skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Taking a look at the recipients,

http://developers.facebook.com/fbFund.php?tab=recipients

there are definitely some which are 'infrastructure' rather than "apps":

HotBerry:
Frameworks and mechanics allowing users to generate own casual games on Facebook (e.g., Pinball construction set).
Watch Screencast

J2Play:
A social gaming platform for pc, mobile, and web game developers.

However, the details announced about the next iteration of the fund may preclude these sorts of entrants. The issue is that while the finalists will chosen by the fbFund committee, the winners will be chosen by Facebook's users. I think it would be hard to "sell" a non-app to them, unless you had compelling instances what the app could do.
That wasn't me though.
Average whale length = 12.8m (from top google search for average whale length)

Area of the US = 9.826630x10^6 km^2 or 9.826630x10^12 m^2

Area in whales of the US = 5.99769897x10^10 whales^2

So that would be 50000 times the size of 6 x 10^10 whales^2! Thats a lot of whale!
How much are Computers able to Understand text? + a lot of CS talks
This is strange. I am one of them red/green colorblind (basically, some shades of green look brown to me, that's the best I can describe it), but the "how it looks to the colorblind" image looks different than how it looks to the non-colorblind. Who knows, maybe my eyes are over correcting the colorblind version of the image.
exactly. Now when people are confused about something, they will go to wiki for validation, even they know it is not 100%. but people do trust it.

If google is able to change the habit to 'xxxx knol', i think google can do anything on the web.
The 7 Similarities between VPs of Sales and Professional Sports Coaches
The 'first timer' argument is interesting. I have been around this rink once before as well, so certain things elements would, at first blush, seem less applicable.

But having been to Startup School, I found that I was wrong. Playing the game once is much better than not having played at all. But you're negotiating with people (ie, investors and VCs) who play the game once a month/week/day! Any leg up that inequality is valuable.

I also don't think that you should discount the timed element: having only 3 months can focus you like nothing else, first timer or not.
The bug is that when you submit a story it doesn't automatically get voted up. Still no downvoting.
I've been wondering about the point system too... Lots of comments have negative points, but I don't see how to downvote. Does downvoting require a certain amount of karma?
One thing YCombinator is exceptional at is grooming a company for VC investment. If you think you even might want a venture funded company, YC can tell you all the ins and outs. I'm sure that even third or fourth time entrepreneurs could use some information about how things are done in the silicon valley investment community. It's more than just how to fill out the paperwork (though they excel at teaching that as well)
You might like to know that Malcolm was asked in an interview elsewhere about Moneyball, and he mentions it as one of his favorite books, and indeed he calls it one of the most important works of nonfiction of the past decade. Apparently he's found a way to resolve these difficulties, but not in a way that found it into a 20 minute talk -- I guess it has to wait for the book.
Yes, I think it's like 25 before you can downvote comments.
And if you're saving up the money, you may decide a $500 computer is just great.
Google Misleading: The Size Of The Web And The Size Of Their Index Are Very Different
I find that unless I battle really hard time wasted is fairly constant, the only difference is what I waste it on.

Keeping the TV out of the house helps make sure that the distractions (books, HN) that are lying around are at least of some positive value, however small.
I don't think they're even competing with each other. And they've said as much.
Perhaps we could assume by now that anyone who wants to read all 30 of these has subscribed via RSS? I'm generally the last to jump on the "hey, let's stop putting TechCrunch stories here because we all read it anyway" bandwagon but this is one big series, so the daily postings are getting a bit obnoxious.
I would be interested in that. It seems coaches need a lot of the sorts of intelligence (social, etc) that the IQ test misses entirely. But I'd be willing to bet they're still among the smartest guys on the team.
McGoogle’s — over one trillion served
I agree with the first part of your post.

