skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I really like the "Rate my start-ups" posts, assuming the HN doesn't get swamped with them. It's fun to hear the feedback of different people with different attitudes. We're all (or mostly) "start-up minded" here at HN so that's a plus too.

I've never submitted one of these, for reference, I just like to read them.
Nice article, but I would like to add couple of more things.
a) Socio-economic structure in that part of the world is complex. You graduate straight out of school and you start thinking about your parents (in most cases Dad is near retirement) and siblings (if you've sisters you've to get them married--i.e. bear all expenses).
b) Most people who make it to the top don't give back to the society in terms of donation to schools. Most people don't take initiatives that will give young kids, straight out of school, an incentive to start a company.
c) Sparse number of highly talented engineers available for mentorship. Most talented people will tell you to focus on your grades, as article noted.
d) Government not providing any incentives to young lads to start businesses. Cost of running a business is usually pretty high. No policy making at that level. No subsidies.
e) No academic or professional activities. There are no meetups and it's very rare that you hear about a conference. Not many places to meet up like-minded people (only exception is the school itself)
f) Lack of libraries. Elite usually love to read Malcolm Gladwell to remain in the Groove. Rare are the people(that I'm aware of) who like to keep abreast of latest trends. Though situation is improving but you won't find many modern classics (engineering or otherwise) in biggest library of your town). Heavy taxes on imported books. A fellow Pakistani once told me he had to pay heavy taxes(one third of the price of the books) on 10 books that he ordered for his personal use.

This is what I've heard and I've also worked in that part of the world(i.e. Pakistan) but I'm not really sure about India.
Everybody I know is pretty happy with Kayak. The main problem is that Kayak doesn't work well with JetBlue and Southwest. If Mobissimo does that then I've reduced the number of sites I need down to two. Then it is just a matter of Kayak buying Mobissimo.
Find the Right VCs with vcdb
Larry Smith on finding technology opportunities
The OC? What is that? I had to Google it and I still am not sure what you mean. Yeah, I don't get out much.
"Japan’s mobile web operators generate revenue by making sites and content providers pay considerable fees for prominent positions in their default menus."

Japan's mobile web is completely controlled by the carriers. This just doesn't feel right. I want my Internet to be uncontrolled, unregulated. I don't want to pay any carrier (Rogers in my case) anything above my plan fees to be able to use the services of my phone.

Japan is obviously an advanced market (the article reads like science fiction in some places!), but at what cost do these advances come?
>Thereby making both highways have less traffic. The fact
>that people come when capacity is improved shows that you're
>lessening the load on other roads!

Yeah: on other roads whose traffic problem was not as bad as the one you just expanded.
Stones Thrown at Giants Just Bounce Off
20 Free eBooks About Social Media
Most Indian IT jobs are for Outsourcing firms, which value academics and certifications highly.

http://infosysblogs.com/managing-offshore-it/2008/07/do_you_...
The reason that Japanese people access the internet on their phones more than from computers is that they spend a huge amount of time on trains where there is nothing else to do. 1-2 hour train commutes each way are commonplace. They are not supposed to be looking around at other people on the train and they aren't supposed to talk on the phone. Most of the time you will be standing up because there are no seats available. What else are you going to do if you spend 2-4 hours a day standing still in one spot trying not to look at anyone?
YouNoodle failed to use BCC when announcing the site to their beta signup list (I was curious...). There were about 120 other people on the email some of whom immediately started Replying to All. Ugh.

Thankfully, I used my gmail account.
I'm scoring this at about 55% good material, which gets an upvote.

The problem, in my opinion, is that some of this advice is simply broiler plate, motherhood, and apple pie goodness.

Yes. Google can demo their product with one screen and a text box. Got the next Google? Then don't worry so much about your demo. Writing the next Space Shuttle flight system? I'd like to see more than a screen with flight numbers on it. (Probably take a lot longer than 5 minutes too). Sure -- write succinctly. Have a great opening screen from your software that draws the viewer in.

Don't show trivial bits? Hey, that's great advice. Care to tell me what's a trivial bit? I've been pouring blood, sweat, and tears into this puppy: everything is important. Once again, the general point of reduce your depth of presentation to important points for the listener is all goodness. But you'd better know the 2 or 3 little things that's going to put a twinkle in the eye of your viewer. Guess what? It's different every time.

I liked the article overall, though.

One of the best questions was in the comments. Is it okay to use pre=canned video to show your app? Suppose for pacing purposes you want to record your demo and then put it inside an annotated powerpoint. Anything wrong with that? I know I've tried that during training sessions on a couple of occasions and it actually went very well -- freed me up from doodling with the keyboard and let me focus more on my audience.
Read your comment after posting mine above. Your first point (Socio-economic structure) is quite correct for India as well.

