skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"YouNoodle is also basing predictions on historical data, and in a rapidly changing world that is consistently disrupted by new technologies, those predictions are very hard to make. Humans who are on top of recent developments can make subjective decisions that are far more likely to be accurate than an algorithm."
> having IRC always available from anywhere.

I use it as a way to direct people to #hecl from the home page of http://hecl.org. I suspect there might be other ways to use it as a sort of cheap support system, especially if it were possible to pay some money and get branded versions... stuff like that.
100 Open Source Presentations From OSCon
It would be even more awesome if each circle had a sub-circle to represent gold medals. For example, it's not immediately clear, for instance in 2004 Athens, that US had 102 medals, 36 golds, but although China only had 63 medals it had 32 golds.

Still, very cool. Love seeing the number of medals against time as well.
You sound like a guy who knows his databases, and I freely admit I don't, but here's what I use to keep my life simple:

I work in java, and so I have the benefit of a stack trace where ever I want. So in the class that deals with sql queries I keep a hashmap with stacktraces as keys and total execution times as values. Whenever I feel an application sluggish, I just optimize the first 3-5 queries, which usually it's just "explain" and "alter table add key", and using a cache when it's serious. This allows no other thought whatsoever about optimisation. I don't even use indexes by default, on the grounds that they always slow inserts but not always speed things up.
This site is blocked by my companies firewall. It appears you've got yourself on some lists for "Spam Urls". I'm not sure what that reason actually means, but I know my employer buys the list of sites to block from some third party.
New Black HTC Touch Pro
HTC Touch Pro is an upcoming mobile handset, which is expected to be released in August, 2008. It will be embedded with a unique feature of downloading the ringtones which can be set in any of the formats including Polyphony, MP3, WAV, or WMA.
I would prefer a tool for entrepreneurs that would show them directly what factors they can focus on to get a higher valuation and/or higher chances of success.

The page would be interactive and users would drag bars or change data such as cost of infrastructure per user, cost of marketing per user, data about competition etc, and then the probability of success would change in real-time.
Startup Idea: Take the same concept and apply it to indie bands. It's such a point of pride among hipsters to predict the next big band that I bet it'd be a niche hit.
ShamWow: A jerk you'll want to buy rags from.
Like, if I forgot my keys, and then decided that, when I eventually find my keys, I'll go back in time and put them under this rock, and then WHOA my keys are under the rock!! (Now to remember to do that, so the universe doesn't fall apart...)

disclaimer: didn't rtfa, just having fun.
We should use OpenID - it was just lower on the list of features.

Ahh doctypes. We'll have to get that squared away too, thanks.
Use the same technique as in statistics: call it the error term.
There are many compelling reasons to stop using such a badly-implemented and rather-demented language; but unfortunately there are no compelling alternatives.

If there are no alternatives, then those reasons start to look a lot less compelling.
Even though Google is an anomaly (black swan:), as you can see in the Techcrunch article, YouNoodle would've still predicted an $80M+ valuation for Google, in part because of the high quality team and advisors they managed to assemble from the start, including Ram Shriram and Andy Bechtolsheim.
This problem has already been solved in various forms.

Social features may not be worth it if you want the best content. The guy who made delicious purposely didn't include "community" features like ratings or comments.
http://simon.incutio.com/notes/2006/summit/schachter.txt

Or from the recent dark knight/godfather episode on IMDB..

"...in these types of situations their cognition or cooperation failed because the members of the crowd were too conscious of the opinions of others and began to emulate each other and conform rather than think differently." -
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13515_3-10000650-26.html

Even Dawkins weighed in on this back in 1997 -
http://www.simonyi.ox.ac.uk/dawkins/WorldOfDawkins-archive/D...

I think what we need is an adsense for content.
It would be interesting what the prediction would be for 37Signals.
I really believe in this to change how investors validate their gut assumptions. All YN is trying to do is take the social, psychological and environment factors to generate an accurate estimate.