Regarding the second part of our post:

1) if black communities are still feeling the negative effects of slavery and discrimination, then we should recognize this, regardless of its effects on economic advancement (ie, tell the truth, even when it hurts)

2) the phrase "telling black people that" really bothers me because it subtly implies black people can't figure it out without help

3) maybe it's because I live in Texas or maybe because I'm a minority, but I sense more hostility from whites towards blacks than vice versa

4) I haven't seen any research that has tied racial hostilities to lack of economic advancement in the US. You could actually argue the opposite since US became an economic powerhouse after WWII, and racial tensions were very high then
Refuge Markets
I just submitted a story that immediately had an upvote. Under what conditions do stories not have an automatic upvote?
It's increased, I was hovering at 43 or so, without a down vote button. But then my karma jumped up to 73, and I can.
Peruse this site's archives to get an idea. http://www.cwrblog.net/
I am on 25 and I cannot down vote comments. Is karma rating the only mechanism for restricting this?
when is someone gonna create a similar layer of social browsing and open it up? commenting is just scratching the surface of this one.
CL-Unicode - A portable Unicode library for Common Lisp
Yes, looks like that's what happened. For some reason the submitter's initial upvote is not included in the votes of this story. I'm not sure how this happened.

You sound like you've seen this before. Have you?
The fbFund has the same goals as well. In particular, the backers led us through the steps of getting all of our paperwork in order so that we would "be ready" for VC investment. It was, effectively, a requirement of the grant.
I'm afraid I don't see how that is relevant.
I saw it earlier today... I added my upvote to sort it out. The only similarities were that both stories had no external urls... they were both questions to the community.

Ah, here it is: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=256760
Hmm, sure enough, the submitter is not listed in the voters for that one either. If anyone knows of any other examples, please let me know.
From the port 25 blog (linked in article):

> It is not a move away from IIS as Microsoft’s strategic web server technology. We have invested significantly in refactoring and adding new, state-of-the-art features to IIS, including support for PHP. We will continue to invest in IIS for the long term and are currently under way with development of IIS 8.

> It is a strong endorsement of The Apache Way, and opens a new chapter in our relationship with the ASF. We have worked with Apache POI, Apache Axis2, Jakarta, and other projects in the last year, and we will continue our technical support and interoperability testing work for this open source software.

Nice to see them moving in that direction.
I can't believe this kind of comment gets upmodded here.
Kinda off-topic, but I noticed that you can't (or at least I can't) downvote direct replies to my own comments. I like this feature, but is it new or have I just never noticed it before?
and I can't believe this kind of comment gets upmodded here.
Can't say much about this particular person, but I'm tired of being told who my heros ought to be. I will choose my own, thank you very much.

Loss of all is as sad as it is certain. I am sorry for him equally as for any other person I didn't know personally.

There is this thing about not saying bad things about the dead. Well, for one thing, he was very arrogant. Looking down on any student not from CMU. Such a lack of respect tells me a lot about a person.
That informs one other axiom:

Much of modern life involves trading freedom of one form for freedom of another.
I like them...
The Tech Behind the VFX of the Dark Knight
That's why Al Gore invented RSS feeds.
I have a hunch that there are significant missed opportunities on both sides

I don't think it could be any other way, though. The investment is only about 5% of what YC does. The other
95% is stuff that has to happen face-to-face.

We did once try letting a startup not move. By Demo Day they were way behind the
others, and they didn't survive much past it.
Stockholders say: "no"
And ditto with a car. A car is so cheap almost everybody could save up enough money in a reasonable amount of time. Not so with a house, or an education.
Ask YC: Please Review this Startup
One of the huge challenges is breaking into the mindset of many decision-makers. And, logic isn't necessarily a factor.

It appears many IT shops get a warm fuzzy out of writing huge checks to companies for software. The primary reason I've seen for this is to have "support", even if "support" is an ill-defined term and the software is beyond lousy.

Why do they care about support? Simple: they are paranoid that some important thing will break and they will be blamed for it. If there's a company they can sue, or otherwise point the finger at, they're overjoyed. I have seen this behavior painfully often, it has nothing to do with actual productivity.