But as of today, things are changing, and i guess the other points really do not apply as much as probably they might have 20 years back.
That is insubstantial. The part that really sets them apart from YC is that they are only investing their time, not their money.
Either you have to let the carriers control things or you have to have regulation. Without regulation, the carriers are free to do what they want since they own the network. To force them to do things they don't want to do, you have to have regulation. If regulation is stifling innovation then you can abolish the regulations. But, that just means everybody is free to do what they want, and you are back to where you started.
It's unfathomable for the Apple fanboy media that someone could prefer a non-Apple product.
Paradoxically, adding routes can actually make traffic worse for everyone. Suppose you have two equal-time routes between A and B. If a shortcut is added connecting halfway on route A to halfway on route B (obviously these are not direct-as-the-crow-flies routes with identical speed limits or this wouldn't work) Travel time for everyone increases by 50% (whether you take A, B, or A-B).

I read an article before (tried to find it but couldn't) about a mathematician and [his/her] grad student who had calculated the theoretical maximum cost of this sort of thing and that 50% is the worst it gets, but that's still pretty bad.
T-Mobile Will Ditch The Traditional Deck To Mirror Apple’s App Store
The way they actually phrase the question is, "How do you know about this startup?" (I.e., not how do the co-founders know each other.)
I have a feeling a lot of people around here did.

We demo'd one of our upcoming products to Jason.
Fingerprint Test Tells What a Person Has Touched
The Downside of Permanent Employment
I've been thinking about the whether opposite kind of program would work. These programs try to take the "good" poor people out of bad neighborhoods, making those neighborhoods even worse off. Why not do the opposite: subsidize and protect large "good" businesses and educational institutions that operate in poor neighborhoods. Provide the businesses with security in the form of dedicated, deputized, police-trained security guards and increased uniformed police patrols. Hire locals to work on demolition of condemned properties in their neighborhoods.

I don't have any concrete ideas for how it would work but it seems like there's some way to do it.
mostly correct but very much incomplete. No discussion of the dihedral groups, hamiltonian groups, stabilizers, kernels, group actions, etc...

The rubics cube solution at the end is interesting though.
Interestingly the core problem of highway congestion is that drivers decelerate faster than they accelerate.

An example: Person A slows down a little on the highway for some reason - maybe she sees something on the side of the road, maybe her cellphone goes off, it doesn't really matter. Person B behind her slows down a little as well to keep her clearance, person C does the same and so on. Now person A speeds back up to her original speed (when she is done talking on her phone, watching stuff on the side of the road, or whatever) but she doesn't accelerate quite as fast as she decelerated - this is perfectly normal behaviour - notice it next time you take a trip in your car. Person B does the same thing when she sees person A accelerate and so on. Before long you have a whole row of cars that need to brake because the cars in front of them have decelerated quickly and accelerated slowly. This is what causes most traffic jams on highways.

This is also why a traffic jam moves backwards on the road as time passes.
That's the reason downvoting didn't exist here at first. PG is aware of the problem of using downmodding to convey disagreement (and he's all too familiar with reddit.) But, eventually, he wound up adding it in anyway, to control overall post quality. You can't downmod unless your karma meets a certain threshold, which means you've been in the community long enough to learn not to downmod on disagreement.

As the community grows, however, reaching that low threshold may become easier and easier, so people less involved in the community suddenly get the same power before they know how to properly use it.

To fix this, the threshold should grow with the size of the community. For instance, instead of a static "50-100" points threshold, maybe it should be a dynamic question, such as, "is his karma in the top 70% of the population?"
I've always wanted highway response crews to come equipped with unfoldable response screens. Something like a nice 20' screen which would block off the view of the accident from the opposing lane. I've always thought a considerable about of time, money, and perhaps life could be saved by such a policy.

It was nice to finally see an article that explained why I don't see such a thing.
This has nothing to do with poverty. The article goes out of it's way to make it clear that the family is black without mentioning it, by saying they are from Oakland, and by pictures.

Then, it blows through the only relevent facts in the first few paragraphs. We find out that the woman's husband had been hanging around and was arrested, the article is very hazy but it seems like it was repeated domestic violence calls, and that the landlord refused to renew their lease for fear of being liable when they commit (further?) crimes. Then the rest of the article is an attempt to spin it into some kind of struggle between inner city people and xenophobic (racist) wealthy suburbanites.

This is a classic attempt to make some kind of social commentary using the story of one family as the vehicle to keep it out of the op-ed section. And as you might expect, it downplays the facts of the case that don't directly lead you to the conclusion the writer is pushing.
dupe http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=271720
Sorry I downvoted by accident. I wanted to say I agree completely. It's good to see someone else who reads Kurzweil.
EDIT: Weird, swombat. I was just reading your whole discussion with Paul Graham in another thread. Fancy seeing you here.

