skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It is overly complicated and there are a bunch of special cases. See Io's prototype system as a comparison:

http://iolanguage.com/scm/git/checkout/Io/docs/IoGuide.html#...
The only problem I see with pg giving advice is that future applicants might tweak their application just to fit what pg is looking for, possibly resulting in an application that misrepresents the team or idea.
National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning (Lectures)
If you are outside the valley thats probably fairly accurate.
Ask HN: is the number of interesting (mathematical) concepts infinite?
I have often heard about the possible infinity of the mathematical universe, but what about the universe of abstract thoughts (or let's say, mathematics)?

Do you think there is an infinite number of mathematical ideas out there (in the platonic universe of ideas)? Clearly the amount of possible mathematical constructs is infinite, but how many are really interesting?

I suppose at the moment it can only be a matter of opinions, as it is hard to give a proper definition of "interesting". Would be interested in links to articles that deal with the problem of defining interesting.
Toyotas hold value over Fords anyways. Fords drop in value like a rock the second you drive off the lot.(thats why I prefer imports, they hold their value, get good gas mileage, and actually last)
I would not recommend using it as a model.

I know you meant well, but I'd appreciate it if people didn't post applications for the current cycle on News.YC, or the site will be overwhelmed with "critique my application" links.
Just fyi the copyright symbol has nothing to do with being a company or not. The copyright law in this country basically says that if you made it, its yours.

As far as timeline, I would go with registering an LLC. Its cheap and will give you a form of legitimacy.
Actually, that's exactly what I was hoping for (the tweak, not the misrepresentation).

The "tweaking" wouldn't be the effect, but the cause. The effect would be to help the team focus on their best target.

I believe that anything that gives people a better chance at succeeding is a good idea.
Really, the logo should've been implemented in Logo.
Free Lunch?
It can be productivity booster too, since your staff don't have to spend an ~hour walking, hunting for a good restaurant, waiting for food, eating said food, and walking back when the food is just right there.

This can be more of a personal preference type of thing.
I moved from Boston to SF, to my current job, and I was offerend 5k for the relocation expenses, which was really useful, as when you are in the early 20s, even 5k is a luxury. I did throw away my furniture in Cambridge, shipped my car ( about 1.2k) and moved in here. That 5k helped in buying some new furniture, and downpayment for first/security for a rental, and of course the plane ticked and shipping of some boxes with my belongings.

My work, also provided me with a month and a half of free (temp) housing, until I found my own place (which was a real pain in SF). They also provided me with a rental car, until my car was shipped from the east coast.

Without all this help, I would have thought twice about moving in the Bay area. While 5k relocation assistance might be good enough for a young single person, it probably wont be for somebody with a family.

Great hackers don't have hard time finding jobs, so if you really want to attract the best, be willing to provide the above.

Also, I am not sure how is the situation in NYC, but I think some of the best programmers are in the SF Bay area, and few in Cambridge/Boston area.

But at the end of the day, if your idea is not apealing to people, it would be hard to attract them on money/perks basis.
$5-10k seems to be the standard for a signing bonus, but I'd err closer to the $10k for New York. As much as I think NYC realtors are a useless, overpaid class of people, it's difficult to attack the NY market without one, and they are egregiously expensive: 8.3-20% of first-year rent, usually 15.
Must agree, his responses are very intelligent and technical. There isnt as much as I would like to read about him online. I guess hes not very public.
the code posts data to three URLs:

define("VERSION_CHECK_URL", "http://opentape.fm/public/latest_version.php");
define("ANNOUNCE_SONGS_URL", "http://opentape.fm/public/announce_songs.php");

it sends the songs, and the hosting's site URL to opentape.fm

looks like a honeypot...?
Reddit offers custom domain names and styles
i think it's good to talk about something while using another, it's variety!
Provide information on neighborhoods, commute, safety, and expected rent. Help them find roommates if you know people who are moving into NYC at the same time. Once they've found apartments, set them up with utilities.

Most companies that are successful at bringing people into New York do so through internship programs. New York is much less intimidating to a college student looking through internships, who doesn't have a problem with finding short-term sublets and roommates online, than to an adult seeking full-time work.
What's the best PHP/AJAX gallery system
I want a free / Open Source PHP/AJAX gallery system, does any one by there knows????
And thanks!
I agree that it's not just about free software. Open source is a great movement for expression and challenges you to grow. But at the same time, aren't you sick of big companies making us pay for crappy software...uh um windows vista?
Handling Self Doubt
Also, it would encourage employees to eat together and therefore socialize.
Why are the concepts 'the singularity', standing for an endless, unpredictable period of technological growth, and the more reasonable advent of super-human-AI, munged together?