Historically successful entrepreneurial teams have exhibited drive, ambition, a great network and ruthless determination. What makes you say its going to change.

Hats off to these guys
Eleven Charged in Hacking Ring That May Have Stole 40M Credit Card Numbers
Yaw, I think it's a great post-- I kinda feel bad about being negative, but News.YC is littered with people who rattle off this groupthink-powered "VC and TechCrunch are evil!" It's WAY more complex than that.

Despite any bias' TC may or may not have, they are hugely valuable to reach tech bloggers and (if absolutely nothing else) provide SEO value and legitimacy for some buyers. Maybe I'm missing something but, other than the danger of having your servers die under the load, how does it HURT to be covered on TechCrunch?
I think the biggest advantage is that it makes the data somewhat independent from the app. This sounds bad when you design the app, but in practice it's a godsend. Probably because it allows you to refactor the code as you wish, as opposed to having the data tying you up forever.

I remember reading about the way Microsoft did things in office: saving was just dumping the program memory in a file. It's obvious it was bad, but what's interesting is that the most important reason it was so horrible is that it forced you to carry the old code with you forever, just to be able to load and save. Having another abstraction layer in between would have made it much more manageable, even if it saving would still mean dumping the memory somewhere.

Of course, in their particular case that may have been an advantage.
True, true.

Quite a smart system, though. Kudos to the YouNoodle team.

(The name's awful, though. If the founders are here, don't be offended, it's nothing personal, but consider another name?)
I think think the upvote concept has merit but I agree, it's flawed by votes for popular stories just because they're popular.

In order to avoid the groupthink problem a simple solution might be to hide the number of votes an article has received until you've voted either up or down/neutral. Obviously without a visible vote count you could still tell an article was doing well by its position on the site, but without the number of votes visible, there would be less of a tendency to vote something up just because everybody else is doing it.
Two dimensional objects representing one dimensional data? Tsk tsk.
News Corp. Q4: MySpace Profits Down
I don't really get why this is "highly controversial" unless it's just more TC link bait.

Sounds like a good idea to me; if they're able to do what what Moneyball did for baseball and what PER did (to a lesser extent) did for basketball all the power to them. What's the downside of having more accurate tools and indicators> Since the tool will be public and founders will know what to focus on.

However, I highly doubt too many VC's will take them seriously until they start producing verifiable results instead of form fitting historical data. Very few took sabermetrics and some of the other sports' quant stuff seriously to start either.
How cloud computing is changing business
Anybody know what "new features and costs associated with the startup of new ventures" means?
I have an 205hp Acura TSX (07) and I have gotten anywhere between 32 - 36 highway on a tank of gas which is almost 25% better than your Mazda and IMO the TSX has great highway acceleration even if it's a little slow from a dead start. Granted it takes an extra second on the 0-60 vs. Mazdaspeed6 but you don't accelerate that hard anyway so what's the point.

I like power but there is a direct relationship between HP and efficiency but going over ~200 in a car seems to be a waste IMO.
Hmmm, any relationship between these 2 statements?...

MSNBC is a joint Microsoft - NBC Universal venture.

and

Many chief information officers remain concerned about the reliability and security of cloud-based services.
This has been discussed a lot, but one element you left out is that the "wisdom of the crowds" doesn't work as well if you can see how people already voted (although you hint at it with a comment about a few downvotes being followed by many more). It creates a 'cascade' rather than genuinely independent assessments.
The idea is great, but how about grouping the types of apps into sub directories? Perhaps you could separate the pure "utility" apps such as webmail, blogs, organizers and office applications from content sites like BarackObama.com and YouTube?
I say step outside the standard and give away a player other than an iPod, or perhaps do both. Another idea if you are driving at music is speakers, but they might be less universally appealing.
Early access to the official Merb book, "Merb in Action" has opened.
I should add that the book is still being written, but signing up for this allows you to see the chapters as they are finished.
Tracking a Shopper's Habits
Damn, I was fooled. I thought this was a dupe of "Your apache config sucks" I'd seen earlier; turns out it's the same post with an edited title
eh I wouldn't count on that, this is actually just a tool to reinforce their current preferences.
I am very new to URL rewriting myself, so I have a pretty dumb question.