I'm everywhere!

BOOOOO!
Killer Apps--You're Doing it Wrong
They have tried this extensively. Inner city block grants, subsidizing business, etc.

The idea that you can 'fix' another person's neighborhood is equally as racist as the policies that caused blacks to concentrate in those neighborhoods in the first place (they were chased out of the countryside in the KKK era and left with few alternatives to the city). What if the government started offering grants to 'fix' your neighborhood? How demeaning that is, and how absurd! As though subsidized bike shops and coffee shops are going to pressure crack dealers to go away.

As for the police patrols and condemned properties, do you think that there is a functioning local government in these areas? Look at DC and Detroit! The local city government is so corrupt that they can't even provide basic services, or basic levels of non corrupt policing, much less an effective attempt at crime reduction. On my way to work in DC a few years ago I would see the same police officer asleep under the same overpass every single day. This was right next to the highway, so maybe 2000 people would see him every morning, and yet he would sleep away, sometimes with his face pressed on the drivers side window. Do you think a bagel shop can fix that!?
Ask YC: What does one do when one has explosive growth and no money?
Let's go with a theoretical application, which is gaining thousands of users everyday, but is not producing income. The web server costs are mounting, the application can hardly handle the strain, what exactly does one do then?

One needs to throw more servers at the problem, but how would that be possible if the site is not producing income?
Could it be any other way? Could you design a road to induce acceleration and slow deceleration without affecting safety?
If anyone wants a really good (non-fiction) book on stuff like this, check out The World We Created at Hamilton High. It's about a wealthy suburban school that gets integrated in the 60s. Scribd isn't displaying the document properly, but here is link to chapter one:

http://www.alexkrupp.com/Hamilton1.pdf
McCain pays for people to spam blogs with "positive" comments about him
Lepton 0.3 released - a high-performance particle engine for Python
What is the facebook endgame?
How do you track your competitors?
Do you use any app or method to track your competitors' progress? Site traffic, downtimes, media coverage, new features and customer reactions, etc
Yes, people are risk-averse.
Beyond the Internet: How Expert Systems Will Truly Transform Business
Other roads with traffic problems bad enough that drivers avoid them if they believe a new alternative has appeared.
You could make all roads downhill.
Mobile technology advances much faster in Japan because it is so much easier to maintain and upgrade the infrastructure. In such a small country, it is considerably cheaper to upgrade to the newest mobile data technology. In a country the size of the US, not so cheap or easy just because of the geography.

Japan telecom companies were able to adopt 3G technologies much quicker than other places for this reason, and this technology became commonplace before it did in other countries. So mobile computing has had more time to develop and permeate their culture.

In any case, it's probably good that mobile internet in the US is developing more slowly and cautiously around the open internet instead of the carrier's content.
The Philosophies of Work: A Conversation with Derek Sivers of CD Baby
Like Columbia in Morningside Heights? I don't think it did much there. When the neighborhood was bad, all you had was Fort Columbia. Now the neighborhood is better, but so is the rest of NYC.

I think most of these programs miss the real problem: the people. The poor make bad choices and have bad life skills (e.g., don't always show up to work). Sticking them in a middle class neighborhood doesn't change this.
A simple and effective way of dissolving a traffic jam is to keep going at the same speed - let me explain:

You see congestion up ahead, and you slow down to, say, 40mph. This creates some room in front of you in anticipation of the inevitable braking. You then drive through the traffic jam at a constant speed with no acceleration or deceleration, and the people behind you will have no choice but to follow (or change lanes which is the weak point of the solution) What you will see at the other end (if you could go back and look) is that you have dissolved the jam because you have prevented people from decellerating quickly and accelerating slowly.

Several people have tried this successfully and it works.
The only constructive way is through search.twitter.com. A lot of mentions there are from potential customers looking to make a decision. Having that information often lets us insert ourselves into the discussion.

All the other stuff is just a total time waste and way to make yourself unhappy. I'm trying to train myself to just think about my own business and customers.

I remember when I was at Odeo, a podcasting startup, we'd hear about all of these startup competitors and I'd get sort of worried. When the company switched to Twitter, Odeo was left un-updated for an entire year (it now has new and active owners). At the end of that year, Time voted Odeo a top-50 website and I can't even remember the names of the competitors.