Since it's already proven difficult to convince these groups that free software (even with a support company) is viable, I expect SAP will simply get its free money. Most groups will write a fatter check and move on.
Anatomy of a Software Bug
(4) A backlash by independent content sites will starve Knol of inlinks.
That may be true today [Google having the most comprehensive index of any search engine], but it probably won’t be true next week (check back here then)

Is there another search engine coming to the market that is even better than Google?
For a day or two my votes didn't count. Maybe they were on moderation when they submitted?
Why SELECT * is usually evil.
You never noticed before.
I tink it's dumb to remove the comments from code, although I agree with making symbol names more meaningful.

In the original post, the comment

// square root of n with Newton-Raphson approximation

Is removed and replaced with the improved function name of SquareRootApproximation(). A good improvement to the code, to be sure, but you lose the information about the code implementing a "Newton-Raphson approximation." The author just glosses over that.... Of course somepne will come back 3 years later and ask themselves, "which algorithm is this?"

So, to tie it back to the topic about business comments, yes, business comments should be there in the code as well. It always helps, and it helps locate customizations that, at first reading do not make sense.

So, comments or better-written code? Both. Redundancy is really good when it contributes to making code more clear.
He was an alumni of CMU and I think its fair to assume he had some amount of pride and spirit regarding his alma mater that he then spent teaching at. Just like many people have regarding their own university or college.

If you don't know or care who Dr. Pausch is, that's fine, but I'm not sure why the rest of us who respected, enjoyed or were inspired by his message and life should not have the opportunity to share our condolences and remember him together.
I can't believe that kind of upmod gets commented here.
Thanks. I guess I'm not as observant as I thought.
The #1 mistake hosting providers make for MySQL servers
It includes SciPy along with many other modules useful to scientific programmers.
What's rich? Really depends on your own state of mind and where you live.
It happened on my last submission. At first I thought I'd been flagged as a spammer, but it still let me vote up manually.
Wikipedia beat everything2, therefor Knol won't beat Wikipedia. Knol is just a pretty everything2.
Yes, but they are cheaper and quicker to construct.
always have enough money in the bank to live your current lifestyle for six months. unexpected unemployment may be rough, but it need not be inhuman
there is blood in the streets now, more than you may see again in your life
Exactly. Define "beat" for entities such as these. Impossible.
TechCrunch is being cryptic (http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/25/googles-misleading-blog...)

“Google also says 'But we’re proud to have the most comprehensive index of any search engine.'

That may be true today, but it probably won’t be true next week (check back here then). Google knows that as well as we do, and that’s why they posted this today."

So, is it Yahoo or Live? If it's one of them, why would Google know it so well?. Any thoughts on what this could be? One of the TC commenters thinks its MSFT indexing facebook ...
Even if one were to be comfortable moving (or lived in the area already), I think one of the problems for would-be YC entreprenuers with families and/or mortgage payments is that the average $5K base + $5K/partner investment comes in below an acceptable threshold for minimum income over the course of 3 months.

Now clearly you're running a business and not a charity, and you've arrived at the investment amount for certain reasons. But I do wonder what sort of opportunities and business ideas might arise if a group similar to YC were to offer, say, $10K-$15K per founder for the period.
You triggered some automatic protection against some form of abuse. I forget what.
Mastering Meetings - 10 Tips for Freelance Web Designers 
Shawn Adrian offers a few humorous and informative tips on making the most out of meetings.
I think not a lot, actually. From what we hear from founders, the moving part seems to be the big problem for people with families, not the money part.
It's pretty close to impossible for a newcomer to suddenly index more of the web than Google. It's gotta be Yahoo or Live. The question is which one? And how'd they do it?