Because one view of the singularity idea is that, from the perspective of us puny human intelligences, the "more reasonable advent of super-human-AI" will be indistinguishable from "an endless, unpredictable period of technological growth". (The rate of growth may seem quite reasonable/predictable to the super-human-AIs, though.)
Why did this have to be done in twelve hours?
I sometimes get very angry at people that have screwed me over. You don't need to get over it completely - learn from the lessons.

But don't let it negatively impact your future decisions, the best revenge is living well.
New York real estate agents are utterly terrible. Once you have them show you more than 8-10 apartments, they stop returning your calls, because they'd prefer not having to work for their absurd commissions.

Last time I used one in a move, I ended up spending $2600 for an introduction. This was to one person, for an hour and a half of work at most.

The movers, of whom there were 4, charged me $320 for three hours of backbreaking, difficult labor. They did excellent work. They were thrilled when I added an extra $60.

The comparison just makes me want to vomit.
We'll definitely help people out with this kind of stuff. If I were to describe my first New York apartment, you wouldn't believe me.
After Lisp, I want to start learning F#. After that, who knows? :)
I think the legality of this depends on the exact details of the contract he signed. If they are a gaming shop and he releases a game, they may have some kind of a claim here. A few months ago I decided I wanted to complete a web research application I had started back in graduate school (and continued after that). This is a completely different area than my company's, but I still had to go through a long series of discussions maintaining this job (for paying the rent while finishing...) and working on this in my spare time. This lead me to my currently insane 70-80 hour weeks which will maintain for uhm... more months than I'd like.

As I understand it, if you do not use any of the company's trade secrets or intellectual property and you develop on your own time with zero company resources, you should be OK. By releasing this game under an alias and in what appears to be a related area, it seems like this guy actually may have been violating some kind of a contract.

I think the moral of the story is, document everything you do as outside of work hours and if you can pull it off, get your company to send you an email stating they know about your work and know it is not related.
Why Some Websites are Like Bad Brochures: Neither Sells
thanks I will take a look at it.

I think I had the most fun and frustration at the same time programming with Lua.
I love the syntax and minimalism, yet I would have loved some more support for OO.
Also, there is a lack of tools and libraries, which definitely hamper productivity.
Almost any tech company makes its employees sign agreements guaranteeing the company the rights to any intellectual property they produce while employed.

That sort of nonsense should be outlawed. It runs COMPLETELY against the grain of free enterprise, as a person who works and toils over a product has to suffer losses when their employer wants to take their property, claim it as business owned and grab the difference?
BULLSHIT
Hm, on second thought I wonder if this will turn out to be a joke. Even if cows could feel the magnetic field, what would be the benefit of grazing in a particular direction? Maybe more efficient resource allocation?
What would be really interesting to see is, PG fill in the application with the Viaweb idea, that should give prospective applicants some idea when applying to YC!
I personally think this is a great idea. Reading through the posts, its obvious that this offers something that juicycampus does not, mainly, actual conversations. You might consider expanding tools, I notice you can private message people, which is cool, but it would be nice if there were a couple "special" reasons to come to your site other than what I just mentioned.
you don't have to login to see stuff, just to post I think.
There are too few details to judge yet in Maestri's favor. Developers don't clock in-and-out 9-5, and there are many ways Mob Wars (hereafter MW) development may have appropriated Freewebs' resources.

All of this is rhetorical speculation; I have no details beyond what's in the VentureBeat article:

What if MW-developer had a company-issued laptop, and did Mob Wars development on that laptop in off hours?

What if MW-developer answered support emails or forum posts for Mob Wars from the Freewebs office?

What if a few lines of trivial boilerplate code are the same in Mob Wars as earlier Freewebs work, by MW-developer or other Freewebs employees? What if those lines are arguably not trivial boilerplate code but rather clever optimizations?

What if Mob Wars is substantially similar to undeveloped-but-planned concepts discussed while at Freewebs by MW-developer and others?
"... and lauds Apple for making something that was closed more open (mobile apps). While I agree with his assessment ..."

I am really getting tired of this Apple fanboy FUD. If you repeat a lie often enough, it's not in fact going to make it true!

Apple took something that was somewhat open (smartphone apps) and made it more closed. Compared to its peers the iPhone SDK is far more closed and restrictive* and that is a huge step backwards. I can hardly believe how this seemingly obvious fact can be spun around 180ᴼ and presented as Apple being more open.

* If you wish to argue this fact, please tell me how I can run background apps on the iPhone or write apps that hook into the system and extend its capabilities.
Search experiments, large and small
Useful Cloud Computing Blogs
just because you don't do it, doesn't mean there isn't a market for it. How many people think it's silly to be posting on this site!
Umm... surely that application is a joke? No?
i'm saving them for retirement when i can spend quality time on it.
pics or it didn't happen.

