skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
On second thought Google cache might not be the best idea:

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> [Investors] think they need a little more information to make up their minds. They don't get that there are 10 other investors who also want a little more information, and that the process of talking to them all can bring a startup to a standstill for months.

I wish there was a way to know the 90% of information that an investor might ask you ahead of time, and be ready by having those questions answered.
Middle school. Followed stocks obsessively. I started buying utilities in 1997, hoping there would be a panic and overreaction to Y2K. I remember telling someone to sell Cisco in 7th grade (Spring 2000), but other than that my market timing sucked.
"you become defined by your tastes rather than ability."

Oh? How so?

" your tastes only narrow & exclude people."

Again: How so?

(Yes, these are semi-rhetorical)

I mean, I'm all for creating over not creating, but this sounds like feel-good but completely unsupported assertions. The sort of thing people want to believe, perhaps because people want to see themselves as creative.

(Also, are there any people who do not in fact create anything?)
State Supreme Court rejects noncompete clauses
Ask YC: Idea for a start-up but no programming skills
I have an idea for a web enterprise. While I have started the process of dedicating myself to this project, I have no background in coding or computer science. I think it's possible to improve on a popular real-world product while reducing costs by tweaking existing technologies. Sadly, I completely lack the skills to craft the technical side of the business myself.

I'm a bay area resident with access to angels if this becomes a serious endeavor. Other than becoming an expert programmer, do any of you have advice for someone with a good idea but no ability to build it himself? I assume as the web becomes more open my situation will become increasingly common.
Why Do PR Firms Send Unsolicited Embargoed Press Announcements?
2000 was my last year in high school. Major regret is spending the next 4 years in university instead of building my empire.
Steve Yegge, we're looking at you.
"... i meant api's which can be used for a small payment (few cents or lower) ..."

do S3 & AppEngine count?
Excellent article about working with investors, but I'm not sure bootstrapping got a fair shake. 2 other ways to Bootstrap:
1) Getting a customer to pay up for a product up front. This is different from consulting, and this is not investment because you are not selling equity.
2) Building a niche product, with a market that is cheap to reach, and using cashflow to evolve product.

Case 1, the pain is equal to the number of customers you have to talk to to find this one or more that will fund your development. Subtract pain if you have good or opportunistic connections; subtract pain if you are a superb salesman; also subtract pain if you have experience in this exact product field before.

Case 2, the pain is in attracting the initial set of customers. Subtract pain if you have a lot of friends who will buy the product; subtract pain if you are natural evangelist (like PT Barnum) or have PR experience; subtract pain if the market is already ready to accept a product that you can build cheaply.
"... no matter how techie or startup they sound. NY Times, WSJ, etc. They're written for too broad an audience compared to the focused info I expect to find on HN ..."

A lot of the times these articles have the benefit of being written where tech & the broader community collide. That's interesting. Also it's the comments that are spawned from an article that are the best HN component. If I wanted to read tech-articles alone I'd trawl delicious, friendfeed, twitter et.,al.
Your tastes only narrow

But even if they do narrow, the more you look, the more you see... a world in a grain of sand.
It's the equivalent of all the landlords in a city enforcing a 10pm noise rule, and it sucks.

This seems like a fairly obvious flaw in your argument -- if noncompetes are such a bad idea, why are they so common? I'm not saying that their ubiquity makes them a good idea. I'm asking why nobody has gotten around to starting a company that avoids using them, and then gotten lots of great developers who work for less money because their freedom is maximized. If I found out that every landlord in my city enforced that rule, I would work hundred-hour weeks raising the money to buy an apartment that didn't enforce the rule, knowing I could charge a huge premium and get lots of residents.

As I've said in other contexts, most complaints about a purely capitalist system can be boiled down to a business plan -- and if nobody has done it, and you won't do it, what does that say about your complaint?
I like it, too -- it's easy on the eyes when working.

I got it from Smashing Magazine; they release a bunch of awesome wallpaper at the beginning of every month and offer them with or without a calendar. You can find it here (August 2008):

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/07/30/desktop-wallpaper...
MIT developing super-realistic image system
What platform could support this vision? Also, how will you get all these disparate classifiers to integrate and scale without getting bogged down in complexity?

btw, on the computer vision example, I believe this is what Numenta is doing to an extent.
Wedgienet.net is written on the side. That's where I found it:
http://www.wedgienet.net/illustration/monster-sushi-2/
Of course, the question should also go the other way: "If you're going to invest, how much are you willing to put up?
How much equity does a VC take when funding a startup?
ArsDigita.

