execution. You could do it in Rails or Python or PHP (or Arc or Lisp).. :)
Ubisoft Steals ‘No-CD Crack’ to Fix Rainbox 6: Vegas 2
Interesting concept. I actually interned briefly at CBORD a couple summers ago. One interesting thing I discovered was that small community colleges with cafeteria management systems took great pride in them. For example, several schools featured their systems on the school’s homepage. It's almost as if they believe that giving students a card to swipe to get into the dining halls is what makes one a real college. I don't really have any specific ideas, other than that you should play off the social status aspect at the lower end of the market. I know people selling software to colleges normally think first about the Ivies, but realize that your product is going to be one of the things that the smaller colleges get really excited about. I wouldn't be surprised if some of them actually started talking your product up on their campus tours.
Orkut
aaasss
LG Dare Verizon
Dare to be different with Verizon Wireless newest phone - Dare by LG. This new handset will surpass your expectations with a large 3–inch touch screen that recognizes your handwriting and gives you tactile feedback. Zoom in closer to find a 3.2 megapixel camera/camcorder with advanced features
Hacker News | Edit
Venture Funding Drops for Youngest Companies As Older Ones Suck Up More Cash
More reasons to launch early and often.
You can use Javascript to convert LaTeX style notation into MathML: http://www1.chapman.edu/~jipsen/mathml/asciimath.html
Sometimes you see posting on HN people saying they don't have a technical background but have a brilliant idea. You can create a company that creates prototype for startups. If you look at http://buglabs.net, they are giving you a tool to create your own product.
Internet: serious business.
> "Because you must order based on the first filter in the where clause! Now, that's an important restriction when you're dealing with a petabyte of information."

If you're dealing with queries on a petabyte of information, you'd likely have to deal with a number of issues, whether sharding, managing clusters of DB servers, etc. Sure, you have to structure your queries differently if you use Google's datastore but it's a trade-off.

Being forced to think about scale-friendly coding isn't necessarily a bad thing.

> "the datastore isn't flexible"

I think you mean the datastore doesn't support the full spectrum of queries you expect from relational DBs. You can add new properties on-the-fly, so the schemas are extremely flexible in that regard. Just throw data at your datastore.
Of course. I was merely making the point that it's manipulative. Not that it shouldn't be.
Ask YC: Anyone using Google Site Search?
I'm researching different alternatives for implementing search in my site. For a while I have been thinking of implementing it using Zend_Search_Lucene. But one interesting alternative seems to be Google Site Search ( http://www.google.com/sitesearch ). It would cost $100 annually (for < 5k pages) and is a bit customizable. Time is a bit of an issue for me, so $100 is preferable to implementing search at this point, I would definitely spend more time on it at some point in the future though.

Has anyone tried it out or has anything to say about it? What do you use for search on your site?
Why are some of the greatest thinkers being expelled from their disciplines?
Wikipedia white-washers beware: Virgil Griffith is watching you.
A copy can never surpass the original.
now that's just not true.

Microsoft, Facebook, Google, and countless others started as copies of existing companies.
Are your sleep habits making you fat, nasty and dumb?
I would take issue with point 16 (on Google and design).

I don't work for Google, but I do have a lot of respect for the company. I've never perceieved any 'design' problem.

In terms of their interfaces, I think they've probably spent a huge amount of time on design, and got it exactly right. Simple, sparse and functional.

From everything I've heard, the 'design' of their software and system architecture is also top notch.

I can't see exactly where you're going with the whole design dependency thing. Search and design seem like very different things that shouldn't 'depend' on each other.
High-Tech Trash: Will your discarded TV end up in a ditch in Ghana?
Telaroids game uses any web page as a level
The VCs know that a big part of start up success lies in sticking around, which is probably why early stage money gets supplanted by follow on money.
For the same reasons that universities stopped teaching Fortran and Pascal: They've been replaced by newer, better alternatives.
ASK HN: Edit Audio Files using PHP
Are there some good libraries/functions available in PHP to edit mp3 format files, say split a 5 min song into 5 separate 1 min parts.

Update: Any Open Source Lib/Tool that can be called on a *nix server
It's an interesting article with some excellent information. However, I don't like the implication that your eating or exercising habits don't matter or aren't significant.

I find it annoying that often people highlight one aspect of a healthly lifestyle by attempting to claim the highlighting of another aspect is overblown.
Great list. I'm going to be lame and pimp my own extremely neglected... I mean alpha... Firebug extension for people using YUI.

http://kid666.com/blog/yui-event-list-bookmarklet/
I love the Forbes.com interstitial. It's so awesome with Flash blocked. The way you have to wait for it to redirect because there isn't a link rocks too.
Not that one is the first to see something new, but that one sees as new what is old, long, familiar, seen and overlooked by everybody, is what distinguishes truly original minds. The first discoverer is ordinarily that wholly common creature, devoid of spirit and addicted to fantasy - accident. (Nietzsche)
I think I just came up with a solution for the dating site, and will give it a try.

What I have not solved is I live in Mexico, and this will require an office or staff in major cities.
GLASS, truly a name that connotes rock-solid system architecture.
Well obviously the one built into the computer is ;)

The other one is thin but not really portable. It's just nice to get the same feel on a desktop keyboard, it has nice feedback. I'm so over model M keyboards now. sigh