How does mod rewrite affect GET operations in PHP? If you rewrite the URL: http://www.example.com?id=1 to http://www.example.com/1/

And your code uses GET to grab the id from the URL. Does this still work? Or is the mod rewrite processed afterwards?
How ACPI really works
That's what I was hinting at.
JavaScript vs. Flash for Animation
I think the interface is very aesthetically pleasing, and everything that I have used thus far seems to be quite intuitive. One issue worth looking at (not a priority) is that size of all the components you load, as the landing with all the market, js, and css is rather heavy.
If I'm not mistaken, there actually was a McGuyver episode where he made a dialysis machine out of spare parts.
I'm skeptical of this on a very plain basis: If you had technology that could do this for companies, why would you focus on the startup market and not instead on the potentially much more lucrative public markets?

If the technology is as good as is stated in the TC article couldn't they pretty rapidly build up a listing of undervalued companies on Wall Street and buy into them?
http://www.piratesandemperors.com/ isn't exactly what you're looking for, but it's close.
#2: Capricious
Is what you want a list of annotated links about a given topic? Or is it an extract and compilation of contents of those other pages that you want?

I had a couple of good GIT related links included in http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=265723. If people have a need for compilations of links, can post some more.

Speaking about dupes, is search functionality available somewhere on news.yc?
That's the tradeoff. I smoke you through the turns, and you get better gas mileage. I don't drive hard on commutes, but I don't work on the weekends =) Also, the MS6 is a mid-size sedan, the TSX is a compact entry-level sedan that weighs ~400 lbs less. The Acura TL vs. MS6 would be a better comparison.

Finally, gas mileage is much more related to the weight of the car mated to the engine, rather than the horsepower output of the engine itself. A simple example -- when people drop in an LS1 engine (when tuned it's upwards of 400hp+) to a Mazda RX-7 body - which weighs about 2400lbs - they get around 25-30mpg.
One bug report to rule them all
It's ironic if you really are smarter than the masses. But that's what the masses think about themselves: http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/2008/08/why-we-think...
This is the first time I've run across this guy. He's a pretty interesting character.

There isn't quite enough substance to what he described for me to make any conclusions on it, but it got me thinking.

I kinda wish he'd be willing to accept enough money to stop being homeless and start turning this idea into some working code.
U2 Tower in Dublin, Ireland
Techcrunch should have also tested whether predictions for startups that failed were correct too; otherwise this is way too incomplete (YouNoodle might be designed to make you happy by making you believe your company is always worth a lot).
Wait you didn't want it out there? Sht.

Ha no, your resume is not available - everything we upload to Scribd is private.
Location isn't one dimensional, and area is the most space-efficient way to represent a scalar value.
Thanks for letting us know - we're looking into this now.
Niklaus Wirth: Compiler Construction (Addison Wesley book)
But no sign of Brannon Braga...
Isn't traction control like the one F1 had in 2006 better in terms of speed and easier for the driver to use?
Hi-tech criminals target Twitter
Four More Reasons Why It Pays to Seek Early Adopters
Steve Jobs on MobileMe: the full e-mail
Greasepocket: Bridging the Browser to the Client
GeoCommons + Mapufacture: Consolidation in the Where 2.0 Space
I live in NYC and, over the last decade, can attest to this reverse migration phenomena. The city is definitely becoming gentrified, safer and expensive. For the first time in years the city is expanding public grade school capacity in area long deserted by families.
It's a bit more nuanced than that. One of the social sites I briefly used counted clicks more then upvotes. Predictably, being a 30ysh year old male, I usualy clicked on links promising pictures of (more or less necked) women. In less then two weeks most of my personalized content was either porn or lolcats.