I think I've finally recovered. :)
I'm starting to re-think the whole Wikipedia thing.

I've been using the site for research related to my online travel site, and I've noticed a lot of facts and figures that are either outdated, slightly off-the-mark, or just plain wrong. Without an update schedule or paid staff, some of the content goes stale very quickly. I suspect this will worsen over time.

None would be glaringly obvious to a casual reader (e.g. the number of rooms at certain Las Vegas resorts is wrong, the current ownership status of some casinos is outdated), but God forbid that people take it for truth.

I updated a couple of entries myself, but I no longer trust it on the whole.
Seth Godin makes a lot of money?
Not quite a teen, not fully an adult
They're still a mainstay of open source projects. I remember when I first logged back into one circa 2000 and thought "Wait, people still use IRC?" Eight years later I'm still using Freenode; #startups is a nice extension of the news.YC community.
Is it lame to want to know why you got modded down?
Sometimes my comments get modded down, which is cool. However sometimes I wish I know why they did.

Should down modding be a comment function. E.g. should users with enough karma to down mod comments explain why they did?

Mostly I just want to write better comments. Sometimes it's frustrating to see a comment drop to 0 thinking it was a valid point and not knowing why someone with great karma didn't agree.
Wow. I'm wondering if you could take a few more opportunities to mention that you went to Oxford. At 13. And that you're smarter than everyone else.

If I were you, I'd seriously never link to that thread again. No matter how blindingly smart you are, you're going to need partners, employees, etc. No reason to permanently and publicly document your arrogance-- that kind of stuff (justifiably) scares people off.

You should honestly be humble-- most of the talent and knowledge you've accumulated probably doesn't have much application in the world of entrepreneurship. There's a reason you don't see Mensa members rocking the world of startups.
The screen shots in the article showed top running but clipped to fit in the screen. Does anyone know if they support multitouch zooming like Safari?

That would be great.
A true hacker
You can use open source libraries such as opencv/torch/torchvision and libraries in R for the machine learning. Haar recognizer is one such algorithm in opencv/torchvision that can locate faces in images.

As for the complexity, that's what the market would sort out. People would build on other's work, and everyone would get compensated for as much as their work is used.

Numenta is an example of the monolithic comapny doing all the work, and that's why you can't use or build on any of their technology yet (incidentally, they use bayesian type algorithms while i'm advocating easy to use standard algorithms that have many open source implementations - boosting, random forests, support vector machines, and maybe neural networks).

A startup opportunity would be for a company to host the learning algorithms, and just have people pay for and submit data from which classifiers (academic jargon for recongizers) can be built and returned. (The company would have to be trusted though as they could simply keep a copy of the created classifier and resell it).
should users with enough karma to down mod comments explain why they did?

Personally I think everyone should be required if they're going to downmod to at least give a reason why. Press the down button, a small, unobtrusive text area comes up and (perhaps a bare minimum of 140 chars just to keep it simple) the user explains why they think the comment doesn't hold it's worth.

It feels almost like something personal when someone just votes you down and doesn't help you understand their viewpoint, or share what they think about the matter. Almost

Great submission. +1
"... condense their message ... rather than rambling self-indulgently ..."

And in the process discard you discard the layering of supported ideas. Instead you get a fragment of an idea that you have no idea how it was formulated. Real life isn't like this. You have to sort the noise from the signal. An essay is one way you can do this. If all you want are the short "tell me the answer" type posts you are susceptible to relying on others to think for you and hence be manipulated.
Good listserv solution for 600-student med school
we're building a portal for our classmates at Tulane, tmedweb.tulane.edu, bringing together lots of resources that otherwise take a lot of clicking to get to, or implement our own services because the university never seems to get around to them, and the community really is the school. It makes sense.

One place we're having some issues is a good, user-friendly listserv app so club officers can easily manage their lists, have ready access to help (via their classmates in the project) and students can browse the lists. I've always used mailman, but there's some concern it's not easy enough. I wouldn't be asking here if I hadn't looked at majordomo, phpmailer, notonebit, phplist, etc.

Is there a stack of two or three things that manage to get the job done? Anything on the near horizon that we in the IT hotbed of Louisiana haven't heard about?
สุขุม อินเตอร์โปรดักส์ บจก. Sukhum Inter Products
Please define 'web enterprise'. Not give away your idea but what you mean by that.
DejaVu Sans Mono is a solid font, but personally I enjoy Consolas, or the (incomplete, IMHO) free version Inconsolata. Also: Monofonto, MPW, ProFont, Proggy, and Anonymous.
Yeah, I clraified that - web part is optional bonus kind of thing.