My take away is that competition is either much less important than your own execution or so massively disruptive that you don't need to track them. In Odeo's case, itunes was that big of a disruption and was the major reason we were experimenting with side projects (like Twitter).
Get funding? This is the classic case for VC, assuming that you eventually plan to convert those users into revenue.
It's really fun when 3 or 4 people all know and do the same thing. It solve the 'weak point' and once or twice I've been part of a 'team' that cleared a jam that way. It's a weird sort of rush.
This is nice, but it probably isn't enough. Because T-Mobile has so many different phone models, a single app will only be able to reach a fraction of their customers.
To me, this article is muddle-headed. It begins with a discussion on the movement of poor from the inner cities into the suburbs and then pivots to begin framing the discussion as one of race instead of poverty. Add in a few outspoken activists, and I'm not sure you have much of anything useful here.

It's a simple question, really. Are the chronic problems that people face _mostly_ a part of their own beliefs and lifestyles or is _mostly_ it something to do with luck, location, harassment, or policy? I'd entertain arguments on both sides of the issue, but this article implies the answer has something to do with race and policy. That seems to presume the to know the answer to the discussion before it even begins. (It's also lazy reporting and close to editorializing, but that's a comment for another day)

If you want to have a discussion about segregation and integration of various races into various neighborhoods, that'd be a cool story too. But that's not what this was either, unfortunately.

As for startup potential, the article obliquely mentions that foreclosure rates are associated with violent crime. I've also heard there's a close correlation with density of liquor stores and crime. I wonder if all of this crime data could be assimilated into a useful service? Perhaps something than runs on your phone? (hint, hint)
I think that if it were this easy to predict the success of a startup, VCs would have figured this out a long time ago. Applying for funding would involve filling out a simple form of variables to be plugged into a magical equation.

I don't think that this site accounts for the high probability of FAIL inherent in any startup. Probably just assumes that the company will continue along the growth path of previous SUCCESSFUL startups that were included in their historic data.
Kinda amusing that you picked eBay, because eBay was bootstrapped. It was one of very few startups where the founder was making more from his startup than his day job, before quitting his day job.
Successfully poisoned the latest BIND with fully randomized ports
Don't worry, OpenSolaris is busy fragmenting into multiple distros. :-(
Actually, I think you wouldn't be far off the mark by saying that one of Y Combinator's most important contribution to its companies is morale. Tuesday night dinners really turned us around when we were feeling particularly demoralized.
Is that not too small for funding? And funding is a long process, is it not?
The problem is that they're putting a price on something that they shouldn't be able to put a price on: The way you use what you paid for.
It's a strong suit in court, and luckily for them (so far) no one has sued. It doesn't matter what their TERMS are, it's what you paid for and what the court thinks is fair use.
If you pay for unlimited data - that's what you should get. If they wanted to limit it, it should be 1GB data, not unlimited.
(I bet this is mostly ATT's fault, but I guess it's easy to blame Apple for following through on agreements.)
Hey, toy ponies rule. I don't think I like your tone
How to Rick Roll a Venture Capital Firm
Consulting is the only option you can count on.

I'm curious - what's wrong with the old-fashioned "having a job and living way beneath your means"? The average grad student lives on about $15-20k/year, and often does so in a startup hub with its inflated cost of living. The average entry-level programmer can make $60-80k/year. Why not work for a year, live like a grad student, and then use the accumulated savings to fund 2-3 years of full-time development?
There are several hugely successful Indian entrepreneurs: Lakshmi Mittal, Sunil Mittal (no relation), Dhirubhai Ambani. Even in IT, there is Azim Premji & Narayana Murthy. But the entrepreneurial culture is still not there - all of these people bucked significant cultural norms.

I had dinner with Sunil Mittal once last year, and he had a constant stream of stories about how the Indian government regulations are so restrictive for aspiring entrepreneurs. Apparently you couldn't import touchtone phones at one point, so he had to have them disassembled & shipped separately to different places just so he could sell them in India. Indian trade policy has gotten better, but there's still room to improve.
A bunch of classifiers is not an artificial general intelligence. A human-level mind (or beyond) requires a systematic cognitive architecture, it's not going to emerge out of a heterogenous, quasi-random soup of mind-components. This is a naive theory of cognitive science, I would argue.

For a careful, systematic design for an advanced AI system, see http://opencog.org/wiki/OpenCogPrime, which is associated with the open-source AI project opencog.org

Anyway, I'm probably one of the biggest optimists in the AI research community, but in my view the idea in this post represents "way over the top" optimism based on a naive view of how mind works.

Given a mature version of an AI system built according to an overall AI architecture like OpenCog, then maybe people writing little "mind modules" as you suggest could make sense. But the Internet just is not a "mind operating system."

I wrote about what would need to be done to turn the net into more of a mind-OS in my 2001 book "Creating Internet Intelligence" (Plenum Press). At the high level I don't think this is a bad idea. But again, brains are not just soups of heterogenous processes -- the right high-level cognitive architecture is required.

-- Ben Goertzel
novamente.net
agiri.org
singinst.org
goertzel.org