The moral of the story: while I do enjoy the ocasional porn and lolcat, it's definitely not what I want from the net (also why I didn't use the site for more then 2 weeks). It's just that it was much easier for their algorithm to categorize those things then the much more abstract "interesting", or even the somewhat less abstract "programming".

edit: It's not that social sites are doomed. It's just they're damn harder to get right then just digg, and they're still in infancy.
Micro-blogging meetup in September?
Gartner: Should big business start using the iPhone? Maybe
I like the idea, but there will always be anomalies that crop up. So just as Google is always fine-tuning their algorithm, so must YouNoodle. Only God knows what will really happen and it sounds like there is an over-emphasis on the Social Proof of those associated with a startup. Opportunities exist that can present themselves to anyone.

It says: "YouNoodle aims to make the prediction right before the first round of funding for a company."

What happens if a company can't or doesn't raise capital? If there were a tool on the site like the just launched http://webequity.com.com.au http://bit.ly/3lZTZa, these startups could still launch whereby the team is paid with equity in the startup instead of cash.

Also, with the valuations in place, tools could be provided to raise money by way of small payments from investors who would also use the site. Alternatively, tools may exist to simply locate such investors with the financial exchange to take place off-site. Such investors may co-invest alongside a high-profile investor who leads the round and who takes an active role in monitoring and working with the company. In this way, a company can uphold its valuation by enabling many diversely sourced investors to access a round who are prepared to pay a premium to access such an investment that they would otherwise not be able to find or participate in, and are likewise also willing to forgoe any board seat claim.
great name, imo
Apple holds on to U.S. retail music lead, but Amazon catching up
Don't laugh. Some day folks will be struggling to maintain their ancient Rails junk and paying top dollar for anyone old enough to remember how it works.

Giant batch systems (I'm assuming this is a batch thing) in COBOL really aren't so insane anyway. The language is simple (if ugly, and an evolutionary dead end), the problem is comparatively simple, and the batch notion eliminates a lot of the complexities people deal with in modern "realtime" systems. The real problem here is the IT bureaucracy that allowed the system to get so stale that it wasn't maintainable anymore. But than can happen anywhere, with any technology.
In the public markets, there's already a ton of competition, mostly because of the availability and quantity of publicly-available data. Instead of competing with thousands of other established companies and investors in analyzing public companies, we've managed to solve the problem of collecting large amounts of data on startup companies instead, into which more than $67 billion was invested last year in cash in the US alone.
How Our Culture Keeps Students Out of Science
If I'm traveling for work (i.e. not a vacation), being able to do billable work while in the air means I'm not losing tons of $ in addition to suffering through a coach flight. Obviously there's some work that can be done off-line, but having net access would improve my ability to do billable work while in transit.

If you're going on vacation, don't bring your laptop:)
Keep track of all the Y Combinator startups on one Slinkset-powered site
Tired of trying to keep up with the 100+ YC companies, I've plugged in the RSS feeds for all their dev blogs.
Maybe because startups are small enough and therefore simple enough (in terms of variables affecting success) for something like this to work, but large public companies wouldn't be.