Interestingly, right now from this forum only two people clicked through to itunes store and one person clicked through to our site.

Fridays are slow.
Django 1.0 alpha 2 released
I thought everyone could downmod comments?
Wow. I'm wondering if you could take a few more opportunities to mention that you went to Oxford. At 13.

I didn't go to Oxford when I was 13, I went to Oxford when I was 19 -- my first degree (which I started when I was 13) was at Simon Fraser University in Canada.

But to respond to your main point: I don't go out of my way to mention this, but if it's relevant -- well, I'm not going to sweep it under the rug either. If someone asks what I was doing in 2000, I'll tell them; and in the context of the (first) dot-com bubble and in a forum where VCs are discussed frequently, I don't think there's anything inappropriate about snickering at an idiotic VC who cold-called an undergraduate with no business experience solely on the basis of media reports saying that said undergraduate had done something in the "hot" area du jour.

I'd seriously never link to that thread again.

I only added the link to that thread because without that context anyone who arrived at news.yc in the past year would have no way to understand the joke.
Sure it could be done, but who is going to pay for it? At $1/1000 uses you won't even be able to cover your hosting fees.
I think it's pretty big of you to fess up and apologise. Honesty and sincerity count.

Well done. :)
Telling someone why he was down modded may help improve an already civil place.
Damnit, I'm in boston on Sunday...
I'd start hanging out with some coder folks. You can also write up your plan and pitch it here and look for founders. Also, network around, see who the people you know know. If you have access to Angels, you can probably get access to people who are looking to join start-ups.
Another nod for someone who had no idea what was going on in in the tech world. I was in 6th grade, honing my skills in TI-BASIC.
Just because it's smaller? Even if it contains links?

http://scrapbook.akkartik.name/post/4424779/are-crowds-wise-...
i was working at be in 2001, the makers of beos. i knew they were in a bit of hot water, because beos wasn't selling at all, and they'd switched to working on embedded devices. but the company had been in business for over 10 years at that point, so i figured they'd keep finding a way.

alas, be went out of business seven months after i started working there. largely due to the dot-com bust. investors were getting very conservative. also due to microsoft's oem agreements.
"... speech recognition is produced by only by two giant companies (Microsoft and IBM), ..."

and ATT ~ http://www.research.att.com/~ttsweb/tts/index.php#top
I think there are a couple of reasons. Which is not to say it won't happen (tipjoy rocks), it's just hard.

Payment is about trust. In order use someone to give or collect money on my behalf I have to trust them. Trust for startups is hard.

Secondly, people aren't always interested in small payments. When the cost of a transaction approaches zero it often becomes it.

If there were an arbitrary scale of value, people would more willing to pay $5 for some that gives them 5 value than $0.50 for something that gives them 1 value. They would look for something that gave them 1 value for free.
Yes S3 and appengine are doing this, but still at the nondomain "computer programmer" type level. A better example would salesforce app exchange, domain specific applications being created on top of others. But this level of activity is still small. There are a much larger number of excel spreadsheet templates/macros etc.

What I was thinking of as that a single developer/domain expert (e.g accountant) could quickly create a small program in an hour or a day or so and immediately have it hosted somewhere for someone to pay for it and use it. This program might be using someone else's small program that does something specific. An "end of the line" entrepreneur/marketer would be creating/paying for the final website interface that the end user uses and pays for (or it could be advertising supported). As it is used, all the various creators would be compensated appropriately.
The market ecosystem of suppliers would sort out the complexity (as is done in the manfucturing/distribution/retail industry).

The above would start working when there is critical mass of developers/designers that are willing to create and consume each others products.
I've been modded down for explaining why I've modded someone down... so I've mixed feelings
Man, I hear that. I also have a Ph.D. in astrophysics from Caltech (proof: http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechETD:etd-05222003-161626). I feel stupid all the time, but then, like Rock, I think "How stupid can I really be?"

N.B. I meet retreaded physicists all the time in tech. Case in point: last week I met the CTO of Aptana, who wrote a particle physics thesis at Harvard with Shelly Glashow.
You need to provide evidence or a sense of where you're coming from, yes. But sometimes just tying in two disparate links can do that.

http://scrapbook.akkartik.name/post/4424779/are-crowds-wise-...

I make it clear what data I'm summarizing, but the summary also seems more timeless to me than the data. I can imagine it being derived from other books about the wisdom of crowds. Like this blog post:

http://gojko.net/2008/08/05/bulding-smart-teams
I disagree that creating a useful artificial intelligence product requires tremendous resources. When search engines first came into existence, a few machines for a crawl and a few machines to do basic posting-list serving were enough to have a useful product. Now it's tougher but Cuil with a dozen engineers has done a reasonable job from scratch.