One of the TC commenters suggested that it's due to MSFT indexing facebook ...
Sure, money brings stresses. However, it also eliminates many sources of misery. For example, a trip to the ER is only going to be stressful for health, not financial, reasons.
The golden rule in starting a business today is to be benevolent, not evil
Microsoft just announced their new search engine ... maybe that?
Every OS Sucks!
Ask YC: Best way to sell downloadable software?
My friend works for a company that wants to sell a piece of downloadable software. They've talked to Digital River but say they aren't very responsive. Anyone know what the best options are? Thanks.
Only if you live in the US. Most of us do not.
The money would have made a difference to me.
Wrong: 5 Reasons Lossless Formats Will Not Destroy MP3
The Vimperator
Yay I coined a word! (technically yould coined it)
But if they increased the amount of money significantly, they'd more than likely have to increase the amount of equity and decrease the amount of investments. This would really take away from what YC does.
Ok, I just tracked down the bug and fixed it.

(It was in some new domain-banning code. The problem was that I was checking the domain even on url-less submissions, which caused an error between the point when the story was created and when it was upvoted by its submitter.)
well there's an exception:give up freedom at present for money, and use the money to buy even more freedom in future
I frequently see people saying, e.g. "blah blah github (http://github.com/schacon/learn-github)" and leaving the link plain. I haven't noticed any A HREF style link, at least; maybe this is intentional, to (weakly) reduce link spamming?

Much like preventing IMG links helps to keep the site focused on relatively intelligent discussion, rather than spamming, lolcats, rickrolling, and other bulletin board malarkey.
What platform does this software run on? There's a far larger ecosystem on Windows than on OS X or freenixes.

What sort of software is this? Mass-market software selling for $5 needs a completely different solution from special-purpose software selling for $5000.
Easynews + OS XBMC.
professor pausch was a great man and i was deeply moved by watching his lectures and he will be missed. granted, i only knew anything about him because of his last lecture, but my life has been made richer because of the things that he has done. thank you, randy.
That ignores the original post: what was the value in "The Last Lecture" that hasn't already been said about death and dying a thousand million times over? It's like "Chicken Soup for the Soul" for programmers or something.
I thought this was a given. I never assumed that "size of web" == "size of our index".
Part of the issue might be that there aren't many venture-scale consumer-oriented projects left to fund. As a corollary, the low cost of trying ideas and starting consumer-oriented software companies has decreased the need for VC money in that arena.
I admire the effort as a constrained writing exercise.

But, I would rather see one article about an idea the author cares enough about to implement, than see 30 thinly-developed "thinking out loud" pieces.

Maybe fans of this series could submit/upvote the best one, or two, or small N... but not all 30.
no its to convince people that you are benevolent, get your fair share of fans, then turn evil when noone is looking
I don't think the argument is that the current system of subsidies is well organised. It is simply that the over-production of food probably has some significant national security advantages. Running out of food is even worse than running out of oil, steal or microprocessors.

This would only be likely happen in a wartime scenario and it would force you to invade another nation to secure access to food or surrender. Having to do this (invade) when you are already obviously streched to the limit would be a significant disadvantage.
I wonder if travel would work. If I did the math correct, there are about 10 weekly dinners + demo day. With a bit of planning, that's only about $4-5k of travel per founder. I'm assuming here that there's only air travel costs and that founders can find places to stay for free while they're in town.

It may be that there is much more face-to-face time that happens because people are co-located, but I didn't the impression that the founders all work in one large room or anything similar.

Even traveling to SF or Cambridge for 2-3 days a week is something that I think people would be willing to do. I can even imagine looking forward to the time away from the family!
I was most struck by this:

But it also has an agreement with Google that Maple is hoping will eliminate any need for the company to market its services. If you Google a dentist in some markets right now, a customer review in DemandForce’s system will pop up

Pop up where? In the natural search results? Is it standard practice for Google to have such special arrangements?
Now I have a quick reference, I might start using Common Lisp.
Aside from the reasons listed, not all mp3 players even play formats like FLAC in the first place. Also, even as a generic term -- unless they're iPods, they're "MP3 players", so they're probably going to be closely associated with MP3 files until something radically different comes along. It took me a bit to find a player I liked that could play ogg vorbis. (It was an iAudio U2 flash drive, several years ago.) Granted, there are also Apple and Microsoft lossless codecs, but file format fragmentation is part of the problem here.