</reddit>
I'm outside the valley. I don't believe such a thing for even one second.
Nervous Dog. Their coffee is pretty good.
Make Magazine foments do-it-yourself revolution
Database vendors add Google's MapReduce
Android: It's all about the chin
Is this webapp a hobby, or a business? Are you serious about it being a start-up? If so, I'd definitely talk to a lawyer before you launch, and get yourself organized.

Do you have a business plan? A budget?
If an applicant sees filling out a form to be a major challenge that requires a model to work from, then how is said applicant going to cope with running a company?
I like how TicketStumbler threads always turn in to Songkick threads. Good thing I like you guys. ;p
that was fun, i hope we can get together again. maybe a coworking session saturday morning? 8am?
I don't agree. This sort of thing would just lead to the 'YC Application cargo cult', as people tried to groom their application towards the perceived expectations set forth by such an 'example' application.

Just answer the questions to the best of your abilities and let the chips fall where they may.
"Bill of rights"?

I'd suggest "You live by the cloud, you die by the cloud", and everything else falls to contract law. Have your lawyer read your agreement carefully.
Ability to work from home - telecommute.

Judge work by result and not by time spent.
We all have those stories. :)

In my first apartment, I lived with a couple. I was closer to the girl, although I had absolutely no romantic interest in her. (I had a girlfriend at the time and was madly in love.) The couple broke up; the guy was angry at me and, drunk, he attempted to physically attack me. Bad end, because I liked both of them and wish we could've stayed in contact. I packed up and bolted pretty quickly, taking a 1:30 am cab ride to... the office.

For a month and a half, I was living at work. This was a regular office space-- not a home office. I had a sleeping bag rolled out on the floor and used the gym shower in the morning. This was an understaffed, workaholic company, and I had to spend 6-11pm in a coffee shop to get away from "home". When my then-girlfriend visited me in the city, I had to check into a hotel. Being a cheapskate, I lined up a one-star out in Queens.

After that, I found a decent roommate and moved in with him. The only quirk in the arrangement was that he and I had diametrically opposite approaches to the Quality/Quantity trade-off, so I met (or at least heard) a lot of strange people.

Fun all around. New York can be worth putting up with all this, but it can be a bit much to bear.
I concur. Holding a grudge hurts no one but yourself. Anger damages the angry person far more than the target of the anger. It merely distracts you from your goals.
to get started:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actor_model

The actor model is a very powerful conecpt. It will become more and more revelant as multiple cores, concurrency, and scalability become more and more important.

I think that Facebook successfully used Erlang for their chat system.
It just seems like a low valuation - I've heard of seed companies getting more than a 1mil valuation.
I thought so too, but you're getting downmodded for it, so I guess not...
After you've met a salary/benefit baseline, the most important thing to recruiting good talent is the work. Often, a good employee will take a fair salary for really interesting work over a great salary for boring work. I've talked with people willing to even take a pay cut to get out of a boring job.

IMO an employer should (a) pay employees fairly and (b) treat them well, give them enjoyable work, etc. And then (c) share the company's profits, if there are any (or when they come). I think this is more important than having an impressive slate of benefits.
I like how the sites are presented visually, as though a pretty visual design would imply a good application.

That's how Rails got so popular.
More importantly, if you need a model to create a good application then chances are your personality/idea is not valid to begin with.

Thats kinda-sorta the whole idea of an application :)
"The tragic part for Maestri, at least is that if he’d just waited until he’d left Freewebs to begin development, his former employer would have a far harder time making the charges stick."

So legally, the advice that I've heard (even here at hacker news) of keeping your day job, and work on your project on the side is usually wrong. And even more so if you work at a tech company already.
the paper is heavy on the insights but less so on the implementation, as to be expected. very interesting and innovative system for its problem space.

also, there are many moving parts to this system. if you read through the paper odds are that you would find parts applicable to your problem. pluck some of the parts for use in your own system.
I'm painfully aware how much it costs.

The bigger question to me, as with charities, is how much goes to the people that matter. In this case, the ones that care for my kid.
You can't use it on a plane because no one wants to be forced to hear someone talk on the phone for an entire 2+ hour flight and we certainly dont want to hear people on planes talking over each other.
If you can afford to pay a market salary, and you expect to relo people, you can also afford to rent a mid-range apartment in Brooklyn to house them in until they find a place.
and prospect of a huge success too.
Intel CTO talks about their work towards the Singularity
If I had several team members with kids, I'd probably look in to just contracting someone directly off Craigslist, in which case 100% of the money goes to the person caring for your kids.
For an overview, read the DoE's primer:

http://www.ornl.gov/sci/techresources/Human_Genome/publicat/...