But really I'd be skeptical about data in this first batch of tests. I'd bet that YouNoodle used these widely known startups as a training set for its algorithm, or at least as a test set...I imagine if one of their unit tests came back and said "Facebook is gonna be worthless", someone would tinker with the algorithms until it didn't say that anymore. Usually you deal with this problem by setting aside some data points until the very end for you to evaluate your accuracy, but without knowledge of where they got their training set, you can't really do this yourself
Tired of trying to keep up with the 100+ YC companies, I've plugged in the RSS feeds for all their dev blogs.
E-Bullion co-founder jailed on money transfer charge, suspected in wife's murder
The first YC08 Demo Day is only a few days after this event, so be prepared to offer moral support and feedback to those who are in the middle of that last push
I think tourism is also part of this - I know that in Barcelona large numbers of the lower class were convinced to leave the downtown because they were causing problems for visitors (crime, poorly maintaining housing) - whereas gentrification side by side with hotels and sightseers works pretty well.
Ruby on Rails for Microsoft Developers available for pre-order on Amazon
...had to add somethng here as I am a big fan of the NHS.
In an increasingly litigious profession, the doctor must've known the consequences had something gone wrong and acted in spite of those career threatening risks - shows true courage.
I hope (although doubt) this helps to stop the practice of defensive medicine where lawyers' concerns take priority over patients' needs.
Yeah, its a little off topic, but visting a hospital always puts my building a web-application into perspective!
I think the best way for Startuply to create value is to go through the academic literature and identify hiring best practices from organizational behavior and other fields. The site should then guide employers to hire using empirically proven best practices without requiring them to understand the theory behind the model or even realize that they are using one of these models. Trying to apply the the methods collaborative news filtering sites to hiring seems like a bad idea. (It sounds like you are trying to write an applicant quality predictor or something similar, unless you are just tracking the quality of applicants from different referral sources to optimize your advertising dollars.) Especially in this case, where showing an evaluator the judgments of previous evaluators creates an information cascade, which Surowiecki writes about in the Wisdom of Crowds.
LaunchBox Digital's (similar to YC) first 'class' graduates
Here's an example of how I've used it:

You're working on some code, and you discover a bug. You're not sure if it is a bug introduced by your latest changes which are not ready to commit, or something which was broken before and you simply didn't notice. Easy to check: use git stash to hide away your latest changes, re-check for the bug, and when you're ready bring back your latest work by calling git stash apply.

This workflow is simpler than making temporary branches which might only have one commit and are not even worth having a name.
I love it.

Now when I see you guys at a party, I can be like "Yo, saw the new geo-targeted iPhone audio-visual widget for Facebook you guys just put out." And you'll be impressed I keep up.
That was just my first point, having little actual experience with early adopters. I posted a followup today with four more reasons why it pays to seek early adopters.
I live in Austin, TX, and can attest to a boom of downtown condo construction in the last few years. Most of these are 300k and up, which is a fair bit above the median house price (roughly 175k or so).
How is YouNoodle going to make money from this?
Like it... my first thought was "Bill and Ted meet Stephen Hawking."
I think the real factor is control. Does Paul Graham really seem like the guy who would want a boss if he could avoid it?
Aurora concept web browser UX demo
Agreed: There is no profanity. I'd take this as evidence that Jobs had nothing at all to do with its writing!

There should be a name for pseudo-press-releases that are disguised as "internal memos".
I assumed http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=267809 was a parody of the inevitable "what? I could build that myself" comment made about all YC startups.

A site where you vote on links? Why I could build that myself. An SMS interface to PayPal? Why I could build that myself. A website that gives away money to startup founders? Why I could build that myself!
must...not...produce...credit card...from...wallet
I thought it was interesting, though most of the answers we already knew.
Maybe they should poll for questions beforehand so they would get better ones. Maybe a 5 minute editorial-style spiel at the beginning would help make the Q&A more active.

Good marketing event for sure.
Or why don't they just become a VC themselves instead of running a startup?

If I could predict the market, I would be investing like crazy! :)
>YouNoodle might be designed to make you happy by making you believe your company is always worth a lot

just like astrology
When I load it, I get a javascript alert() that says "This page requires AC_RunActiveContent.js." Great work, development team.
Gah, I guess we have to update our blog now. :-(
Thanks. I'd debated calling it StartupStalker.com, but that seemed a bit much.
Cisco says "progress" in U.S. enterprise market spending, an encouraging sign
Finally, an intriguing glimpse of what the web could become in the future, if we open ourselves up to the possibilities.

I didn't see anything in that video that was "way out there" either. With enough foresight and vision, something like that could be made with today's technology.

Yeah, we could argue back and forth about the feasibility of that specific UI. But without vision and exploration, we won't see the web evolve.