Also, not all music even benefits from the careful encoding that could benefit, say, Beethoven. One of my favorite bands, The Mountain Goats, has recorded about half of their numerous releases on an old Panasonic boombox. Also, some studio music is produced so poorly that a lossless copy off CD wouldn't help much (http://www.mindspring.com/~mrichter/dynamics/dynamics.htm).
Most financial assets gradually appreciate, but borrowing to buy financial assets is a good way to eventually go bankrupt.

Maybe a better rule: borrow so your consumption fluctuates less than your income, but always save twice what you think you should and borrow half what you think you can, to account for how stupidly optimistic people are in the presence of easy money and compound interest.
This is pretty interesting idea. I'm interested in the overhead involved to get these new features.

The "official" site is here - http://cyclone.thelanguage.org/
This isn't a 'blood in the streets' situation. Not yet.

Once you've lived through one, you'll find it easier to tell.
Yahoo search shell
You seem to be assuming that intelligence and IQ are the same thing. Is that what you meant?

Just to be clear, I believe in speaking frankly about race, so am not objecting to that aspect of your post. But I'm skeptical of attempts to bottle up something as grand as "intelligence" into a single metric. For example, I read somewhere that the original Stanford-Binet had to be modified because women were scoring higher than men (so it obviously needed correcting). That's a pretty compelling detail, if true.

(I don't remember where I first read this, but a little Googling brings up http://www.beyondsatire.us/?q=node/18, which is hardly definitive but does have an interesting author.)
I wasn't trying to feed the flames of an argument, I was genuinely curious. In my day-job, I administer MySQL databases, and only vaguely handle anything with PostgreSQL. Replication was an issue when we went down the MySQL path, and I haven't kept abreast of PostgreSQL's development.
Wil Shipley just launched Golden%Braeburn for OS X apps, which looks pretty nice (same system used in Delicious Library):

http://golden-braeburn.com/
> Part of the issue might be that there aren't many venture-scale consumer-oriented projects left to fund.

(1) Yes, there are.
(2) Some of the remaining ones are 1-50x bigger than anything that has been done so far.
The Economic Gist Via Craigslist
From the title, this seemed like it was going to be an homage to Lorne Michaels' offer to pay the Beatles $3000 to perform on SNL.
Running a company and living off it's profits is not the same as selling a company to a bigger player. The latter is a one time payment.
Made me think of Kosmix and Evri.
China Surpasses U.S. in Number of Internet Users
swreg.com and regnow.com are two options. I rolled my own and got a merchant services account. I think I remember seeing good things about swreg. Their rates are certainly lower.

If you are trying to lock down a shareware program, armadillo is the best.

The ASP is worth joining to get the best info if they're doing a lot of this: http://www.asp-shareware.org/
Multiply Accuses Facebook of Copying its Design
This is really good, in fact. I like it, it's a great all-around page for a variety of things, if I'm getting this right.

Hakia, Kosmix and Mahalo are kind of similar in this respect, so take a look at how their data is structured:

http://porsche.gemzies.com/

http://hakia.com/search.aspx?q=porsche

http://kosmix.com/topic/Porsche?searchSubmit=Go

http://mahalo.com/Porsche
"By 11:05am PDT, all server-to-server communication was stopped...

By 2:20pm PDT, we'd restored internal communication..."

I wonder why it took 3 hours to clear state.
Python for my Grandpa
A car may be "cheap", but the primary variable cost associated with it is only getting expensive

(i.e. it's approaching $5/gal in CA)