The U.S. Department of Energy does a surprising amount of research on genetics and bioinformatics. The reason: while the Manhattan project was running, DoE scientists were aware that radioactive weapons would cause amazing and lasting damage, but really didn't know much about how radioactivity would affect living things specifically. So a parallel project was set up to study the effects of radiation on cells -- e.g. selectively damaging DNA and proteins and watching what happens to the organism. Research continued after the Manhattan project ended, and eventually led to the Human Genome Project.

Another resource you should definitely be familiar with is NBCI:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/

Yes, algorithms are an important area of research. Caveat: it's entirely driven by biology. For example, aligning two partially matching protein sequences requires a clever algorithm. Sounds like diff, right? The catch is, related sequences don't match particularly well until you take into account which transformations are more likely to occur in nature, which takes significant biochemistry to determine and use properly. So really, your best bet is to associate yourself with a university of some sort, since that's where most of the molecular biologists tend to hang out. Learn biology first, and you'll pick up algorithms in the process.
I think that'd be a disservice to future applicants and YC.

Here's why: Any single application cannot represent everything YC is looking for. They invest in wildly varying startups. I was surprised when we were asked to come for an interview, and equally surprised when we were accepted...because YC had never funded anything in our area before (we're not web 2.0, we're not a hosted app, we're not social or user generated, and our design sense historically kinda sucks). But, history now indicates that YC is looking for more than merely more web 2.0 apps. They've now funded hardware, enterprise apps, sports related apps, and a lot more. There is no "YC style startup". Reddit was a great success, and one can find parallels in some of the other YC startups...but there are far more that don't fit that mold at all.

If you tweak to fit what you think is the YC mold, you may very well tweak out the really unique and interesting bit of your application.
ah, that's right. the real-world equivalent of rapture city.
China Bans TringMe's VoIP Service
Given that we don't have to worry about Auschwitz, We also don't have to lie to our kids to teach them about taboos.

If you don't think there's anything wrong with swearing, you don't have to say "You can't swear because it's wrong." You can say, truthfully, that there are certain words grownups are allowed to use that children aren't. You can say "You are not allowed to say that because if you accidentally say it at a friend's house, his parents won't want you coming over to play anymore." That's very likely true. You may be leaving some things out -- reasons that you don't fully understand and therefore don't know how to explain to a small child -- but you don't have to actually tell any lies.

You don't have to believe in religion to teach your children that you respect other peoples' beliefs, and don't try to correct their religious beliefs when you don't agree with them. Of course, if you actually think they're stupid for having those beliefs, then you will have to lie by omission to help their social life. I haven't told my children any more than they asked about my beliefs, so it took until my daughters were about 10 until they realized I don't believe in God at all, but I didn't lie or pretend to believe something I don't, either. They understood from an early age that different people believe different things for a lot of reasons and it's only polite to respect that.

If your kid is curious enough to ask questions that can't be answered without explaining the mechanics of sex, you can also teach him that we don't really talk openly about sex in polite conversation, and that other kids might have parents that don't want them to know about it yet. And remind them that it's important to them socially that they don't get in trouble with their friends' parents.

You can say that George Washington Carver's achievements were not so much scientific as social (and you don't entirely understand why they're learning about him science class), without saying that no black scientists are worthy.

This is the approach I've taken, and it's worked pretty well so far. We live in a very "Christian" suburb, and so far my kids haven't been kicked out of any homes for being inappropriate, nor have any of their parents come to me with concerns about such things. (I have 16 year old daughters and a 6 year old son.)
very true :-)
Is slinkset toast..?
Nice! I hope they get one out for Mobile Safari too - GMail and Google Reader would be great on my ipod touch without wifi.
Step back and look at the menagerie of lame form based applications that get churned out by oversized .NET development teams and I assure you that one decent PHP coder could write a functional equivalent with far less overhead.

Corporate types love .NET because it provides a comfortable buffer of bureaucractic bullshit that makes them look busy without actually producing anything. The whole Microsoft infrastructure just keeps people busy upgrading, fixing, reinstalling, documenting, and arranging project scehdules. It's just pure Dilbertware.
1. You can probably file LLC papers with your state (or another state) for ~$200. I did that for my first company and didn't hire a lawyer until 3 years later. I highly recommend doing this before you launch your startup. You really should talk to a lawyer before launch, but this is better than nothing.

2. Nothing stops someone from stealing your idea, except: (a) patents, (b) copyright, (c) trade secrets.

You only have to file paperwork for (a), not (b) or (c).

3. You can build on someone else's idea, unless it violates (a) or (b). (c) only protects you as long as it remains secret.

4. Talk to a lawyer. :)
Wait, wait, wasn't there a post with the same title but "design" instead of "blogging" a week ago?