The real problem is to find an application for artificial-intelligence-style programming that is actually useful. What good is classifying what's in a picture? If you could sketch out a useful product then the right small group of engineers could build it.
he wrote about that, actually: http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/01/blogging-theory-201-...

i think his main point was that, despite popular opinion, more people will read the longer articles, and more people will take them seriously and remember them. to quote: In short, I think long blogs have better survival characteristics: greater reach and greater impact.
I think bitching about things getting too modded-up is a good story-downvote substitute. I think we need more of it.
interesting. at what point do you get that message?
This is awesome.

I actually really like the timeline widget they used too. Anyone know if it's the MIT one?
If the applications being created are very small, e.g. in a few hours or days, as is the case in the content creation industry (for websites), small sums of money work. Websites are running on adsense, 1 dollar for every thousand page views (uses of the site).

As for trust, a third party can run the application and meter use (as in amazon ec2 and payment system), and besides, if a user doesn't pay or a provider doesn't give quality product, you will withdraw your offer from that person pretty quickly. As examples, affiliate systems like commission junction, clickbank, adsense are working.
Seems like it would be worth at least trying out this idea; it's hard to know a priori if it would be liked or disliked by most people.
I'm another vote for this feature.. please implement if possible.

Cheers
Well I wonder if a response even has to be public.

I guess I feel like I only comment if I have something constructive to say. So that little bit of feedback about why it wasn't useful would be nice for me. I don't mind if no-one else has to see it.
A couple of years? You obviously know nothing about getting a Ph.D. It takes at least six years to gain that much self-confidence!
One category where this doesn't work: I modded down dozens of basically identical "Congratulations!" comments in a popular thread a few months ago -- telling everyone that being the nth identical comment doesn't sound fun.
http://www.amazon.com/Superdistribution-Objects-Property-Ele...
very quickly.

when i check it in my browser it was fine, but as soon as i started scanning with the software google blocked it. they may have recognized that the requests werent coming from a standard browser, so they flagged my ip.
I'm shocked when I see the stuff people say in comment threads on other sites.

Digg are obviously notorious, but I was stunned at some of the comments I've received on the site, or by users associating themselves with Digg off the site.

I guess I feel like Hacker news is a place for smart grownups who have figured out that having differing opinions isn't a reason not to be civil or even friends.
Would love to see this on HN.

I already explain (usually) but then again, I rarely down-mod. I quite honestly don't see the point in down-modding if you're not going to take the time to organize your thoughts to write a sentence or two. It's just the decent thing to do.
I've been modded down for wondering wtf I was modded up, so don't feel too bad. see thread at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=249009
Include a referrer HTTP header, set the user agent, and set a random wait time between 500ms and 5s.

I crawl Google frequently and that format has always worked for me... At least it did until I made this post. :)
I like the NYT stories. If anything, at least the writing is good.
This would be an interesting userscripts.

I particularly like scripts like http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/30512 which make hacker news even better.
Comments about moderation rationale can clutter discussion, so maybe they wanted to discourage them. (A form for reasons when moderating would probably do well to keep them out of the way unless requested.)
I don't think any of those screen shots were cropped, you can always see the status bar on the iPhone.
I think the right way to handle this is an anonymous messaging system. Click a button under one of your comments that has been downmodded, and the people who downmodded it will be notified. They can then reply anonymously with an explanation.
Labeling such comments as dupes should be fine...
I'd also bet that if people were required to leave an explanation tied too their handle, there would be a lot less downmodding.
It's custom. No connection to the SIMILE project.
yes to both, imho. Neither are 'news worthy' if the link it's too is news worthy then that link should be posted not the link to the twitter.

I come here for new and articles on running a business, technology, and to help others.

clicking through to a 1 sentence twitter from my rss readers is not a good use of my time.

I can see the place for something like twitter but I don't think that place is something like hacker news.
I don't know what to think of this... there's two potential problems:

First, how do you distinguish the first "Congratulations" from the redundant 14th one? If you downmod everyone then you're penalizing some innocents.

Second, if so many people do the same thing consistently and you're about the only one who seems annoyed by that behavior maybe you should reconsider your reaction? Maybe it was a more "light-earthed" thread so people were less strict about redundance.
Not sure what you mean, how do you do that?

edit: You mean the flagging option? That's for dead obvious spam and trolling I think...
I think feedback would help newer users, but any explanations could/should be anonymous.

Some people can't handle criticism, and there's no need to allow them to turn comments into their own personal griefing grounds.